Love's Revenge: The Italian's Revenge / A Passionate Marriage / The Brazilian's Blackmailed Bride. Michelle Reid

out where she stood!

      ‘For goodness’ sake, cara,’ he rasped. ‘What is wrong with you?’

      ‘M-my bag, then,’ she whispered shakily, and when all he did was come striding towards her without bothering to answer she hit the hysteria button. ‘My handbag, Vito!’ she actually screamed at him. ‘Where is it? My handbag—my handbag!’

      It brought him to a stop in sheer astonishment. ‘Catherine—what the hell is this?’ he demanded, beginning to sound shaken himself.

      She didn’t answer, instead she suddenly burst into action again. Darting down to snatch up her dress, she began to pull it on. She was trembling so badly she could barely manage the simple task, but when he attempted to help her she slapped him away.

      ‘I can’t believe I let you do this!’ she launched at him shrilly. ‘I can’t believe I let myself!’

      ‘Do what, for God’s sake?’ he shouted back angrily. ‘Make love?’ He decided that was the only answer. ‘Well, that’s rich coming from the woman who just ravished me!’

      If anything, her face went even whiter, though it didn’t seem possible. And, on a pained whimper that did nothing for his temper, she turned and ran for the bedroom door with her fingers still grappling with the zip on her dress and the rest of her still completely naked.

      ‘Catherine!’ Vito barked at her in a command meant to stop her leaving the room.

      But Catherine was already out of it and running down the stairs. Outside in the late-afternoon sunshine she found her handbag, still lying where she had left it on the floor of the red Mercedes.

      By the time Vito had pulled some clothes on and followed her Catherine was just sitting there on the bottom step in front of the house, with the bag and its spilled contents lying beside her.

      And there was such an air of fragility about her that he made his approach with extreme caution, walking down the steps to come and squat down in front of her. ‘Are you going to tell me what that was all about now?’ he requested carefully.

      She shook her head and there were tears in her eyes. He sighed, his mouth tightening as he began flicking his gaze across the contents of her bag as if the answer would show itself there.

      But it didn’t. All he saw was the usual clutter of personal things women tended to carry around with them. Lipstick, wallet, the passport she’d needed to get her into the country. A packet of paper tissues, a couple of spare clips she used to hold back her hair sometimes, and a hair comb. He looked back at Catherine, looked at the way she was staring out at nothing, and automatically looked down, expecting to find the cause of all of this—trauma clutched in her hands. But her hands were empty, their palms pressed together and trapped between her clenched knees.

      It was then that he spied it, lying on the ground between her bare feet, and slowly, warily, he reached out and picked it up.

      It took him about five seconds after that to realise what was wrong with her. Then the cursing started. Hard words, hoarse words, words that had him lurching to his feet and swinging around to slam his clenched fist into the shiny bodywork of the Mercedes.

      After that, he too went perfectly still, frozen by the same sense of numbing horror that was holding Catherine. And the ensuing silence throbbed and punched and kicked at the both of them.

      Until a sound in the distance grabbed Vito’s attention. His dark head went up, swinging round on his shoulders so he could scan the furthest corner of the garden, where a gate out onto the road served as a short cut to their nearest neighbours.

      Then suddenly he was bursting into action again, spinning back to Catherine and stooping down to gather her into his arms before turning to dump her into the passenger seat of the Mercedes.

      ‘What—?’ she choked, coming out of her stunned stupor on a gasp of surprise.

      ‘Stay put,’ he gritted, then turned back to the house and disappeared inside it, only to come back seconds later with a bunch of keys in his hands. On his way past her bag he bent to gather in its contents; it landed on the back seat beside two pairs of sunglasses as he climbed behind the wheel.

      The engine fired first time, and with the efficiency of a born driver he turned the car around and took off at speed down the driveway.

      ‘Santo and my mother are on their way back.’ He grimly explained his odd behaviour. ‘I did not think you would want them to see you looking like this.’

      Like this … Catherine repeated to herself, looking down at herself with the kind of blank eyes that said she couldn’t see, as he could see, the changes that had come over her in a few short, devastating minutes.

      Stopping at the end of the drive, Vito Giordani looked at this woman who had known more than her fair share of pain, heartache and grief in her life, and felt the air leave his lungs on a constricted hiss.

      ‘How many have you missed?’ he questioned flatly.

      Catherine lifted those wretched dull grey eyes to him and a nerve began ticking along his jawline as he set the car going again, taking them not down the hillside but up it, out into open country.

      ‘You can count as well as I can,’ she answered dully.

      Vito grimaced. ‘I am afraid my eyes glazed over when I noticed that yesterday’s was still there.’

      Yesterday’s, the day before—and the day before, Catherine counted out bleakly. A contraceptive pill for each day since Vito had come back into her life, in fact.

      ‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve been messing up my life since I was twenty-three years old, and here you are, six years on, still messing it up.’

      About to remind her that it wasn’t him who’d forgotten to take the damn pills, Vito bit the words back again. ‘Getting embroiled in a fight about whose fault it is is not going to solve the problem,’ he threw at her instead.

      ‘Nothing can solve it,’ Catherine countered hopelessly. ‘The damage has already been done.’

      Mouth set in a straight line, Vito said not another word as he drove them higher and higher, until eventually he pulled the car off the road and onto a piece of scrub land that overlooked the kind of views people paid fortunes to see.

      They didn’t see the beauty in it, though. There could have been pitch-blackness out there in front of them for all they knew. And they were surrounded by perfect silence. Not a bird, not a house, not another car, not even a breeze to rustle the dry undergrowth. In fact they could have been the only two people left in the world, which suited exactly how they were both feeling.

      Two people alone with the kind of problem that shut out the rest of the world.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ Vito murmured.

      Maybe he felt he needed to say it, but Catherine shrugged. ‘Not your fault,’ she absolved him. ‘It’s me who’s been unforgivably stupid.’

      ‘Maybe we will get lucky and nothing will come of it,’ he suggested, in an attempt to place a glimmer of light into their darkness.

      ‘Don’t count on it,’ Catherine replied heavily. ‘Twice before we’ve taken risks, and twice I got pregnant. Why should this time be any different?’

      Why indeed? was the echo that came back from the next drumming silence.

      ‘There has to be something we can do!’ he muttered harshly. And on a sudden flash of inspiration said, ‘We will drive to the doctor’s. Get that—morning-after pill—or whatever it is they call it …’

      Catherine flinched as if he had plunged a knife in her. ‘Do you know what they call those pills, Vito?’ she whispered painfully. ‘Little abortions,’ she informed him starkly. ‘Because that’s what they do. They abort the egg whether it is fertilised or not.’

      ‘But you also know what they told you,’