'No, I didn't think you would hit me…' Alex murmured softly, chillingly.
She fought through the wanton layers of her own suffocating pleasure and struggled to think again. 'What…?' she mumbled, relocating her voice an equal challenge.
'I touch you and you wouldn't hear a fire alarm. I touch you at any time of the day or the night and it's instant surrender. You've taught me that in two short weeks. All the sex that I want, whenever I want.' 'A-Alex, what are you-?'
'Saying?' Smouldering golden eyes locked with hers with icy precision. 'Dio… I am not complaining, bellamia. But what a waste of a year. I was needlessly cautious to a degree that now embarrasses me. Sexually harassing you between the filing cabinets would have been a hugely entertaining exercise… You can't keep your hands off me even in the middle of a fight! So if you have to languish over the pretty blond boy you lost, why should I be offended? Between the sheets you're still incredibly willing to satisfy my most basic needs…and your own.'
Eyes wide, Sara was rigid with shock until it belatedly dawned on her for the very first time that Alex might actually be jealous-a suspicion that made his verbal offensive wash over her. 'I wasn't thinking about Brian,' she said quietly, intently, wanting to convince him, and she would have said a great deal more with very little encouragement.
But she didn't get the encouragement. In coolly insolent response, Alex scanned the length of her naked body, so trustingly open to his gaze, before he met her anxious eyes again. 'Not right now, no,' he conceded with a pointed derision that was like a slap in the face. 'But, you see, I expect your full attention out of bed too. Feel free to agonise as much as you like over Shorter… but from now on I suggest you indulge your sentiments in private. Your tragedy-queen mood with its accompanying deathly silence sets my teeth on edge.'
And Sara shrank inside herself, the illusion that he might have been becoming jealous of that former love brutally, instantaneously dissolved. Her struggle to hide her growing distress earlier had meant only one thing to Alex once she had denied that Claudia had played any part in her change of mood. He had assumed that Brian was behind her withdrawal-a belief that had provoked not jealousy but coldly sardonic impatience and reproof. Love him all you like, was the message she'd received. Just don't bore me to death with your silly emotionalism.
And that was when Sara felt unbearably, hideously humiliated. She read the other message that Alex was giving her too: her undeniable ability to behave like a wanton slut in bed was just about the only thing he did appreciate about her! With a frantic hand she snatched at the sheet and dragged it clumsily over bared skin that now shamed her. She curved defensively away from him, her flesh clammy. Alex used her own body like a weapon against her. He made her feel cheap. 'Cold and detached,' Pete had said. She stared strickenly into those stunningly golden but frighteningly unreadable eyes and shivered compulsively, as if she were looking into the jaws of death, repulsed by her own vulnerability.
Alex frowned, muttered something fierce in Italian and rugged her firmly back against his warm, muscular length. In bitter pain, she felt the familiar surge of her own body against his and knew that he could make her want him no matter what he did, and that chilled and mortified her even more. She froze in instinctive rejection. 'Don't touch me.'
His strong muscles clenched hard. 'Sara…I'm finding out that I can't live with being the consolation prize. If you want to stay married to me, you have to put the love of your life behind you,' he spelt out with hard emphasis.
Reacting to the part of that threat which related to their marriage, Sara turned white. 'As you did with Elissa?' she whispered feverishly.
His ebony brows drew together. 'Madredi Dio… what-?'
'Because you can't say you put her behind you, can you?' Sara suddenly launched at him an entire octave higher.
'Elissa doesn't come into this!' Alex dismissed with raw, stinging impatience.
Sara turned her head away, her heart thumping at the foot of her throat. 'I heard someone say… at our wedding… that I looked like her…'
The words lay there between them. The pulsing silence seemed to stretch endlessly. She was holding her breath. 'Alex?' she finally prompted very, very tautly.
There was slight movement beside her and the lights went out.
'No comment,' Alex murmured without any expression at all.
The response stunned Sara. She lay there rigid in the darkness but Alex made no further move towards her. However, there was nothing tense about the drowsy sigh of positively indolent satisfaction that escaped him as he shifted against the fine linen sheets and then lay with the stillness of complete relaxation-a reality soon borne out by the deep, even sound of his breathing as he fell asleep… while Sara lay awake. The honeymoon was over.
Alex dealt her a measuring look in the limousine carrying them across London. 'You look tired. You should go straight back to bed.' 'I'm fine, I have to unpack- ' 'The staff will do the unpacking. You might as well rest. I'll be late tonight,' he told her.
Sara stiffened. 'Then I'll go down to Ladymead, see,.JW the work is going.'
'I should check out the workforce first,' Alex murmured with lazy mockery, dark eyes flicking over her strained face. 'If a brawny plasterer takes off his shirt in your radius, I might be history before I know it.'
'Very funny, Alex.' Flames of colour burnished in her pallor.
'I never did tell you who my first love was-' 'You mean your memory goes back that far?' Alexsmiled, his mood infuriatingly buoyant. 'I was twelve. She was thirteen. I lied about my age. She blushed every time she looked at me. She had skin like a peach, black curly hair and braces on her teeth. For the whole of one week I was enraptured.' 'The longevity of your affections is remarkable.' Alex laughed appreciatively, his dark, flashing eyes colliding with hers. 'When she found out I was younger, she cut me dead!'
An involuntary smile crept across the tense line of her mouth, a giant wave of love surging up inside her. She veiled her shadowed eyes immediately but she was angry with herself now for lying awake all night brooding. Alex had never promised to love her, had he? He had said that he could make her happy and he had, but he had also shattered her illusion that she could somehow have more. Maybe she had needed that lesson. It had been very foolish of her to imagine that simply because she had fallen in love Alex might have too.
'I was dying to see it. I still can't believe my eyes. It's a wonderful old house, gloriously picturesque,' Donatella sighed appreciatively as they strolled slowly indoors. 'When Papa said that Alex had bought a ruin, we all laughed because Alex cannot bear to be uncomfortable on the domestic front. He is very spoilt that way. This dust, this dirt, this frantic upheaval would drive him crazy… but what a declaration of love that he should close his eyes to all the imperfections and buy it anyway!'
'Alex knows what I like very well.' Sara's eyes suddenly gleamed with secret amusement. Alex really hadn't needed to hedge his bets with Ladymead the day he'd proposed. She still would have married him. Perhaps it was time she told him that too. 'And he can hardly have been unaware of what was required here. The palazzo must require fairly constant maintenance.'
'But that's different. For Alex that is the home of his earliest memories. He uses it most. Papa rarely goes to Venice now,' Donatella said as they strolled round the echoing ground floor. 'He has never liked the palazzo since Alex's mother died there.'
'Did he love her so much?'
Donatella looked wry. 'He would tell you he did but then they were only together three years. I'm more cynical. With every wife but Francine he fathered another child, found his attention straying and got divorced again. I think he simply likes women too much, but he does like to think of himself as a family man.'