The mattress gave under the onslaught of his weight. 'I was callous and sadistic. I was a total bastard. I admit it. I wanted to hurt you-'

'You did,' she gasped. 'Now go away and let me do my grieving in private.'

'In all the time we were together four years ago, I never once saw you cry. And now twice in a week…' His roughened voice broke off. 'You were always so tough-'

'I used to cry in the b-bathroom with the shower running.'

Vito loosed a laugh utterly devoid of humour. 'I wish I'd known.'

'You would have revelled in it,' she mumbled, and sat up, scrunching the sheet defensively round her and concealing her swollen face below the veil of her tousled hair. 'I thought you'd gone…'

'I couldn't leave you like this. I came back.' He slotted a brandy into her hand and she drank it down like a Cossack about to go into battle. The alcohol eased the ache in her throat but she still refused to look at him.

He laced long fingers into her hair and tipped up her face, preventing her retreat. 'We're getting married in ten days' time and then I have a six-week vacation which we will spend in Sri Lanka.' She trembled at the implacability she met in his fierce dark eyes. Other emotions were beginning to surface from beneath the crushing weight of feeling she had given vent to. No wonder he had called her a whore that first day in his office. Only a woman worthy of that name would have behaved as he believed she had four years ago and again today. He had talked about abortion as though she were so without female sensitivity that such a choice would have meant absolutely nothing to her. Hatred surged in a hot, reviving rush through the cracks he had made in her composure. Loathing at his injustice began to crackle in a series of little fires fed by bitter resentment. He had married another woman, yet he reserved the right to stand in judgement over her for almost making a choice that many women would have made in her position. The guilt she had long borne burnt out forever in that moment. The urge to clear her name that had weakened her response to his bitter prejudice earlier vanished entirely. He hadn't even asked if the child was his. Presumably he thought she couldn't possibly know whether it had been or not. So now she had it all. The truth as Vito saw it, and the motivation behind his coercion.

If he had not loved her, he had certainly been physically obsessed by her. Unsuitable as she was, he had stayed with her five months and he had asked her to marry him. The sensation of what he had termed an 'entirely superficial hurt' to his male pride had been a masterful understatement which appearances could no longer sustain. Her refusal to marry him four years ago must have absolutely devastated him, and the belief that she had immediately turned to another man had added an entire chapter to that devastation. The savagery with which he had condemned her had been revealing. Carina clearly hadn't managed to soothe that rawness. Evidently only the most bitter of revenge scenarios was capable of taking away that slur on his manhood.

'Is it possible for us to start again?' The abrasive demand was literally wrenched from him as he stared down at her, a tiny pulse pulling at the taut edge of his wide mouth. 'This is not how I meant it to be.'

'Blood and gore every five minutes? Why don't you just arrange for me to have an accident?' Ashley enquired shakily. 'It would be so much quicker and cleaner.'

The long brown fingers knotted into the fiery strands of her hair. The ferocity of his brilliant gaze stabbed into her like a knife. 'Hate and love are but two sides of the same coin.'

'You'd better watch out, then. This much hate comes uncomfortably close to manic obsession,' she muttered, her breath tripping in her dry throat.

'And you should know why,' Vito traded, his fingers tightening with the raw tension that smouldered from him.

In his grip, she gave a tiny compulsive shudder, suddenly becoming alarmingly aware of the intimacy of their surroundings combined with her nudity and his white-hot sexual temperament. The vibrations in the atmosphere were shooting round her like invisible lightning bolts, making it incredibly hard for her to breathe. 'Because I said no? Because I had the incredible bad taste to find another man?' she threw at him in provocative intent, hoping to douse the dark flames of arousal in his intent stare.

Vito didn't even flinch. True, a momentary gravity tightened his facial muscles, but the idea that she had so swiftly sought consolation was evidently so ingrained that she could not shock him. 'Because I loved you,' he grated, and she was the one most inconveniently shocked by that confession. 'You look surprised, but why should you? Do you really believe that lust rejected would still incite me to such violence?' He ran the fingertips of his other hand up along the line of her extended throat in a caressing gesture that was curiously chilling. 'Love? I believed it couldn't happen to me. I had given up all hope of it ever happening. I was twenty-eight years old and, in many ways, older than my years. And then one night I saw you on a dance floor and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life…'

Ashley was trembling, curiously unwilling to accept the truth of what she had once believed. 'Infatuation,' she said fiercely. 'And it burnt out for both of us.'

'But this didn't…' One forceful hand welding to her taut spine, Vito lowered his dark head. His breath fanned her cheek and then he let his teeth nip playfully at the soft fullness of her lower lip, soothing the tiny assault with the teasing tip of his tongue until involuntarily her mouth opened, inviting a deeper invasion.

The hard heat of his body against hers was a powerful enticement. Tiny little quivers of sexual tension were awakening at every pressure-point where his lean muscles were in contact with her softer curves. Ashley began to shake, struggling to deny and to fight the insidious weakness stealing through her limbs. She could stop this, she would stop this, the little voice in her head screamed. He could not force her into intimacy. But a curious weighted stasis was holding her still in his embrace as though she was waiting for a hurricane warning before she could actually act in her own defence.

'No… no, not this!' Her voice was hoarse with the effort it took to break the spell. He clenched both her hands in his and held her back from him before she could take a single evasive movement. His intent gaze smouldered over her. As she glanced down at herself, she saw the revealing thrust of her nipples against the fine percale sheet still draped across her breasts, and her translucent skin burned with the heat of her own betrayal.

A dark flush accentuated the harsh set of his features. 'If you can't live without a man, that man might as well be me,' he grated roughly.

Fury speared through that all-pervasive physical frailty. Between clenched teeth, she spat, 'If rape turns you on, go ahead!'

A glimmer of black humour softened the hard set of his sensual mouth. 'How you do love to dramatise yourself. Why can't you be honest about this at least? You saw me for the first time in four and a half years last week and within minutes you were hot all over, eating me with your eyes.' Outraged, Ashley shrieked, 'That's a filthy lie!'

Vito dealt her a flashing smile of all-male satisfaction. 'Console yourself with the thought that if you hadn't looked at me like that, you wouldn't be here now. You dug your own grave, cara.'

With a superhuman effort Ashley took advantage of his loosened hold and, dragging her hands free, leapt off the bed. Snatching up the dress she had earlier discarded, she fled the room. The rest of the apartment was unhelpfully in darkness and she skidded in the direction of the hall, uncertain of her bearings.

Vito caught her hand and in her determination to escape she tore her fingers free so violently that she fell back against the wall. 'You're out of control!' she gasped strickenly as he trapped her there, one hand squarely planted on either side of her head in the depths of her hair.

'And so are you,' he breathed unsteadily. 'Exactly the way I like you.'

Scarcely able to believe that this was happening to her, Ashley attempted to raise her knee, but a hard thigh pinned the recalcitrant limb in place and simultaneously Vito brought his mouth crashing down on hers.

It was like a naked flame thrown on tinder-dry straw; a complete and uncontrollable conflagration. As his tongue hungrily probed the moist recesses of her mouth, a hoarse moan of pleasure was forced from her. Her taut body went into meltdown; between one moment and the next all rational thought ceased as though he had thrown a switch. She braced her hands on his shoulders and answered that kiss with complete abandon.

Time had no meaning. All that existed was a fierce world of almost unbearable sensation which wiped out everything else. He was lifting her up to his level, burying his face in the ripe swell of her aching breasts until he found a taut nipple to tease with his mouth and feelings, physical feelings that had been held in too tight for too long suddenly exploded in a fiery gush of response. Her fingers dug into the springy depths of his black hair and she wanted to scream with the power of what she was experiencing. Vito choked out a curse as he cannoned off a door and then he found her mouth again, feeding her desire with the overwhelming force of his own. He didn't break that contact for a second as he brought her down heavily on a bed somewhere in the darkness.

He was struggling out of his shirt and the assistance he got was negligible as her hands wandered in a helpless need for reacquaintance over the broad expanse of his chest, fingertips skating through the dark whorls of hair and down to the smoother skin at his lean waist. He felt hot, as if he was burning up, but the same flames were in her and she was lost, irretrievably lost in the scent and the feel and the touch of him.