by Lynne Graham
The pain and the anxiety had always melted down to the same source. Love. Such a cruel emotion to the unlucky. It was love which was stalking her like Nemesis now. She had never managed to kill her love for Alex. She had dug the weakness down deep and sought to bury it, but it had lingered, preventing her from finding peace even with herself. When had loving Alex ever caused her anything but pain? She did not marvel at her own reluctance to admit her vulnerability. Pride and simple fear had warred against the admission.
“Sofia tells me that you are not feeling well.”
“It’s just a headache. I’ll lie down for an hour.” Her voice emerged perfectly normally and she turned.
Alex was on the threshold, dark and tawny and compellingly masculine. Concern showed clearly in his narrowed, probing scrutiny.
“Leave me, I’ll be fine,” she insisted when he continued to stare.
“Are you in love with Steven Glenn?”
The unexpectedness of the quiet demand took her by surprise. His eyes were cool and level. The weather might have been under discussion.
“Why should you think that?”
His arrogant head tilted back, black hair gleaming in the filtered sunshine. “I was curious, and it’s wiser if we don’t have any secrets between us.”
“You’ve got everything else, Alex,” she heard herself riposte drily. “I’m afraid you don’t have access to my every thought too.”
Fury glittered in his gaze. The illusion of cool was abruptly cast aside. “Then you will understand if I prevent you from returning to England in the foreseeable future,” he delivered crushingly.
As he withdrew, the door rocked on its hinges. A sick tide of bitterness rose like bile within her. How could he think that she could love another man and still abandon herself to him? It certainly clarified Alex’s view of her. As far as Alex was concerned, she was enslaved by her own promiscuous nature. Already he was suspecting his conviction that there had been no other men. He would have her watched like a thief when he was abroad. He would never trust her out of his sight. But she understood why he could live with her moral deficiency. It was her weakness, not his. Had his surveillance of her life included a photo of Steven? A humourless smile curved her lips. Steven was a very handsome man. Well, let Alex live with his suspicions! Steven was at a safe distance. If Alex had to distrust her, Steven was a harmless focus.
When she returned to the terrace after lunch, Alex was not there.
“Kyrios Veranchetti has gone fishing.” Sofia answered her enquiry cheerfully.
She got a pair of binoculars and located him out in the bay.
“He with old Andreas like when he was a boy,” Sofia burbled, sketching an impossibly miniature Alex with a workworn hand.
She could see two figures in the shabby caique. Sunlight glinted off a can of beer in Alex’s hand. She put the binoculars away guiltily and spent the afternoon sunbathing. He came back just before dinner, angling her a flashing, sensual smile on his way past. “I won’t take long to change.”
He talked with animation over the meal. Their earlier conversation might never have happened. As she went to bed, she was wondering how she was to survive another decade of Alex’s supreme self-sufficiency. He didn’t care if she loved another man. He had her in body, he didn’t need her in spirit, too. She was almost asleep when he came to her. Her drowsy, muffled protest was silenced by the tender caress of his mouth. If he had been storm and passion the night before, he was seduction and silence now. But this time she was agonisingly conscious of his withdrawal afterwards. He quietly removed himself back to his own room. Actually sleeping with her appeared to be an intimacy Alex could not bring himself to contemplate.
She woke up to the sound of the helicopter landing. When she walked out on to the terrace Alex was chattering in Italian on the phone, and two dark-suited men, one standing, one sitting, were with him. Her colour evaporated as she recognised one of them. The older one with the greying hair was Roberto Carreras, the lawyer Alex had sent to Florence with the separation papers. Just looking at the man brought back hideous recollections.
“Some coffee, kyrie?” Sofia bustled past, carrying a laden tray, and the men turned their heads, seeing her slim figure for the first time. It was too late to retreat.
Carreras immediately stood, his suave features betraying not an ounce of discomfiture as he politely spun out his chair for her. “Buon giorno, signora,” he said, and passed some meaningless comment on the magnificent view.
She was ill with mortification, forced to take the seat and smile in the man’s general direction. Alex glanced up, an abstracted half-smile softening his expression. Sofia moved about, pouring the coffee, pressing Kerry for a breakfast order. But if she ate, she would very likely throw up, she acknowledged. She had been so distressed that day. The lawyer had remained coldly impersonal while she had begged him to speak to Alex for her, had begged him to convince Alex that he had to come and see her face to face. “That is not my client’s wish, signora,” he had intoned expressionlessly.
In retrospect, she marvelled that she had survived that period. A shudder of fearful repulsion snaked through her as she surveyed Alex from beneath her copper lashes. “Excuse me.” She got up on cotton-wool legs with a slightly bowed head. “I’ll leave you to your business discussion.”
Strolling into the house, she could feel Alex’s questioning glance burning into her back. She went out to the terrace at the rear of the villa. How could she sit and make polite conversation with a man who had witnessed and played a part in her humiliation? It was too much to demand of her. But Alex was an unfeeling, insensitive brute. He probably didn’t even remember that Carreras was the one.
There were too many cracks to paper over. This marriage could never work. Even her innocence could not wipe out the memory of a nightmare. Yesterday she had let herself float with the tide because she loved him and she had wanted to cling to the fragile hope that he had meant it when he talked about a fresh start. What a fool she had been!
She was standing by the sea wall, gazing down sightlessly at the waves crashing white foam against the rocks far below, when firm hands curved hard to her shoulders from behind. She flinched.
“They’re gone,” Alex drawled roughly.
So he had remembered…my God, how could either of them ever forget?
“You’ve got to let me go, Alex,” she whispered. It was the only answer that she could see.
His fingers bit painfully into her slender forearms. “No,” he gritted. “Why should you talk like this now?”
“You’re hurting me.”
His hold loosened, his thumbs rubbing soothingly over the indentations of his hard fingers. “I didn’t mean to. I think I have bruised you. Forgive me.”
An hysterical laugh bubbled up in her convulsed throat.
“I remembered too late to protect you from that embarrassment. It won’t be repeated. It was an unfortunate oversight. You will not have to see him again.”
The laugh escaped this time, high-pitched and unnatural. “What are you going to do? Tell him he’s no longer welcome in your home because he once performed a certain task at your behest?”
“I will transfer him somewhere. He will not suffer by it. I can do no more. If you are so upset by the sight of him, I can no longer entertain him,” Alex retorted with abrasive practicality.
She gulped. “I see. Are you planning to do that with everybody who might talk? The staff in the house in Florence, the security men, your secretarial staff in Rome who never put through my calls, the personal aides who ensured my letters were returned…what about the other lawyers involved?”
Spinning her round, he gave her a little shake. Perspiration gleamed on his hewn dark skin, lines of strain grooved deep between his nose and mouth. “Stop this now,” he insisted in a ragged undertone.
She turned up her tear-stained face in a movement of despair. “You’re not being logical, Alex. Athene may not descend to gossip, but a lot of your friends must
be in the know. I know what a hotbed of gossip Roman society is, and the way rumours go, I should imagine that the word is that you walked into an orgy by now…” She faltered out of all control and restraint. “Doesn’t it bother you that people are going to mutter and sneer behind your back?”
His hands sprung wide as he released her. He backed off several steps as if he could not trust himself too close. Slowly she shook her head, Titian hair flying about her in fiery glory. It had had to be said, all that Alex did not want to hear, for as those things happened she would be the one to pay the price.
“Don’t you see that you will take your anger out on me?” she pressed hoarsely.
“Cristo!” The muscles in his strong brown throat worked. “How can you believe that of me?”
Her arm steadied her weary body against the wall. “You can’t turn the clock back, Alex. You’ve got to see that. It was over for us a long time ago. You should have left me alone. You saw me in hospital and you acted on an ego-ridden whim. There is no going back. Let me go…”
He swung away from her, his brown hands clenching into impotent fists. She did not know whether his aggression was aimed at her for ripping the lid off the reality he ignored or aimed at all those faceless people who might dare to whisper. He punched one fist into his palm with a thud which tremored through the hot, still air. His golden gaze struck sparks from hers in an uncompromising refusal to yield.
“I believe I would sooner see you dead than let you go. I want you too much, and I am not afraid of gossip. Nor should you be, for who would dare to insult you to your face?” he demanded fiercely. “It will be a brave man who dares to offend me. This is between us and nobody else, don’t you see that?”
“I can’t take it, Alex,” she said in a stifled whisper. “I was content as I was.”
A black brow shot up. “You will be content with me. If you can accept me in bed, it is only a matter of time before you accept me everywhere else.”
“Never! It’s too late.” Hectic pink searing her cheekbones at his blunt reminder of her weakness, she tried to walk away. The intensity of the powerful emotions simmering between them had exhausted her. Alex would never admit to a wrong decision. He would manoeuvre and manipulate and calculate to the bitter end in an effort to make it a right one. But when he talked of removing Carreras from the scene, he was touching the tip of an iceberg, and evading the issue. Carreras had only been an instrument, a highly paid professional man doing his job. It was the man behind the instrument who had driven her nearly crazy with grief.
Only black storm clouds loomed ahead. Alex was not omnipotent. He liked to think he was, though. He had been born into wealth beyond most people’s wildest dreams. His Midas touch had transformed wealth into legend. Her supposed infidelity was probably the only situation that Alex had ever met which was outside his control. She had offended in a way no other living person would have dared to offend. He still regarded her as his, indisputably his, and no man and no woman could be permitted to take what belonged to Alex before he chose to discard it. She was the one slap in the teeth Alex had ever had, and with masochistic fervour Alex was seeking to redress that slur on his masculinity. How stupid she had been to believe Nicky his main motivation in this marriage!
“I wish I could go back and change some of the actions I took.” The harsh confession was dredged from him. “But even if I could, I do not believe I could have behaved differently…”
An anguished smile twisted her pale face. How like Alex it was to lament and negate in one savagely candid statement.
“You were very young and I was hard, but I suffered too,” he asserted roughly. “On three separate occasions I flew to Florence during those six months.”
She stilled and whirled jerkily back.
“Once I got as far as the gates of Casa del Fiore before I told the driver to turn back.” The dark eyes had no shimmer of gold. They were black and deep as Hades. “And you should be glad I turned back. I did not trust myself near you.”
A picture of Alex flying into Florence and backtracking in triplicate frankly astonished her. Her imagination balked at the vision of Alex controlled by rampant indecision. But that he had tried to make himself approach her, that he had been drawn against his own volition, softened the dead-weight of resurrected bitterness which Roberto Carreras had aroused. Instinctively she moved back towards him. “W…What did you want to say?” Her voice was almost inaudible.
His jawline clenched rock-hard. “Why? Why, that is what I wanted to say. Was it because he was younger than I, better-looking, more exciting? Was it out of badness or out of need?” he selected in a savage undertone which froze her in her tracks with a sudden onslaught of throat-constricting fear. “Was he good? How often did he take you, how did he take you? That was all that was on my mind!”
His slim, beautifully shaped hands folded over the balustrade of the wall, the knuckles showing white. A surge of frightening anger had him in its merciless grasp. She was sentenced to appalled stillness by the horrific reality of how deeply Alex had been affected. She wanted to speak, she wanted to drag her sister kicking and screaming into his presence and wipe it all out. But common sense kept her quiet. In the mood Alex was in, the explanation would sound like fanciful nonsense. It would enrage him even more.
“And still sometimes it is on my mind. Because I never got my hands on him, and if I ever did I would kill him.”
She trembled. “But…if you’d actually seen me, don’t you think you might have had other…things to say?” she whispered.
“I knew you were not well. I was kept informed by your doctor. If I had come to you and you had lost our child, I could not have lived with myself.”
It was not an answer to her question. But it had been a sentimental question. At no stage had Alex seen the smallest hope of a reconciliation.
“And that day at the hospital, after Nicky’s birth, I looked at you,” he breathed, “and I hated you for what you had done to us both. I never wanted to look upon you again, but I could never put you behind me where you belonged.”
Was that what this marriage was aimed at achieving? Deep down, was that what Alex was really seeking? He had called her a fever in his blood. He would secretly despise such a weakness in himself, but he would not admit to it in self-denigrating terms. She was suddenly convinced that, whether he appreciated it or not, Alex was hoping to look at her with perfect indifference at some time in the future.
“And you still believe we can make a new start?” she queried.
His proud profile tautened. “It is natural for us to drag up all the feelings that we never shared then. By doing so, we will lay them to rest.”
If more honest sessions akin to what she had just undergone lay ahead, a quick, merciful dive off a cliff would be kinder to her twanging emotions.
“I didn’t deliberately seek to hurt you then.” Alex looked down at the seas battering the rocks below and emitted a harsh laugh. “I was not really myself. If it had been drugs, drink, illness…insanity, anything but infidelity, I would have stood by you.”
He stepped away from the wall. “Do not ask me to let you go again. I don’t like this view you have of yourself as a prisoner,” he admitted. “You have everything that any normal woman could want, and I take very little in return.”
He was daring her to disagree. His anger had gone, but he would have relished a good rousing battle to blow off the cobwebs. When she thought about it, she was the only person she had ever known who argued with Alex. “You take everything,” she contradicted painfully, and this time she did manage to walk away.
It was lunch before they came together again. Alex was back on the rails of cool, implacable good humour. He suggested they spend the afternoon on the beach and he wouldn’t let her brood. “You see, you are not unhappy,” he stated with arrogant emphasis the first time she laughed at one of his sallies. “You only think you are, and perhaps you want to be, but you are not.”
“Were you very unhappy whe
n I left you in Florence?” he asked, with a na;auiveté which could only astound, in the depths of her bed that night.
His limbs were still damply entangled with hers, his breath warming her cheek. In itself, the question was a miniature breakthrough in intimacy. Alex was normally edging away by that stage, making her wonder melodramatically if he hated himself in the aftermath of their passion. It was also the first time that he had ever made a personal enquiry as to her state of mind then.
“Scared,” she muttered. “Lonely.”
His lean body stiffened in the circle of her arms. His damp, silky hair brushed her brow as he lowered his head. “For him?”
“Oh, go to hell, Alex!” After an outraged second of disbelief that he could even think that, she yanked herself violently free of him. “How can you say that? I loved you, God, but I loved you!” She buried her contorted face in the pillows, her narrow back defensively presented to him.
“From love of so fine a strength, a man would surely take great comfort…” he raked back at her in cruel cynicism. “The love I got from you I bought. Your head was turned by my money and your body was ripe for a man’s possession. Do not call that love!”
He slammed out of the room. Something went crashing noisily down in the corridor and she heard a groaned profanity. He had hit himself on the small table she had put outside to carry a vase of flowers. She sincerely hoped it had hurt like hell. If he wanted to play musical beds in the middle of the night and throw right royal rages, he deserved everything he got.
* * *
“I’M SORRY…how often must I say it?” Alex thundered across the table at lunch time the next day. “Yes, Alex, no, Alex, if you like, Alex! What kind of conversation is this?”
Sofia had almost dropped the coffee-pot. Out of the corner of her eye, Kerry noted her hasty retreat from the roar of Alex driven beyond endurance by silence. “I can’t get very chatty about the idea that I married you for money and sex,” she said bitterly. “Somehow you have twisted up our whole relationship. I didn’t cost you a groat in comparison with anybody else’s ex-wife. You got off really cheap,” she pointed out coldly.