The Heat Of Passion

The silence went on and on and then abruptly and without any warning, Gerald Amory rose heavily from his seat and moved with the shambling gait of a much older man towards the front door.

‘Where are you going?’ Jessica demanded, her violet eyes almost purple with the strength of her distress.

‘Home ... I need to be on my own, Jess ... please understand that.’

In despair, she hurried down the path after him, ‘Dad, we can cope better with this together! Please stay,’ she pleaded.

‘I’m sorry. Not now, Jess,’ he breathed tightly, unable to look at her.

Cope with the shame, the publicity, the court case? With the loss of his home, his job, his self-respect? Would he be able to cope? It was a tall order, she registered dully, especially for a man of his age. But what alternative was there? You coped, you survived. If Jessica had learnt anything in recent years, it was that truth. Yet struggle as she did she could no longer keep her mind fully focused on her father’s problems. The past was surging back to her, the past she had buried six years ago...

The day she had met Carlo Saracini she had been in London, shopping for her trousseau in the company of a friend. It had been less than two months before her wedding to Simon. She hadn’t been wearing her engagement ring. One of the stones had worked loose and it had been in the jeweller’s for repair.

She had been standing chatting to Leah at a busy intersection, waiting on the lights changing so they could cross. Somebody behind her in the crowd had pushed her and she had fallen into the road, practically beneath the wheels of Carlo’s chauffeur-driven limousine.

She didn’t remember falling. She had knocked herself out. What she did remember was coming dizzily back to consciousness before the ambulance arrived and focusing on the most extraordinary golden eyes above hers. She had been suffering from concussion. As a child she had had a story-book about a tiger with eyes that were pools of brilliant gold. So, naturally she had stared. She had never before seen eyes that shade.

‘Stay still... don’t speak.’ Carlo had been rapping out autocratic instructions in every direction, including hers.

‘I’m fine—’

‘Keep quiet,’ she had been told.

‘It’s only my head and I want to get up...’ She had begun trying to move.

A brown hand like a giant weight had forestalled such daring.

‘Look...I want to get up,’ she had said again, embarrassed eyes flickering over the gathering crowd of onlookers.

‘You are not getting up... you could have injured your spine.’

Her temper had begun to spark. ‘My spine is OK...I’m OK—’

‘We will have a doctor tell us that.’ He had continued to stare down at her with the most phenomenal intensity and then he had run a forefinger almost caressingly along her delicate jawbone. ‘I shall never forgive myself for hurting something so incredibly beautiful...’

Leah had been totally useless, having hysterics somewhere in the background. Jessica had found herself in a private ambulance, accompanied not by her friend but by Carlo.

‘She will follow in my car,’ he had asserted, getting in the way of the paramedics while simultaneously telling them what to do.

She just hadn’t had the strength to fight Carlo Saracini off that day. Her head had been aching fit to burst and her stomach churning with nausea. She had shut her eyes to escape, telling herself that this volatile and domineering foreigner was simply attempting to make amends for an accident which hadn’t been his fault in the first place.

She had been taken to a clinic, subjected to an alarmingly thorough examination against her will and tucked into a bed in a very expensively decorated room.

‘I want to go home,’ she had protested to the nurse. ‘This is so unnecessary.’

Carlo had strode through the door, splintering waves of vibrant physical energy that seemed to charge the very atmosphere and drive out all tranquility.

‘Where’s Leah?’ she had whispered, shaken that he was still around.

‘I had her taken home. She was too distressed to be of any assistance. I understand that your parents are abroad and will not be home until tomorrow. Do you wish me to contact them?’

‘I don’t even know your name,’ she had begun through clenched teeth.

‘Carlo Saracini,’ he had murmured with a slashing and brilliant smile. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I just want to go home... don’t you ever listen to anything people say?’

‘Not if I don’t want to hear it,’ Carlo had admitted.

‘Look, all this...’ She had indicated the fancy room with embarrassment. ‘It’s not necessary. I fell into the road. Your car didn’t touch me. It’s not as if I’m going to sue you or anything, and all this fuss—’.

‘Is my wish,’ he had inserted silkily, scanning her slender shape beneath the bedclothes with blatant appreciation, making her cheeks ignite into sudden colour and sweeping up to her face with yet another smile. ‘I can’t take my eyes off you. You may have noticed that. Then, you must be accustomed to a great deal of male attention.’

‘Not since I got engaged,’ she had muttered stiffly, infuriated by the fashion in which he was openly looking her over as if she were an object on a supermarket shelf there for the taking.

He had stilled, golden eyes narrowing and flaring. ‘You belong to another man?’

‘I belong to no man, Mr Saracini!’ Jessica had snapped.

‘You will belong to me,’ he had murmured with utter conviction.

She had honestly thought he was nuts. Nobody had ever talked to her like that before. Mind you, she had been to Greece once on holiday and had noted that radical feminism had yet to find a foothold there. But that a male dressed with such apparent sophistication in a superbly tailored mohair and silk blend suit, a male who spoke with an air of culture and education, should make such primitive statements had astonished her.

‘I’m getting married in six weeks,’ she had informed him flatly, involuntarily studying his strikingly male features before she realised what she was doing and hurriedly looked away again.

‘We’ll see...’ And Carlo had laughed indulgently, the way you laughed when a child said something innocently amusing.

Jessica sank back to the present and discovered that she was shivering. Her first thought was for her father. No matter what he said, he shouldn’t be alone. Grabbing up a coat, she let herself out of the tiny cottage she rented and climbed into her car to drive over to his house.

‘But your father’s at work, Mrs Turner. What would he be doing home at this time of the day?’ Her father’s housekeeper studied her with a questioning frown.

Jessica swallowed hard, fighting to keep her face unconcerned. ‘I thought he was finishing early.’

‘Well, he didn’t mention it to me.’

‘I’ll catch him later.’ Jessica climbed back into her car.

Dear God, where had her father gone? She must have been out of her mind to let him wander off like that in the state he was in! Another little voice asked her what she was doing. Her father had said he needed time on his own. She was not his keeper. Shouldn’t she respect his wishes? But the nagging sense of urgency nibbling at her nerve-endings wouldn’t leave her alone.

Reluctantly she went home again. Carlo... she couldn’t get Carlo out of her mind. Would she go to the Deangate Hall Hotel to crawl and beg and plead as once her father had done with her mother? Her stomach gave a sensitive heave. What would be the point? She knew Carlo Saracini. There was no way he would let her father off the hook. Carlo wanted revenge. He couldn’t touch Jessica but he knew just how deep the bond was between father and daughter. It would be a sweeter revenge than any that dark Machiavellian intellect might have calculated.

‘Some day you will come to me on your knees and beg me to take you... and I will break you.’

,As she remembered, perspiration dampened her short upper lip.

Carlo Saracini had destroyed her life. He had hacked to pieces everything she held dear. Her love for Simon, her happiness, her tranquillity... and in the end her self-respect. She had fought him to the very last shred of her endurance and then had learnt the secret of her own frailty in a shattering hour of self-discovery. Shuddering with disgust, she shut out the memories but the humiliation and the shame lived on as strongly as ever.

Carlo was one hundred per cent predator. Ruthless, unforgiving, utterly intolerant of those weaker than himself. She would never ever forget the way he had looked at her on her wedding-day. With smouldering incredulous fury and naked hatred. The Alpha male, fabulously rich, indecently successful and stunningly hand some...rejected. Right up until the very last moment Carlo had expected her to change her mind and fling herself at his feet.