Clearly, she was afraid to be alone with him. Why?
He didn’t find out why till dessert, when she’d explained with quite touching agitation that she’d been foolish enough to date her last boss, then been even more foolish in becoming his secret mistress. He’d promised her the world, but in the end had dumped her and married some society girl with the right connections. That was why she’d moved to Sydney, to get right away from the awful memories, at the same time deciding that she would never again date her boss. Such men could not be trusted. They used silly girls like her because they were pretty and easily impressed. But they didn’t love them, or marry them. They just screwed them, and screwed up their lives.
Charles set out to prove her wrong, but she was very difficult to convince. She did accept further invitations to dinner with him and showed him in many incredibly sweet ways that she liked him a lot, but she continued to spurn any advances. Charles became even more enamoured, and vowed to show her that his feelings for her were above board.
He could still remember the look on her face when he told her over dinner one night in early March that he loved her more than words could say. But when he asked her to marry him, producing the most beautiful—and the most expensive—diamond ring he’d been able to buy, her shock quickly turned to disgust.
“You don’t mean that,” she retorted. “You’re just saying it to get me into bed. You think you can buy my love, but you’ve wasted your money on that rock because the pathetic truth is I’ve already fallen in love with you. I was going to go to bed with you tonight, anyway.”
He wasn’t able to contain his delight at this announcement. Or his desire. He’d never been so hard.
“Oh, just put the rotten thing on my finger if it makes you feel better,” she swept on irritably. “Then take me to wherever it is you have in mind to take me. But you and I both know you won’t go through with any wedding. After you’ve had what you want, you’ll dump me like my last boss.”
“You’re wrong,” he insisted passionately as he slipped the sparkling rock on her engagement finger.
And he proved her wrong by marrying her a month later without having so much as laid a finger on her. The kiss he gave her after their very small and unostentatious ceremony was their first proper kiss. It had been sheer and utter hell to control himself for so long but he’d managed by focusing on the big picture.
Rico called him insane, marrying a woman he hadn’t been intimate with before. A strange sentiment for a man of Italian heritage. Weren’t they into virgin brides? Not that Dominique was a virgin. She’d never pretended to be.
But there was a touchingly virginal air about her when she came to him on their wedding night, trembling in her white satin nightgown. Clearly, she was nervous, afraid perhaps that she’d made a big mistake herself, marrying a man she’d never been intimate with. For all she knew he could have been the worst lover in the world!
But their wedding night was magic for both of them. Sheer magic. When he witnessed his new bride’s awed joy, his own pleasure and satisfaction was boundless.
“I didn’t know what real love was till this moment,” Dominique had told him as she lay still snuggled up to him somewhere close to dawn. “I love you so much, Charles. I’d die if you ever stopped loving me back.”
Impossible, he’d thought at the time. And he still thought the same. If anything, he was more in love with her than ever. He’d be the one who’d die if she ever stopped loving him.
“I have to go,” he told her gently, feeling slightly guilty for leaving her alone now. “I’ll try not to stay too late, but—”
“Yes, I know,” she broke in with a sigh. “I understand. Rico will try to keep you there till all hours.”
Dominique clenched her teeth at the thought of Charles’s best man doing just that. And it had nothing to do with Rico being a poker addict.
Enrico Mandretti’s scepticism over her love for Charles had been evident from their first meeting. Clearly, he thought her a devious fortune hunter. He didn’t have to spell out his suspicions. They were there in his dark, cynical eyes.
The trouble was…he was right. Yet oh, so wrong.
She did love Charles. More than she’d ever thought herself capable of loving any man. But before she’d met her future husband she’d been exactly what Rico believed she was. A gold-digger. A good-looking girl using her looks and her body to achieve her main goal in life: to acquire a wealthy husband, a gold-plated insurance policy that she would never have to suffer what her mother had suffered.
Dominique was sure that rich men’s wives didn’t go through what her mother had gone through. They were protected from such ignominies. They could at least die with dignity. That was, if they had to die at all.
After her mother’s lingering and very painful death, Dominique had vowed that she would marry money, if it was the last thing she did. Becoming a rich man’s wife, however, proved not such an easy task, not even for a girl with her looks. Rich men married women who moved in their own social circles. Or girls who worked with them; sophisticated, educated creatures with university degrees.
Unfortunately, Dominique’s education had been sadly lacking during her teenage years, her schooling constantly interrupted then totally terminated so that she could stay home and nurse her mother till she passed away. By the time she was eighteen, Dominique knew it would take years before she had the skills which would put her into the immediate vicinity of wealthy businessmen.
But she had youth on her side, and tenacity, and she’d finally achieved her aim a couple of years back, that of being in the right place, working alongside the right kind of boss. Single. Good-looking. And rich.
Unfortunately, her target had been even more ruthless than she was. His life’s plan did not include getting hitched to some no-account girl from the backwoods of Tasmania, no matter how hard she’d worked to educate herself, or how much he fancied her.
Sleeping with her was fine. Lying to her perfectly OK. Marrying her? Never in a million years!
After her mission to become Mrs Jonathon Hall had failed, a distressed and a slightly bitter Dominique had taken her over-generous severance pay along with Jonathon’s guilt-ridden, glowing reference and headed for the bigger fish pond of Sydney. Once there, she’d plotted out her strategy for becoming Mrs Charles Brandon with cold-blooded resolve. More cold-blooded than ever.
But there had been nothing cold-blooded about the feelings Charles had evoked in her during their first meeting. She’d already seen photographs of him and thought him quite attractive—Dominique knew she couldn’t bear to marry a man who was physically repulsive to her—but she’d found Charles in the flesh so intensely sexy she’d been totally thrown.
Those icy grey eyes of his had cut right through her defences to that part of her which she’d kept locked tightly away all her life. Dominique had never fallen in love before. Or even into lust. She had felt varying degrees of attraction to members of the opposite sex over the years. She’d even slept with a few. Jonathon, she’d been very attracted to. Sex with him had been quite pleasurable, but she’d never been carried away by it, or really needed it. Oh, no. All her responses with Jonathon had been totally faked.
Yet when Charles had stared at her body none too subtly that first day, she’d found herself staring right back at his own tall, lean body and wanting it so very badly.
Panic best described her reaction to this alien craving. It was no wonder she had fled, totally abandoning her plan to seduce Charles Brandon. She wanted to marry a rich man, not fall in love with one. Love made a woman weak and foolish and vulnerable. Love brought misery, not happiness.
But Charles wouldn’t leave it at that, would he? And here she was, his wife; his adoring and besotted wife.
Now she knew what her mother had meant when Dominique had once asked her why she’d married a man like her wretched father.
“Because I loved him to