Weddings: The Nights: Virgin on Her Wedding Night / Claiming His Wedding Night / One Wild Wedding Night

Valente swung round to settle shimmering golden eyes on her like metal grappling hooks. ‘What the hell is going on here? You wanted me to marry you—’

‘I know … I know. I’m sorry—’

‘Sorry doesn’t cut it in this scenario,’ Valente incised. ‘I want an explanation.’

Her troubled eyes strayed down over his lean, powerful physique and veered away when she realised that the silk boxers could not conceal the bold bulge of his arousal. Guilt assailed her in a choking tide. ‘I told you I was no good at sex …’

‘What just happened in that bed was about more than you not being good at sex,’ Valente flung back at her in condemnation. ‘You turned into a marble statue in my arms, and then you fought free of my arms as if you were being assaulted!’

‘I thought it might be different with you. I’m so sorry.’ Caroline was fighting the buckets of overwrought tears penned up behind her eyes, determined not to stoop to that very feminine plea for sympathy. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

That last phrase was all Valente absorbed: I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’ being his touch and proximity. Dark blood settled over his stunning cheekbones and a shudder rippled through his big body, and coiling his masculine hands into powerful fists.

‘Then why did you marry me?’ he demanded rawly.

Feeling all the more naked and foolish, standing there in front of him with her arms crossed in a protective screen over her breasts, Caroline said, ‘I want to get dressed and then we can … talk.’

‘Maledizione … you will talk now,’ Valente delivered with emphatic force. ‘I have listened to enough nonsense.’

Caroline took him by surprise and backed into the bathroom to her right, slamming shut the door and ramming home the bolt to lock it with trembling urgency. That achieved, she stripped off what remained of the fancy lingerie with frantic hands. She hated those fanciful undergarments which could only remind her of her inadequacies in the seduction field.

‘I’m out of patience. If you don’t come out, I’ll kick the door down,’ Valente warned her dangerously from the other side of the door.

Caroline grabbed the flamboyant turquoise silk robe that hung on the back of the door and put it on. It had been made for someone a good deal taller and carried the exotic scent of another woman’s perfume. Of course he had had other lovers—probably hundreds of them, she thought wildly, and every one of them would have given him more pleasure than she ever could. As the door was struck with savage force she looked desperately round the tiled room for some means of escape, but she was stuck. The bolt broke away from the wood on the second blow and the door swung wide.

Valente focused on her standing there, as straight and defiant as an early Christian martyr while wrapped in his former mistress’s robe. As a picture it was all wrong. Housekeeping, he acknowledged, had fallen down in not removing that garment. It was not a moment when he wanted to be reminded of Agnese’s voluptuous sensuality in the bedroom. Agnese, who hadn’t been able to get enough of him between the sheets. Agnese, who had begged him to keep her on even after his marriage and who had dared to suggest that no wife could replace her. And just this once, Agnese, whose beauty and vanity were legendary, had been proved right.

‘How dare you do that to me.?’ Caroline protested, trembling like a leaf after that demonstration of male aggression. She felt helpless, threatened, for she did not know how to defuse his anger.

‘How dare you pose there, shaking like I’m about to physically hurt you?’ Valente raked back at her, closing a firm hand round her wrist and urging her back into the bedroom. ‘I’m entitled to an explanation from you. Feeling like you obviously do about me, why did you insist on marrying me?’

It was the question she had most dreaded, for she could not defend herself on that score. ‘I couldn’t have cut it as a mistress,’ she pointed out heavily, half under her breath. ‘You wouldn’t have helped my parents or Hales after an experience like this. So it had to be marriage. That’s your fault. You offered me so much to be with you that you made it impossible for me to refuse.’

Outraged condemnation had fired his beautiful eyes to a golden heat that threatened to burn her tender skin. ‘Yet right from the beginning you knew that the only thing I wanted from you was sex. So you deliberately set out to rip me off.’

Caroline tore her guilty gaze from him and studied the carpet. ‘There wasn’t a choice. But I did hope it would work out between us.’

‘Even though you recoiled from me in disgust the first time we kissed again?’ he bit out rawly.

Caroline paled. ‘That’s not what I felt.’

‘How could you possibly have hoped it would work out? I was so hot for you I was blind to all the signals that something was wrong and you knew it. You kept your distance and played me right up to the doors of the church. You’re a liar and a fraud!’

Every word cut into her like a knife, reminding her of failings that she was already all too well aware of. ‘Yes, in that field I was … but I did try to tell you the truth about me at the beginning,’ she reminded him painfully, the intimate conversation tearing off entire layers off her protective skin. Now that he knew her secret, she felt horribly exposed. ‘I’m frigid. It’s my problem, nothing to do with you.’

‘Dannazione! How can it be nothing to do with me? You promised to give me a child. What hope have we now of achieving that ambition?’

Caroline was pale as milk. ‘None, I suppose.’

‘You cheated me, and I don’t allow anyone who does that to walk away unscathed. You may be my wife, but for how much longer?’ Valente slung that question at her with icy derision. ‘You left one salient fact out of your financial calculations. If this marriage isn’t consummated I can have it set aside and it will be as if we were never married. I’ll be free of you and you will no longer be entitled to a settlement of any kind.’

With that final contemptuous speech Valente snatched up the clothing he had discarded, strode into the adjoining bedroom and closed the door firmly in his wake.

What shook Caroline at that instant was that she had to stop herself from running after him. What shook her even more was the intense emotional pain of his rejection. He hated her. He couldn’t wait to get rid of her. It was as if the roof had fallen in above her and the floor beneath her feet had vanished, so that she was still falling, falling, falling, in a never-ending downward spiral. The only thing I wanted from you was sex. And it was the one thing she couldn’t give him.

The veil between her plotting and her secret desires had been torn apart by their confrontation. Had she wed him for her family’s sake? To save the workers at Hales from the dole queue? Or because she had dreamt of turning the clock back five years and magically reclaiming the love she had once lost? Wasn’t it true that what she had really wanted more than anything else was a second chance with Valente? But history was history, and couldn’t be eradicated any more than she could get over her sexual dysfunction just because she wanted to. In despair, she sobbed into the pillow.

Even though it was late, Valente wanted to phone his legal team and put them to work on ridding him of his brand-new wife. Having switched off his emotions, he was in business mode, and keen to take action on what he viewed as an act of fraud committed against him. But the prospect of telling anyone alive that his bride had just refused him froze him into rare inactivity. Dressed, he strode downstairs, startling the staff still engaged on cleaning the dining room. He poured a drink in the drawing room and strode out on to the loggia.

I thought it might be different with you. Her words fluttered back to haunt his disarranged thoughts. It had been that bad with Matthew, as well? Valente’s rage began to abate at that awareness. She didn’t like sex, and whose fault was that? It was a fault that could only be laid at Matthew Bailey’s door. Pacing the loggia, while Umberto lit candles on the stone tables and sent his employer concerned glances, Valente pieced back together everything he knew about his bride.

Five years back she had been shy, innocent and inhibited, but she had never shown the slightest hint of fear when he touched her. There had been nothing abnormal about her reactions. Could he have been mistaken about the response she had recently given him when he kissed her? Was she repelled by him personally? Or simply repelled by sex? And what did the fear and her flight into the bathroom to shelter behind a locked door suggest? A fear that he might not take no for an answer? The lean strong bones of his face clenched hard on that suspicion. The instant he acknowledged her terror, everything else fell into place. She had had to get drunk to come to him at the hotel that night. She had been miserable throughout their wedding day out of fear of what the night would bring.

Without a doubt she had known she had a serious problem, and she hadn’t shared it because she had been afraid he would walk away, when he was the only guy available to solve all her family problems. While he understood, he couldn’t forgive her for her deception. Nothing could excuse her trickery in demanding a role she could not fulfil. And she still owed him answers.

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 nightdress 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 heartbroken, 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.

From the first, he had encouraged her to touch him, to explore at will and experiment, and she had soon discovered that the more familiar she became with that lean, beautifully masculine and intensely responsive body of his, the less nervous she was around him. Her fear had gone, for he had proved how self-controlled he could be. With a little sigh she shifted her hips in a sensuous circle on the lounger, recalling how she had wakened him the day before, and the unrestrained sound of his satisfaction while he buried his hands in her hair and urged her on.

With a wicked little quiver of awareness alight low in her belly, she acknowledged that her physical barriers were coming down—and why not? If Valente’s wonderful patience with her had taught her anything, it was that he was still the man she had loved when she was twenty-one years old. And at least he was no longer being forced to go without any sexual satisfaction at all, she reflected. Her cheeks hot, she smiled in remembrance of the pleasure she had discovered she could give him. And she had given that pleasure eagerly, while marvelling at the change in herself and the newly learned confidence driving it.

A helicopter flew overhead while she ruminated over the truth that, given time, she was convinced she would be able to meet the terms of their marital agreement. Valente would win where Matthew had failed, which she supposed was only to be expected when she was in love with Valente and desperate to be part of a normal marriage. She had never got over losing Valente, which was hardly surprising in the circumstances. Her horribly ill-judged rebound marriage to Matthew had made it all too clear to her what she had lost … Footsteps sounded on the terrace and she lifted her head.

‘I thought you wouldn’t be back until late tonight!’ Caroline exclaimed, glancing up in surprise and welcome at her tall, well-built husband.

Valente sat down on the lounger beside hers, his lean, darkly handsome features serious. ‘Since you’re flying back to England to be with your father for his surgery tomorrow, I thought I should finish up early.’

‘Good.’ Caroline smiled up at him, her entire face lighting up.

Sexual hunger hit Valente as hard as a punch in the stomach. He wanted to haul into his arms and carry her up to bed, but he knew better than to succumb to such a caveman impulse around her. To occupy himself, he leant forward instead and retied the straps on her bikini top. ‘Keep the little white patches intact,’ he urged softly. ‘I find them very sexy, tesora mia.’

Caroline sat up, reddening to the roots of her pale hair. The atmosphere was thick with tension. Hot dark golden eyes travelled from her full pink mouth down to the taut little breasts restrained by her bikini top, which she longed for him to uncover. Her mouth ran dry, the hunger in his all-male gaze causing a burst of sudden heat in her pelvis. Her nipples tightened to an almost painful degree. The very knowledge of his desire made her feel dizzy, and somehow proud that she could have that effect on him. Yet she lived in constant fear that frustration would drive him into the arms of another woman before she could get over her hang-ups.

Valente gazed back at her steadily. ‘I need a cold shower, or …’

‘Or?’ she whispered.

‘I could take you up to bed and unwrap you and play with you like a toy,’ he husked, in a voice laden with lust.

His earthy proposition shocked her, because it was still broad daylight and during those hours they were usually very restrained. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip because she was both seriously tempted and seriously scared that things would go further than she could cope with. ‘You won’t—?’

‘Haven’t I proved how good my self-control is yet?’

Having learnt that she got no attention when Valente was around, Koko cried mournfully at the foot of the staircase as Caroline and Valente disappeared from her view.

‘That cat is such a bad loser, belleza mia,’ Valente quipped.

‘I bring her up to keep me company when you’re not here,’ Caroline admitted. ‘I suppose it doesn’t help that I spoil her.’

‘You always had a thing about cats. I remember bringing you little glass cat ornaments back from Venice.’