Her face was flaming, shame and confusion having assailed her in a twin attack as her body reacted to the touch of his clever fingers. He had no idea of how inadequate she was and she dragged her hand free. Weighing up the potential future of the employees at Hales, however, Caroline ignored the twang of her conscience. She had already warned Valente what she was like. It would be his own fault when he discovered that she was incapable of providing him with the level of sexual entertainment he expected. In any case he was trying to blackmail her, and she needed to use every possible weapon in her repertoire to fight back.
‘I could never become your mistress,’ she told him baldly. ‘It would kill my parents. They’re too old to handle that, Valente. Nor could they accept such a relationship and still live under this roof.’
Lean, strong face implacable, Valente moved back to the door. ‘Why did you bring me in here?’ His beautiful mouth took on a sardonic curl as he cast a speaking glance over the dusty reproduction sleigh bed, brilliant black eyes flicking up again to rest on her earnest face. He was unimpressed, for she had seemed equally sincere five years earlier when she told him how much she loved him. ‘For a crazy moment I saw the bed and thought that maybe you wanted to pay me something on account … a first instalment, as it were.’
Consternation gripping her as he reached for the doorknob, Caroline blocked his passage while a blaze of temper roared through her. There it was again, the suggestion that she was a cheap and easy slut, and she hated him for it when she had given him no grounds to view her in that light. ‘Why won’t you talk to me or listen?’ she hissed. ‘I will do just about anything to protect the workers at Hales, but don’t ask me to hurt or upset my parents. They could only accept the set-up you suggested if we got married!’
Valente flung back his arrogant dark head and laughed as though she had said something uproariously funny. ‘Che idea! I’m not the romantic I was five years ago, when you appealed to my protective instincts. Nor am I so hot for your tiny body that I would surrender my freedom for even a short period of time.’
Mortified colour flooded her cheeks when she appreciated that he had taken her declaration as a serious suggestion—which it had not been. It had simply occurred to her that the only way her parents would accept her intimacy with Valente or his financial help would be if he was her husband. In actuality the prospect of being married again, ensnared in a nightmare pretence of a relationship whilst being subjected to male demands, had as much attraction for Caroline as a dose of the plague, and she went white. She had hated being married, had felt trapped and helpless. But she found herself thinking that marrying Valente would be a much safer solution for her family than her becoming a mistress who might well be discarded within days, along with his generous promises. After all, she knew, even if he didn’t, that she was the last woman alive likely to fulfil his fantasies in the bedroom.
‘But then it wouldn’t have to be a normal marriage. I mean one that lasts,’ Caroline could not resist pointing out in a grudging undertone.
His sleek ebony brows pleated. ‘Maledizione! How could you seriously think that I would marry you?’ he demanded with incredulous bite. ‘Naturally I can understand why you would prefer that option. The divorce settlement would be worth millions, and we both know that although you hide it well there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for that amount of money!’
Barley able to credit that she was having such a conversion with Valente, Caroline fixed affronted grey eyes on him. ‘I thought pre-nuptial agreements dealt with that sort of threat these days. I know you don’t believe it, but I don’t want your wretched money—’
‘There’s no way I would stoop to the level of marrying you!’ Valente spelt out with disdainful emphasis. ‘You’re a lying, deceitful, mercenary little witch. Get the idea of marriage right out of your head now.’
Caroline kept her head high. ‘I’m afraid it’s the only option I could accept—’
‘But what would I get out of it—apart from a sense of self-sacrifice?’ he fielded with unconcealed scorn, outraged by her cheek in even suggesting the idea, when she had stood him up at the altar five years earlier.
‘Then accept that I will never be your mistress, Valente. Evidently we’ve reached stalemate.’ Tilting her chin, Caroline opened the door and walked back out on to the landing with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘I would want a child.’
Lashes flipping up in bewilderment over her startled eyes, Caroline froze in her tracks. She was stunned by that entirely unexpected announcement.
‘An heir to follow in my phenomenally successful footsteps, piccola mia,’ Valente mused silkily. ‘How does that idea grab you?’
Caroline had turned pale, knowing that he had just presented her with yet another impossible challenge. ‘It doesn’t.’
Valente released a cruelly amused laugh. ‘I didn’t think it would, but that’s the final offer on the table, cara mia. If I take you as a wife there has to be something more in it for me than sex. In that department I have endless choice and no reason to choose marriage. But a child would be the perfect sweetener to the deal.’
‘Sadly, I’m not a whore or a brood mare.’
Valente cast her a lingering glance in the entrance hall. ‘All women are capable of playing the whore for the right man … or the right opportunity. I wanted you the first time I saw you and I still want you. You’ve upped the stakes and so must I. I’ll consider your idea if you spend the night with me at my hotel.’
Paralysed to the spot by that stunning proposition, Caroline gazed back at him with huge disbelieving eyes.
‘I always play hardball, and if you want a wedding ring for what you can get out of me as a legally wedded gold-digger, I expect to preview the merchandise,’ Valente delivered silkily. ‘I’m tied up in meetings until ten tonight. I’ll see you then.’
White as milk at that crack about merchandise, not to mention his belief that she had only mentioned marriage in the hope of reaping a greater financial profit from him, Caroline muttered, ‘I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Final word, last chance,’ he quipped, closing his arms round her slight body without warning and sealing her to his lean, powerful frame. ‘The game is over, angelina mia. Take your chance while you can, because it won’t come round again.’
Even a hint of what he probably saw as passion but she saw as potential coercion caused all the colour to bleed out of her complexion. It took every ounce of her self-command not to succumb to the urge to fight him off like an attacker. His strength, his very forcefulness, intimidated her. He dipped his mouth with comparative lightness down on to parted lips, and this time around she did not respond. In a sick daze of enforced tolerance, she was as still and unresponsive as a doll. Releasing his hold on her, he lifted his handsome dark head again, his shrewd, dark-as-night eyes arrowing over the frozen pallor of her face.
‘Is this little demonstration your final answer?’ Valente demanded, his musical, lilting Italian accent roughened and brusque in tone.
And she almost said yes. But something unrecognisable inside her surged up at the last moment with another answer entirely. It was an answer that took her aback almost as much as it surprised him. ‘No … no, it’s not!’
The fierce tension in Valente’s tall, powerful physique eased infinitesimally. He turned to smoothly greet the men descending the stairs. A few minutes later the cars outside were pulling away and heading back down the drive. But Caroline was welded to the spot long after they had vanished from view. Her sense of horror at the invitation he had made in the most demeaning of terms had momentarily deprived her of the