by Lynne Graham
“And I flew off half-cocked to Athens, without really thinking the whole thing through. Your reaction when I called made me appreciate that it was going to take more than a few words,” Jeff admitted.
Vickie took a seat stiffly, still watching Kerry’s anxious face. “As you’ve probably guessed, I refused to come initially. I’m not proud of that. It was unforgivable. I don’t win any badges for courage. I couldn’t have done it without Jeff’s support. I did love Alex, Kerry,” she faltered and looked up at the man by her side. “But never the way I love Jeff. I’m glad it’s over, you have no idea what a relief it is…”
Jeff cleared his throat impatiently. “I think right now Kerry has to be more interested in hearing that we’ve seen Alex.”
“You’ve seen him,” Kerry echoed. “But how?”
“I thought it would be wiser if we saw your husband at his office, and didn’t involve you until we saw how it was going to go,” Jeff supplied.
Kerry shut her eyes, rocked off balance to learn that the deed had already been done. “What did he say?”
“It was…ghastly,” her sister said shakily. “He went all quiet. It was like the whole thing just suddenly sunk in on him. One minute he was raging, the next he sat down.”
“But did he believe you?” Kerry pressed in exasperation.
Jeff drove his fingers through his untidy hair ruefully. “Oh, I think he believed us all right. I’m not sure he would have if we hadn’t both been there, though.”
“You said he went quiet? Pleased quiet? Angry quiet?” Kerry prompted in desperation.
“He was appalled…stunned,” Vickie answered reluctantly.
“But he hasn’t come home.”
“He does have a lot to think about.” Her sister looked at her guiltily, unhappily. “He divorced you. Finding out the truth now, when it’s too late to really do anything about it…” Vickie hesitated. “You see, I never thought about how it was going to be for him. Telling him the truth wasn’t really giving him anything to celebrate. That’s the best way I could put it…”
Kerry viewed her in blank incomprehension. Alex ought to have been jetting home in haste to…to what? Fling himself at her feet and apologise? Like Vickie, she had never thought beyond the moment when Alex would know the true story. She had never questioned how Alex might react.
“I think it’s time we left,” Jeff said bluntly. “We’re booked into a hotel, and the last thing Alex needs is to find us plonked here when he does come back.”
“Do you think if we held off getting married for a few months, you and Alex would come?” Vickie whispered uncertainly.
“Frankly, I think your sister has got more on her mind right now.” Jeff’s tone was dry and Vickie reddened.
Kerry gave way to her sister’s red-rimmed eyes and gave her a brief hug. The ice was broken, but she still could not have looked Vickie in the eye and told her that she completely forgave her. The cost had been too high. She managed to smile as she saw them off. It was difficult. Alex’s delayed return was worrying her increasingly. She phoned the family house in Rome to speak to Mario, who was presently working as one of Alex’s aides. She learnt that Alex had left the office before lunch time. By the time she got off the phone, she regretted calling. Athene had come on to the line to ask if there was anything wrong.
At two in the morning, she finally went to bed, and anxiety had been replaced by anger. How could he do this to her? Didn’t he realise how worried she would be?
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS NOON the next day before Alex arrived home. He was as sleek and immaculate as ever, but he looked as if he had been up all night. Aside from the faint pallor, the etching of strain round his mouth, Kerry could not have read a single emotion in his shuttered dark gaze. He stared at her and sank down on to a sofa. For a moment his glossy head was bent, and then he lifted it again and the air of vulnerability was gone.
“I should have phoned, but I should imagine that is the least of my sins,” he began.
“Vickie and Jeff came here last night. I know you’ve seen them,” she interposed.
A wintry smile firmed his mouth. “I almost made a derogatory comment about them both, but you have a saying about people in glass houses…” He paused, his bone structure prominent beneath his bronze skin. “I spent the night in the car. I didn’t know what to say to you then. I needed time. Your sister informed me that she had told you the truth before you married me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
The impatience had drained out of her. A curious foreboding was clenching her tight now. “I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
He bit out a harsh laugh and studied his linked hands. “You know me too well. I shouldn’t have asked the question. A more caring and less intimidating husband might have invited confidence. I don’t blame you for keeping quiet. Jeff…it was he who phoned you on the island? You were very happy that day,” he drawled in the same measured, carefully unemotional tone.
“Of course I was…after all this time, I finally saw a hope of it all being cleared up,” she replied.
“It is now.” Releasing his breath slowly, he stared across the room at her. “An apology, no matter how deeply it was meant, would be another insult to the many I have already offered you. In my desire for revenge, I have done you incalculable harm. Nothing I could do or say would make up for the pain I have caused you.”
Her eyes were haunted pools in the ashen pallor of her face. Her fingers curled tightly over the back of the armchair in front of her. She felt sick because she was afraid. If he loved her, there was plenty he could do, but he did not love her. Faced with his own mistrust and misjudgement, all Alex could feel now was the heavy burden on his conscience, the impossibility of finding adequate words to express his regret for all that had happened between them since that day in Venice.
“You said that the clock could not work in reverse,” he reminded her. “You were correct. Even before they came to see me yesterday I had already seen this. I had also come to appreciate that a…loving husband would not have behaved as I did four years ago. I might have seen that if my wife did end up in another man’s arms, my own behaviour had undoubtedly contributed to the betrayal. But then I was not capable of seeing that…”
“Alex…I…” she faltered, torn by his pain but held back by his icy control.
He rose abruptly to his feet and moved a silencing hand. “No, don’t tell me not to say these things. I must say them. I fell in love with you because you were so full of life, and then I proceeded to crush it out of you,” he breathed contemptuously. “Worse,” he continued before she could argue that his faults had not been so severe. “I didn’t even notice I was doing that to you.”
Her fingernails bit into the velvet beneath her hand. “It wasn’t so bad as that,” she protested weakly.
The dark head flung back. “Do not be so generous to me,” he grated. “When was I ever generous to you? Had I left you in the life you were contented with, I would feel less like some Dark Ages tyrant now. But no, once again I had to come into your life and make a mess of it, even to the point of making you pregnant again. And why did that happen? Because I blackmailed you into bed. I might as well have raped you.”
Kerry was trembling. So much of the understanding she had once longed for had been locked up inside him. It must have existed before yesterday. Alex could not have put all this together overnight. But what she was hearing was too extreme, too terrifyingly linked with a hard, bitter finality for her to receive any comfort from it.
He drew something from his inside pocket. “This is the contract I forced you to sign.” He tore the document violently in half and cast the pieces into the grate. He straightened again, pale but controlled. “Now you have no restrictions. I will leave you to lead your life as you choose to lead it. If you do not want me to see Nicky,” his voice roughened and dropped low, “this I will accept, too.”
Shock was coursing through her in waves. Dear God, it was happening all over again! On
ly this time he had had the decency not to send a lawyer to do the dirty work. A searing memory of the letters she had written and the calls she had once made sealed her lips rigidly on any protest. If he was leaving, she would let him leave. Why should she tell him that she loved him, when her feelings weren’t returned? She refused to make the smallest move to argue his decision.
“You married me just to get revenge, didn’t you?” she accused with stark eyes. “And once you’d got it, it was worthless, wasn’t it?”
His dark eyes flamed golden. “Yes…worthless.” His low-pitched response was wry. “And I know that to give you your freedom back when it should never have been taken from you is poor recompense. But it is all that I have to give.”
All that he had to give. The statement rippled through her slight body, burning and wounding wherever it touched. It took her anger away. It numbed her. “And what am I supposed to do now?” she asked woodenly.
“You do whatever you want. I will do nothing. You can have a divorce, a separation, whatever you choose. Where you live is also your decision,” he laid out tautly. “Naturally, I will leave this house…”
“That’s very generous of you, but I can be generous too,” she assured him shakily. “I’ll pack for you!”
“I have already asked Lucrezia to take care of it,” Alex murmured tightly. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s what I want. My God, Alex, you don’t think I’m about to argue, do you?” she gibed, half an octave higher.
A tiny muscle jerked in the corner of his compressed mouth, as if her venom had thrust fully home. In a torment of blind rage and despair, she watched him leave the room. She listened to his steps ringing up the stairs, and it seemed no time until they came down again. Still she had not moved. The slam of the car door echoed through the window. Unexpectedly, the door opened again.
Alex hovered there, shorn of his usual cool poise. But then, the last time he had walked out, he had not had to tolerate an audience or a conscience. She observed him with cold eyes. “Did you forget something?”
Alex, you bastard, how could you put me through this again? But she didn’t speak. As he turned on his heel, she crammed a shaking hand to her wobbling mouth and bowed her head over the chair which was still supporting her. Why was it that no matter what she did he could still walk away? Here she had been, expecting at first guilty discomfiture upon his part but inevitably the same release she had experienced after Vickie’s revelations. But the one salient fact she had overlooked was that Alex did not love her. Alex had reacted according to his principles. He had forced her into this marriage. In apology, he was removing himself from her life again. She was fiercely glad that she had let him go thinking that she was delighted to see the back of him. Once before, loving him had humiliated her. It had not done so this time.
A quiet like the grave settled over Casa del Fiore. The staff seemed to creep about. Lucrezia, full of enormous Florentine compassion, looked upon her with great, tragic eyes and endeavoured to tempt her flagging appetite. At the end of a week, Kerry was emptied of tears. Her misery had stirred Nicky into rampant insecurity, and she had to pull herself together for his benefit. After the strain of smiling all day, she ended up ringing Steven late one evening. It was a long call, and forty-eight hours later Steven arrived on the doorstep.
Nicky greeted him boisterously and, under Lucrezia’s dazed scrutiny, Kerry threw her arms about him too. “That’ll have to be some shoulder,” she sniffed.
His classic features pulled a clownish grimace, and his blue eyes were rueful. “It’s one of the very few things I’m good at.”
* * *
“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell him how you felt?” he asked later, when Nicky was in bed.
“There was no point.” Her tone brooked no argument.
“I’ve never met Alex…”
“Aren’t you the lucky one?” she muttered, blowing her nose. “He was a jealous, suspicious toad the first time around, but you know, this time he was worse…he was so nice all the time, it was like living with a saint over the last few weeks. Not my idea of Alex at all.”
Steven looked understandably a little at sea, and tried to be constructive. “My gut reaction is that in clearing out he thought he was doing the decent thing, like somebody out of one of those ghastly melodramatic plays they enjoy in Greece.”
Kerry was unimpressed. “If he hadn’t wanted to let me go, he wouldn’t have. Let’s talk about something more cheerful. He’s gone and that’s it, and I never, ever want to see him again. Do you hear me?” She snatched at another tissue and wiped at her overflowing eyes.
Steven stayed only for three days, and mentioned that he would be selling up the business. Barbara had convinced him that he would cope much better with a simple workshop in a town where there would be more demand for his services, and she was thinking of looking for a job closer to home. Kerry had to quell the unpleasant feeling that everybody else’s problems were working out, while her own simply increased in complexity.
She let the workmen back into the house. Her life wasn’t going to fall apart again, she assured herself. She had got by without Alex before, she would do so again. She kept herself busy and she fell into bed every night exhausted. Alex had been gone exactly three weeks when Athene arrived without so much as a polite call to advertise her intent.
Kerry, surprised with a scarf round her head, wearing a pair of jogging pants and a stripy rugby shirt Alex had once worn, stiffened as Athene strolled in, her cool, dark appraisal sweeping her in obvious recoil. “Perhaps I should have warned you that I was coming.”
Kerry showed her into the small sitting-room, since the salon was being redecorated. Athene shed her coat and inched off her gloves. “If it is not too impertinent a question, may I ask who the young man was that you had staying?”
Off-balance, Kerry stared back at her.
Athene quirked a silvery brow. “Your housekeeper is related to one of my servants. Such news travels fast,” she remarked drily.
Kerry reddened. Athene in this formidable mood could only be compared to the iceberg which sank the Titanic. She found herself hurriedly making an explanation, and alluding carefully to Barbara’s existence in Steven’s life.
Athene’s Arctic cool melted slightly. “Ah,” she nodded. “This makes greater sense. You don’t look to be thriving upon my son’s absence.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Kerry parried proudly.
“I am not quite in my dotage,” Athene fielded, and her thin lips almost smiled. “This outfit you wear can only be an expression of grief.” She paused and then looked up. “I did not come here easily. You and I have only Alex in common, and I have come for Alex’s sake.”
“Alex left me…” Kerry began spiritedly.
Athene waved an imperious hand. “But not, I think, willingly, and I have no need to receive details. I knew from the first moment I met you six years ago that you and Alex would have a stormy relationship. Given your personality, it was only a matter of time until the trouble began…”
“My personality?”
Athene frowned irritably. “You are too defensive. Will you let me speak?” she demanded thinly. “If Alex had married a quieter girl, content to fit with his expectations, the marriage probably would have lasted as yours did not. You were outgoing and lively, and Alex was stifling you because he could not bring himself to trust you. The fault was his. Perhaps I could have stopped it then by speaking to him. I chose to conserve my own dignity. I did not interfere, and when I would have done, it was too late.”
Kerry sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t see what you could have done.”
Athene smiled grimly. “Yes, you have noticed that Alex and I are not close. Did you ever wonder why? Alex was my firstborn and my favourite, but I believe his first loyalty always lay with his father. Nevertheless, when he was a child, we were close until a certain episode occurred.” Her voice was becoming taut and hesitant. “I lost my son’s respect
. Has he told you of this?”
Puzzled by the increasingly personal tenor of Athene’s words, while marvelling that Athene could ever have done anything to fall foul of Alex’s high principles, Kerry murmured gently, “Alex wouldn’t have told me anything of that nature unless there was a need for me to know.”
Athene sighed. “It was not a need he would have acknowledged, and it is an episode he has done his utmost to forget. That I have always been aware of,” she conceded, almost as if she was talking to herself. “When I married Alex’s father, Lorenzo, I admired him very much. I was only a teenager when I understood that it was my parents’ dearest wish that I should marry the son of their oldest friends. It was not arranged, you understand, but it was expected.”
“Were you unhappy with Alex’s father?” Kerry prompted in surprise.
“When I fell in love, for the first and last time in my life,” Athene stressed looking her almost defiantly in the eye, “then I was unhappy.”
As Kerry’s face tightened in astonished realisation that Athene was admitting to having loved another man, her companion’s lips compressed tightly.
“Why not me? None of us are born saints. I had been content with Lorenzo. He was a good man and a faithful husband, and he still loved me on the day he died. He never knew that for a few short weeks of our marriage I carried on an affair with another man, and it would have caused him great pain to discover that secret. He had always awarded me unquestioning faith and trust,” she admitted heavily.
Mottled colour had suffused her powdered cheeks, making Kerry sharply aware that this confession of frailty had cost Athene dearly.
“We met quite by accident,” she continued expressionlessly. “He was a businessman, but not wealthy. For me, it was a kind of madness. I counted no costs when I became involved with him. Every moment I could steal from my family, I was with Tomaso, and inevitably we were found out.” Her voice had sunk very low. “I wanted desperately to be with him somewhere where we could be alone. We used to have a summer place outside Cannes. Alex was at boarding-school then. He was to spend his half-term there with me. There was illness in the school and they let him leave early. He crept into the house to surprise me, and he discovered me in Tomaso’s arms. He was only thirteen, and I was terrified that he would tell his father. I realised too late what I had done. I sent Tomaso away and I never saw him again. I had my children and my husband to consider. Alex remained silent. He understood that nothing could be gained from any other course but his father’s pain and disillusionment.”