by Penny Jordan
‘Any decent man would consider it his duty to protect a woman from your sort,’ Marco told Anton curtly. ‘And let me warn you that my protection of Lily will extend beyond this incident. You would be well advised to keep away from her in future. In fact, I’d advise you to leave Italy today.”
The smirking self-confidence with which Anton had greeted Marco’s arrival had evaporated now into blustering protest as he complained, ‘You can’t make that kind of threat.’
‘I’m not threatening you,’ Marco assured him. ‘I’m simply giving you some advice as a result of your own behaviour.’
Lily listened to their exchange with gratitude and awe. Marco was being magnificent. He was so completely in control, so completely the master of the situation, completely demolishing Anton who, having released her when Marco arrived on the scene, was now backing off, eventually turning his back on them to disappear into the crowd. She looked at Marco. He was standing rather stiffly to one side of her, looking away from her.
Marco knew something had happened to him. Something that threatened his defences. His throat felt raw and tight—with tension, nothing else, he assured himself. He looked back at Lily. She looked stricken, but she didn’t say anything. Her face was paper-white as she turned away from him, dignified in defeat, her manner that of a weary combatant struggling to pick up her weapons and continue to fight on alone. She looked alone. He knew all about how that felt—how it hurt, how the heart hardened around that hurt.
She was trembling violently, her manner that of someone too traumatised to be able to behave rationally. Whatever had happened between her and her ex whilst Marco had been paying their bill had plainly affected her very badly. He stepped towards her, and then checked himself and stepped back. He wanted to cross the chasm that separated him from obeying his instincts but years of denying those instincts, had laid down rules inside him that had to be obeyed. The voices of his inner rebellion were growing stronger, urging him to join them, but he couldn’t. Because he was too afraid. Afraid of being deceived and betrayed. Out of nowhere, out of nothing he could understand, something inside him rejected that possibility, stating clearly and firmly that Lily wouldn’t do that to him.
All around them people were going about their business, but for Marco his world had come to a halt and was now poised trembling on the brink of something momentous. Lily. His heart pounded and surged inside his chest cavity, as though trying to break free of unwanted bonds. Lily. She had turned to him. She had wanted his help and she had trusted him to give it. Trust. Trust was a rare and precious gift when it was exchanged between two people. Lily had offered him the gift of her trust, and that gift demanded surely that he reciprocate in kind. Trust Lily? Trust anyone with his own vulnerabilities? He couldn’t. He scarcely trusted himself with them. That was why he had had to lock them away.
A car horn sounded in the traffic and the moment was gone, banished by the demands of the real world. The danger had passed. The path he had laid down for himself had forked, and briefly he had been tempted to take the wrong fork, but thankfully he had recognised the folly of doing so. Practicality reasserted itself within him, much to his relief—if for no other reason than because it was easier to deal with practical matters than it was for him to deal with emotions.
They had finished their work for the day and, whilst he’d intended to take Lily on a tour of a silk mill as she’d requested, it was plain to Marco that right now she was in no state to do anything. The best thing he could do was get her back to the privacy of the Duchess’s villa.
She didn’t speak as they were driven back to the villa, simply sat stiffly at his side, her stiffness occasionally broken by the tremors that shook her body.
The Duchess was out visiting friends, and Lily made no objection when Marco suggested that she might want to rest in their room, letting him guide her up the stairs and along the corridor to their suite, where she subsided onto the bed, sitting tensely at its edge as she spoke for the first time. ‘Please don’t leave me here on my own,’ she begged.
‘You’re safe now, Lily,’ Marco responded. ‘He can’t come back into your life now—unless you choose to ask him to do so.’
‘Ask Anton into my life?’ Lily shuddered. ‘Never. Never …‘
‘You must have cared for him once.’ The cool words, a product of his suspicion and refusal to trust, were forced into the open by those voices within him that warned he had already let down his guard far too much, and that now was the time to rectify that mistake whilst he still could.
But they made Lily flinch visibly, causing him to feel an unexpected stab of guilt as she denied emotionally, ‘No. Never. I disliked him from the start. But he was my father’s friend and I couldn’t avoid him.’
She had met the other man through her father? Even the logical, searching, suspicious voice within him had to accept that that changed things—but it still insisted on reminding her, ‘You were lovers.’
CHAPTER NINE
LILY raised her head and looked up at Marco, revulsion darkening her eyes. Marco’s words had filled her with anguish and fear, flooded her mind with memories that undermined her already shaky self-control.
She had kept her secrets to herself for so long—refusing to unburden herself to anyone, bearing the horror of them alone—but now suddenly everything was too much for her. She couldn’t go on any longer. She couldn’t bear the pain and the guilt any more.
She was shivering and trembling, lost in the grip of her emotions and the past.
‘No!‘ she told Marco vehemently. ‘No. I would never let him even touch me.’ She shuddered. ‘I hated him—loathed him.’ The words gathered speed, spilling out of her in jerky uncoordinated sentences. ‘He kept saying things to me … looking at me … even though he knew how much I hated him. That just made him laugh. He said that he’d get his way in the end and that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. I was only fourteen, and my father …’
She shuddered again and Marco listened, every word she uttered a fresh lash of anguished guilt against new emotions still raw from having the protective cover he had used to smother them ripped from them. Whilst he had been clinging to his refusal to trust her she had been at the mercy of her tormentor.
Like a river dammed from its original course and now returning to it, feelings, emotions and awareness were starting to flow back over dry, parched land that was now struggling to cope with the flood, whilst the other course fought desperately to hold on to its supremacy. As always when his emotions seemed to threaten him, Marco took refuge in practical action, going to the cabinet in the sitting room and opening it, pouring Lily a small glass of brandy which he took back to her, instructing her, ‘Drink this.’ When she hesitated, he assured her, ‘You’re in shock and it will help you.’
Nodding her head, Lily tilted the glass to her lips. The fiery liquid burned its way down her throat, warming her stomach, leaving her feeling slightly light-headed.
Why had she told Marco what she had? She wished desperately that she hadn’t, but it was too late to deny her admission now. She stood up abruptly, ignoring the dizzy feeling that instantly seized her as she paced the floor at the end of the bed, lost, trapped in a world of fear and despair.
Marco felt the full weight of the enormity of what she had said to him. She was carrying a terrible burden of emotional pain. He could see that now. A burden of pain he had reinforced by his cruel misjudgement of her. Like a blind man trying to seek his way in unfamiliar territory he tried to understand what he should do—for her, not for himself, because it was her need that mattered to him now. Comforting her was far more important to him than protecting his own emotional distance. He wanted to help her, he recognised. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to love her. Love her? He wanted to love her.
Quickly he pushed the admission away. There were things that Lily needed to say. Things she had kept locked away inside herself for a very long time, and he knew all about t
he darkness that could cause.
‘Tell me what happened, Lily,’ he urged her gently. ‘Tell me about him … Anton.’
Lily looked at him, as though properly registering his presence for the first time. ‘I can’t,’ she answered him. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You think I’m a liar.’
Her words struck like a blow against his conscience.
‘I will understand and I will believe you,’ he promised her, adding quietly, ‘You said it was your father who introduced you to him?’
‘Yes. Anton owns one of the magazines that used to commission my father. He used to come to my father’s studio.’
‘And that was where you met him?’
‘Yes. I didn’t like him right from the start. There was something about him.’ Lily closed her eyes, but she couldn’t blot out the memories and the images she didn’t want to see. ‘He knew that I didn’t like him. I could tell. It amused him. He enjoyed … he liked frightening me. And I was afraid of him. He made me afraid of him. Just by looking at me sometimes. I used to have nightmares about him looking at me.’
Marco swallowed down on the angry pity her words had produced.
‘What about your parents? Your mother …?’
‘My mother was dead by then, and my stepmother had left my father, taking Rick with her. I was at boarding school, so most of the time I was … I didn’t have to see him. It was just during the school holidays, when I was staying with my father.’
‘Didn’t you tell him how you felt?’
‘I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have understood. My father … Well, you heard Melanie. He never really wanted children.’
Maybe not, but having had them surely he must have accepted that it was his duty as a father to protect his child? Marco thought grimly, but he didn’t want to upset Lily even more by saying so.
As though she sensed what he was thinking, and his criticism of her father, she told him quickly, ‘They were friends—and not just that. My father worked for Anton. As you know, my father was a photographer. He worked for several upmarket magazines, doing modelling shoots. He and the people he mixed with were very cutting edge. They lived a certain kind of lifestyle. I suppose the best way to sum it up is to say that it was a … a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle.’
‘And Anton also lived that lifestyle?’
‘Yes. He was—still is, I suppose—a very wealthy man. A very important man in the fashion world. His magazine is hugely influential. Being commissioned to photograph fashion shoots for it was an accolade. It could make or break a photographer. My father lived for his work. It gave him the kind of high that other people get from drugs. He was very creative, a genius in his field, and he would get angry and impatient with people who got in the way of him fulfilling his talent.’
‘Meaning that he didn’t have much time for those close to him?’ Marco guessed.
‘My stepmother was better at dealing with him than my mother, but even she lost patience with him in the end. Rick, my half-brother, worships the memory of our father and wants to follow in his footsteps—but of course he never really knew him properly.’
‘Unlike you. So, Anton and your father were friends?’
‘Yes. I remember the summer I was fourteen he seemed to be at the studio all the time. When Dad wasn’t there he’d ask to take some … some nude shots of me, and I refused. I remember Dad being furious with me when I tried to tell him.’
‘Why? What did he say?’
‘He refused to believe me—accused me of attention-seeking. Being just like my mother. It was a horrible holiday. Dad refused to speak to me, and then just before I went back to school my stepmother told me that she was divorcing him. I liked her. I still do. She was kind to me—that’s why I feel I owe it to her to keep an eye on Rick, as well, of course, as because he’s my half-brother. She’s remarried now, and she lives in California. She’s always inviting me out to stay but I haven’t managed it as yet.
‘Rick always says that it isn’t fair that Dad taught me to use a camera but died before he could teach him. I couldn’t have not learned, really. Well, I couldn’t have had him for a father and not learned how to take a photograph. I always preferred to photograph things, though, not people. It felt safer, somehow. The camera catches things that the naked eye doesn’t always, you see. My mother… . Well, in some of the last photographs of her I think you can see how desperate she was, how alone she felt. I wish I’d been able to help her.
‘Anyway, after that whenever I came home from school for the holidays Anton always seemed to be there, at the studio, and I noticed …’ She paused.
This was so difficult.
‘You noticed?’ Marco repeated, his voice so devoid of emotion that its calmness steadied her.
She still couldn’t look at him, though, so she went to stand in front of the window as she told him in a low voice, ‘I noticed that the models my father was being asked to photograph for Anton’s magazine were getting younger and younger. That wasn’t entirely unusual for the time. The modelling world was changing, and the demand was for younger girls. But Anton’s magazine seemed to use more of them than anyone else. There was one girl—Anna. She was so pretty, so very pretty, and young—only fifteen. I really liked her. She wasn’t like the other models. She was still at school, like me, but I was at boarding school in the country and she was at a London day-school. Her mother was a dancer and her parents were divorced too. Her father didn’t approve of her modelling. She told me that her agent said she thought she’d be doing a Vogue cover by the end of the year, only she didn’t.’
Her voice became suspended. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t … It was so awful, so horrible.’
‘What happened, Lily? ‘
Marco suspected he knew what she was going to say, and he was appalled.
‘It’s the reason I still hate going in helicoptors—because we travelled to the shoot in one that day.’ She shuddered at the thought. ‘I still feel so guilty because I never said anything,’ she told him in a ragged voice, turning round from the window to look at him, her face ravaged by her emotions.
Marco knew all about guilt, and how it ate away at a person. He went to her, wanting to reach out and hold her, but he was held back by his own demons. They told him that if he held her now he would be making a commitment that would bind him to her for ever, and that was a risk he must not take.
He saw Lily’s shoulders lift as she breathed in, taking the kind of breath that someone facing an enormous physical challenge needed to take.
‘Anna said that Anton had raped her and she thought she was pregnant. She said that Anton had been coming to the studio to see her, and he’d sent my father away on some pretext so they’d be alone together. She cried when she told me. She said it had been awful and that she was afraid to tell her mother.’
Lily took another deep breath to steady herself.
‘That was the day before I was going back to school. I never saw her again. When I asked my father about her he said that Anton had told him she’d stopped modelling because she’d fallen down the stairs to her mother’s flat and broken her leg. I wrote to her, but she never wrote back to me. Her mother wrote instead, saying that Anna had gone to live with her father and her stepmother.’
Her voice broke, and Marco could only guess at what she was feeling.
‘That was at half-term,’ she told him. ‘At the start of the Christmas holiday Anton was still always there at the studio.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘And then one day, after he and my father had gone out to lunch together, Anton came back but my father didn’t.’
Lily swallowed hard.
‘It was everything I’d dreaded, but worse. He told me what he wanted to do to me—what he was going to make me do to him.’
Marco’s contempt for the other man turned to white-hot rage.
‘I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. He told me that he had a thing about virgins—young virgins. It was horrible—sickening. I was so afraid that I
ran out of the studio. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I had a key to my father’s flat, but I was afraid to go there in case somehow he, Anton was there.’
Marco closed his eyes against the anger boiling up inside him—against the man who had wanted to abuse her, against her father, against the whole of his sex for being what it was, but most of all against himself for not recognising her fear and for not protecting her from it.
Marco was so silent, so unmoving. Why didn’t he say something? Didn’t he know how much she needed comfort from him? How much she needed him? Defenceless and drained, Lily could only hold out her arms to him in supplication and beg, ‘Hold me, Marco. Please hold me.’
Lily’s words shocked through Marco. Hold her? He couldn’t. Everything he had taught himself to be recoiled from the thought of such intimacy. He feared the private wounds within himself it might reveal, searing him just as her anguished plea had seared his emotions—those emotions he had fought for so long to deny. If he touched her now he was afraid that he would take her to himself, crush her to himself, and never want to let her go.
Marco was turning away from her—no doubt filled with contempt for her and for her weakness, Lily recognised mutely, and her pent-up breath escaped on a sound that was humiliatingly close to a small sob.
Lily was crying? He had made her cry?
Marco turned round, and from doing that took a step towards her, ignoring the mental lashing of his brain that urged him to stop. How could he when his heart was aching with remorse and longing?
Lily watched him without speaking, and for a moment Marco thought that she was going to ignore him and walk away from him. Part of him hoped that she would. But then she made a suppressed sound of desperation and almost flung herself against him, wrapping her arms around him, resting her head on his chest, her body trembling against his.
Slowly, awkwardly, uncomfortably, he lifted his own arms and placed them round her. Defeat. Surrender. The giving in of his will to his emotions. It should have felt wrong. She should have felt wrong. But instead it felt—she felt. Marco understood as he held her close. It felt as though she completed him. He breathed in and then exhaled slowly and deeply, as though he was releasing a burden he had carried for far too long.