Her companions melted away like snow in summer, subdued by the electric tension in the air. Cesare surveyed Mina’s defiantly set face, took in the outfit and elevated an ebony brow. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Well, I don’t want to play at being your wife any more,’ Mina breathed flatly. ‘I gave it a whirl and, let me tell you, twenty-four hours was more than enough.’ A deep dark bitterness unlike anything she had ever known lanced through her as she drew herself up to her full diminutive height, quite untouched by the incredulous look stamped on Cesare’s dark, vibrant features. ‘The worm has turned, Cesare. I can’t change the way you feel about me but the good news is I don’t care any more! I don’t give a damn what you think. Nor do I have the slightest interest in what you say, what you do or where you go!’
‘I’m not going anywhere——’
‘Oh, I expect you’ll change your mind about that. If you want what you call personal entertainment,’ Mina phrased in a tone of shaking rage, ‘then you can go find it elsewhere! As far as I’m concerned I’m not married to you.’
Cesare surveyed her with blatant disbelief. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous. Out of the utmost generosity of spirit, I decided to give you a second chance——’
‘You decided to give me a second chance?’ he practically whispered.
‘And you blew it in one night. I was prepared to do the very best I could to make this a real marriage,’ Mina told him rawly. ‘I was not prepared to be greeted with a new series of threats and yet another one of your revenge fantasies——’
‘My what?’ Cesare roared at her.
‘I hate your guts!’ Mina splintered back at him with what was perfect truth at that precise moment, on the edge of leaping up and down with sheer uncontrollable rage. ‘I wouldn’t want your precious forgiveness if I was on the edge of the grave! And not if you were lying on that floor right now dying would you get my forgiveness for what you’ve done to me! I’m finished with you—absolutely, totally finished with you on a personal basis!’
There was an instant of sharp silence as she spat out those final syllables.
Eyes narrowed to a gleam of glancing gold beneath black lashes rested on her for a timeless moment and then, without the smallest warning, Cesare flung his arrogant dark head back and burst out laughing.
It was like throwing a match on a bale of hay. Mina went up in flames. Stalking across the room, she swung her hand back to slap him but he ducked with fluid speed and shot out two powerful hands to capture her wrists before she could pull back. Her teeth gritted, she attempted to kick him to force him to release her. He dropped his hands fast to her narrow ribcage and simply lifted her off the floor.
‘Put me down!’ she screeched at him as he held her at arm’s length.
Rampant amusement sent a dazzling smile across his sensual mouth. ‘I plead self-defence.’
Meeting that charismatic smile was like running into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Rage turned to complete bewilderment. If she had been on her own feet, she would have swayed with dizziness, and while she was warring with that alarming reality Cesare brought her up to him and closed his arms round her.
‘Put me down,’ Mina mumbled in a different voice entirely.
‘I have this appallingly sexist urge to kiss you,’ he whispered in a thickened tone that sent tiny little shivers running down her spine.
‘F-forget it.’
In blatant disagreement, Cesare rearranged her even more intimately against him, settling her arms down on to his shoulders and splaying his hands on the swell of her hips. He let his mouth nuzzle against the taut curve of her delicate jawbone and then probed the mutinously sealed line of her lips. She quivered, fighting what he could make her feel with every fibre of her being, terrified that she would respond.
Disconcertingly, hot, salty tears suddenly lashed her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks. She despised her own weakness, despised herself utterly for even being tempted. Wanting hurt, loving hurt, and she had allowed him to teach her those things.
Abruptly, Cesare lowered her back down to the floor. ‘Mina?’ He sounded shaken.
She dashed a furious hand across her wet cheeks and slung him a look of uninhibited loathing. ‘I hate you!’ she gasped in an ironic lie.
CHAPTER NINE
MINA gazed out over the valley. Near the castello the landscape was thickly wooded but further off she could see olive groves and orchards of orange and lemon trees. The wrought-iron bench she sat on stood in the dappled shade of a huge beech tree. The noisy exchanges of two goats tethered on opposing sides of the road far below briefly disrupted the silence. Mina sighed, charmed by the beauty of the peaceful scene but more troubled than ever by her own tangled thoughts.
She hadn’t seen Cesare since yesterday. He had left her alone. She had asked for a tray in her room last night and had lain sleepless until long after midnight, ruefully reflecting on the truly mortifying reality that even fighting with him was preferable to being deprived of him altogether. She was deeply ashamed of that fact.
The soft crunch of footfalls turned her head. Cesare stilled several feet away, sunlight gleaming over his black hair and glancing off the hard angles of his classic profile. She tensed, disconcerted that he had tracked her down.
‘This was my great-grandmother’s favourite place,’ he murmured in wry explanation. ‘She died when I was thirteen. For a long time afterwards I would come here to feel close to her and I would still see her sitting there on that bench, dressed from head to toe in black. She was a wonderful old lady, very sharp, very shrewd.’
‘You never talk about your family…’ Mina stared at him.
‘Bisnonna was the most important part of it,’ Cesare told her, his mouth twisting as he looked out over the valley. ‘When my grandparents died in a train crash, she raised my father. He married my mother when she was twenty-one. I was born, then Sandro. My parents may have stayed together but it was a lousy marriage.’