Valente lounged back in his chair, black-lashed eyes reduced to a daunting sliver of hot gold resolve and challenge. ‘Whatever it takes,’ he repeated silkily, stubbornly unrepentant.

And that was the moment Caroline realised that he had made her an offer she could not in all conscience refuse…

CHAPTER SIX

‘YOU’VE won,’ Caroline conceded in a driven admission. ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep my father alive.’

‘That’s admirable, gioia mia. I admire loyalty,’ Valente countered smoothly. ‘That only leaves the terms to be discussed.’

Caroline wanted to empty the water jug over him, because he made no attempt to hide his strong satisfaction. Winning meant a great deal to Valente Lorenzatto, and he scared her because his ruthlessness appeared to respect no boundaries. By ‘terms’, he meant mistress or wife. He was driving her in a direction she did not want to go. For her own safety, she needed an arrangement which could not be set aside in the space of a moment. A mistress was too easily discarded-and she was convinced that he would quickly want to discard her, cutting her out of his life as quickly as he had come back into hers.

Valente wanted and expected only pleasure from her sex. In the past, women had fawned over him for his dark, sexy good-looks and potent personality. Sixth sense had warned her even then that he had enjoyed many conquests. Now, with the addition of wealth and position, Valente had to be downright irresistible to her sex. After all, even she was not totally impervious to his magnetic attraction. Although coping with a few gentle kisses was a far different challenge from sharing a bed and the ultimate intimacy with him, she acknowledged apprehensively.

The first course was served. Held by the dark shrewd gleam of Valente’s unyielding gaze, Caroline pushed the plate away.

‘Eat,’ he urged immediately, reaching across the table to push the plate back towards her again. ‘You’re as thin as a cardboard cut-out.’

Her face flamed. ‘I’m naturally thin.’

‘When I lifted you last night, you felt as light as a child in my arms.’

‘Your concern is nonsensical. I’m quite happy with myself the way I am,’ Caroline told him tartly, wondering if his tastes in women ran in the same direction as her late husband’s. She shuddered at the recollection of Matthew’s cruelly cutting comments about her boyish lack of curves.

‘If you’re planning to demand that I marry you, you’ll need to be a healthy weight to conceive,’ Valente pointed out coolly. ‘But I hope that isn’t the option you’re thinking of choosing.’

‘Why?’ Caroline asked starkly.

Valente slotted a knife and fork into her empty hands with military precision and no lack of determination. ‘I’m being honest. I don’t want to marry you. I’m not the same person I was five years ago. I don’t think the same. I don’t feel the same, either.’

Hotly flushed in receipt of that blunt rejection, coming at her even before she had voiced her own feelings, Caroline breathed, ‘You’re telling me. You used to be much warmer and more caring.’

‘Only those sterling qualities didn’t get you to the church on time,’ Valente fired back with sardonic bite, watching her eyes fall from his in discomfiture. He smiled a razor-edged smile. ‘I don’t want a wife. I want a mistress. I will be much more generous if you come to me on my terms.’

Caroline swallowed hard and skimmed her gaze round the dining room, noting that several women were looking in their direction, with Valente providing the focus for their attention. Other women would always want him, she reflected unhappily. And now she was about to work a confidence trick on him-because, while she might rail against his ruthlessness, wasn’t it dishonest of her to opt for marriage when she knew that she was unlikely to consummate it? Shame filled her, closely backed by fear, for she dreaded entering the minefield of matrimony again and the threatening challenge of the marital bed.

Valente watched her, trying to read the significance of her lowered lashes and the quivering vulnerability of her very kissable ripe pink mouth. It had been a torture to lie beside her without touching her the previous night. He had only to imagine what he would do with her when he got the opportunity and his body hardened instantly, the fierce, urgent arousal that had already disturbed his sleep for two nights returning to dig talon claws of very real hunger into his tall, powerful frame. What was it about her that made her so much more sexually alluring than other women?

But marriage would be a ridiculously high price to pay for fulfilment, he conceded grimly. In all likelihood the slaking of his desire for her would result in a rapid cooling-off of his interest, and a wife was not as easily shed as a mistress. On the other hand a child from such a marriage would ensure that he did not have to tie himself down on a more permanent basis to another woman in the future. It was imperative that he have a child at some stage to continue the family line, protect the extensive Barbieri estates for the next generation, and take charge of his own vast business empire.

‘It would have to be marriage.’ Caroline had to force out her final answer, because cheating didn’t come naturally to her and she was convinced that what she was doing was just that. But he had offered to cover the cost of her father’s heart surgery, to let her parents remain at Winterwood, and to ensure that jobs were safe at Hales Transport. It was his own fault that he had heaped the scales so heavily in his own favour. How could she possibly turn him down? He had the power to turn all their lives around, but if she married him he would also have the power to destroy her and complete the task that Matthew had begun.

In negotiation mode, Valente studied her like a cat studied a mouse getting ready to make a break for freedom. ‘Why?’

Feeling too warm under such pressure, Caroline unbuttoned her jacket and slid out of it, revealing a tantalising amount of bare skin, for the dress beneath was not as modest in cut when she bent down to eat. ‘Dad would never accept the other option. He’s an old-fashioned man…’

‘Plenty of couples live together these days without a wedding ring.’ Valente feasted his eyes shamelessly on the stimulating view of the rounded globes of her breasts and imagined having the right to touch and stimulate that sweet soft flesh. If he married her she would always be available, not just waiting at the end of a phone line for his call. It was a seductive thought, and the pressure that built at his groin was an exquisite pain.

‘I don’t think I could trust you to keep your promises unless I was your wife,’ Caroline stated forthrightly, and set down her knife and fork, amazed to discover that she had cleared her plate.

Valente was shocked out of his erotic reverie by that comeback.

Her grey eyes were silvery pale as frost and full of challenge, her fragile bone structure tautly outlined below her fair skin.

‘You don’t trust me,’ he said, unamused.

‘You don’t trust me, either.’

‘I won’t be a great husband.’

‘As long as you’re not violent or abusive I can cope with that.’

Valente’s black luxuriant lashes dropped down to conceal his startled gaze. For the first time he felt an acute stab of curiosity to know more about her marriage to Matthew Bailey. ‘I will be neither.’

‘We’re agreed, then?’ Caroline prompted anxiously.

There was a cool, unforgiving darkness in his measuring gaze. ‘We’ll get married as soon as it can be arranged.’

‘Did you mean it when you said you wanted a child?’ she whispered after the next course was served, for she was barely able to believe that he had agreed to her option.

‘Si, gioia mia. There has to be some advantage for me in the arrangement.’

In the circumstances it was crazy, but she felt hurt by the cold calculation of that declaration. He talked and behaved as if he wanted her at any cost, but quite evidently his intelligence ruled him more than his passion if he could say such a thing. She was outraged by his assumption that providing him with a child could be styled as an acceptable demand in any agreement. Yet she saw no point in arguing, because she was convinced that he would soon cancel their agreement and divorce her when she disappointed him in the bedroom. They would never get near the stage of conceiving a child, which meant that once again she would be letting him down. It was a thought that cut through Caroline like a knife. All of a sudden it seemed to her that no matter what she did, she did it wrong.

At the end of the meal Valente insisted on taking her home, accompanying her out of the hotel with a light hand at her spine and relieving her of the immediate anxiety that he might be expecting a more intimate demonstration of commitment from the woman he had just agreed to marry.

Midway through the journey he changed his mind about their destination. Her mother was with her father at the hospital, and the limousine headed there instead.

‘The sooner we tell your parents the better. Your father will have less to worry about,’ he stated confidently.

Caroline was mortified when her mother reacted with unconcealed delight to their announcement. Wealth evidently cancelled out all Isabel’s former objections to Valente. Caroline could not bring herself to look at Valente, but the look of acceptance and relief in her father’s shadowed eyes reinforced her belief that what she was doing was right in so far as it affected her family and the business. Beyond that level she refused to think.

On the way back to Winterwood, Valente discussed his plans for the house and the provision being made for a self-contained apartment on the ground floor which would be adapted to suit her parents’ needs. ‘They will, of course, be free to use the rest of the house when we’re not there.’