'What time is it?' she muttered.

'Midnight…later.' With an infinitesimal shrug, he sighed. 'I really don't know.' The syllables dragged ever so slightly.

That very faint slur betrayed him. His mother was right all along, she decided. I'm the kiss of death to Vito… I'm driving him to drink.

He cleared his throat. 'I've seen Lorena, Pietro's mother. She knows now what he has done. She intends to return to Italy with him. She is very close to her late husband's family and believes that they will help her to exercise greater control over his son. I am not so optimistic. I suspect that Pietro will remain a problem.'

Ashley surfaced from the bedding with the sensual glide of a mermaid emerging from the waves. She sat up, righting the slipping satin strap of her diaphanous nightdress. 'You've had a busy evening,' she said, combing her fingers slowly through her vibrant mane of hair so that it fell in a silken mass across her pale shoulders. It was so much wasted effort. The male who would have been electrified by such a display a mere fortnight ago still didn't spare her a glance. 'I'm feeling much better,' she added.

'Good.' The tone was strained. He stared moodily down into the crystal glass he held. 'I seem to have this extraordinary talent for destroying what you hold dear. Yet you must accept that I never intended, never planned for it to be that way. I thought I had the right… I thought that you owed me this chance-'

Unbearably taut, she whispered, 'I'm not sure I follow.'

He threw back his head and laughed with savage amusement. Her entire attention was fiercely locked to him, her heartbeat racing even in that moment of stress to the raw, virile power of his male beauty. 'I have never been afflicted by any great degree of humility,' he confided shamelessly. 'You see, I thought that I could make you love me.'

A hoarse sound of distress escaped her. A shudder of reaction forced a passage through her tense body. He confirmed her own suspicions but it had been many weeks since she had dwelt on those suspicions which would have clouded and ruined that final, glorious month in Sri Lanka.

'I actually thought that if I pushed all the right buttons, it would happen. You would wake up one day and, far from wanting to stick a knife between my ribs,' he asserted harshly, 'you would think, I cannot live without this guy. And you would cling like ivy, cleave like Eve to Adam in the Bible-'

'I think I get the picture, Vito.' It took her a full thirty seconds to even make her voice work and it emerged rusty and flat, unable to rise above the tremendous pain she was fighting to hide. No wonder he had decided not to get her pregnant. He had been far more intent on revenge and he had gone to a lot of effort… in fact he had gone to the most unbelievable lengths to push what he had called 'the right buttons'. And had she been honest with him, he might have been spared all that tedious exertion. He had actually got what he wanted far more quickly and easily than he could ever have guessed. She was so desperately hurt, so horribly humiliated that she wanted to die.

He released his breath in a hiss. 'I was incredibly conceited-'

'Yes.' And with just cause, she conceded wretchedly.

She had been a vulnerable target, a willing victim.

'To even think that after all that I had done to you, you could even… even begin to care for me again,' he practically muttered, sounding rather peculiar.

Since she hadn't brought herself to look once at him in the last few minutes, she presumed it was the effect of the alcohol. 'C-crazy,' she managed jerkily half under her breath.

'It was unforgivable.'

Dumbly she nodded agreement.

'Manipulative, calculating,' he breathed raggedly, an edge of something remarkably similar to desperation in his delivery. 'I can't help being like that… '

She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to shout at him and throw in a few adjectives of her own. It would make him feel better. But for the first time in her life with Vito, she had absolutely nothing to say. Her defences were down. She was in too much pain to feel anger. He would just have to live with his conscience.

'I can't bear your silence,' he admitted gruffly. Accidentally, she glanced up and collided with lustrous dark eyes. He looked shattered, as if every sentence he had spoken had taken a physical toll. She had never seen him like that before; vulnerable, unsure. No doubt she would never see him like that again. He had plunged them both into an unholy mess but she had every certainty that by tomorrow Vito would be concentrating his immense energy and brilliant mind on how to approach with tact the problem of the custody of her unborn children. Two for the price of one and he didn't even know it yet, she reflected mirthlessly.

'Perhaps you would prefer to talk tomorrow when we are both feeling calmer.'

She never wanted to talk to him again, but she nodded and went back to studying the sheet she was nervously pleating. There was no way she could sleep after he had gone. Could he take her children away from her? She hadn't signed anything. She wasn't a drug addict or an alcoholic. She couldn't see what possible argument he could put up in a court of law… Some time around dawn, she fell into an uneasy doze.

'You don't feel car-sick?' Vito shot her a concerned glance. Ashley's teeth clenched. That was the third time he had referred to her health. Add that litany to three other stilted remarks ranging from the weather to the beauty of the countryside and you had a far from scintillating dialogue. She had spent yesterday in bed. She had got up for breakfast and he had mentioned talking as in proper talking and she had suffered a sudden relapse, pleading weakness to escape. When had he turned her into such a coward? They couldn't live in limbo forever. Either she talked or she ran away, and if she ran away she would be running to the end of her days, despising herself for such cowardice.

Just about the last thing she had expected this morning was the announcement that they had a luncheon engagement in deepest Berkshire and that he had no intention of making excuses for her absence. With bad grace she had surrendered, marvelling that he could think a lunch date worthy of such attention in the present state of their marriage.

'I want us to stay together.'

The cool assertion dropped like a brick through the windscreen, momentarily depriving her of breath.

'Until the baby is born,' he added very quietly. 'That is very important to me.'

'Tough!' Biting her lip until the blood came, she stared out at the motorway stretching endlessly ahead and thought that he had chosen his time well. There was nowhere to run. Stay until the baby is born and then get lost. She felt sick, horribly sick, shrinking from the mere suggestion. Didn't he have any sensitivity at all? To continue to live with him would destroy her. She needed to get away to get over him. She needed to go back to her own world, away from his and every reminder of him. But the leaving would be hard because incredibly, even after all he had done, a shameful part of her still wanted to cling to what little of a semblance of a marriage remained.

'The last time I wasn't there-'

'I don't need you!' she spat jerkily. 'I don't need you for anything.'

'I didn't say that you did.' He was measuring his words with supreme tact. 'But I would like you to stay-'

'So that you can watch over me?' she cut in bitterly. 'Make sure I don't sneak off for another termination?' The lean brown fingers on the steering-wheel clenched to show white knuckles. 'You didn't have one the first time. Why should you want one now?'

Ashley was shaken. He was telling her that he believed her, he believed that she had had a miscarriage four years ago. 'When did you change your mind and decide that I wasn't lying?'

'Weeks ago, but you didn't want to talk about it,' he reminded her drily..

'I didn't see why I should have to keep on defending myself.'

'I really do want this baby,' he breathed almost roughly. 'I may have failed you in the past but that does not mean I have absolutely no rights this time.'

'I don't want to talk about your rights,' she whispered sickly.

'Why the hell have you never learned to speak my language?' he suddenly raked at her furiously. 'It is not easy for me to find the correct words to express my emotions in English. What do you think this is like for me? I am in the wrong. In every direction I look, I am even more in the wrong! If I spent the rest of my life telling you that I was sorry, it wouldn't change anything!'

'Five minutes of you saying sorry in any language would be a wonder to me. Let's not go overboard by talking about the rest of your life!'

'I'm getting off this motorway,' he gritted.

'Not one of your brighter ideas,' she said dulcetly, unable to stop stabbing at him. A row about nothing in particular was much more her style than a discussion about the burial arrangements for their marriage. 'And if you don't stop speeding we will probably be greeted with a roadblock at the next exit.'

He took the next exit in smouldering, simmering silence and shot into a lay-by five minutes later, killing the engine-purr with a suddenness that brought the silence rushing dangerously back.

'I'm sorry…is that what you want?'

Green eyes flashing, she dealt him a taut look of mutiny and turned her head deliberately to stare out of the side-window. He could never be sorry enough. Two and a half months ago she had been reasonably happy, hating him, and right now she was sickeningly miserable loving him for no return. So he wanted the baby. Well, that was scarcely news. 'Do you feel sick'? 'Do you feel faint'? 'Do you want to stop for coffee'? The message of his concern for the life in her womb had been beaten in with overkill.