It wasn’t Abigail. It wasn’t her mother. It was the last person in the world she wanted to face, but face him she did, defiantly across the length of the room.
‘So,’ he said, strolling into the room and shutting the door behind him, ‘the bride is ready.’ His voice was sneering, his expression hard and contemptuous.
‘What are you doing here?’ Isobel asked. Her heart was beating quickly, making her feel giddy and deprived of air. He had always had this sort of dramatic effect on her, as if his presence threw her system into some weird kind of overdrive.
‘Didn’t you think that I’d turn up?’ Lorenzo smiled humourlessly. ‘Why, Isobel, my dearest, I’m the best man.’
‘Yes.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘But you should be downstairs, with everyone else.’
What she really meant was that he should be anywhere else, but not here, not in her room. She couldn’t bear this game of cruelty he had played ever since he had found out about Jeremy, even though she could understand it.
‘I never thought you’d do it,’ he bit out, advancing towards her. ‘When you told me five months ago what you were planning, I thought that it was a joke, some kind of mad joke.’
‘No joke, Lorenzo.’
His hands shot out, grasping her arms, and she winced in pain.
‘Why? Why, damn you!’
‘I told you…’
‘You told me nothing!’ He flung her away and walked towards the dressing-table, resting on it with clenched fists.
Isobel followed him, stared at his back, the downbent head, and struggled not to put her arms around him.
Presently he turned around and faced her, his face dark and savage.
‘Why are you doing this, Isobel? You’re not in love with Jeremy Baker.’ There was a sneer in his voice and she answered quickly, to avoid the subject of love.
‘How can you speak about him in that tone of voice? I thought he was your friend!’
‘We both know him,’ Lorenzo bit out. ‘He’s unstable, reckless. You told me so yourself. Wasn’t that one of the reasons that you stopped seeing him, even as a friend, after he went to work for your father? He frightened you. You were glad to be at university.’
‘You frighten me too,’ she said, ‘when you’re like this.’ They stared at each other. He was furious and his fury, she knew, was given edge by his frustrated bewilderment at the situation. She looked at him, at the whip-hard strength of his body, the dark, sexy good looks which had turned every girl’s head at school when he had joined years ago. He had only been sixteen at the time, but already his face had held promise of the powerfully striking man he was to become.
‘I am trying to be reasonable, Isobel,’ he said in a voice that didn’t sound reasonable at all. ‘I am trying to work out whether there’s something here I’m missing or whether you need to be carted off to the nearest asylum in a strait-jacket.’
His eyes narrowed on her, curiously light eyes that were especially striking given the darkness of his hair and the olive tint of his skin. He was Italian, the son of emigrants who had settled in England, choosing their spot carefully so that their brilliant and gifted only son could be sent to one of the finest private schools in the country. He had easily gained a place on a scholarship and had landed among the students, bright enough but mostly with rich backgrounds, like a leopard in a flock of sheep.
He was different from them all, and he had never seemed to give a damn. He hadn’t needed to. His brains were enough to guarantee respect. At sixteen, he possessed a formidable intellect that, it was whispered, outranked some of the professors. His mind was brilliant and creative, and his drive to succeed was formidable. Nothing since had changed.
‘I know what I’m doing, Lorenzo,’ she whispered, looking away to her hands which were clasped in front of her.
‘You damn well don’t!’ he roared, and she glanced nervously at him and then at the door.
‘You’ll bring everyone rushing up to see what’s going on!’
‘And I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you now! That you’ve gone off your rocker!’
‘You don’t understand!’ she retaliated, and he moved towards her.
‘What don’t I understand?’ He stood in front of her, staring down.
For a second she didn’t have a clue what to say. From the start there had been a thread of suspicion underneath his anger at her decision and she realised that her words, spontaneously spoken, had tightened the thread. She couldn’t afford for that to happen. He was too clever by half for him to be allowed a glimpse of the truth behind the black farce.
‘I care about Jeremy,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, and he tilted her chin up in a rough gesture.
‘Like hell you do.’ His hand moved from her chin to coil into her hair so that she was forced into looking at him. ‘There’s only one person you care about. Would you like me to prove it to you?’ His mouth twisted into a smile but there was nothing gentle in it.
‘Lorenzo, don’t!’
‘Why? Are you frightened?’
‘No, of course I’m not frightened!’ She tried to laugh but it came out as a choked sound. ‘I am going to marry him,’ she said, placing her palms on his chest and feeling his masculine energy whip into her like an electric current. ‘You may not like the idea, but it’s a fact of life and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.’
‘You were my lover,’ he said in a low, rough voice. ‘Were you playing games behind my back with him? Is that it?’
‘No!’
‘You hardly saw him when you were at university. You hardly went home and weekends were with me.’ His brain was ticking, thinking it through, applying the same ruthless intelligence to the enigma as he applied to any problem. ‘He could hardly have come up to see you during the week. He wouldn’t have been able to wangle the time off from his job.’
‘He wrote,’ she admitted. It was a small concession and it was true. Jeremy had written.
‘You arranged a wedding courtesy of written correspondence?’ Lorenzo sneered, and his grasp on her hair tightened. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You went out with the boy for one term when you were sixteen, yet you set a wedding-date by virtue of a few letters?’
‘This is pointless,’ she whispered, and anger flooded his face.
‘You,’ he said grimly, ‘have been mine since you were sixteen. You are twenty now and we have been lovers for over a year. Jeremy has never been a part of that picture. You have always belonged to me.’
The words invaded her mind and threw up images of Lorenzo, his strong arms wrapped around her, his mouth exploring her body. He had been her first and only lover.
‘I belong to myself,’ she muttered, trying to wriggle free.
‘Tell me that you’re in love with him,’ Lorenzo murmured savagely in her ear. ‘Let me hear you say it.’
He was so close to her that she could feel his heart beating, smell the rough sweetness of his skin. Ever since she had known that she would marry Jeremy, she had avoided Lorenzo Cicolla like the plague, because his proximity was the one thing she had feared most and, standing here, she knew that she had been right.
‘You can’t, can you?’ he taunted. ‘Then why? Has he threatened you? Answer me!’
‘Of