‘She won’t if you wake her up. She’s very crabby when she’s disturbed.’
He pulled the door shut again with exaggerated care and then hovered as though he was lost in his own house. ‘I’ve made a mess of our marriage…’
‘You tried hard to.’ Mina didn’t prevaricate. ‘You hit your lowest point with Freddy Fish——’
‘Freddy who?’
‘I set you up with that fish to see how far you were prepared to go on your being nice campaign!’
A rawly appreciative smile momentarily wiped the tension from his vibrantly handsome features. ‘You mean…?’
‘I think the day Freddy was caught he should have been eaten or thrown back in the water. How dare you believe I had such bad taste? Your other low point was Franca the man-eating teenybopper…’
Cesare visibly winced. ‘I was getting desperate…’
‘But I never knew how desperate until you opened that newspaper and saw that Felix Severn had been arrested. That, in my opinion, was when you really went off the rails.’ Mina strolled into the bedroom she had selected for herself, a grin etched on her beautiful face. ‘Well, are you coming in or aren’t you?’ she asked mockingly when he paused on the threshold, being Cesare no doubt reading significance into
her choice of a separate bedroom.
He came in, his eyes fiercely pinned to hers, a faint frown-line etched between his brows as he waited tensely to see what she was about to say next.
‘Yes, you were like a man possessed with a mission last night,’ Mina continued cheerfully. ‘I got a vision of being holed up behind barricades in the castello…the forces of law and order trying to starve us out!’
‘Maybe I was a little over the top but naturally I was concerned,’ he protested.
‘Concerned?’ Mina repeated shakily, struggling to hold back her amusement at this staggering piece of macho understatement. ‘Cesare, by the time we landed in London you were a man on the very edge of lawlessness, ready to perjure yourself for my benefit!’
‘Dio mio…I didn’t want you to go to prison!’
‘But your determination to keep me out of the hands of the Fraud Squad really reached its crowning climax when you decided that you would be the sacrifice instead,’ Mina completed, and had to swallow back a sudden thickness in her throat, her momentary amusement banished. ‘Cesare, that was so sweet——’
‘Sweet?’ Dark colour delineated his blunt cheekbones, his lustrous dark eyes flaring gold at a label he found grossly inappropriate.
‘I was touched to the heart. I also realised——’
‘That only a man in love would make such an idiot of himself!’ Cesare slotted in harshly, defensively. ‘Well, why shouldn’t you laugh?’
‘I’m not laughing,’ Mina whispered, distressed that he had taken her words the wrong way. She had hurt his feelings, pierced his pride and the wound was that much more tender for a male who found it hard to express those same feelings.
‘I’ve always loved you,’ he muttered almost defiantly. ‘And thinking you were dishonest, grasping and that my only hold on you was sexual didn’t make any difference. I was willing to settle for what I could get…’
Her nose tickled with the onset of tears. She remembered him voicing that same statement on their wedding night, and only now appreciated the significance of that admission.
‘But it made me feel insecure…and when I feel like that I throw my weight around——’
‘And smoulder with jealousy.’
Cesare tensed under the charge and finally nodded, brilliant dark eyes clinging almost pleadingly to hers.
‘There was no need for that,’ Mina whispered shakily. ‘I never stopped loving you either.’
He looked dazed, as though that had been the very last thing he had expected to hear. ‘But——’
‘But what?’ Mina demanded, her tumultuous emotions sweeping her with sudden violent impatience.
‘Clayton…I thought——’
‘I told you I loved you weeks ago and you flung it back in my face!’