Married By Christmas Bundle: Anthology

by Carol Marinelli

  He didn’t know how he felt about returning to the estate where he’d grown up. He’d been working towards reclaiming the property for twelve years, but this visit was unexpected. It was not how he’d imagined his return would take place.

  A lot had happened during the intervening time. When he was eighteen years old he had already been making a start in the world of business—wanting to break away from the father he didn’t get along with and prove himself to his beloved grandfather. Now he was a billionaire—a significant player on a global scale that even his grandfather and father wouldn’t recognise.

  As he drove Claudia along the Piedmont roads that he remembered so well, he felt strangely detached. The roads looked familiar, but it was as if he didn’t really know them. He couldn’t recall what it was like—how he’d felt—driving along those roads during his youth, before Vasile had destroyed his family.

  All he could remember was how he’d felt the terrible day he’d driven home—except it was no longer home—to take responsibility for his eleven-year-old sister. The gut-wrenching anger that had consumed him that day had never gone.

  Now, years later, Marco had everything he needed to bring down Primo Vasile and Francesca Hazelton, and to reclaim the property where he’d grown up. Francesca was the legal owner of the estate, although it was her husband, Hector, who had made his home there.

  Marco had never found anything he could use against Hector. As far as he could tell, Claudia’s father was an honest businessman and, although he had moved his own family on to the estate after the De Lucas were gone, he had not been directly involved in the ruin of Marco’s family.

  He’d taken over the management of the vineyard and Marco knew that Hector had been a good employer—the loyal staff who’d worked for the De Luca family had not suffered unnecessarily. Marco frowned, thinking that, like his own father, Hector Hazelton would have been better off without his wife. Francesca was a lying, deceiving witch, just like Marco’s mother. Just like Claudia.

  Marco wished Hector no harm, but he had no qualms about taking back his home. Hector had his own assets in England and would still be a wealthy man. It was too bad he hadn’t chosen a better second wife. Then perhaps his daughter wouldn’t have turned out to be a corrupt schemer like her stepmother.

  ‘It’s just round the next bend, on the right,’ Claudia said, as if she was unaware that Marco did not need directions.

  He swung his sports car into the tree-lined avenue that led to the house and his heart started to thump heavily, like the slow, steady beat of a military drum within his cold chest. His grandfather had planted those trees as a wedding gift for his wife. Marco could barely remember his grandmother; she had died when he was a young boy. But he remembered his grandfather very well. The old man would probably still be alive if it hadn’t been for Vasile.

  ‘We’ve made good time,’ Claudia added, looking at her watch. ‘We should be halfway back to the city before it gets dark.’

  Marco barely registered her words. He was thinking about his beloved grandfather—another innocent victim of Vasile’s corruption. He had died the night Marco’s father, drunk on a lethal combination of shame and alcohol, had driven his car off the road.

  Marco had not been there to stop it.

  That was his biggest regret.

  ‘I’m so glad my father was well enough to ask for some of his things.’ Claudia’s voice right beside him jolted him out of his thoughts.

  ‘Yes.’ The single word was all he could manage, with the memory of his grandfather’s needless death fresh in his mind.

  Claudia jumped eagerly out of the car and hurried up to the front door as if she couldn’t wait to get inside. He stood still, looking up at the traditional Piedmont property that until twelve years ago had been in his family for generations. It was a fine day and the majestic mountains in the north were clearly visible. They provided a never-changing, solid point of reference but, as he looked, nothing about the house, or the garden that was visible from his viewpoint, appeared to have changed.

  And, as he stood there staring, a battery of other memories hammered through to the front of his mind. He felt every muscle in his body tighten.

  The door opened almost before Claudia had reached it and Marco realised that someone inside must have seen the car approaching. An older lady appeared, presumably the housekeeper, and laughter and greetings followed. Then suddenly the friendly chatter ceased. Everything had gone silent.

  ‘Signor De Luca?’ The woman who had welcomed Claudia was staring at him as if she had seen a ghost.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Claudia said, looking almost as startled as the older lady. ‘Let me introduce you. Rosa, this is Marco De Luca. He was kind enough to drive me out here from the city today.’

  Marco studied the kindly-looking woman who was staring at him with her eyes as wide as saucers, and suddenly he realised who she was. Or rather where they had encountered each other before. She was one of the many people who had been employed by his parents to run the house, back when the estate had belonged to them.

  ‘Rosa—’ Marco stepped forward and surprised her by taking her hand ‘—how good to see you looking so well. How are you? And your sons? They must be grown up by now.’

  ‘Very well,’ Rosa stammered. ‘Everyone is well. Paolo, my oldest, is engaged to be married next year.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Marco said. ‘I am sure you are very proud.’

  He glanced at Claudia and saw that she was following the exchange with a bewildered expression.

  ‘Rosa used to work for my parents,’ Marco explained, watching her carefully to see her reaction.

  ‘But…Rosa, I thought you’d worked in this house since you were a young girl?’ Claudia said. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a mixture of confusion and disbelief on her face.

  ‘Si, that’s right,’ Rosa said. ‘Before you came here, the estate was owned by the De Luca family.’

  For a moment Claudia forgot to breathe.

  She stared at Marco, hoping to see some indication that this…this coincidence had been as much of a surprise to him as it had been to her. But there was nothing. No surprise. No awkwardness.

  He had always known about this link between them.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she cried. ‘You knew all along!’ She clapped her hand over her mouth and fled into the house. She ran instinctively to her father’s study and opened the window, gasping for air.

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ She heard Marco’s scornful voice behind her and spun round in time to see him closing the door of the study. ‘You knew as well as I did about our little connection.’

  ‘Little connection!’ Claudia exclaimed. ‘We grew up in the same house! And, although you clearly knew that, you never saw fit to mention it to me.’

  ‘Why tell you something you already knew?’ Marco asked. ‘You obviously wanted to pretend that you were unaware of us—of Bianca, of me—of all of the people who were torn apart by the unscrupulous dealings of your family. At the time it suited my purpose to go along with that.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ Claudia stared at him with wide eyes, struggling to comprehend what was happening. ‘What unscrupulous dealings? What do you mean by torn apart?’

  She couldn’t understand the accusations he seemed to be making. And, as she stared at his hostile expression, it felt as if she hardly recognised him. Had he truly believed such appalling things about her all the time they’d known each other?

  ‘You can give up the lies now,’ Marco grated. ‘You have nothing to gain by continuing to keep up the pretence.’

  ‘I haven’t been lying to you,’ Claudia said.

  She was shocked to discover that her family had moved into the house that had once been the home of the De Lucas. It was hard to believe, but it must be true—after all, Rosa had confirmed it.

  In that case, Claudia could understand why there might be hard feelings. But Marco seemed to be accusing her of something much worse
. He really seemed to think that Bianca, and the rest of his family, had been deliberately hurt by her family.

  ‘There is no point in clinging to your petty fiction,’ Marco said. The disdain that dripped from his voice matched the expression on his hard face. ‘It’s time to move on from that now—get it all out in the open at last.’

  ‘Everything I’ve ever told you is true.’ Claudia felt her eyes fill with tears but she blinked them away and faced him squarely. ‘I trusted you with so many things—things that really mattered to me. And you repaid that trust with deception.’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you,’ Marco said angrily. ‘I simply didn’t tell you the whole of my life story.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ she asked. ‘It comes to the same thing if you deliberately mislead someone.’

  ‘I was simply playing you at your own game,’ Marco responded.

  ‘I wasn’t playing a game. My friendship with Bianca was genuine, and I believed that what you and I had together was genuine,’ she said. Then, suddenly, an awful thought occurred to her. ‘Did Bianca know too? Is that why she dropped me?’

  ‘I stopped her contacting you,’ Marco said. ‘I took her away to America, to get her as far from you as possible.’

  ‘I felt so bad when you disappeared,’ Claudia said. ‘I thought you didn’t care any more—that you had better things to do. Now I know that you wanted to hurt me! That you were laughing at me!’

  ‘I was never laughing at you. It was never that trivial.’ He looked at her coldly, through dangerously narrowed eyes.

  ‘If Rosa hadn’t recognised you, I still wouldn’t know about your family.’ Claudia stood tall and looked straight back at him, although a horrible threatening sensation scratched down her spine as their eyes met.

  ‘I was going to bring everything into the open today,’ Marco said.

  ‘Why today?’ she said. ‘Why should I believe you were finally going to reveal your awful secret today?’

  ‘My awful secret?’ Marco bit out, echoing her words. He clenched his fists by his sides, suddenly seeing red. How dared she stand there and continue to pretend ignorance? ‘You know the bare facts of the story as well as I do. What you don’t know is what it was really like for my family when it happened.’

  Her face was as white as a sheet as she looked up at him. He could tell she was shaken by their confrontation, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to feel the pain he had felt—the pain he still felt when he remembered what had happened.

  ‘Of course I don’t know what it was like—I don’t even know what happened,’ she said in her defence.

  ‘You don’t know how many nights I lay awake—tortured by thoughts that perhaps I could have saved my family from the worst of it,’ he said bitterly. ‘Or maybe even could have prevented it altogether.’

  ‘Prevented what?’ she asked, still acting as if she didn’t know what had taken place.

  ‘The destruction of my family,’ he said.

  There was an ominous pause and his words seemed to echo around the room. Marco watched as a change came over her. Her body stiffened and suddenly she was standing very still.

  ‘Destruction,’ she said at last. ‘That’s a very strong word. How were your family destroyed?’

  Her voice was so quiet and shaky that he could hardly hear her. But that didn’t matter. He was on a roll now. He was going to tell her something that had been weighing on him for twelve years.

  He wanted her to share his pain at the memory. He wanted her to feel his guilt over not stopping what happened.

  ‘The last time I saw my father alive he was sitting at that very desk. He was drunk,’ he said, raking his fingers roughly through his hair. ‘He was bawling into his drink, saying that my mother was having an affair.’

  He paused for a moment as an image of that scene flared horribly in his mind.

  ‘He told me the family business and estate were in danger,’ Marco continued. ‘I didn’t take him seriously. I was ashamed of him—disgusted that he was drinking and that he couldn’t hold on to his wife. I told him to pull himself together.’

  ‘You must have been very young.’ Claudia’s voice revealed her shock. ‘What did he expect you to do? What could you have done to make a difference?’

  ‘I was a man—eighteen years old. Old enough to take responsibility. I may not have known that my family was on the brink of destruction—or that a man called Primo Vasile had seduced my mother and persuaded her to betray my father. But I did know that my father was upset.’ Marco paused, his heart pumping fiercely under his ribs. ‘I didn’t know what I could do to help. So I stuck to what I already had planned and left the country.’

  Claudia didn’t say anything. She just stared up at him with a stunned expression on her face.

  ‘When I returned, everything had gone to hell,’ Marco said. ‘My father and grandfather were dead. My mother had fled in shame. And Bianca, my sweet, innocent little sister, was a virtual orphan, living at the mercy of state care.’

  He turned away, looking blindly out of the window. The pain and shame that he normally kept so well clamped down seared into him like a brand. He had failed his family. And they—not him—had paid dearly for that failure.

  ‘How did they die?’ Claudia gasped.

  ‘A car accident,’ Marco bit out. ‘My father should never have been driving. If I’d been here, I would have prevented it.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Claudia said. Despite the way he had just treated her, there was a sympathetic note in her voice. Sympathy was the last thing Marco wanted to hear.

  ‘No—it’s Vasile’s fault,’ Marco said.

  ‘How awful,’ Claudia said. ‘For everyone—especially Bianca. She never told me anything about that.’

  ‘Don’t talk about my sister as if you care.’ Marco rounded on her. ‘That’s where all this started between us.’

  Claudia stared at him, utterly stunned by what Marco had told her.

  Patches of livid red burned on his cheeks and he glared back at her with eyes that were full of accusation. His shoulders were trembling and she realised that he was consumed by a terrible combination of guilt and fury.

  It was almost too much to take in. He had told her the night before that his mother had betrayed his family and abandoned Bianca, but she had never imagined that he was talking about such a cataclysmic outcome for the entire family.

  The fact that Primo Vasile had been his mother’s seducer, the catalyst behind all the destruction, was an appalling discovery. She knew he was a bad person—after all, he was blackmailing her into marriage—but the dark picture Marco had painted made her feel dizzy with horror that he had embroiled her in his schemes.

  ‘I don’t understand why you kept all this secret from me,’ she said.

  It had wrenched her heart when he’d told her how his family had suffered, but it wasn’t fair of him to blame her. She’d been thirteen years old when it had happened. And she was still reeling from the shock of discovering that their families were connected in such an awful way.

  ‘We both kept secrets,’ Marco countered.

  ‘I never deliberately withheld information,’ Claudia said. ‘In fact I did tell you everything—you always knew the names of my parents and where I came from. I didn’t hide anything.’

  ‘You never mentioned Primo Vasile,’ Marco said. ‘Don’t you think that’s a fairly major omission?’

  ‘What did he have to do with me?’ Claudia asked. Her blood ran cold—but it was only in the last couple of days that she’d had any direct involvement with him. ‘Did you expect me to discuss every one of my father’s business associates?’

  Suddenly she stopped and stared at him in shock.

  ‘That’s what it was always about!’ she gasped. ‘You got close to me, hoping to find out information to use against Primo—because of what he did to your family.’

  ‘No,’ Marco said. ‘Not then. I wanted to know what you were doing hanging round my sister.’
/>   ‘She was my friend!’ Claudia declared.

  She glared at him, horrified that he could even imagine she might have had any other reason than friendship for spending time with his sister. Just what sort of person did he take her for? And what sort of person was he to judge her by such awful standards?

  ‘Is Primo Vasile your friend?’ he asked blandly.

  ‘I hardly know him,’ she snapped, still smarting from his insinuation that she had somehow been a threat to his sister.

  ‘Maybe not the best basis for marriage,’ he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CLAUDIA’S heart lurched.

  Somehow Marco knew about her planned marriage to Primo.

  ‘No…I…’ she stammered. She wanted to deny it—it had been such a hard struggle to accept that she must go through with it. Having Marco throw it in her face was unbearable.

  ‘Do you think I’m a complete fool?’ Marco demanded. ‘I’ve made it my business to know everything that bastard does. I know everything he so much as thinks, even before he knows it himself. Something like a wedding would never escape my notice.’

  ‘But how…?’ Claudia’s voice died away. It was only two days since she’d met Primo and Francesca at the Ritz, and that was the first time the subject of her marriage to Primo had been raised. Or, rather, that was when they had used her father’s precarious situation to blackmail her into marriage.

  Marco had appeared right outside the Ritz only moments later. Somehow he had known about it before she had.

  She clamped both hands over her face, feeling sick to her stomach. She had been used. By everyone.

  Francesca and Vasile had used her—were still planning to use her. She’d tried to shut that appalling reality away, not think about it because there was nothing she could do about it. She had to go through with it, for the sake of her father. But now the discovery that Marco had been using her too was overwhelming.

  ‘There’s no need to hide, bella mia.’ She felt Marco’s fingers on her wrists, pulling her hands away from her face. ‘The fact that you are not what you seem to be is nothing new to me. I know what the face of deception looks like.’