When Valente entered the bedroom without warning, Caroline slowly lifted her dismayed face from the crumpled pillow. She had never looked plainer. Her hair was a mess, her nose red and her eyes badly swollen. But, oddly enough, her obvious distress soothed Valente, who decided she had rarely looked so appealing. Koko, clearly having triumphed over the bedroom ban, was curled up against her mistress like a Siamese second skin.

‘Why…er…what do you want?’ Caroline prompted tautly.

Valente scooped up the cat, strode back to the door and deposited the outraged and hissing cat back out into the corridor-but not before he had fallen victim to the lightning-fast slash of a punitive little claw across the back of his hand.

‘She’s welcome everywhere else but not in the bedrooms,’ Valente announced, while Caroline studied him as though he had taken a whip to her pet.

‘If you’ve got anything else to say to me, couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘No, it couldn’t. I’ve had a lousy wedding day and an even lousier wedding night. I want to know what turned you off sex.’

‘No! I couldn’t possibly discuss something so private with you,’ Caroline argued in open consternation.

Brilliant eyes dark as ebony, and hard as diamonds in the lamplight, Valente sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Well, the only other option is for you to discuss the problem with a stranger-a sex therapist.’

Her grey eyes widened, her horror unhidden in the face of what clearly struck her as an even greater challenge.

His sardonic mouth curled. ‘I win by default? Even though a counsellor could be just what you need.’

‘I just don’t want to talk about it,’ she breathed painfully.

Valente threw his broad shoulders back against the pillows. ‘Tough.’

‘What are you doing?’ she gasped, unnerved by his presence back on the bed.

‘Getting comfortable.’ Without a hint of awkwardness, Valente punched the pillows into shape and settled lithely back against them, his long, lean body assuming a relaxed sprawl that mocked her seething tension. ‘Tell me what your last wedding night was like…’

Caroline stiffened, and what colour there was in her cheeks drained away.

In the crushing silence that clawed at her already ragged nerves, Valente rested his shrewd gaze on her only for a moment. He was well aware that he had chosen a vulnerable time to stage his grilling, but equally aware that he was more likely to get the truth out of her. ‘Were you intimate with him before the wedding?’

Caroline shook her head in a silent negative. During those fraught weeks between inadvertently jilting Valente and agreeing to marry Matthew she had rarely been alone with her bridegroom. ‘He didn’t seem interested,’ she confided flatly. ‘Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, he married me for the business and for the promise he’d be put in charge of it. I was very stupid. I just took it for granted that the private stuff would fall into place. We were married before I realised that I wasn’t the sort of woman he had ever found attractive.’

‘How did you find that out?’

Caroline lay as still as if she was made of solid stone and studied the ceiling, her hands clasped taut, fingernails biting crescents into her tender skin. ‘He was drunk on our wedding night… He-’ her voice sank even lower ‘-he made a lot of jokes about how flat-chested and boyish my body was.’

Tensing at that startling admission, Valente almost groaned his disbelief out loud. ‘Go on…’

‘He got angry with me when I couldn’t respond the way he wanted. He drank a lot and he got rough and he hurt me,’ she muttered in an anguished rush of embarrassment. ‘Then he lost interest. Of course he tried a few other times, and every time it didn’t work he got angrier with me. He said I’d made him impotent and he started sleeping in the room next door.’

Shattered by what he was finding out, Valente breathed, ‘So when did you finally manage to consummate your marriage?’

Caroline swallowed hard. ‘We…didn’t. He had an affair with a woman who was much more his style than I was. He liked to tell me about her-’

Black brows drawing together at the full catastrophic truth of the abusive relationship she had suffered with Bailey, Valente leant closer, his lean, muscular frame very tense. ‘Are you telling me that you never had sex with him?’

In squirming mortification Caroline rolled over, presenting a defensive back to him. ‘After the first three months he never came near me again. He kept up a front around his parents because we lived with them. Luckily it was a very big house. Matt acted like I didn’t exist most of the time.’

Valente rolled her back, so that he could look at her pale heart-shaped face and defeated gaze. Luxuriant jet-dark lashes low over shimmering golden eyes, he breathed huskily, ‘You’re still a virgin?’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ she almost spat at him, in angry embarrassment over the extent of his probing.

‘It means a great deal to me, belleza mia. It means I’m getting back what I believed had been stolen from me,’ Valente confessed candidly, all his tension evaporating. ‘What else did he do to you? Did he knock you about?’

‘No, he only ever hit me once…when he discovered that I’d searched your name on the internet.’

Valente was appalled. He went from being boyishly pleased that she had sought information about him to being sobered by the price she had paid for her curiosity.

‘It’s time we got some sleep,’ Valente murmured flatly.

‘We?’ she queried anxiously.

‘Si…sleeping apart will only divide us more. I promise that I won’t do anything you don’t want. I also assure you that I won’t get angry, I will never be rough, and I will never, ever hurt you.’ Valente intoned those promises steadily, in his dark, distinctive drawl.

‘Or force me to do anything I don’t want to do?’ she pressed.

Valente set his even white teeth together so hard he almost chipped them. It was well for Matthew Bailey that he was safely dead and buried, for Valente had long loathed men who abused women. ‘Of course not. You must learn to trust me.’

‘That’s so hard,’ she admitted, watching him stride into the dressing room, listening to doors being opened and shut.

Valente emerged with a handful of burgundy-coloured silk which he tossed on the bed. ‘I bought you a new wardrobe as a wedding present. Change out of that robe.’

‘Who does it belong to?’ she asked, with a piercing sensation in her chest.

‘Nobody you need to consider.’

Valente was reflecting that he had always enjoyed a challenge, that nothing he had ever gained had been easily acquired. On the other hand, she had chosen to marry that bastard Matthew, and Valente was not prepared to wait for ever to enjoy the delights of what should have been his. The ache at his groin reminded him that celibacy had never agreed with him, either. Patience promised to be a gruelling challenge.

Too exhausted to protest, Caroline went into the bathroom. There she shed the robe that she guessed had belonged to a former lover and shimmied into the night-dress before scrambling into bed. Valente was getting undressed, and she looked away hurriedly, shrinking from that intimacy.

‘I’m not making any other promises, piccola mia,’ Valente spelt out succinctly. ‘Tonight changed everything between us…’

‘Yes,’ she agreed flatly, refusing to look at him and burrowing below the sheet.

‘I’m not a man who makes hasty decisions. I’ll give our marriage a chance. We’ll move one step at a time.’

Tears seeped out below her tightly shut lashes. She was defective goods, but he would graciously give her a trial before he sent her back to England. Once again a man was ensuring she believed that all she had to offer was her body. Feeling as though he had battered her with his condescension, she closed her eyes tight, praying for sleep to come quickly, for she was beyond even thinking about the future.

But she didn’t need to think about it, did she? Inevitably he would divorce her. There was no advantage to him in staying married to a woman like her. She had brought him no business dowry and she could not give him a child. What had happened with Matthew had happened a second time. But this time she was heart-broken, and it was all too easy for her to think of herself as absolutely useless again…

CHAPTER EIGHT

EVERY time she glimpsed the magnificent panoramic outlook from the terrace of the Villa Barbieri, Caroline wondered if she had accidentally strayed into paradise.

It was the most beautiful still day, and she loved the silence. The terracotta roofs of the sleepy village on the hilltop were a charming enhancement to the ancient honey-coloured and much-repaired stone walls of the buildings. The far view of the looming Alps was misty and indistinct, while the lush hills opposite were covered with fresh, green chestnut trees, acacias, scrub oak and broom, before petering out into the fertile valley where silvery-green olive groves and lines of grapevines took over.

She lay in the shade on her stomach, with her bikini top undone and Koko dozing beneath her lounger. If ever a cat had been born to live in a house the size of a palace it was Koko. She might hiss and spit at Valente, and emit noisy, sulky cries from a distance when he was around, but Caroline’s pet had wasted no time in making fans of the staff, who could not do enough to make the little cat feel at home.

‘She’s incredibly jealous of me,’ Valente had declared the week before. ‘As far as she’s concerned, I’ve stolen her place with you.’

And it was true, Caroline conceded with a wondering smile at that truth. Koko had been banned from the bedroom, while Valente slept with Caroline every night that he was in residence. He was travelling back and forth to Venice, usually only spending one night away from her at most. It hurt that he had never asked her to go with him, but when he was at the Villa Barbieri she woke up in his arms and increasingly fell asleep in them as well. Enclosed in that simple, unthreatening togetherness with a man for the first time, she had gradually learned to trust him. Somehow she had even learned to long for more than his kisses as he controlled his passion while assiduously stoking hers. Step by step, he had promised only four weeks earlier, and she was already becoming unnervingly eager for the next move forward.