‘It’s such a responsibility being promoted over and over again,’ she had asserted on her first visit to the house, over a cup of tea, and scones which she had assumed were home-made, because, she had implied, what else did someone like Isobel have to do with her time when her little chores at the local surgery were finished? ‘Sometimes I sit back and think how wonderful——‘ pointed cat-like look at Isobel ‘—it would be to throw it all in and do something completely undemanding for a few years.’
Isobel had smiled politely and murmured something innocuous, while thinking that she had never seen anyone express an observation with such insincerity in her life before.
But Lorenzo had obviously missed it because he had looked at the blonde with a veiled smile of amused indulgence.
‘Although,’ Jessica had resumed, crinkling her nose at Lorenzo flirtatiously, ‘I would probably die of boredom after a couple of weeks.’
She was fond of making little self-disparaging comments, Isobel soon realised, which she would then quickly nullify by building herself up with a practised, bewildered shake of her head. A sort of ‘I don’t want to be terribly popular’ approach. ‘It’s not as though I try very hard, but I just can’t seem to stop everyone responding to me!’
You’re just being catty, Isobel told herself now. She strolled into the kitchen and was confronted by another sad state of affairs. The dimensions were lovely, but everything had been left to rot and there were huge gaps where the paint had flaked off and something which suspiciously reminded her of mould was creeping into the edges of the walls.
Jessica was coming over to dinner later that evening. Isobel gazed at the creeping mould and thought how much she hated the prospect of having to endure at least three hours in the company of a woman who did everything possible, in the least direct way, to make her feel inadequate and unfulfilled.
‘This is such a quaint little village,’ she had told Isobel at a later date. ‘I guess it’s all gossip and wagging of tongues around here? Just like in your lovely British movies?’ Her eyes, patronising, had said, What a dull life you lead, gossiping from dawn till dusk. Look at me, I’m smart and successful. Any wonder Lorenzo thinks I’m the bee’s knees?
She made damn sure that finance was discussed in the most complex terms possible, and her eyes, sliding along to Isobel, would reinforce that unspoken message which she had been communicating from the very first moment she had arrived.
There was a loud bang on the front door, which knocked the thoughts out of her head, and Isobel sprinted across to open it. It could only be Mr Evans, probably here to give her a little pep talk on the charming possibilities of the cottage. He would point out the original beams, the lovely view from every window, the marvellous fireplace in the sitting-room, and he would disarmingly play down the immense amount of money needed to bring it all up to any reasonable living standard.
She opened the door with a dry smile, and was stunned to discover that the amiable Mr Evans was nowhere on the horizon.
Lorenzo looked down at her, his eyes glittering in the fast-gathering gloom of twilight.
‘Oh, hello,’ Isobel said, as her nervous system shifted up a couple of notches. He must have come straight from work. He was still wearing his suit, and the long, black coat which made him look like a highwayman. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked automatically, and he raised his black eyebrows in a question.
‘I’ll give you three guesses, shall I?’ he asked drily. ‘Is there any chance you might stop barricading the door so that I can come in?’
Isobel stood aside and watched as he walked past her and into the centre of the hall.
It was, she thought with a little spurt of dread, the first time in two weeks that they had been alone together. Really alone. Not merely positioned in the same room, more often than not with Jessica providing a third party.
He looked around him, and she said, closing the door, ‘How did you know where to find me?’
His eyes lazily made their way back to her face. ‘Evans told me,’ he answered, sticking his hands into the pockets of his coat. She didn’t blame him either. It was freezing in the house. She herself was amply covered in jeans, vest, jumper, and her father’s old Barbour which she had always loved so much. She could still feel the cold, though.
‘He thought, strange though it might seem, that I would be interested in joining you here to see what I thought of the place.’
The light shone bleakly down from the naked light bulb, and it picked up all the sharp angles of his face, the intense blackness of his hair, the clever, glittering eyes. Funny how intimidating a man could be without really having to try.
‘Well, I’ve already had a look around,’ Isobel said weakly, and he moved towards her. Nothing threatening, but she still took a step backwards, and then gritted her teeth together in irritation at behaving so childishly.
‘Good,’ Lorenzo drawled, ‘so you’ll be able to give me a comprehensive guided tour.’
‘Of course.’ She headed off towards the staircase, very businesslike, and he followed her, his footsteps stealthy for a man of his size.
She got the vague feeling that something had changed in him, that he had reached some sort of decision, although it might well have been in her imagination.
She began pointing out the various features, which she was certain he could see for himself without having to have her play the tour guide.
‘Only two bathrooms, I’m afraid,’ she said, then added, because she couldn’t resist, ‘I don’t know what your penthouse suite was like in Chicago, but houses of this age don’t run to massive en suite dressing-rooms with separte inbuilt wardrobes for suits and shirts.’
‘Don’t they?’ he asked softly, from nearer behind her than she had thought. ‘You do surprise me with that little gem of insight.’
‘Bathroom,’ she said, pushing open a door. ‘A bit small, I’m sure you’ll find.’
‘A little decrepit, at any rate,’ he commented, walking in and surveying the walls and ceiling thoughtfully.
She followed the line of his gaze and murmured wryly, ‘Matches the rest of the house. Apparently the owners were forced to sell. I suspect that, long before that, they’d run out of money. Or at least they’d decided to stop spending what they did have on their house.’
‘Shame.’
They did the rounds of the bedrooms, which followed no formal logical pattern and required the occasional dodging under low, beamed door-frames, and after they had completed a similar circuit of downstairs, he turned to her and asked, casually, ‘What do you think of it?’
They were in the sitting-room. It was the only room where any form of active residence could be glimpsed. This was in the form of yellowed net curtains precariously hanging from the windows. They were old and faded enough not to warrant their removal. Cobwebs clung to the walls and the dust which covered every square inch would have set Cinderella back by a good few weeks.
‘I rather like it,’ she admitted a little defiantly. ‘It has atmosphere.’
‘It’s run down.’
‘With a little restoration, it could be beautiful.’
‘It would give any chartered surveyor an apoplectic fit.’
‘A little painting,’ she said with great understatement, glancing around her and using her imagination to restore it to its full potential. ‘Some lovely old furniture, bowls of flowers.’
‘Massive structural work…’
‘The odd bit of structural work…’
He threw back his head and laughed at that, and she grinned at him reluctantly.
‘Are you sure that you’re not being persuasive because you want me out of your mother’s house?’ he asked.
‘Of course not!’
‘Or because you’re secretly in Mr Evan’s employ?’
‘Heaven forbid! Although he did know my father…’
‘Then why don’t you sit down and tell me why you think I should invest my money in this place.’
Is
obel looked around her and said matter-of-factly, ‘My eyes must be failing. I can’t see any chairs.’
‘Who needs chairs?’ He took off his coat and laid it by the wall and pointed her towards it in a sweeping gesture, with a theatrical little bow, and she laughed, relaxing her guard. He was being friendly, she realised, and some part of her felt vaguely upset at that, though she didn’t know why.
‘Well,’ she began, sitting down and feeling a shiver of apprehension as he lowered his lean frame next to her, ‘I doubt you’ll find anything as charming as this anywhere around here. It’s a damned sight nicer than any of the properties I’ve looked around, and I’ve seen a lot. OK, so you’ll need to have some work done on it, but what else can you expect of an old property that’s had no money spent on it in years?’
‘What indeed?’ he murmured, and she felt that shiver of apprehension again.
‘There are six bedrooms.’
‘More than enough to entertain the occasional overnight guest,’ he agreed, looking at her.
‘And the garden would be a challenge for your mother.’
‘Why didn’t you and Jeremy ever have children?’ he asked softly, out of the blue, and she sighed wryly, looking at him.
‘I thought you’d given up asking those questions.’
‘Because you refuse to give answers?’
‘You’ll have to pull out the kitchen and start from scratch. That room looks as though it might pose a serious health hazard.’
‘You have nothing to fear from me, Isobel,’ he murmured. ‘I admit that when I first returned here I would have liked nothing better than to have made you suffer the way you once made me suffer, but you were right. All that is behind us now. I’ve thought about what you said, about not being able to marry me, and you’re right. Revenge can be taken so far and then beyond that it becomes insanity. So what I want to say is that you’re free. I’ll buy your father’s company, no strings attached. We can never be friends, but it’s time for the past to be put to rest.’
That, she knew, should have sent her spirits soaring. Instead she felt a blinding sense of loss, the loss of the man whom she still loved to distraction, but who had now put her behind him, an unfortunate episode in his past which had once hurt but no longer did.
She knew as well, that she could tell him why she had married Jeremy, and she would have nothing to fear. He would not use the knowledge over her and, deep down, she had known that he never would.
But she would never tell him. She realised that now, with great sadness, because how could she explain her most intimate and private agony to a man who didn’t love her? Her secret, like it or not, was now hers forever. There was no chance that she would ever share it with anyone because she would only share it with a man she loved, a man who returned her love, and that was the one thing Lorenzo would never do.
Sitting here, with his legs so close to hers, his body emanating warmth, reminding her of past things, she just felt ready to cry.
‘In the end, he won, didn’t he?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘He drove us apart four years ago because he hated me. The fact that you were something to pin on his jacket, something to adorn his arm, was an added bonus.’
She frowned, puzzled. ‘Lorenzo, you’ve said that once before. That he hated you. But he had no reason to…’
‘Oh, but he had.’ Lorenzo took her face between his hands. ‘I discovered something about him, quite by accident, you see.’
She was completely lost now. What on earth was he talking about?
‘Do you remember my mother used to clean for his? A long, long time ago?’
Isobel nodded. There was a stillness in the air that made her hairs stand on end.
‘One day, Emily Baker was there. She had had a little too much to drink and she was in a maudlin mood. Heaven knows, she always tended to be neurotic, from what I had seen.’ He paused and looked at her, and in the half-shadows his pale eyes seemed black and bottomless. ‘My mother was about to leave but she was worried about Jeremy’s mother. Knowing Mama, she probably said something along the lines of, Is anything the matter? Anyway, out it all came. She began pouring her heart out. Guilt over something she had done years back.’ He looked at her.
‘Are you telling me that her husband was not Jeremy’s father?’
‘Apparently he couldn’t have children.’ Lorenzo sighed. ‘Isn’t it ironic the amount of people who seem to spawn children like rabbits, when there are others, worthwhile good men, who can’t? Anyway, she had a brief affair and hence the birth nine months later of Jeremy. I suppose it was a confession that would have sunk into oblivion. Certainly Mama would never have said anything further about it, and I can’t imagine that Emily would have considered it dinner-party conversation. But Jeremy walked in on the little scene. He made ugly, derogatory comments to his mother. He was shocked. She had never mentioned a word of it before.’
‘But what did that have to do with you?’
‘He assumed that my mother had told me, which of course she had, in the mistaken illusion that I could talk to him, lend a sympathetic ear. But Jeremy had never been one for the sympathetic ear. Months later, when it had been fermenting away inside him, he accused me of acting as though I was superior to him. He threw his parentage into my face, said that I’d probably been sniggering about it behind his back, and I did the worst possible thing. I laughed. Laughed that he could have been so off-target. But he misinterpreted my reaction, thought I was laughing at him, and he hit the roof. He said that one day he’d get even, and naturally I didn’t pay a blind bit of notice to that. But he did, didn’t he, Isobel?’
She nodded, digesting what he had just told her. It accounted for a lot of things, for Jeremy’s sarcasm whenever Lorenzo’s name was mentioned, and his recklessness, his dependence on drink. Did it all stem from that? He had never, ever discussed his parents with her and she had never had a clue about Emily Baker, but why should she? To outside eyes his parents were a happy couple, and chances were that her single sin had been a peccadillo born of depression, something that passed in time.
It had begun to rain. Autumn seemed to have been drenched with rain. She heard the steady drumming of raindrops against the window-pane.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘we ought to be getting back.’
He looked at her, hesitating, then he said, standing up, ‘I suppose so.’
‘Isn’t this awful weather?’ she murmured as they walked towards the front door.
‘Worse than Chicago,’ he agreed, ‘and that was bad enough. The winters were hard, but the summers were good. Seasons behaved themselves the way they ought to.’
She smiled and automatically raised her eyes to his, and for a split-second she thought that he was going to kiss her. But he didn’t. He said slowly, ‘I think I might return to Italy, make my base there.’
‘Driven away by the constant rain?’ she murmured lightly, but her heart clenched tightly inside her. ‘Is this your way of telling me that my efforts in finding you the perfect house have been for nothing?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I could always buy this place, and keep it for the times I return here. I shall have to oversee the company so I’ll be back and forth, I should imagine. But,’ he added, ‘we need never cross paths again.’
Why did that hurt so much? She should be singing for joy. She opened the door, letting in a spray of rain, and ran towards her mother’s car. Part of her knew that never setting eyes on him again was the best possible thing for her mental health, but there was another part, the same little desperate part that had been with her for the past four years, telling her that to glimpse him fleetingly was better than nothing.
She fumbled with the lock while he watched calmly, getting wet, and when she had settled into the driver’s seat he went across to his own car, letting her leave first, then following slowly behind her.
Jessica was already there by the time they made it back to the house. There and looking none too pleased as they made their wet entry i
nto the hall.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked solicitously. ‘You’re soaked.’ She fussed around Lorenzo, who shrugged off her attentiveness with irritation.
‘We were looking at a house,’ he said briefly.
‘Oh, yes.’ She glanced at Isobel, eyes hard. ‘I forgot that you were playing the estate agent. However do you find the time? I do wish I could have had someone running around to find my apartment in Chicago! It would have saved me a lot of valuable time. And was it a success?’
‘We think so,’ Lorenzo said, and Jessica’s eyes hardened a little bit more. She didn’t like the ‘we’ bit, it was just a mite too familiar for her, even though Isobel could have told her that she had nothing to fear on that score.
She left her in the hall, still unsuccessfully clucking around Lorenzo, and removed herself to her bedroom, where she had an overlong bath and, after eyeing her wardrobe critically, slipped on an ivory-coloured calflength skirt and a short-sleeved, figure-hugging jumper in the same colour. The reflection staring back at her was tremendously beautiful. Isobel looked at herself without vanity and wondered why people ever imagined that looks brought happiness. In her case, it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Then she sat down on the dressing-table chair and thought about what Lorenzo had told her. Would she have reacted differently to Jeremy if she had known the true facts about him? She thought not. For the first time she contemplated her past calmly, without rancour.
She had been forced into a marriage through circumstances and, even though she had tasted the bitter fruit of unhappiness, she would have done the same thing if she had had to make the choice all over again.
In a way, it had worked to her advantage that she had not loved Jeremy. It had given her a sublime indifference to the rather unpleasant sides of his character, the tendency towards bullying, the mood swings, the bursts of unbearable arrogance. He was like a wilful child, incapable of understanding that the world did not revolve around him.
Would Lorenzo really return to Italy to live? she wondered, playing with the brush on the dressing-table. It was more than likely. Whether he ever really admitted it or not, she knew that she was the reason that he had returned to Yorkshire in the first place, back to the town that he had left behind in bitter anger. He had purged his system of her now. He was free.
Vengeful Seduction (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern) Page 13