The Widow

by Anne Stuart

  He didn’t expect to see her again, which was nothing but a blessing. She annoyed him, she got under his skin, and she made him start thinking about things that had no place in his self-sufficient life.

  No, to be honest he couldn’t blame her for everything. He’d been burned-out for a while now, ready to chuck it all and head back to Australia. He’d been counting on this story, and the ensuing book deal, to keep him in style for the rest of his life.

  He didn’t need money to go back to Australia. There were jobs waiting—he could have his pick of newspaper work if he wanted, or he could just go out to the cattle station he owned with his brother and become a rancher and screw everything. Right now that seemed the best bet.

  In the meantime, though, he had to finish with this mess. He couldn’t just drop it, not until the questions were answered. Where were the paintings? Who killed the old man?

  And what the hell was he going to do if he never saw Charlie again?

  He needed to get back to his apartment and call Gregory. So why the hell was he circling around, stashing his battered Fiat in a back alley and sitting in a café, watching the road to La Colombala?

  Charlie did what she always did in times of stress. Once the police had finished their brief and respectful questioning, she had headed straight for the kitchen. By the time her mother strolled in, the tabletops and countertops were littered with ingredients, and Charlie was kneading bread with a vengeance, her face streaked with flour, her clothes covered with everything else.

  “You always were an extremely messy child,” Olivia remarked. “I should have sent you to the Cordon Bleu. At least there you would have learned to clean up after yourself.”

  Charlie didn’t even look up from the dough. “At the Cordon Bleu you have people to do the dirty work and the cleanup,” she said. “Besides, by the time I was old enough to go I was already married to Pompasse.”

  “To my regret, yes,” Olivia said. There was one tiny section of counter that was uncluttered, and Olivia hoisted herself up onto it, obviously preparing for a chat. “I remember when we lived in that awful place in the suburbs, when I was married to what’s-his-name. Greenwich or Rye or someplace. You were seven years old and I bought you one of those tacky little play ovens. You spent every spare minute turning out tiny little cakes that tasted like cardboard and you kept wanting me to eat them.”

  “And you were on a diet and couldn’t be bothered,” Charlie said.

  “You’re just lucky you didn’t end up with an eating disorder, given that you turn to food for comfort at the drop of a hat.”

  “I wouldn’t call this situation ‘at the drop of a hat,’ I turn to food preparation, not eating, and I came here to be alone,” Charlie pointed out coolly, concentrating on the dough.

  “I know you did. I didn’t feel like leaving you alone. Sue me. What are you going to do about Henry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. The entire household does. Are you going to forgive him and take him back, or are you going to break the engagement?”

  Charlie glanced at her. “I’m sure you have an opinion on that that you’re just dying to tell me.”

  Olivia shrugged. “I want what’s best for you.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Actually, I really do. We never got along, the two of us. I suppose I was just too selfish to be a mother. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I worry about you, Charlie. I don’t want to see you make another mistake.”

  Charlie didn’t bother to hide her disbelief. “Don’t tell me you want Henry for yourself? He’s too old for you.”

  “You still think I wanted Pompasse?” Olivia asked, disbelieving.

  “Why else were we here? Why else did you have a screaming, raging fit when I told you we were married?”

  Olivia shook her head. “I love how the young always have all the answers. Of course I intended to have an affair with him when we first came to visit. He was famous, he was fascinating, and I was in a celebrity-hunting mood. I never intended to marry him. And I certainly never intended for you to marry him.”

  “I did. And you couldn’t stop me.”

  “I know, Charlie. And I’m sorry for that.”

  Charlie jerked her head up, the dough momentarily forgotten. “What did you say?”

  “I said I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you. The man was obsessed with you, and when I couldn’t stop it I could only hope he’d treat you like a goddess. Instead you had years of misery.”

  “It wasn’t misery,” she said absently, still concentrating on Olivia’s words. “I don’t think you’ve ever apologized before.”

  Olivia laughed. “Haven’t I? Well, I’m an arrogant bitch, there’s no denying that. Not anybody’s notion of an ideal mother. I’m selfish and greedy and self-absorbed, and I doubt if I ever put your well-being ahead of mine in your entire lifetime.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Charlie.”

  Charlie looked at her, her hands motionless in the dough. “And how do you define that love? Isn’t love caring about someone, sacrificing for someone, putting their happiness ahead of your own? You’ve never done that in your life.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Olivia said. “But, nevertheless, I love you.”

  Charlie straightened her shoulders. “I’m touched to hear it.”

  “You’re all I’ve got, Charlie.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “Mine,” Olivia said. She slid off the counter in one smooth move. “I just thought I’d mention it, in case it might come in handy later on in life. The fact that your lousy mother loves you.”

  “Great.” Charlie punched the dough.

  “Nothing like a touching mother-daughter reconciliation to get me sentimental,” Olivia said lightly. “So tell me, precious. How was Maguire in bed?”

  “Why don’t you find out for yourself?” she shot back.

  “Apart from the fact that I don’t know where he’s gone, I’m not interested. You know me, I like ’em buff and brainless. Maguire’s buff enough, I gather, but he’s a little too complicated for me. I think you could handle him, though.”

  Charlie turned to stare at her mother in disbelief. “Are you out of your mind? He’s a tabloid reporter! He was lying to us, using us to get his slimy little secrets to splash all over the pages of some disgusting magazine. He probably has pictures of you in the shower.”

  “And pictures of you in bed. I agree, he’s a very bad boy, and he deserves to be punished. But I’ve never seen anyone look at you the way he does, when he thinks no one is watching.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Of course you don’t, sweetie,” Olivia said. “You have all the answers. But you know, sometime you ought to consider the alternative. Maybe things aren’t quite what they seem.” And she left the room before Charlie could reply.

  Typical of Olivia. She had a flair for the dramatic, and she always wanted to have the last word, the great exit line. She probably expected Charlie to throw her arms around her and weep gratefully at the thought that beneath her pathological self-absorption her mother had a spark of feeling for her. If she even believed it.

  But Charlie had been protecting herself for too long to fall for it. So Olivia was having some sentimental backwash about her only offspring. It was probably just hormonal and would pass as soon as she set her sights on some new young man. In the meantime, Charlie had too much on her plate to start bringing her mother into the equation.

  She’d had five minutes alone, letting her anger dissipate into the dough, when Tomaso appeared in the open door, his sun-beaten face creased with concern. “No one’s going to want to eat that, Signora Charlie,” he said. “Lauretta would tell you that you’ve put so much anger into making it that it would probably poison people.”

  “Too bad Maguire’s gone, or we could feed it to him,” she growled.

&nbs
p; “I wanted to talk to you about that.”

  Charlie sighed. “Not you, too, Tomaso! I’ve already had to put up with the police and my mother. I really don’t even want to think about Maguire, much less discuss him….”

  “Not Maguire, Charlie. It’s everyone. I think you all should leave, and quickly.”

  Charlie looked down at the dough. Tomaso was right—she could feed it to Henry and Gia, but she found she didn’t even care enough. She dumped the dough in the compost bucket, and for a moment she remembered doing the same thing a week ago, when she first heard that Pompasse had died. Maybe she’d better stop making bread. That, or stop getting upset.

  She turned her attention back to Tomaso. “Leave? But why? We haven’t even buried Pompasse yet. And where would everyone go?”

  “It’s Madame Antonella. She’s getting very troublesome, cara. She hasn’t been well these last few months, and the master’s death has hit her very hard. You’ve heard her—she keeps talking about murder, and whores, and the like. I can’t be sure that she’ll be safe as long as there are strange people around. Once everyone leaves she’ll calm down and be fine. But I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself or someone else as long as there are so many strangers here. And to madame, in her condition, almost everyone is a stranger.”

  Charlie sighed. “I can’t kick everyone out, Tomaso, even if I wanted to. I think part interest in this place was left to Gia. If you really think Madame Antonella has deteriorated that much then perhaps we should find someplace to put her. She’s only in her seventies, but at times she seems much older. She needs a kind of home, or assisted living, where she can’t hurt herself.”

  “Charlie!” Tomaso was shocked. “Don’t let Lauretta hear you talking like that! The master promised madame a home for life. He was devoted to her. You can’t send her away!”

  “I don’t want to send her away, I just want her to be safe,” Charlie said wearily.

  “She would never…” Before Tomaso could finish his sentence Madame Antonella tottered into the kitchen.

  Her rheumy eyes slid over Charlie, dismissing her, and fastened on Tomaso. “Where’s Lauretta? I want to go home now,” she said in autocratic tones.

  “Lauretta is already up at your cottage,” Tomaso said in a soothing, deferential voice. “I’ll take you up there. Say goodbye to Charlie.”

  “Charlie?” The old lady looked confused for a moment. “Who’s Charlie?”

  “The master’s wife. You remember Charlie, Madame Antonella. She lived here with us.”

  Antonella stared at Charlie for a moment, then shook her head. “She’s not his wife,” she said flatly. “Now, stop annoying me. Take me back home.” Not bothering to wait, she started out the back door to the winding gravel path.

  “She didn’t hear me, did she?” Charlie whispered, worried.

  Tomaso shook his head. “She’s deaf, and we were speaking English. Besides, few things make sense to her nowadays. But I meant what I said. Lauretta and I are worried about her, and there’s no way we can move her. The rest of you will have to leave. Soon.”

  And he followed the old woman’s slow, fragile progress up the hillside.

  18

  It was going to rain. By the time Charlie finished cleaning up the devastation she’d created in the kitchen the sky had turned a dark, ominous gray. Odd, but in the seven years she’d lived in Tuscany she couldn’t really remember rain. They had to have had their share of it, otherwise the crops wouldn’t be so plentiful. But whenever she thought of Tuscany, all she could remember was the bright, merciless glare of the sun.

  The house seemed deserted, though she knew that was too much to hope for. Lauretta and Tomaso were up at the cottage, getting madame settled, trying to calm her querulous fears. Olivia was probably taking her afternoon rest—she wouldn’t forego that for love nor money. Particularly for money, which had always held more sway with her mother than so-called love.

  Charlie still couldn’t get over her mother’s odd conversation. Never in her life had her mother told her she loved her, or at least not that Charlie could remember. Olivia wasn’t the demonstrative sort, and she’d never been particularly fond of children. She had trotted Charlie around Europe as if she were a partially housebroken toy poodle—watching her like a hawk, cooing over her on occasion, but mostly handing her over to someone else’s care. By the time Charlie was twelve she’d lost count of the schools, the countries, even the fathers she’d had. By the time she was fourteen she’d learned to do without anyone.

  She’d always thought that was the way she preferred things to be. But for some reason she was getting mortally tired of being so damned self-reliant. Just once in her life she wanted to lose her temper, have a tantrum, stop being in charge of everything.

  That was impossible, of course. She was a responsible woman, with people depending on her. It didn’t matter that she wanted to jump in her car and go chasing after Maguire to give him a piece of her mind. The lying, treacherous, slimy bastard had used her, and God knows how far he would have gone if her mother hadn’t interrupted. Right now the notion of venting her fury had taken on an almost grail-like dimension.

  At least Olivia had managed to save her in time, and for that alone Charlie should be eternally grateful. She was just having a hard time summoning that well-deserved gratitude when all she wanted to do was break something over Maguire’s hard head.

  There was nothing she could do about it but get on with life. Maguire had escaped, and it was just as well. She needed to focus her energy on getting her life back together, not on an infuriating, lying journalist.

  She needed a shower and a change of clothes, but she couldn’t decide where she wanted to go. Her bedroom upstairs was haunted by the memories of Pompasse and the noisy lovemaking of her erstwhile fiancé. The studio held even stronger ghosts.

  In the end she had no choice—her clothes were upstairs. She could only hope that Gia and Henry had taken their activities elsewhere if they were busy continuing them.

  They weren’t. Henry was sitting in her room waiting for her, and it took all of Charlie’s formidable self-control not to turn around and leave. She could handle it, she told herself. She could handle anything.

  “This is my room, Henry,” she said in a deceptively polite voice. “I don’t remember inviting you in here.”

  “You’re angry,” he said, an understatement. “I don’t blame you. I’m completely horrified by what I did last night. I have no excuse, no right to ask you to forgive me.”

  She waited. She knew perfectly well he was going to ask, anyway. She just didn’t know what she was going to answer.

  He rose, crossing the room to take her hand in his. He had very narrow, soft hands. Perfectly manicured, always immaculate. Hands that had never done a day’s worth of real labor in his entire protected life. He drew her back to the bed, and she let him, letting her hand rest in his, observing her own reactions from a distance.

  Odd, but she didn’t feel that chill, that fear from the touch of his dry, cool skin. She didn’t feel anything at all anymore. Maybe Maguire had cured her. Or maybe she’d just gone beyond distaste into numbness.

  He sat down beside her on the bed, gently stroking her hand, and she let him, her attention on the darkening clouds outside, the rapidly approaching storm.

  “I need to tell you why it happened,” he was saying. “I need to explain to you, so that maybe I’ll understand it myself. You have to know how frustrated I was. I’m a man, Charlie, with a man’s needs. I’ve tried to be patient with you, God knows I have, but last night something just snapped. Maybe it was jet lag, maybe it was the way that Neanderthal was looking at you, maybe it was some crazy self-destructive streak…”

  “Neanderthal?” she interrupted.

  “Maguire.” His voice held all the contempt of generations of Ivy League entitlement. “That ruthless, sleazy journalist couldn’t keep his eyes off you. And you didn’t seem to mind. I couldn’t believe it—you’ve always placed a high valu
e on yourself, and yet you didn’t even notice that man was stalking you.”

  “Stalking me? I don’t think so, Henry,” she said calmly. “You were imagining things. I have no idea why you’d be jealous, but I can assure you that Maguire wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me, apart from his goddamned story.”

  “I’m not trying to excuse myself,” Henry said, ignoring her protest. “I’m just trying to explain. I’d just flown halfway around the world for you, and you didn’t care. You didn’t want or need my help. Or me, for that matter. You disappeared, and Gia was looking at me, talking to me the way you used to, as if I were the center of the universe, and I suppose I was flattered. And I admit it, I was attracted. I was tired of being made to feel like I was disgusting. Gia saw me as a man she wanted, rather than someone making impossible demands.”

  “Gia saw you as someone she could take away from me,” Charlie said. “A new meal ticket with the added advantage of hurting me.”

  “She’s in love with me, Charlie.”

  She turned to look at him. He was absolutely serious, and for once Charlie couldn’t think of a single response.

  “Well?” he said after a moment.

  “I hope you’ll be very happy together,” she said.

  “I don’t want it to be this way, Charlie,” he cried. “This wasn’t what I planned. Let me tell you about the first time I fell in love with you.”

  “Please don’t,” she said wearily. The rain had begun to spit down from the sky, beating against the old house. She should get up and close the casement window, but Henry was still stroking her hand as if he thought if he rubbed it hard enough he’d get his three wishes.

  “Humor me,” he said. “I’ve never told you this, and it’s past time. We didn’t just happen to meet at La Chance, you know. I came looking for you.”

  “Really?” She tried to summon an ounce of interest. He wasn’t going to release her until he got it all off his chest, and she owed him that much. To hear him out.