‘Just calm down,’ he soothed. ‘They’re not coming to judge you.’
But that was where he was wrong. Of course they would be judging her—it was human nature to judge, especially when a shop-girl married a much older man who happened to be a billionaire.
She dressed for dinner and re-jigged the place-cards—frighteningly aware that the guests had travelled a long way for this dinner. Gianpiero and Serafina were Paris-based, and Nick and Kate were visiting from New York. Only six of them—because she’d felt that eight might be a bit over-ambitious—and now she worried whether six might make the big table look awfully empty.
Cassie had organised the menu, knowing that Gina disapproved of most of it, but telling herself that she didn’t care. Because this was about more than introducing herself to Giancarlo’s friends as his wife—it was about trying to define her role as his wife. It meant gently showing Gina that she wanted to be involved in the running of the house and that she wasn’t just some docile little puppet of a woman.
But that was what she felt like. Sometimes she might almost have been invisible. It was as if she didn’t count—as if she had no real place in a house paid for by her wealthy husband and run by his efficient housekeeper and his other members of staff. And wasn’t this dinner also supposed to make Giancarlo see her as a partner, rather than an appendage? Not just some fertile little blonde quietly growing her baby in the background while he carried on working with the same intensity and dedication as he’d done as a broke young lawyer who’d first arrived in London.
This was supposed to be their first outing as a couple. Because even though their sex life had resumed since that night in Rome she still felt no closer to him. Wasn’t this just another hurdle she had to leap over—to prove to him that she was someone he could trust? Someone he could confide in.
Fortunately, the simple dark dress she wore gave no hint of her burgeoning belly and she left her hair free to tumble over her shoulders. She’d chosen white hyacinths and tiny white narcissi with which to decorate the rooms and the whole house smelt heavenly.
And when Giancarlo emerged from his dressing room, looking formidable and yet heartbreakingly beautiful in a dark, dark suit which hugged the powerful body and drew attention to his muscular physique, she prayed that she would not let him down.
‘Stop worrying,’ he said as he saw the small frown furrowing her brow. ‘They won’t bite.’
Maybe they wouldn’t—but Cassie still felt terribly intimidated when the two couples arrived. Kate was a sleek New-Yorker with a freckle-spattered nose, a lazy smile—and the most immaculate clothes Cassie had ever seen. Her husband, Nick, was ‘something in films’—his suit was linen and slightly crumpled, but he exuded the indefinable air of the truly powerful. As for Serafina—she left Cassie wondering if there was such a thing as a plain Italian woman, and her banker husband was equally good-looking.
While having pre-dinner drinks in the drawing room, Cassie was so nervous that she slopped champagne over Kate’s silk jacket.
‘Oh, gosh. Oh, no. Oh, I am so sorry!’
‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’
‘It only cost nine hundred bucks, didn’t it, honey?’ joked her husband.
‘Sit down, Cassie,’ said Giancarlo gently. ‘And let Gina serve the drinks.’
She felt like a child who had been reprimanded—but maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth. In many ways her life experience was as insignificant as a child’s when compared to theirs. She didn’t even get a chance to talk about the articles she’d read in the papers—or the news bulletins she’d tried hard to memorise. This rarefied group were all ten to fifteen years older than her and they seemed to want to talk about things she’d never heard of. Or people she’d never met and probably never would. Giancarlo’s age had never seemed a barrier—but now, with this laughing glossy posse of friends, he seemed to have stepped even further beyond her reach. Maybe Gabriella had been right after all.
Her decision to serve a traditional English roast dinner was as ill advised as Gina had hinted. Cassie saw the slight narrowing of Giancarlo’s eyes as a dish of misshapen Yorkshire puddings made their appearance—and she distinctly overheard Serafina asking Gina whether she still made her delicious home-made pasta.
‘But I thought we’d try something different for a change!’ said Cassie brightly.
Four pairs of curious eyes were trained on her.
‘So where did you two meet?’ questioned Gianpiero as he politely ladled a couple of sprouts from the dish.
‘I was…I was working in a store, actually.’
A brief silence was filled in by Serafina. ‘Oh! Which store?’
‘Hudson’s.’
‘Hudson’s? Honey, isn’t that where you picked up that suit?’ asked Nick.
Kate smiled back. ‘It is indeed. Why, you might even have served me, Cassandra.’
‘I doubt it. You see, I worked in the candle section,’ said Cassie doggedly, just wishing that the floor would open her up and swallow her.
‘Don’t tell me Giancarlo was buying candles?’ drawled Nick.
‘No, I was much more interested in the person selling them,’ he murmured, and they all laughed.
But the revelation about just how lowly her job had been made Cassie sink even further inside herself and the rest of the evening passed by in an embarrassing blur. The food tasted like stodgy sawdust and was only saved by some brilliantly strong Italian coffee and the expensive dark chocolate bought by Serafina. By the time the guests had left in a flurry of goodbyes and air kisses—she felt completely drained—as if all the life and energy had been sucked from her.
Giancarlo bolted the front door and looked at her as she slumped tiredly against the wall. ‘So what was all that about?’ he questioned softly.
‘Which bit are you referring to?’ she snapped. ‘The complete flop of the meal or the fact that I sloshed wine all over a thousand-dollar suit?’
‘I’m talking about the way you sat there looking as if you were a witness at your own execution!’
‘Can you blame me? Your friends don’t like me.’
‘That’s complete rubbish. You didn’t really give them a chance, did you?’
‘Everything they said went way over my head. You were all talking about things I’d never heard of!’
‘But that’s hardly surprising—I haven’t seen them for ages and I’ve known them for years—’
‘While you’ve only known me for five minutes?’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said frustratedly.
‘No?’ Suddenly, an odd feeling of weakness washed over her—as if she’d been battling and battling against some immovable force and had finally run out of strength. She shook her head. ‘Look, maybe this is all a waste of time and we should just stop pretending to each other,’ she said wearily. ‘Maybe I should just give you your freedom—at least that way you can get together with Gabriella and have some chance of happiness.’
Giancarlo stilled. ‘So that I can what? What did you just say?’
Cassandra shrugged. ‘She’s going to split from your brother—you told me that and so did she. She also told me that all of your friends were wondering why the hell you married me—and tonight proved her right. She still wants you—she made that perfectly clear. And I know you still want her, Giancarlo.’
There was a heartbeat of silence. ‘And just how do you know that?’ he questioned dangerously.
But Cassie was too distraught to heed the icy warning in his voice and much too emotional to be able to bite back the words she had been bottling up for days now.
‘Because you didn’t lay a finger on me after the wedding, did you? Not until the day we saw her. Then you couldn’t get enough of me—it was like you were wild for me that night.’ The bitterness welled up, like an all-consuming cloud. ‘Did you close your eyes and imagine it was her, Giancarlo?’ she whispered. ‘Her you were making love to—not me? Is that why you said all those things to me in Ita
lian—things I couldn’t even understand?’
There was a fraught and disbelieving silence. ‘You think that?’ His face had drained of all colour. ‘You really think I am capable of such behaviour as that?’
Her mind was spinning so much that she wasn’t sure what she was thinking any more and the thready beat of her heart was making her feel dizzy. ‘It’s the kind of assumption any woman might make under the circumstances.’
His stony words matched the sudden hard gleam of his eyes. ‘Not if she had any respect for her husband,’ he snapped. ‘Or any respect for herself!’
At this, something inside her snapped back. ‘How can I respect myself when I get nothing back from you? You never tell me what’s on your mind. You never open up to me. I don’t really matter to you, do I, Giancarlo—not as person? I never have, not really. I’m just a commodity—first a mistress and now a prospective mother. You don’t want me—only what I can give you!’
He felt a slow kind of anger begin to burn inside him. How dared she confront him with this messy emotional display and outrageous allegations? ‘Do you imagine that this kind of hysteria is going to win you any brownie points?’ he flared. ‘Don’t you think that sitting down and having an adult conversation about what is troubling you might be preferable to throwing out a series of accusations when you’re overwrought?’
She stared at him—and never had he looked more forbidding. Not even that windswept day in Cornwall when his rage had been dark and he had discovered she was pregnant.
But that had been when she’d decided to go it alone—when her pride had been intact, not slowly being dismantled by her unrealistic yearning that one day he would learn to love her. Because he would never do that. She should have stuck to her guns and kept her integrity and been that single mother who could hold her head high. Who wouldn’t keep pushing and pushing for a little love and affection and coming up against an emotional brick wall, time after time. But maybe she could still do it. Maybe it wasn’t too late to claw back a little independence.
‘You…you…You cold-hearted machine of a man—you’ll never understand! You wouldn’t be able to interpret the facts if they jumped out and punched you! Well, I’m through with trying to pussy-foot my way round your brooding silences and attempts to stonewall my conversation. Having to bite back questions all the time because Mr Moody doesn’t want to answer them!’
Cramming her fingers in her mouth to stifle her sobs, Cassie rushed straight past him, running upstairs to the spare room where she locked the door and stumbled into the bathroom to let the tears begin to slide from her eyes.
She cried until there were no tears left—until her body and eyes felt dry and sore and aching. Her head felt tight and so did her stomach as she crept from the bathroom and lay on the bed and wondered what on earth she was going to do next.
Should she tell Giancarlo that, despite their bitter and angry words, maybe it was best that it was all out in the open? That they couldn’t carry on ignoring the fact that the marriage wasn’t working—and that a baby certainly wasn’t going to make it any better. If he knocked on her door and demanded to be let in, she would open it and they would calmly talk it all out until they had worked out some kind of way forward which would be satisfactory to both of them.
But he didn’t knock—and in a way that shouldn’t have surprised her, for Giancarlo was not the kind of man to meekly turn the handle of a locked door and ask to be let inside. She would just have to wait until the morning, when they could discuss things in the cold light of day. And she would have to face the future with a heart which felt as if it were breaking in two.
Kicking off her shoes and still wearing her dress and stockings, she crawled beneath the coverlet and lay there, shivering and drifting in and out of sleep.
She didn’t know how long had passed when her eyes snapped open in alarm, her senses alerted by some dark instinct—knowing that something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
She just didn’t have a clue what it could be.
She felt a sharp spear of pain low down in her abdomen—accompanied by the frightened jerk of her body. For a moment she just lay there—too scared to move—until tremblingly, she slid her fingers down between her thighs and their tips came warm and sticky. And she didn’t need to snap on the bedside lamp to see that they were covered in blood.
An intense shudder of shock and fear ran through her—the kind of fear she had never known before. She opened her mouth to call out—but no words came. Sucking in a deep breath, she tried again—calling out the only word she could think of in the mists of this pain and fear.
‘Giancarlo!’ she screamed. ‘Giancarlo!’
Chapter Twelve
GIANCARLO hadn’t been asleep. He had been lying there fully dressed—staring blankly at the ceiling, wondering, with a curiously heavy heart, just why he was in one great big bed, while Cassandra was a few yards away in another.
Because she was a stubborn and wilful woman, that was why, he thought grimly. Too stubborn to understand the subtle complexities of life. His life. Couldn’t she see that he had a history and a way of living which were already established—and that it was her place to slot right into them? Yet she couldn’t have made it more difficult if she’d tried.
Did she think that by going off to sulk in the spare room she would be able to manipulate him to her will and way of thinking? Did she really think he would allow her to trample all over his feelings? Well, she was about to learn a very stark and hard lesson.
And then he heard it. A terrible, blood-curdling scream which clutched at his heart with an emotion which was pretty much unknown to Giancarlo.
Fear.
He leapt out of bed—for there it was again. Cassandra calling out his name. Screaming out his name.
In an instant he crossed the room and tried to open the door of the spare room when, to his astonishment and fury, he discovered that it was locked.
Locked.
‘Cassandra!’ he thundered as he smashed his fist against the solid wood. ‘For God’s sake, will you open this door?’
But to his consternation he heard nothing but a helpless whimper from inside the room and, scarcely knowing what he was doing, he dashed downstairs to fetch the ornate brass coal scuttle which adorned the fireplace in the morning room. Scarcely noticing its weight, he ran back upstairs with it.
‘Stand back!’ he yelled. ‘Stand well away from the door!’ And he smashed the heavy scuttle hard against the panel.
It took him three attempts before he had splintered a hole big enough to be able to snake his hand through and unlock the door from the inside—and when he had snapped on the light he flinched at the sight which greeted him. Cassandra, all curled up in a foetal position, her eyes wide with terror as she looked up at him, her face deathly pale.
He was over to her in an instant, his hand touching her clammy cheek. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I’m…bleeding.’
With a wrench of his heart, he looked down to see the crimson flowering on her fingertips and pain shafted through him. ‘We need to get you to hospital.’
‘I’m losing the baby!’
‘We need to get you to hospital,’ he repeated grimly and, picking her up, he began to carry her downstairs.
‘Giancarlo—an ambulance,’ she breathed.
‘I can get you there quicker myself. Shh, Cassie. Shh. Don’t cry, cara mia. Please don’t cry.’
But Cassie could do nothing to prevent the tears which slid down her cold cheeks. She clung to him as he carried her out to the car, placing her inside it as carefully as if she had been made of porcelain.
A new sob erupted from her throat as he soothed her before climbing into the driving seat and setting out for the hospital and then everything became a blur of people asking her questions and her being wheeled into some sort of X-ray room where she was to wait for the radiographer to scan her.
And through it all she had that terrible aching feeling in her stom
ach and the sense of awful foreboding at what this was all going to mean.
‘Hold onto me.’ Giancarlo reached out his hand and she gripped it.
‘I’m losing our baby,’ she whispered.
He flinched. It was that little ‘our’ which cut him to the quick. The suggestion of togetherness which he didn’t deserve—because he had been too much of an emotional coward to reach out for her. ‘There will be more babies, Cassie.’
Brokenly, she shook her head. ‘But not with you,’ she whispered. She had offered him his freedom earlier because it had felt the right thing to do—never dreaming that he would be liberated by nature itself, rather than by the simpler act of her letting him go. ‘Not with you.’
‘No.’ He knew what she was saying—for why would she ever consider trying to have another baby with a callous brute like him? And yet the realisation hit him like a juggernaut—leaving him feeling far worse than he could ever have imagined. A terrible pain tore at him as if someone had ripped his heart out with jagged fingernails. It was over. He and Cassandra were over. And mixed in with all this pain was the thought that his child had never had the chance to exist—and now never would. He remembered the online photos of the developing foetus he’d studied—and tried to picture at what stage his own little boy or girl would be at. But it hurt too much to try.
He looked at his wife. Her eyes were closed, her lashes like two feathery arcs brushing her snow-pale cheeks, and he brought his fisted hand to his lips and bit hard into the knuckles as if afraid that some primitive sound of sorrow might issue from his lips.
Yet he knew that there were words he had to say—and to say now, in case he never got another chance. He moved his hand from his lips and let it lie over her motionless fingers.
‘But you’ll find someone else some day,’ he said unevenly. ‘Some man who is worthy of you. Who can give you all the babies you want—and the love you deserve.’
Shameful Secret, Shotgun Wedding Page 14