by Penny Jordan
Since he obviously already knew some of the guests Lily expected Marco to do something to correct this error, but he did nothing about it at all, instead staying at her side whilst the Duchess beamed with obvious pride in having ‘outed’ their relationship. He was obviously very fond of the Duchess, and determined not to embarrass her by revealing the truth in public, Lily recognised. Whilst she could understand that, it certainly didn’t make her position any less difficult to bear. Having Marco behave as though they were indeed a couple, having him standing so close to her, adopting a protective manner towards her that she knew was fictitious, brought her to a sharply keen knife-edge of painful awareness of just how much the inner vulnerable core of her longed to have the right to this kind of closeness with him.
Of course he was sophisticated and urbane enough to carry off their supposed relationship with cool self-confidence. He was that kind of man—totally at home in his surroundings and totally in control of himself. And of her? She had known him for less than a handful of days but in that time he had changed not just her beliefs about what she wanted out of life, but her perception of herself as well.
When she was confronted by the feelings aching through her now she came face to face with a part of herself she had thought locked away for ever. Somehow, though, despite it being pushed away, ignored by her and denied, Marco had the power to bring it to life within her. There was no point, though, in indulging in hopeless, self-destructive daydreams and fantasies. Lily knew that loving Marco was dangerous for her and could only bring her misery and pain.
‘You need a fresh glass of champagne. That one’s gone flat, by the looks of it.’
Marco was holding out a fresh glass to her and smiling as he did so. A faked smile, of course—how could it not be?—but her heart couldn’t help yearning and wondering what it would be like to have Marco really smile at her like that, with a smile that was full of tenderness and more than a hint of sensual promise of the pleasure that would be theirs once they were on their own. A lover’s smile, in other words.
Her hand trembled as she reached for the glass he was holding out to her. To disguise her vulnerability she took a quick sip of it, almost choking on the bubbly liquid in shock when she felt a hand on her arm and heard a familiar female voice exclaim, ‘Lily—little Lily! Darling girl, you look so like your dear mother. I’d have recognised you anywhere. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. I had to ask Carolina to bring me over.’
Somehow Lily managed to smile back at the elegant mature woman now standing with the Duchess, smiling at her.
‘I could hardly believe it myself.’ The Duchess laughed. ‘There I was, telling one of my closest friends about Marco’s lovely new girlfriend and the exhibition she is organising, and when I pointed you out what should Melanie say but that she recognised you? She knew you as a little girl but lost touch with you.’
Lily was acutely conscious of Marco standing next to her, listening to everything that was being said. If there was anything that could cause her even more emotional distress and dread than recognising how vulnerable she was to Marco then it was this. Someone from her past with its memories that she had fought so hard to leave behind her.
Marco could see how shocked Lily was. Shocked in a way that suggested she had been dealt some kind of almost physical blow. She was trying hard not to show it, but he had heard her indrawn agonised breath and seen the colour leaving her face. Why? Because the Duchess’s friend had known her as a little girl? Why?
She was trapped, Lily thought helplessly. She couldn’t simply turn and run away, no matter how tempted she was to do just that. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Marco hadn’t been with her. She would still have felt shocked. She would still have felt the pain that seeing Melanie had brought her. But that pain would have been much easier to bear without Marco’s presence.
And now, instead of running somewhere to hide, she had to smile as though she meant it and say with as much composure as she could to the woman standing with the Duchess, ‘Melanie, how lovely to see you again.’
Melanie Trinders had been a close friend of her mother. They had modelled together, and Melanie had been a regular visitor to their home.
Lily had tried to sound cool and slightly remote, but her attempt to put some emotional distance between them had no effect whatsoever on her mother’s old friend. Lily was immediately embraced—wrapped, in fact—in the warmth of expensive cashmere and even more expensive scent, and subjected to a fond continental exchange of kisses before being held at arm’s length by the elegant and still beautiful late middle-aged woman dressed in a scarlet designer dress that fitted her model-svelte figure like a glove.
‘To think that when you invited Harry and me here tonight I had no idea that your guest of honour was going to be my dear Petra’s daughter. And such a clever and beautiful daughter. Petra would have been so proud of you, Lily. Proud of you and happy for you,’ she emphasised, giving Marco a meaningful look before turning back to Lily. ‘Emotional happiness was always so important to your mother. I could never understand what she meant about the importance of love until I met my Harry.’
Smiling at the Duchess, she told her friend, ‘Carolina, this is such a wonderful coincidence. Lily’s mother was one of my closest friends. We modelled together.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘A lifetime ago now. Petra was younger than me, and such a lovely girl.’
Melanie turned back to Lily, still holding her hands. ‘Lily, you are the image of her. I remember when you were born. Your father was still furious with your mother for having a baby. He didn’t even go to see her when she was in hospital—just as though he had nothing at all to do with your arrival into the world. He bullied her dreadfully to lose weight, of course, so that she could go back to modelling.’
‘Your mother was a model?’ Marco demanded, his mistrust and suspicion returning along with his angry contempt. If Lily’s mother had been a model that meant she would have even more cause to know just what could happen to the unwary—and yet she had still tried to inveigle his nephew into it. The loathing he felt for the kind of people who had brought about Olivia’s destruction surged through Marco’s veins.
‘Not just a model, but the model of her time—just as Lily’s father was the photographer of his generation. I’m not surprised to hear from Carolina that you use photography in your own work, Lily. I can still remember watching you playing in your father’s studio as a little girl. Even then you preferred taking photographs rather than being in them. Your father was a genius with the camera and a wonderful success in the fashion world.’ She looked at Marco. ‘Given your relationship with Lily, though, I’m sure that she will have told you that whilst her father was brilliantly successful as a photographer he was a disastrous husband and father. I understand his second marriage broke up as well, Lily?’
Melanie had obviously taken Marco’s fixed concentration on what she was saying as a sign that he wanted to hear more, Lily decided miserably. Because without waiting for Lily to answer she continued, ‘I can remember going into the studio and seeing Lily playing there on the floor. You were such a sweet-natured, pretty child, Lily, and you could have been the perfect child model. No wonder Anton wanted all those pictures of you.’
Champagne nearly spilled from Lily’s glass as she made a sudden rejecting movement she couldn’t control. Her hand was trembling uncontrollably, her stomach heaving with sick dread, and she looked towards the door, desperate to escape.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, Marco was forced to recognise, and the rebellion within him rose up and totally overwhelmed the weakened force of his determination to remain distant from Lily. It was that rebellion and not he himself that had him moving towards her, putting himself between her and the others to shield her, taking hold of her arm to steady her, taking charge and obliterating any resistance. Lily looked numbly at him, like a hunted, tormented creature in fear for its life, caught in a car’s headlights.
‘Anton liked photographing
her, then, did he?’ the rebellion in him asked conversationally, mercilessly silencing what he thought of as his real self when it tried to protest that it didn’t want to get involved.
‘Oh, yes,’ Melanie agreed. ‘He always said she had real model potential …’
Lily struggled to subdue the sound of protest and anguish rising in her throat. She looked ill, Marco recognised. Bruised and defeated and agonised.
‘I was so sorry when I heard about your mother’s death, Lily,’ Melanie added in a much more sombre voice. ‘Such a dreadfully sad thing to happen.’
‘She was never able to come to terms with her divorce from my father,’ Lily responded in a strained voice, somehow managing to drag herself back from the edge of the dark, greedy chasm of fear that had opened up at her feet.
The other woman patted her arm and then excused herself, explaining, ‘I must go—my husband will be looking for me. Stay in touch, Lily darling.’
The Duchess too had moved away to talk to another guest, leaving Lily alone with Marco in their own little pool of silence.
Marco was still looking at her, even though he had now released her arm, and Lily could imagine what he was thinking. Draining her glass, she turned to him and spoke in an empty voice.
‘My mother committed suicide—drink and prescription drugs. Oh, yes,’ she added fiercely when he didn’t speak, ‘I do know what the modelling business can do to those who are too vulnerable for its cruelty. I’ve experienced it at first hand. That’s why …’
Without waiting to see what his response was she stepped past him and walked away, her head held high and half blinded by the tears she knew she dared not shed. She didn’t stop in her headlong flight until she realised that she’d lost her way and was in a small ante-room, thankfully all on her own. She wanted fresh air—fresh air and privacy—and the self-indulgence of crying for a mother and a childhood that were long gone. But she wasn’t here to indulge herself, she reminded herself sharply. She was here to work. But the floodgates had been opened and there was no holding back the memories now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE knew who the hands on her shoulders belonged to without needing to turn round.
Marco. It couldn’t be anyone else.
And the reason she knew was because … because she would know him anywhere. Because with her emotions exposed to the painful air of recognition by Melanie’s revelations she had committed the worst self-injury of all. Because there were no other hands she wanted to hold her, only his.
When had her emotions become entangled with her desire for him? When had they melded together to create the most eternally binding human cord of all? Love. Ah, how the mere thought of it threatened pain. She couldn’t love Marco. He was turning her round and wrapping his arms around her, holding her as carefully as though she might break. Out of pity, she told herself fiercely. Out of pity—nothing else. And pity wasn’t what she wanted from him. She knew that now. She tried to break free but he wouldn’t let her go ‘You’re right,’ she told him, as though he had made the statement. ‘I’m here to work, not to behave like a silly fool who can’t control her emotions.’
The rebellion that had begun as a small protest he could easily control had become a raging force for change within him, directing him into responses that should have felt awkward and unwelcome but which instead seemed to come fatally easily. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to demand, in a voice that was low and rough with something that could have been self-condemnation, ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before.’
‘Tell you what? Tell you that my father was a photographer? Tell you that my mother was a model? Tell you that between them the world of modelling and my father destroyed her, and that because of that I’ve …?’ Lily’s voice thinned out to become brittle and self-derisory. ‘Why should you want to know? Why should you or anyone else care?’
Marco could hear the pain she was trying to control. It seared through him, burning through the restraints he had wrapped around his own emotions. An answering pain mixed with yearning and an entirely male desire to hold and protect her spilled over. To say what he had felt listening to Melanie’s revelations had been shock didn’t come anywhere near describing the effect those revelations had had on him. They had pierced the seal he had placed on his own emotions, exposing them to the raw reality of another person’s pain. Lily’s pain.
Now he felt as though he was at war with himself—with one part of him wanting to comfort her and the other defensively wanting him to ignore what had happened, desperately wanting him to ignore the voice inside him that was telling him that he and Lily shared a unique bond forged in pain. Deep within himself emotions he couldn’t afford to let himself feel were struggling to find a voice. The scar tissue he had forced to grow over them was being ripped from old wounds, and against the pressure of his denial the words came out.
‘I once knew a girl who became a model.’
His harsh and reluctant admission caused Lily to look at him in surprise. Something in the way he had spoken as much as the words themselves jerked her out of her own distress to register his need. She lifted her hand, as though she was going to reach out and touch him, and then let it drop again, saying uncertainly, ‘She was important to you?’
‘Yes.’ Another admission was wrenched from him; another clamp removed from the resolve-clad box in which he had locked away his right to feel emotional pain. ‘We were to have been married.’
Married? Marco had been going to marry someone?
‘She’s dead now. That sordid world killed her.’
Sometimes there were things that were too painful to know, Lily acknowledged, and this was one of them. She was still in Marco’s arms, but now she felt she had no right to be there and that the sanctuary they provided rightly belonged to someone else.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She tried to step back from him, but instead of releasing her his hold on her tightened. He was so lost in his pain that he was barely aware he was holding her, Lily suspected.
‘I couldn’t protect her and she died. I tried, but I failed.’ Now that the seal damming his past had been pierced the feelings he had locked away for so long flooded past his defences, leaving him powerless to stop himself from revealing the self-contempt he had always tried to keep hidden.
‘We grew up together. A marriage between us was what our families had always hoped for. It seemed the right thing to do. We got on well together. She understood the demands of my position. I thought that she knew me and I knew her. I believed I could trust her with anything—my hopes, my doubts, our future together. I believed she trusted me, but I was wrong.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily repeated ‘She’d always told me she was happy with our parents’ plans for our shared future. I didn’t know that she wasn’t. She lied to me.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t want to hurt you and was trying to protect you?’ Lily suggested gently, wanting to ease his pain.
Marco looked at her.
At no time had anyone—not Olivia and not even himself—suggested that Olivia might have wanted to spare him pain. Lily’s words, her gentleness and her concern for him, felt like the comforting and healing effect of warm sunlight on an unbearably dark, cold place. But he was giving in to something he must not give in to. He was letting the dangerous sweetness that Lily had brought him overwhelm reality. There were still anomalies in Lily’s way of life that logic insisted did not add up ‘We’d better get back to the reception. The Duchess will be wondering where we are,’ Lily warned him.
‘In a minute. First I want you to explain to me what you were doing working in that photographic studio, given what Melanie said about your childhood. I would have thought that it would be the last place you’d want to be after what. I’ve now learned about you.’
‘I was standing in for my half-brother,’ Lily admitted. Now he knew about her parents she felt strong enough to tell him the truth, and then at last he would believe her. ‘My father married a second time.
My stepmother was very kind to me. She’s remarried now—my father died ten years ago—but my half-brother has turned our father into a hero figure and wants to follow in his footsteps.’
She gave a small sigh. ‘He texted me asking me to stand in for him because he knew I was in Milan. I hadn’t realised then that he’d asked your nephew to model for him.’
She was telling him the truth, Marco recognised on an unsettling surge of uncomfortable guilt. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of that before?’
‘I didn’t think you’d believe me,’ Lily told him wryly.
‘I probably wasn’t ready to listen even if you had. I’m sorry I misjudged you. ‘
‘Something like that,’ Lily agreed. It was impossible for her to tell him now that she had wanted to keep a distance between them because she had feared the effect he had on her. After all, now she not only knew that he did not reciprocate the desire she felt for him, she also knew he was still mourning the girl he had expected to marry.
She started to walk towards the door, conscious of her duty to the Duchess and her work, but came to an abrupt halt when Marco caught up with her and asked, ‘And Anton? Tell me about him?’
Lily’s breath escaped in a soft hiss of anxiety. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
She was lying, Marco knew, but instead of feeling the sense of condemnation against her he would normally have felt instead he felt an unfamiliar stirring of—of what? Curiosity? Or was it something more personal than that? Something that was in fact concern for her?
Whilst he battled with his own thoughts Lily continued walking back to the reception. She looked so vulnerable and so determined to be strong. No one should have to find strength on their own, without someone who cared about them to help them. He knew the desolate wilderness that place was. He couldn’t let Lily struggle in it. He strode after her, catching up with her to put his hand under her elbow so that they re-entered the reception together.