'I got rid of them,' Luca announced, raking an impatient hand through his dripping black hair and snatching up a towel.
'Rid of them?'
'Rather drastic, I know, but surely not a sacrifice?' Luca gave her an expectant look. 'Since you need lessons on how to dress. Porca miseria!' He grimaced, watched her face pale and telegraph hurt disbelief.
'That was tactless. But I just thought it would be easiest if I simply presented you with a new wardrobe. The clothes are in the dressing room. You won't even need to go shopping now.'
Darcy's eyes prickled with hot, scratchy tears. She was appalled. Never had she felt more mortified. This was a member of the opposite sex telling her she looked abso¬lutely awful in her own clothes, telling her that he, a man, knew more than she did about how she should be dressing. 'How could you do that to me?' she gasped strickenly, and fled.
'It's a gift...a surprise...most women would be over the moon!' Luca fired back accusingly.
'Insensitive pig!' A sob tearing at her throat, Darcy threw herself back on the bed.
The mattress beside her gave with his weight.
'You have a beautiful face and an exquisite slender shape...but your clothes are all wrong,' Luca breathed huskily.
Darcy was humiliated and outraged by such smooth bare¬faced lying. She knew better than anyone that she wasn't remotely beautiful! Flipping over in a blind fury, she raised her hand and dealt him a stinging slap.
'Not...most...women,' Luca muttered half under his breath, like somebody learning a very difficult lesson. With a slightly dazed air, he pressed long, elegant fingers to the flaming imprint of her fingers etched across one hard cheek¬bone and blinked.
Instantly, Darcy crumbled with guilt. 'I'm sorry...1 shouldn't have done that,' she muttered brokenly. 'But you asked for it...you provoked me...go away!'
'I don't understand you—'
'I hate you...do you understand that?'
Darcy coiled away from him. She hurt so much inside she wanted to scream to let the pain out. She hugged herself tight. When Luca put a hand on her shoulder, she twisted violently away. When he reached for one of her hands, she shook him off.
'I actually liked you before I realised who you were!' she suddenly slung at him in disgust. 'I actually trusted you! Gosh, I've got great taste in men!'
'Haven't you already got what you wanted from me?' Luca raked back at her in cold anger. 'I have promised you my financial backing for the duration of our marriage. Your problems are over.'
Darcy regarded him with bitter outrage. 'I'm not some¬thing you can buy with your money.'
Luca shot her an icy unimpressed appraisal. 'If you're not...what are you doing in my bed?'
There was no answer to that question. She couldn't even explain that to her own satisfaction, never mind his. And that he should throw her sexual surrender in her face made her curl up and die deep down inside.
She listened to him dressing, and she was so quiet she barely breathed.
Luca forced himself under her notice again by coming to a halt two feet from the bed. Clad in a lightweight beau¬tifully cut pearl-grey suit, he looked absolutely stupendous, but icily remote and intimidating...like someone who ate debtors five to a plate for breakfast.
But now she knew that his black hair felt like silk when she smoothed her fingers through it, that his smile was like hot sunlight after the winter and that even his voice trickled down her spine like honey and made her melt, she thought in growing agony.
'This is not how I thought things would be with us. I'm civilised...I'm very civilised,' Luca informed her with un¬feeling cool. 'We're supposed to be skimming along the surface of things and having a great time in bed. So tell me who bought the Adorata ring and we'll get that little complication out of the way. Then there is hope that peace will break out.'
'I've already told you that I did not take that ring,' Darcy whispered shakily.
And repetition of that claim has an excessively aggra¬vating effect on my normally even temper,' Luca drawled. 'We're at an impasse.'
Darcy studied him, cold fascination holding her tight but pain piercing her like cutting shards of glass—that same pain bright and unconcealed in her eyes. 'I can't believe that you're the same guy I met three years ago...I can't believe that we laughed and danced and you were just so romantic and warm and—'
'Stupid?' Luca slotted in glacially, deep-set dark eyes hard as diamonds but a feverish flush accentuating the taut slant of his high cheekbones. 'Absurd? Ridiculous? After all, outside my own elite circle, I wasn't streetwise enough to protect myself from a calculating little predator like you!'
Darcy was shaken by that response, dredged from her own self-preoccupation to finally think about how he must have felt when he'd believed he had been robbed by the woman he had spent the previous evening romancing in high style, the woman he had brought into his home, the woman he had made love to over and over again until they'd fallen asleep in each other's arms.