by Daphne Clair
His gaze next disdained the calico covers hiding the shabbiness of her comfortable secondhand couch and the mismatched armchairs facing it across the low table that bore the honourable scars of a chequered life. For a few seconds his attention was caught by the worn, silky antique rug that Roxane had spent too much on but loved all the more for it.
He swept another sharp-eyed glance about the room, before he turned to her.
Roxane asked defiantly, ‘Don’t you like it?’
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did his voice was expressionless. ‘It’s very attractive. Small but…cosy.’
‘I like small.’
For a moment the wicked, teasing sexual humour that had attracted and excited and confounded her when they first met gleamed in his eyes, lifting one eyebrow and a corner of his mouth in subtle disbelief. And damn, she responded to it as always, with a frightening mix of inward laughter and sheer wanton, bone-melting desire.
Keeping her expression blank, she hoped her eyes wouldn’t betray her.
The laughter died and his mouth went hard. To her considerable surprise, he looked away first. ‘Is the house yours?’ he asked, almost as if it were a random question plucked from the air.
‘Mine and the bank’s.’
Her stock answer, but she should have expected the sudden stabbing quality of his stare. ‘If you needed money you could have asked me. Through your lawyer if necessary. I told him—’
‘I don’t want your money. I have a good job and I can afford the mortgage.’
‘Mortgage!’
He made it sound like a dirty word. Roxane smiled thinly. ‘It’s what we little people have when we need to buy a house.’
‘You have no need to buy a house. I can give you anything you need—hell, I did give you everything!’
‘Not everything,’ she said softly, sadly. Not the one thing she needed above all.
Furious, he said, ‘I loved you!’
She wouldn’t even think about what that past tense meant. ‘I know. I know you did. In your own way.’
He thrust a hand savagely over his hair, the frown turning to a scowl. ‘I gave you my heart and my soul, everything that was in me. I don’t know any other way.’
Of course he didn’t. Maurizio Riccioni never had done a thing in his life except in his own inimitable, confident, and usually hugely successful way. Why should he have ever imagined that his marriage, his wife, might not succumb to that combination of self-assured charm and incisive decision-making?
Almost compassionately she said, ‘It wasn’t all your fault. I was too young, and I should have said no when you asked me to marry you.’
‘You did,’ he reminded her.
Yes, she had, the first time he asked her, showing a shred of common sense. But her opposition hadn’t lasted long. She’d soon had her fears and scruples overturned one by one under the onslaught of Zito’s clever brain, unswerving will, and devastating kisses. He had even talked her parents round, despite their misgivings about their only daughter marrying at nineteen.
He’d reluctantly waited until she turned twenty, and on her birthday she’d stood beside him while they exchanged their solemn vows in the cathedral in Melbourne, with all the trimmings and before several hundred guests.
But marriage was more than a frothy white dress and a champagne reception. And theirs hadn’t stood the test.
‘I should have stuck to my refusal,’ she admitted.
‘Thank you.’ His voice held an acrid note. ‘Sometimes I wish I had beaten you.’
‘Zito!’
He managed to look both shame-faced and impatient. ‘You know I’d never hurt you, or any woman! But it would give me a reason for your desertion—something that made sense.’
He started prowling round the room again, stopping at the small desk that she’d found in one of the few remaining Ponsonby junk shops that didn’t have pretensions to being an antique store. When she’d sanded and polished it the grain of the timber had come up nicely.
Zito took a hand from his pocket and idly shifted aside a ‘personal invitation’ to subscribe to a book club at a ‘once-only’ price, revealing the envelope underneath.
‘Those are private!’ Not that she had anything in particular to hide. There was only more junk mail, bills and a letter from a cousin in England.
He looked at her unseeingly, his finger stilled on the sheet of paper, then lifted his hand, looking down again. Finally he turned fully. ‘Ms Roxane Fabian?’
Why did she feel guilty? Roxane shrugged.
‘You told me you were happy to take my name,’ he said, his voice thickening, ‘when we got married.’
‘I didn’t mind…it was no big deal.’
‘It was to me. A very big deal.’
Just as reverting to her maiden name had become important for her. She supposed it was symbolic. ‘An ownership thing?’ she accused, trying for mild amusement.
He controlled his temper, covering it with a hard laugh. ‘If you thought that, then you were too young.’
Or too stupid, his tone implied. ‘You didn’t think so…then.’
His reaction was barely noticeable, but Roxane was so attuned to his every tiny movement she saw the stiffening of his muscles, the infinitesimal recoil. She’d pierced the armour of his self-confidence, however minutely.
The elation she felt disconcerted her. She had never deliberately set out to wound Zito. Of course she’d known he would be upset and angry when she left him, but she’d had no thought of revenge or punishment, only a dire need for self-preservation.
In her long and probably incoherent farewell letter she had assured him that she didn’t hate him, and he shouldn’t blame himself for what he couldn’t help. She had tried not to hurt him any more than the simple fact of her departure inevitably would.
Maybe the hurt had gone deeper than she’d expected. He’d had more than twelve months to get over it, but his jabbing little remarks weren’t accidental.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect you’d understand.’
‘Was there another man?’ he asked abruptly. And looked around again, as if searching for evidence. ‘Have you left him too?’
Roxane’s temper snapped. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ He couldn’t conceive that she’d just wanted to be alone, that she could manage on her own? ‘Another man, after living with you for nearly three years?’
At her scorching tone he looked arrested, almost confused. She added, ‘And how dare you suggest I was unfaithful?’
Her anger seemed to give him pause. He shot a look at her from under his brows. ‘For months I tortured myself with the thought…’
It hadn’t even occurred to Roxane that he would think that. How could he have…? This was further proof that he’d never really known her, never bothered to comprehend her deepest needs. A small ache shifted from somewhere near her heart and lodged in her throat, stifling her voice. ‘You were wrong.’
A lifting of his shoulder, a tilt of his head, seemed to indicate it was not important. But of course it was. His pride would have suffered, and he had a surfeit of that. If the truth were known, pride was probably the real reason he had refrained from sending someone looking for her, rather than respect for her stated wishes.
‘You broke your other marriage vows,’ he said. ‘Why not that one?’
‘It’s different!’
‘How?’
The question was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, you were wrong,’ she reiterated.
He gave her a piercing stare, and nodded as if accepting that. ‘And now?’ he inquired softly.
‘Now?’ About to snap a hot rejoinder, Roxane paused, her chin lifting. ‘Now my private life is my own.’
His eyes narrowed, and she had to resist an instinct to let hers skitter away.
A shrill burring made her jump, and she said foolishly, ‘That’s my phone.’
Careful not to rise too hurriedly this time, she went to the hallway to lift the
receiver. ‘Yes?’
Zito stood regarding her through the open door while she tried to give her attention to the caller. ‘Yes, Leon.’
Wrenching her gaze from Zito’s inimical stare, at the corner of her eye she saw him swing round and disappear from her line of sight.
‘Saturday?’ Roxane forced herself to concentrate. ‘Yes, it is short notice. Wait while I get my diary.’
She dug it from the bag she’d left by the phone. ‘You do mean Saturday next week? What kind of party? If it’s black tie formal…’
Leon assured her it wasn’t. An impromptu welcome home, he said, for a son returning from overseas with his new fiancée. ‘A family affair. About a hundred guests.’
‘Just an intimate little gathering?’ Roxane felt sorry for the unknown young woman. ‘So the relatives get to cast their eyes over the bride-to-be?’
‘It could lead to more introductions. These people are some of Auckland’s best-known socialites. I hope you’re free to supervise as well as make the arrangements?’
Roxane’s own social life was low-key and intermittent. ‘I’ll be there on the night,’ she promised.
‘I know I can rely on you.’
Silly to feel a glow of satisfaction at the banal words, but when she returned to the little sitting room after hanging up, her lips were curved in pleasure.
Zito was standing at the long old-fashioned window. He faced her as she paused inside the door, and his eyes didn’t match his casual tone when he spoke. ‘Boyfriend?’
She didn’t have a boyfriend, but the suggestion made her hesitate before answering. ‘Business.’
‘Business?’ he repeated sceptically. ‘At this time of night?’
‘It’s not that late.’ She checked her watch. Just after nine.
Zito brushed that aside. ‘Saturday night—a party? An intimate party. Did you really need to consult your diary, or was that just to keep him on his toes?’
‘You’re being absurd.’
He came away from the window. His eyes were obsidian, glowing with a dark fire, his high cheekbones outlined with dusky colour under his natural tan. ‘Absurd, am I?’
‘Yes!’
Maybe it was the fierce contempt in her tone that stopped him, just a few feet from her. Certainly it was the first time she’d ever stood up to him like this.
‘So who is this bride-to-be?’ he shot at her. ‘You? Because if so, you’ve forgotten a small detail, haven’t you?’
Roxane was so astonished she laughed.
And saw again, with a surge of strange triumph, that she’d unsettled him. She had never seen Zito wrongfooted so many times in the space of—what? Half an hour?
It was a peculiarly heady sensation.
Tempted to let him retain his hasty assumptions, she decided that would be unnecessarily childish. Crisply, she informed him, ‘That was my boss. We organise and cater events, mostly for corporates and big business, but he was asking me to make the arrangements for a private welcome home and engagement party for a client’s son.’
Zito stared at her as if trying to decide whether she was telling the truth, then he sank abruptly onto the nearby couch and bowed his head, his fingers combing through the black strands, and muttered something she couldn’t catch.
After a small hesitation Roxane sat in one of the armchairs facing him. Knees and ankles pressed together, she folded her hands in her lap. Capable hands, the nails allowed to grow just over the tips, and glossed with clear satin polish. Ringless hands. Hastily she covered the left one with her right.
When she looked up Zito was leaning against the couch cushions, looking disgruntled, his long legs sprawled in front of him. ‘I’ve been stupid tonight,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Clumsy and stupid.’
Startled by the admission, Roxane didn’t argue, regarding him warily.
His eyelids drooped as his gaze lowered to her mouth, and then without haste traversed her body, making her skin prickle pleasurably in reluctant response. ‘I should have caught up and stopped you after you got off that bus,’ he said.
‘Instead of scaring me witless?’
‘When did you know it was me?’
When he’d called her ‘darling’ in his unforgettable, dark-melted-chocolate-and-brandy voice, that she’d always imagined held a trace of his Italian ancestry, although he was a second-generation Australian.
‘Just before I hit you,’ she told him.
He laughed. She remembered that he’d laughed then too, although the slap must have hurt.
Old emotions stirred, treacherously. Against the quickening in her blood she curled her hands, gripping one inside the other.
To quell the memories she said, ‘What were you doing in Ponsonby Road, anyway? For that matter, what are you doing in Auckland?’
‘We’re thinking of opening a New Zealand branch of Deloras. I was dining at GPK.’
‘Checking out the possible competition?’ Zito’s grandfather had arrived in Australia as a penniless assisted immigrant, and worked as a dishwasher and kitchen hand until he opened his own small restaurant, and then another, and another. Over the years the family business had become a multi-million dollar Australian institution.
And now they were planning to expand across the Tasman Sea and conquer the New Zealand market?
‘Combining business with…pleasure,’ Zito said.
Her skin tightened. ‘You were with a woman.’
Of course he hadn’t been eating alone. And of course his companion had been female.
‘A woman I won’t be seeing again.’
‘I’m not surprised, if you left her flat in the middle of a meal.’ The waspishness of her voice was simply on account of his unusual lapse of manners, Roxane assured herself. She had no right to be jealous. And of course she wasn’t. ‘What on earth did you say to her?’
‘I apologised, gave her some money for the meal and a taxi, and said I’d phone her in the morning.’
Poor woman. Roxane very nearly laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky if she accepts the call.’
‘I’ll send her some flowers,’ he said dismissively.
‘Oh, that’s sure to bring her round.’ That and his notoriously irresistible charm. ‘You’ll have her eating out of your hand in no time.’
She’d irritated him. ‘As a gesture of apology,’ he said. ‘I told you I won’t be seeing her again. She’s a casual acquaintance—nothing more.’
Who had probably hoped to be much more. The woman would never know what a lucky escape she’d had.
Roxane knew she was being unfair. An older, more sophisticated woman, more sure of herself than Roxane had been when she married Zito might have been perfectly happy—and made him happy too. She took a deep breath, blinked fiercely and stared at a blank spot on the wall.
‘What’s wrong, Roxane?’
Strangely, he sounded as if he really cared about the answer. Roxane blinked again and made herself look at him, saying the first thing that came into her head. ‘I haven’t eaten since lunch. I’m hungry.’
The remark must have spilled out of her subconscious, perhaps triggered by his talk of an abandoned dinner.
And for some reason it seemed to make him angry again. ‘Will you never learn to look after yourself?’ he asked.
‘I have,’ she replied icily. ‘If you hadn’t attacked me and dragged me in here and poured brandy down my throat, I’d have had something to eat by now.’
That was probably half the reason for her sluggish light-headedness—shock followed by alcohol on an empty stomach.
‘I can fix that.’ He got up. ‘Where’s your kitchen?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’ He was already leaving the room. ‘I’ll find it.’
‘Zito…’ She stood up too, following after him while he strode along the short passageway and unerringly found the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Zito,’ she repeated as he switched on the light, ‘I don’t need you to fix anything for me.’
He turned a
nd gave her his most dazzling smile. Generations of charismatic Italian genes had produced that smile.
Taking her arm, he drew her to the small round table in the window corner, pulled out one of the aqua blue spray-painted wooden chairs and planted her on the cheerful patterned seat cushion. ‘I’m still hungry too. And there’s no reason you should have to cook for me. Just sit there and tell me where everything is.’
He slipped his coat and tie off to hang them over the other chair, and rolled his sleeves up muscular olive-skinned forearms as he went to the sink to wash his hands.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She’d been tired after working late, she’d probably gone to sleep at the desk in her inner city office, and this was all a bad dream. Zito wasn’t really here in her kitchen, opening cupboards to haul out pans, finding a jar of pasta on a shelf, demanding to know if she had red onions and tomatoes, was the garlic bulb he’d discovered with the onions all she had, and were there any cloves?
‘In the cupboard next to the fridge,’ she answered automatically, as she’d answered all the other questions. She watched him shake cloves into his hand and sniff at them, eyes closed, his long lashes a black crescent against golden-brown skin as he inhaled the sweet-pungent scent.
He’d always done that, checking for freshness and potency the way his grandfather had taught him.
Every time the staff who had run their big white house in Melbourne had their days off, Zito had taken Roxane down to the huge, spectacularly well-equipped kitchen and they’d make a meal together.
‘Smell that,’ he’d say, after doing so himself, and she’d bend over his cupped palm, breathing in the scent of newly ground pepper, an exotic spice or a freshly chopped herb before he tipped it into whatever dish he was preparing.
He’d pause in the middle of slicing an apple or a crisp, barely ripe cucumber, taste a piece and then turn and hold out another bit for her to take in her mouth.
Sometimes she’d playfully nip his fingers, inviting retribution in kind. He’d scold her for distracting him from the serious business of cooking and promise her an erotic punishment, deferred until the evening.
But not always deferred after all, so that much later they would rise from a tumbled bed and after showering together return to the kitchen, perhaps wearing only a robe apiece, and resume the interrupted preparations. The food tasted even better for the delay in one kind of gratification to the satisfaction of another.