The Heat Of Passion

Sympathy, understanding and forgiveness. Alien emotions where Carlo was concerned. Her temples were throbbing. Her concentration was blown. She studied him with perceptible incomprehension, temporarily drained of all emotion. She just didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘This role,’ Carlo selected smoothly, letting champagne froth down into another glass. ‘It would entail considerable intimacy—’

‘Intimacy?’ she whispered shakily.

Carlo slotted the glass into her nerveless fingers. He surveyed her with immense satisfaction. ‘Intimacy,’ he repeated lazily, making a sexual banquet of the word and the long-drawn-out syllables were like a set of taunting fingers on her spine.

‘What... what exactly are you offering me?’ Jessica framed jerkily.

‘You would have to agree before I told you the details.’ Carlo dealt her a cool, steady glance, silky black lashes low over hooded, very dark eyes.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Unusual.’ Carlo shifted a broad shoulder in a slight shrug. ‘But I don’t trust you. Why should I? And it is not as though you have moral scruples, is it? And even if you had,’ he pointed out, ‘you do have your father to consider.’

She tensed, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘Are you talking about some kind of job?’

Carlo’s mouth curved wryly. ‘You could call it that.’ ‘And would it entail breaking the law?’ she prompter flatly.

‘What do you take me for, cara?’

‘Would it?’ she persisted.

‘No.’

Jessica cleared her throat. ‘You mentioned intimacy... were you talking about sexual intimacy?’ she pursued, tight-lipped and rigid. ‘Or was that just your idea of a joke?’

His strong jawline hardened. ‘There would be nothing remotely humorous about the exercise, that I can assure you. And yes, I was referring to sexual intimacy. The part you would play would not be credible without it.’

Dear heaven, why was she actually standing here listening to this nonsense? Her oval face set with distaste and rejection as her imagination ran absolutely rampant. Was he suggesting that she become some sort of business spy, sleeping with some competitor to gain information? An insane idea, but why else the secrecy? A kind of job that would last no longer than three months which would entail sex. How utterly revolting! A hysterical laugh clogged up her throat though. Her level of sexual experience lifted such a proposition to the heights of a tragicomic black joke...but then Carlo was not to know that.

Jessica threw back her shoulders. ‘Clearly you need a hooker

‘Madre di Dio...what are you saying to me?’ Carlo shot her a black glance of naked hauteur. ‘Are you crazy? I need a woman who can at the very least behave like a lady—’

‘And you don’t know any?’ Jessica cut in. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? And how many beds are you expecting this lady to climb into at your request?’

Dark golden eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Jessica reddened, suddenly uncertain.

‘The only bed you would be expected to warm would be mine,’ Carlo spelt out very drily.

Jessica went white and looked back at him in disbelief. Setting down the untouched champagne, she reached for her coat with an unsteady hand. ‘Quite out of the question,’ she told him with bitter clarity. ‘I have no intention of selling my body to keep my father out of prison! Why the cloak and dagger approach, Carlo? Couldn’t you just have asked me to be your mistress? Well, the answer is no... no, no, no! I’d sooner take to the streets!’

Brilliant dark eyes raked over her impassively. ‘Go, then ... I have nothing more to say to you.’

‘But I’m not finished yet,’ Jessica asserted with venom. ‘Six years ago, you came into my life like a dark shadow and you tried to destroy it. There is no human being alive whom I hate more than you! And why did you set out to wreck my life? Out of nothing more than overweening conceit, selfishness and lust. It didn’t matter to you that I was engaged to another man or that I loved that man. It didn’t matter that you might hurt him as much as you hurt me.’

‘You hurt him, not I,’ Carlo returned without emotion. Jessica shuddered with the force of her own teeming emotions. ‘You set out to ruin our relationship—’

‘If you had truly loved him, I would have been without power. The power I had you gave me...’

Hot pink flushed her slanted cheekbones. ‘I did not!’

‘With every look, every breath you took in my radius. Your hunger drew me,’ Carlo condemned without conscience.

‘No!’ She stared back at him in stark distress and reproach, her father’s plight forgotten as he plunged her back into the past, heaping her with more guilt and an even greater sense-of responsibility for all that had gone wrong.

‘Did it give your ego a kick?’ Carlo sent her a look of blazing contempt. ‘You play with fire, you get burnt, cara:

Jessica’s knees felt like cotton wool. She was shattered by Carlo’s view of what had happened between them. He was accusing her of having encouraged him when she had fought his ruthless pursuit every step of the way. Only at the last when she was at the very end of her strength had she failed.

‘I came here and I shouldn’t have come.’ White and drawn, she turned away. ‘We hate each other, Carlo. I don’t think you realise the extent of the damage you did six years ago and I expect that even if you did you wouldn’t care—’

‘You walked away from me..

And it was still there, an intensity of disbelief and banked-down fury. She couldn’t understand the strength of his emotion after all this time. It wasn’t as though Carlo Saracini had fallen in love with her. Right from the beginning, it had been a rawly sexual wanting on his side. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way he talked to her. Predator and victim. Passion and pain. That was what he had offered her. And she hadn’t walked away... she had run as if the hounds of hell were on her tail.

‘I still don’t think I deserve the offer you just made,’ Jessica breathed not quite steadily. ‘You sit there in your ivory tower, wrapped in all your money, and you have the sensitivity of a butcher where feelings are concerned.’ Tears stung her amethyst eyes but she held her head proudly high.

‘That is a gross untruth,’ Carlo slashed back at her rawly.

‘You walk over people. You manipulate them. You push them around. My father really liked you six years ago. You see, he couldn’t see through you as I could. Oh, yes, he thought you were a hell of a guy!’ she proffered in a choked voice of distaste. ‘But you don’t give a snap of your fingers for what he’s going through now, do you? All you can see is an opportunity to humiliate me further. And I will not give you that weapon, Carlo. You see, I have my pride too.’

He was pale beneath his naturally olive skintone but he wouldn’t give an inch. And she hadn’t expected him to. Censure rarely came his way. In receipt of it, he silently seethed, presumably thinking it beneath his dignity to defend himself against such charges.

Eyes as flaming gold as the heart of a fire burned her face. ‘Were you happy with him?’

On her passage to the door, she froze and slowly turned. He hadn’t absorbed a thing she had said. Pain dug lines of stress into her face. He was asking about Simon. She looked away. ‘He was my best friend,’ she said finally.

‘And this ... this being a best friend is your ideal of marriage?’ Carlo demanded, his usually fluent English curiously letting him down.

No, but it was what she had ended up with, she reflected sadly. Her troubled eyes slid back to him and collided with questioning gold and something twisted tight deep down inside her stomach. The atmosphere fairly throbbed with undertones. She stopped breathing, was sentenced to sudden stillness, every bone in her body pulling taut. For a split-second, she experienced the most extraordinary physical pull in his direction and resisted it with every last remaining drop of self-discipline. But that split-second shook her inside out.

‘I would have been your lover, your soul, your survival,’ Carlo gritted, and the anger was there, the anger she had feared, suddenly flaring up at her without warning in a blazing wall of antagonism that made her step back. Burnished golden eyes alive with derision and fury bit into her with a look as physical as a blow.

‘Get out of here,’ Carlo told her roughly. ‘Get out of here before I lose my temper and show you just how sensitive I can be!’

Jessica required only that one invitation. On unsteady legs, she backed out in haste. Out in the corridor, she closed her eyes and breathed in slowly and deeply. She felt bereft, alone, wretched, and the sensations were intense. Carlo confused her, cast her into turmoil. He always had. They were opposites in every way but just for a moment... for a strange and highly disturbing moment she had recognised an utterly inexplicably pang of empathy. She had wanted to put her arms round him.

Crazy, unbelievable, just one of those mad tricks of the mind when one’s emotions were on a high, she translated inwardly. After all, would she pet a sabre-tooted tiger plotting to put her on his dinner menu? But she could not escape the feeling that she had hurt him. And yet wasn’t that what she had always wanted to do?

When she was with Carlo Saracini she didn’t know herself. It had always been that way. With other people she was introverted and quiet, never bitchy or hot-tempered and certainly not violent. Dear heaven, she thought as she recalled the manner in which she had launched herself at him like a screaming shrew. He drew out everything that was bad in her character. He made her feel as though she could turn into a woman like her mother ... wasn’t that what frightened her the most?

She got into her car without remembering leaving the hotel. She didn’t start the engine. She stared out the windscreen unseeingly. The way she had felt when he touched her six years ago still haunted her. And every so often she made herself draw those memories out to reinforce her own disgust and shame. Not only did she look like her mother, she had found that she could behave like her too. That had been the most devastating discovery of all. That there was this weakness inside her, this ability to forget everything ... loyalty, self-restraint, even love... and lose all control in a man’s arms.

Sometimes, Jessica had even told herself that she ought to be grateful for that sordid incident with Carlo. She had been afraid then that if she didn’t remain constantly on her guard, virtually policing even her thoughts, she too might easily turn into a slut. If it hadn’t been for that noise next door, Carlo wouldn’t have stopped, she knew that. Sex was a terrifyingly powerful force if you knew yourself to be as vulnerable as Jessica felt herself to be. One weak moment in the vicinity of a male like Carlo and that would be that. She had been incredibly lucky to escape unscathed.