Abruptly he wrenched back from her and ripped off the remainder of his clothes. He muttered something in Italian and then he groaned, 'How the hell do you do this to me? It wasn't supposed to be like this.'

Cooler air briefly washed her damp skin and for a split-second a shard of reason almost returned, but, before the nebulous thought could form, Vito was back in her arms with a vengeance. She gasped as long fingers slid between her thighs and found the moist centre of her desire, cried out and arched her back beneath the hot onslaught of his mouth on her taut breasts.

'Tell me how you feel,' he demanded between clenched teeth as he moved over her, his hands rough on her thighs, his body a heavy but blessed weight on hers.

'Vito, please… oh, God, please… don't stop.' She was at fever pitch, her entire being concentrated on a razor edge of unbearable need. She could feel him, hot and hard and ready, and she couldn't wait, was terrified he might make her wait, because if he didn't drive her over that edge she thought she might die from frustration.

He took her like an invading army, ruthless in conquest. The sheer power of his first thrust forced a cry of pain from her dry lips but pain became intolerable pleasure within seconds. Her hips writhed beneath his as he drove into her in long shuddering strokes, his skin slippery with perspiration against hers. She moved to the heated rhythm he set, abandoned and driven by the most intense excitement of all, and then suddenly every muscle clenched and she was moaning with the ecstasy of fulfilment, rawly erotic shock waves spreading out from the very centre of her body to drain her momentarily of all thought and all movement. With a groan of raw satisfaction Vito subsided on her, spent and satiated. Instinctively she wrapped her arms round him and almost instantly drifted off to sleep.

When she surfaced, it was like waking up to a living hell. Lights were on, harsh and glaring, and the first things she saw when she opened her eyes were the photographs on the cabinet by the bed. Carina, smiling from a silver frame. And Carina in Vito's arms, punch-drunk with happiness in one of those informal but intimate studies that just might have been taken on a honeymoon. Ashley's stomach twisted and turned over sickly as if she had gone down too fast in a lift. She turned away and met Vito's shuttered dark gaze. Almost fully dressed, he was shrugging a broad shoulder into the jacket of a navy pinstripe suit. He looked heartbreakingly handsome and soul-destroyingly remote. If he was feeling anything, he wasn't showing it, and that ability of his to shut everything out tortured her at a moment when she felt sick with self-hatred and humiliation. Trembling all over, she shut her eyes, struggling fiercely against her mind's determination to replay the last few hours. It would happen soon enough: the self-examination, the questions that had no welcome answers. But not now, the little voice in her head pleaded, not now… in front of him.

'I think I should leave.' There was no emotion whatsoever in the announcement, except that some sixth sense told her that Vito couldn't wait to get away. She pressed her cheek into the pillow. 'Can I leave too?' she whispered, and it sounded as if she was begging, and for the first time in her life she really didn't care.

'It was inevitable that this would happen.' 'You made it happen,' she condemned. 'We made it happen,' he countered harshly. 'I didn't plan it. I intended to wait until after the wedding.'

A near-hysterical laugh escaped her and she bit down so hard on her tongue that it bled. She never had been able to cope with Vito when he froze, and he wasn't about to let her go. Vito's ancestors had been loan sharks since the Middle Ages. Something for nothing was not a concept that had figured largely in his upbringing. Vito would take what he wanted from her regardless of the cost. He would pick her apart as he had done over dinner and then fall like a vulture on the pitiful remnants that remained. He had done it twice already and the poisonous taste of defeat was smashing her into pieces.

'You should run a little account book, stamp each page every time I-'

'Don't!' he raked at her with sudden rawness. 'It wasn't planned!'

'No?' She cast him a fleeting look because she just couldn't bring herself to face a head-on collision. 'Over dinner you smash me up. Then you trail me to the opera. Then you trail me out of the opera. Then you offer me brandy and a little bit of sympathy and then you… and then you… you-'

'Do you think I'm proud of what I did tonight? Do you think I'm proud that I can't keep my hands off you?' The ice had cracked. Tense as a jungle cat about to spring, he flung the demands at her with lancing ferocity.

'Why don't you throw some money on the bed?' Ashley whispered strickenly. 'Isn't that what you do with whores?'

'You are not a whore!'

'You said I was,' she persisted stubbornly.

Vito flung up both hands in a gesture of raging frustration. 'Dio, I was jealous, so jealous that I wouldn't listen to reason. I accept now that you were with Tim today and that that stupid bruise wasn't what I assumed it was, but at the time I believed you'd been with another man!'

'And now that reason has returned I've been upgraded, have I? Well, I've got news for you,' she bit out shakily. 'I feel like a whore. How you feel has got nothing to do with how I feel.'

He swore, long and low in his own language, both hands clenched into fists. He swung round in a graceful arc and surveyed her with sudden piercing intuition. 'You think that if you make me feel bad enough I'll let you go. I won't,' he said succinctly. 'Next week we are getting married and nothing will change that fact.'

'I think the punishment exceeds the crime.'

For an instant he lingered by the door, brilliant dark eyes appraising her incredibly beautiful face. His expressive mouth tightened as though the view disturbed him… 'But whose is the punishment and whose was the crime?' he breathed tautly.

She slumped back on the bed, caught an accidental glimpse of the photographs and abruptly reared up again. Lifting them, she yanked open the cabinet drawer and dropped them inside. Now why had she done that? She didn't want to think about why. Was she jealous? Four years ago she had been so jealous – she had burnt on a rack of her own making, imagining him with her… over and over again.

And now here she was back in Vito's bed once more, involved in a relationship of such tortuous complexity and bitterness that she could hardly cope with her own turmoil. Somehow it was no consolation to know that Vito's incredibly disciplined intellect was very evidently suffering from a little chaos too. He hadn't planned this. No, well, ungenerous as she felt towards him, she really didn't think that he had. Vito didn't like messy situations. Vito didn't like to lose control.

And Ashley didn't like to lose control either. Passion had surged in beneath her shaky defences and had betrayed her as never before. With Vito, it had always been like that, but in the past it had been a weakness made bearable by love. Only she didn't love him any more. She had taught herself not to love him. Month after month, day in, day out, she had reminded herself of his betrayal until bitterness became her strength and hatred her armour. But what had happened to the bitterness and the hatred when she needed them most? Had she been able to withstand that passion and remain cold, she would be free as the wind right now! Vito was far too male to feel any desire to force his attentions on an unwilling woman. She hadn't been unwilling. Her teeth gritted together in self-disgust. She had ached for the heated caress of his hands and the hot invasion of his body. It had been as if every moment, from that first meeting in his office, had been building up into exactly this climax. In the aftermath she felt sick, mortified by her own abandonment. She had wanted him… oh, yes, she had wanted him every bit as much as he appeared to want her, and consequences be damned. And why was that? She hated him, didn't she? She hated him for what he had done in the past and for what he was doing to her now.

But it didn't seem to make any difference once he touched her. She had been upset, she reminded herself frantically, deeply upset. He had caught her at the worst possible moment and somehow… somehow, she reasoned lamely, all those painful emotions had exploded into passion. A passion she had been unable to experience with anyone else. She thought of the dates she had forced herself to accept when she had so desperately wanted to feel something, anything so that she could reassure herself that she was still in the land of the living. In fact just last year she had met one really special man. A doctor, a single parent with a little girl at the nursery. And she had really liked Josh and he had more than liked her, but when it came to crunch-time she had had to stop seeing him, because liking had flatly refused to turn into love or even desire. And then Vito had come along and she was like a woman with a death wish. Tonight-well, tonight she had gone off the deep end. She had thought of nothing, not even consequences. And it had been years since she was on the Pill, that low-dosage Pill that had been insufficient to prevent her pregnancy. Just suppose she was like her mother, who had once joked that she could get pregnant just looking into a pram? No, it wouldn't happen, she couldn't believe it could happen to her a second time, but she didn't intend to take the risk. Tomorrow she would see a doctor and ask for a prescription for a contraceptive Pill. That would frustrate Vito's plans for the future, and it wasn't as if he could ever find out why she was failing to become pregnant. She would be very discreet.