CHAPTER NINE

PRESSED into the library, Ava filched the newspaper from Vito to get a proper look at the article. She spread it out on his desk and poured over it to read every word while he remained poised by the fire to defrost, his expression forbidding and stormy.

‘This is horrible,’ she muttered in disgust.

‘It is what it is,’ Vito responded stonily. ‘The truth we can’t change. I can’t sue anyone for telling the truth but I wish I’d chosen to be more discreet in your company yesterday. What I do want to know is where they got the tip-off from. I will be questioning my staff. Nobody else knew you were here.’

The truth we can’t change. That statement rang like the crack of doom in Ava’s ears and her heart sank to the soles of her feet. It was the truth, the elephant in the room whenever they were together. Serving a prison sentence hadn’t cleared her name, rehabilitated her reputation or made her one less jot guilty as charged of reckless endangerment of Olly’s life. She stilled on that thought, cold inside and outside, her skin turning clammy. Maybe this was the real punishment for what she had done, she conceded, never ever being able to forget for longer than a moment in time.

Vito strode to the door. ‘I’ll talk to the staff.’

‘Wait … at least one other person knew I was here,’ Ava volunteered abruptly. ‘I was visiting Olly’s grave and she recognised me. I thought I’d seen her before somewhere but I didn’t know her—Katrina Orpington?’

Halfway out of the door, Vito came to a sudden halt. ‘Katrina? The vicar’s stepdaughter?’

‘Is she? Blonde? Looks a bit like a model? She called me a killer, thought it was offensive that I should be in the cemetery,’ Ava advanced woodenly.

Vito’s gaze flared hot gold. ‘And you didn’t warn me? Dio mio, is there anything you’re willing to tell me?’

Her troubled eyes veiled and her soft lips firmed. ‘You don’t need to hear that kind of stuff.’

‘I don’t need to be shielded from it either!’ Vito growled, his anger unhidden.

In the simmering silence Ava perused the newspaper again. No, on one score Vito had proved correct: the item contained no lies, simply the facts inviting people to make their own judgement of how appropriate it was for Vito to be entertaining his brother’s killer. In the photo taken yesterday, having taken fright at the sudden appearance of the photographer, she was clinging to Vito, leaving little room for doubt that theirs was an intimate relationship. The article would certainly raise brows and rouse condemnation. Her face burned, guilt and regret assailing her. Vito had been good to her. He did not deserve public embarrassment on her behalf. She should never have come to Bolderwood: returning to the scene of her crime had been asking for trouble. It hurt that she had made the mistake but that Vito was being asked to pay the price.

All she could do was leave: the solution was that simple. Gossiping tongues would fall silent once people realised she was no longer around. She hurried upstairs to her room, dug her rucksack out from between the wardrobe and the wall and proceeded to pack it with her original collection of sparse clothing. She discarded the outfit he had bought her but kept on the underwear. She wondered if someone would give her a lift to the local railway station, checked her purse to see if she had enough for the fare: she didn’t. She would ask Vito for a sub on her salary although she cringed at the prospect of directly approaching him for money and accepting it from him. It would feel downright sleazy.

Without warning the door opened. Vito scanned the small pile of clothing on the bed, the open rucksack, and shot a gleaming, cutting look at her that would have withered a weaker woman. ‘Madre di Dio! What the hell are you doing?’

Ava ducked the direct question. ‘I should never have come here in the first place—it was asking for trouble! I did try to warn you about that.’

Vito shifted a silencing hand. ‘Enough with the lie-down-and-die mentality,’ he derided. ‘You’re tougher than that.’

‘Maybe I thought I was but I’ve just realised that you can’t beat social expectations, you can’t flout the system and then complain when you become a target.’

‘No, you can’t if you’re a coward.’

Blue eyes darkening with fury, Ava pushed her chin up. ‘I’m not a coward.’

‘You’re getting ready to scuttle out of here like a rat leaving a sinking ship,’ Vito contradicted without hesitation. ‘What else is that but cowardice?’

‘I’m not a coward!’ Ava proclaimed, inflamed by the charge. ‘I can take the heat.’

‘Then take it and stay.’

Ava snatched in an uneasy breath. ‘It’s not that simple. You don’t need this … er … trouble right now.’

Vito squared his big broad shoulders. ‘I thrive on trouble.’

Ava tore her strained gaze from the bold challenge in his features, her heartbeat quickening. She wondered how long it would be before she could picture that darkly beautiful face without that happening. Here she was, twenty-two years old, and she was as infatuated as a teenager with a man who could only hurt her. That was not a record to boast about and the best thing she could do for both of them was sever the connection in a quick, clean cut that would cause the least possible damage. Vito was a stubborn guy. The very idea that he should conform to social mores was anathema to him. Vito was always ready to fight to the death to defend his own right to do as he liked. A textbook knee-jerk reaction from an arrogant, aggressive male.

‘Look,’ Ava breathed on a more measured note, ‘all the party arrangements are in place. I’ll leave clear notes and contact details for all the outside help I engaged—’

‘I don’t give a flying … damn …’ he selected between gritted white teeth ‘… about the party! You know how I feel about Christmas.’

‘Can Harvey still stay?’ Ava prompted anxiously.

The animal concerned voiced a little whine and pushed his muzzle anxiously against Vito’s thigh, his need for reassurance in the tense atmosphere pronounced.

Vito groaned out loud at the question. ‘I think you’d have to kidnap him to take him away.’

Ava nodded woodenly because she knew she was going to miss Harvey’s easy companionship and affection. Of course she would miss Vito too but that would be good for her, character-building, she told herself urgently. She had let herself get too dependent on Vito and that was dangerous. It was better to get out now on her terms at a time of her choosing rather than wait for his inevitable rejection. ‘I have to leave.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Vito decreed harshly.

‘Be reasonable,’ Ava urged. ‘I can’t stay after that story was published in the papers … as if people around here even need reminding of what I did!’

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Vito fired back without scruple.

‘Well, it bothers me!’ Ava flared back at him out of all patience, her hands planted on her slim hips for emphasis. ‘And what difference does it make anyway? So, we part a few days earlier? This was only ever going to last two weeks.’

Eyes smouldering between thick black lashes over that assessment, Vito shifted closer with silent fluid grace. ‘Says who?’

‘Says me!’ Ava thumped her chest in emphasis with a loosely coiled fist. ‘Do you think I’m stupid, Vito? Did you think I wouldn’t appreciate that once the party was over, we were too?’

His face set even harder. ‘I never said that.’

‘Yeah, like you were planning to come calling at my humble bedsit on a regular basis!’ Ava scoffed in disbelief. ‘Why can’t you at least be honest about what we have here?’

‘Do you think that could be because when I dare to disagree with you, you immediately accuse me of subterfuge?’ Vito queried smooth as silk, a sardonic ebony brow raised.

Ava was getting more and more worked up over her inability to get through to him. He was dancing around words, refusing to match her candour, selfishly complicating things when she wanted it all done and dusted, neat and tidy and over while she still had the strength to deal with it. Before she even realised what she was doing, both her hands lifted in frustration and thumped his broad hard chest instead. ‘It’s over, Vito! Fun while it lasted but now the writing’s on the wall.’

‘Not on my wall,’ Vito fielded, closing strong hands round her waist and lifting her right off her startled feet to lay her down on the well-sprung bed.

‘What the heck are you talking about?’ Ava snapped back at him in bewilderment, scrambling breathlessly back against the headboard to stay out of his reach.

‘My agenda, rather than yours … sorry about that,’ Vito delivered rawly, dark golden eyes glittering like starlight in his lean taut features as he came down on his knees at the foot of the big bed and began to move closer again. ‘It’s not over for me yet. Sorry, if that disrupts your rigid timetable. But I still want you …’

Sentenced to involuntary stillness by his extraordinary behaviour, Ava stared fixedly at him. He was stalking her like a predatory jungle cat ready to pounce. ‘Now just you stop right there!’ she warned him shrilly.

She drove him insane, Vito acknowledged darkly. Somehow every time they clashed she brought emotion into it, the emotion he shunned and she unleashed like a tidal wave. ‘I’m not stopping,’ Vito almost purred with assurance. ‘And you know I don’t back down …’

That dark sensual voice of his was compelling, sending a deeply responsive echo strumming right through her taut length. ‘You know I’m right, Vito.’

‘You always think you’re right,’ Vito husked. ‘But on this occasion, you’re wrong. I want you.’

A jolt of desire shot through her, making her achingly aware of the heat at her feminine core. Her cheeks burned with mortification. ‘We only got out of bed a couple of hours ago!’ she slung.

‘And I’m still hungry, bella mia,’ Vito growled deep in his chest, drawing level with her to bend his head. ‘Doesn’t that disprove your theory that I’m ready to let you go?’

‘You don’t let me do anything!’ Ava launched back at him in a rage. ‘And I know you well enough to know that you won’t be ready to let me go until you make that decision.’

His fingers feathered slowly through her tousled coppery hair and curved to her taut jaw. ‘You’re a lot of hard work but I still burn for you.’

Ava flung back her head in defiance. ‘Well, my flame’s gone out. Common sense snuffed it,’ she traded.

‘What the hell does common sense have to do with this?’ Vito demanded thickly, crushing her stubbornly compressed mouth beneath his and revelling in the way her soft full lips opened for him as the tip of his tongue scored that sealed seam.

His mouth devoured her and she wanted to eat him alive, powered by a frantic desire that terrified her when she was trying so hard to make him see sense. But there was no sense in that all-encompassing overwhelming hunger that gripped her. Her hands came up of their own volition to cup his high cheekbones and then threaded into his thick silky hair. The spicy scent and taste of him only made her want more … always more. When did she reach satiation level? When would that terrible craving ease enough to allow her to hold it at bay?

‘I’m packed, I’m leaving,’ she mumbled obstinately when he freed her swollen mouth long enough to let her breathe again.

‘I could chain you to the headboard to keep you here,’ Vito told her silkily as he closed a possessive hand round a full breast below her sweater, a thumb massaging the already swollen peak. ‘Now doesn’t that open an interesting field of possibilities?’

Ava trembled, sexual frissons of sensation running through her like liquid lightning. ‘Only if you’re a perv,’ she told him doggedly.

‘You like it when I’m dominant in bed,’ Vito traded with fiery erotic assurance in his stunning eyes.

Ava planted her hands to his shoulders and pushed forward, off balancing him back against the pillows. A wolfish grin split his bronzed features and he laughed with rich appreciation, hauling her down on top of him with shocking strength to take her mouth again with ravishing force. She shivered violently, insanely aware of the male arousal resting like a red-hot brand against her and the hand sliding down over her quivering stomach below her unfastened jeans to tease her with knowing expertise.

‘Don’t forget that I’m an equal opportunities employer,’ Vito reminded her raggedly, lifting her out of her jeans with more haste than finesse.

‘I’m in the middle of packing!’ Ava raked at him in a frustration steadily becoming more laced with self-loathing.

‘But you’re not going anywhere now,’ Vito pointed out, shedding his jeans with positive violence and drawing her back up against him, all hot and ready and hard.

‘We should have discussed this like civilised adults—’

‘You talk too much,’ Vito told her, delicately tracing her lush opening with carnal skill and then, having established her readiness from the whimper of anguished sound that exited her straining lungs, he shifted over her and sank into her with a raw primal sound of satisfaction that she found insanely arousing.

That fast the moment to stand her ground was lost and her body took over, her hips angling up to accept more of him … and then more and then, heavens, the pulsing, driving fullness of him was pushing her closer and closer to the edge she had never thought to visit again with him.

In the aftermath, his heart still thundering over hers, she held him close, adoring the weight and intimacy of him that close, wanting and barely resisting the urge to cover him in kisses. But while her body was satisfied, her brain was not and with every minute that passed she was seeing deeper into herself. She wanted to run away because she was scared of getting hurt. Why was she likely to get hurt? Solely because she felt too much for him. She was hopelessly, deeply and irretrievably attached to Vito Barbieri, indeed as much in love as a woman could be with a man. For too long she had denied her true feelings, suppressed them and refused out of fear to examine them.

‘And now you’re thinking too much … for a sensible adult,’ Vito reproved, noting her evasively lowered lashes and mutinously closed lips before he lowered his handsome head to rub a stubbled cheek against the soft slope of her breast and drink in the familiar scent of her with a sense of bone-deep satisfaction. ‘This isn’t complex. We’re in a good place right now … don’t spoil it, gioia mia.’

‘I need a shower,’ she said stubbornly, whipping her clinging arms off him again.

‘You are so obstinate,’ Vito grated, rolling off her with sudden alacrity and viewing her with forbidding cool from the other side of the bed.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ Ava replied glibly.

And she did, any time of day, every time, all the time, Vito mused grudgingly, watching the lithe swing of her slim curvy hips and spotting the tattoo of his name inked onto her pale skin as she vanished into the bathroom. Ava had taught him what a weekend was, how to walk away from work, daydream in important meetings. She was like an express train to a side of life he had never known before and sometimes it spooked him. He should have let her leave, a little voice intoned deep in the back of his mind, get his work focus back on track, return to … normal? Yet being with Ava felt astonishingly normal even when her backchat was ricocheting off the walls around him. The phone by the bed buzzed and he flipped over to answer it.

In the shower, Ava was scrubbing the wanton evidence of her weakness from her skin when Vito appeared in the doorway, a towering bronzed figure with a physique to die for.

She rammed the shower door back. ‘Don’t I get peace anywhere?’ she sniped.

‘That was Eleanor on the phone. Your sisters have arrived for a visit—she put them in the drawing room.’

Ava froze in stark shock and equally sudden pleasure. ‘Gina and Bella have come here to see me?’

‘Obviously they read that newspaper article … or your ex-father figure talked. Dress up,’ Vito advised. ‘You don’t want them feeling sorry for you.’

‘Or thinking that you would consort with a poorly dressed woman,’ Ava completed cheekily.

‘I’d consort with you no matter what you wore,’ Vito imparted with a lazy sardonic smile.

‘But you probably prefer me in nothing,’ Ava pointed out drily.

Her mind awash with speculation, Ava dug in haste through her extensive collection of new clothes. Gina and Bella, both in their thirties, were always well groomed. Vito’s comment had struck a raw nerve. Ava didn’t want to look like an object of pity, particularly after the humble letters she had sent in hope of renewed contact with her siblings had been ignored. So, why on earth were they coming to see her now? Her generous mouth down curved as she wondered if her sisters were planning to ask her to leave the neighbourhood to protect them from embarrassment. Gina, married to an engineer, and Bella, married to a solicitor, had always seemed very conscious of what their friends and neighbours might think of their mother and her drink problems. Elegant in a soft dove-grey dress teamed with a pale lavender cardigan, her revealingly tumbled hair carefully secured to the back of her head, Ava slid her feet into heels and went downstairs.

Nerves were eating her alive by the time she opened the drawing-room door. Vito was not there. Gina and Bella were small, blonde and curvy like their late mother and both women swiftly stood up to look at her. Recognising the pronounced lack of physical similarity between her sisters and herself, Ava marvelled that it had not previously occurred to her to wonder if they had had different parentage.

‘I hope you don’t mind us calling in for a chat,’ Gina said awkwardly. ‘We came on impulse after seeing that photo of you in the paper with Vito Barbieri. Dad didn’t realise that you were staying here at the castle when you visited him and Janet yesterday.’

‘I don’t think he would have cared had I come down on a rocket from the moon,’ Ava declared wryly as she sat down opposite the other two women. ‘I was only in their home for about five minutes and once he’d said his piece there didn’t seem to be anything more to say.’

‘Well, actually there is more,’ Bella spoke up tensely. ‘Dad might still feel that he has an axe to grind over the fact that he chose to pretend that you were his child all those years but, no matter what Mum did, you’re still our sister, Ava.’

‘Half-sister,’ Ava qualified stiffly, unable to forget her unanswered letters. ‘And let’s face it, we’ve never been close.’

‘We may have grown up in a very dysfunctional family,’ Gina acknowledged, compressing her lips. ‘But we don’t agree with the way Dad is behaving now. He’s made everything more difficult for the three of us. He demanded that we keep you out of our lives. He prefers to act like you don’t exist.’

‘And for too long we played along with Dad for the sake of family peace,’ Bella admitted unhappily.

‘And sometimes we used his attitude to you as an excuse as well,’ Gina added guiltily. ‘Like us not coming to see you while you were in prison. To be frank, I didn’t want to go into a prison and be vetted and then searched like a criminal just for the privilege of visiting you.’

‘We did once get as close as the prison gates,’ Bella volunteered with a wince of embarrassed uneasiness.

‘Prison-visiting … it just seemed so sordid,’ Gina confided more frankly. ‘And the gates and the guards were intimidating.’

‘I can understand that,’ Ava said and she did.

Eleanor Dobbs entered with a laden tray of coffee and cakes, providing a welcome distraction from the tension stretching between the three women.

‘Mum wrote a letter to you just before she died,’ Gina volunteered once the door had closed behind the housekeeper again.

Ava sat up straight and almost spilt her cup of coffee in the process. ‘A … letter?’

‘That’s why we tried to work ourselves up to come and visit you—to give you the letter,’ Bella confessed.

‘Why didn’t you just post it to me?’ Ava demanded angrily. ‘Why didn’t anyone ask if I could visit her before she died? I didn’t even know she was ill.’

‘Mum passed away very quickly,’ Gina told the younger woman heavily. ‘Her liver was wrecked. Dad didn’t want you informed and Mum insisted that she couldn’t face seeing you again, so we couldn’t see the point of telling you that she was dying.’

Ava absorbed those wounding facts without comment. News of her mother’s death had come as a shocking bolt from the blue while she was in prison. She had been excluded from the entire process. Now she had to accept the even harsher truth that, even dying, her mother had rejected a chance for a last meeting with her. ‘The letter …’ she began again tightly.

Bella grimaced. ‘We didn’t post it because we know prisons go over everything offenders get in the post and the idea of that happening to Mum’s last words didn’t feel right. But we’ve brought it with us … not that it’s likely to be of much comfort to you.’

‘Towards the end Mum’s mind was wandering. The letter’s more of a note and it makes no sense.’ Gina withdrew an envelope from her handsome leather bag and passed it across the coffee table.

‘So, you’ve read it, then,’ Ava gathered.

‘I had to write it for her, Ava. She was too weak to hold a pen,’ Bella explained uncomfortably. ‘It’s obvious that she was feeling very guilty about you and she did want you to know that.’

Ava’s hand trembled and tightened its grip on the crumpled envelope. She still felt that her sisters could have made more of an effort to ensure that the letter came to her sooner but she said nothing.

‘We all loved her but she wasn’t a normal mum,’ Gina remarked awkwardly. ‘Or even a decent wife and we all suffered for that.’

Her attention resting on Ava’s pinched profile, Bella grimaced and murmured, ‘Let’s leave this subject alone for the moment. Are we allowed to satisfy our crazy curiosity and ask what you’re doing living in Bolderwood Castle?’

‘I’m organising the Christmas party for Vito,’ Ava advanced. ‘Everything else just sort of happened.’

‘Everything else?’ Gina probed delicately. ‘You used to be besotted with him.’

‘I got over that,’ Ava declared, privately reflecting that proximity to Vito and a closer understanding with him had merely made her reach a whole new level of besottedness.

‘Come on, Ava. The whole countryside is talking and you’re killing us here,’ Bella complained. ‘Spill the beans, for goodness’ sake!’

As the door opened Ava was rolling her eyes in receipt of Bella’s pleading look and saying, ‘Vito’s not my partner or my boyfriend, nor are we involved in anything serious … he’s just my lover.’

‘Outside the bedroom door I rarely know where I am with your sister!’ Vito quipped without batting a single magnificent eyelash while he strolled fluidly across the room to greet her sisters as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Registering that Vito had heard that unplanned statement, Ava turned a painful beetroot shade, her discomfiture intense. But she hadn’t wanted her siblings to get any ambitious ideas about where her relationship with Vito might be heading and a dose of plain speaking had seemed the best approach to take. Ava watched as her siblings reacted predictably to Vito’s stunning good looks and white-hot sex appeal. Gina stared at him transfixed while Bella giggled ingratiatingly at almost everything he said. Vito, in comparison, was smooth as silk as he invited her sisters to the Christmas party and asked them about their children. As distanced as though she were on another planet while she had that all-important letter still clutched in her hand, Ava learned that Bella had given birth to a baby boy the previous year, a brother to round out her trio of daughters. Gina, of course, never as child-orientated, still had only one child, a ten-year-old son, and a successful career as a photo-journalist.

Ava was stunned to hear Vito invite her sisters and their husbands to attend the private lunch that was always staged for his closest friends before the party kicked off in the afternoon.

‘Why did you do that?’ she demanded accusingly when her siblings had gone.

‘It seemed polite and you do want your sisters back in your life again, don’t you?’ Vito asked levelly.

‘Sort of …’ Too much had happened too fast for Ava to be sure of what she wanted, aside of Vito. He was the one constant she did not need to measure in terms of importance and that hurt as well. How could she have been stupid enough to let her guard down and fall for him again?

‘What’s wrong?’ Vito prompted, watching troubled expressions skim across her expressive face like fast-moving clouds.

Ava explained about the letter.

‘Why haven’t you opened it yet?’

‘I’m afraid to,’ she admitted tightly, her blue eyes dark with strain. ‘Bella implied it would be disappointing. It’s one thing to imagine, something else to actually see her words on paper. If it’s unpleasant those words will live with me for ever.’

‘Maybe I should open it for you …’ Vito suggested.

But such a concession to weakness was more than Ava could bear and she slit open the envelope to extract a single piece of lined notepaper adorned with Bella’s copperplate script.

Eyes wet with tears of regret and disappointment for she had had high hopes of what she might find in the letter, Ava pushed the notepaper into Vito’s hand. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t know what’s she’s talking about,’ she declared in frustration. ‘Gina said Mum was confused and she must have been to dictate that for Bella to write.’

Frowning down at the incomprehensible letter, Vito replaced it in the envelope. ‘Obviously your mother felt very guilty about the way she treated you.’

‘Did she think I’d hate her when I found out that I wasn’t her husband’s child?’ Her brow furrowed, Ava shook her head, conceding that she would never know for sure what her mother had meant by her words. ‘What else could she have meant?’

Vito rested a soothing hand against the slender rigidity of her spine. ‘There’s no point getting upset about it now, bella mia. If your sisters are equally bewildered, there’s no way of answering your questions.’

He was always so blasted practical and grounded, Ava reflected ruefully. He didn’t suffer from emotional highs or lows or a highly coloured imagination. Reluctant to reveal that she was unable to take such a realistic view of the situation when the woman concerned had been dead for almost eighteen months, Ava said nothing.

His mobile phone rang and he dug it out with an apologetic glance in her direction. That was an improvement, Ava conceded. In the space of little more than a week, Vito had gone from answering constant calls and forgetting her existence while he talked at length to keeping the calls brief and treating them like the interruptions they were. She focused on his bold bronzed profile as he moved restively round the room, another frown drawing his straight black brows together. For once the caller was doing most of the talking, for his responses were brief.

Ava was staring out of the window at the white world of snow-covered trees and lawn stretching into the distance when he finished the call.

‘I’m afraid I have to go out,’ Vito murmured flatly.

‘I’m going to take Harvey for a long walk,’ Ava asserted, keen to demonstrate her independence and her lack of need for his presence. It was a downright lie, of course, but it helped to sustain her pride.