by Various
‘I don’t understand…Why would you want to pack for me?’
The answer was another tirade of Italian, foremost of which—and totally without needing any translation—was the constantly repeated ‘Signor Emiliani’.
Signor Emiliani said this…Signor Emiliani did that…Signor Emiliani had instructed her to pack, ready for the Signora to leave.
Oh, had he?
Lucy didn’t stop to think, only reacted. She was out of the door in a second, rushing down the corridor before she had time to think. He was throwing her out. After he’d had what he wanted, he was getting rid of her. So much for all his promises to let her stay.
She didn’t know if what she was feeling was agonising pain, sheer blind fury or a dangerously volatile and potentially lethal combination of both. She only knew that she was going to find him and have this out with him. She couldn’t settle until she did.
He was no longer in his bedroom, but she had a strong suspicion of just where she might find him. If he was busy organising things and issuing orders left, right and centre, then there was one place he was likely to be.
She was right. When she marched straight into his office—not allowing herself to pause at the doorway for fear she might lose all her courage and back down, maybe even run away—it was to find Ricardo sitting at his desk, a litter of papers spread out before him, his dark head bent over something he was writing.
‘I said come back in half an hour!’ he snapped, not looking up and obviously mistaking her for someone else.
‘Oh, really?’ Lucy questioned cynically. ‘I got the impression that I was to go away and not come back at all—ever—wasn’t that what you said?’
Ricardo’s head came up fast in astonishment, and the look she caught in his dark eyes shocked and disturbed her. For just a moment he looked like a completely different man.
She couldn’t put a name to what she had seen and it didn’t stay around long enough for her to take it further. One swift blink and it was gone and in its place was cold, hard rejection.
‘Lucia! I sent someone to…’
‘I know you sent someone to pack for me—to make sure I got out of your house as quickly as possible—but I have news for you. I’m not going.’
Deliberately she folded her arms across her chest, chin lifting defiantly. She even planted her feet wide apart on the gold and blue rug before the desk, challenging him to come and move her if he dared.
‘And don’t call me Lucia.’
She wasn’t going to let him know how much it hurt to hear his own personal version of her name on his lips, spoken in that seductive accent. It had once meant so much to her. But that had been when she had believed they had a relationship.
‘My name is Lucy.’
Ricardo’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.
‘I know,’ he said and there was almost a note of amusement in his tone. ‘Lucy is what I just wrote here. Lucy Emiliani, soon to be Lucy Mottram again.’
He tapped his pen down on the topmost piece of paper on his desk, making Lucy crane forward to read. She gasped as she realised that it was a cheque—obviously a replacement for the one he had written before, which she had torn to shreds and scattered to the winds. A cheque for the same impossibly huge amount of money that he had offered her then.
‘I told you I didn’t want that. As I recall, I ripped up one cheque already—’
‘That was when I thought I wanted you to stay.’
If he’d flung the pen right at her heart he couldn’t have made a deadlier hit, and Lucy could only be glad that she already had her arms folded around herself because they went some way towards holding her together when she felt she was falling apart.
‘And now?’
The look Ricardo turned on her told its own story. What do you think? was stamped onto those hard, unyielding features.
‘Is this your answer to everything, Ricardo? Throw money at it until it goes away? So you think you can pay me to leave, do you?’
‘It’s something I can do for you. The only thing. Pay to support you when you do leave,’ Ricardo corrected but Lucy was too far gone to recognise exactly what the difference was in what he said.
‘Well, you can think again. I’m not leaving. Not now—not ever—not when you think you can break your promise and get away with it.’
‘Promise?’ Ricardo pounced on the word as if she had said something exceptional and his dark brows snapped together in a quick hard frown. ‘Break what promise?’
That had Lucy unfolding her arms and flinging them in the air in total exasperation.
‘What promise? Oh, come on, Ricardo! You know perfectly well! You promised me that I would see my baby—see Marco again—’
‘And you will.’
‘What—to say goodbye?’ Lucy choked on the words, finding them almost impossible to get out through the thickness of tears clogging up her throat. Tears she was determined that Ricardo was not going to see her shed. ‘You’ll allow me that? Well, thank you so very much! How cruel can you be!’
‘Not to say goodbye.’ Ricardo pushed back his chair roughly, getting to his feet and raking both hands roughly through his hair in a gesture of frustration. ‘You’ll see him when you collect him ready for the journey.’
She had to be imagining things, Lucy told herself. The stress had finally got to her and she was hearing things that there was no way that Ricardo could ever have said.
‘What journey? I don’t understand,’ she stammered. ‘Where is he going?’
‘Wherever you’re going.’
Then, when she still gaped at him, too bemused to take anything in, he shook his head with a strange mixture of resignation and impatience.
‘Wherever you’re going, then Marco is going with you. He’s leaving with you. You’re both going together.’
‘He…you are joking. You have to be.’
‘No joke. Why would I joke about this?’
Ricardo’s eyes met hers with a burning intensity that left her no room for doubt that he meant exactly what he said.
‘When you leave, Marco is going with you. I won’t contest your custody. All that I ask is that you allow me access as often as possible.’
‘Of course I…’ Lucy couldn’t complete the sentence but broke off in total confusion. This couldn’t be happening. You don’t need to do this. You have custody of Marco and you can keep him here. Why are you doing this?’
‘If I keep Marco here, then you will never leave,’ Ricardo told her starkly. In a series of impossible things that he’d said since she had come into the room, that was the most unbelievable of all.
‘You’re so determined to get rid of me that you’ll give your son away to achieve it?’
‘You are his mother. I know you will love him and care for him. I also know it cannot be any other way.’ Ricardo’s voice seemed to have developed a raw and disturbing edge. He sounded as if his words were coming unravelled at the edges, disintegrating as he spoke them. ‘I know that you won’t leave without him. So how can I set you free unless I do this?’
Now Lucy knew that she was hearing things. Had he really said set you free?
‘How can you set me free—and, more importantly, why?’
‘Oh, Lucy…’
The deliberate effort he made to use the English form of her name caught on something raw and painful deep in Lucy’s heart.
‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m letting you out of this marriage. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I trapped you into a marriage you didn’t want once before. I’ll not do so again.’
A marriage you didn’t want. Was it possible that Ricardo was saying that he had wanted it? No—no way! Hadn’t he always emphasised that he had never wanted marriage? That he was only marrying her because of the baby.
But hadn’t she been the one to drive that home too? Saying she would marry him for the baby—and only for the baby. Because it was what she’d thought he’d wanted.
‘You didn’t trap me,’ Lucy said careful
ly. She was manoeuvring blind here, feeling her way inch, by wary inch and if she put a foot wrong then she might fall flat on her face from a very great height. ‘If anything, I trapped myself by being so stupid—so naïve about the contraception thing. But when you asked me, I went into our marriage of my own free will. I didn’t have to marry you. But it was…I knew it was what you wanted. For Marco.’
‘For Marco at the beginning, perhaps, but later…’
‘Are you saying…?’
Oh, dear heaven, no! She wasn’t brave enough to go so far so fast. Not without something from him that would give her room to hope. Carefully, nervously, she took a couple of steps forward towards where Ricardo now stood by the side of the desk. This close she could see the faintly bruised shadows under his eyes, the fine lines of strain that feathered out from the corners, and had to wonder just what stress had put them there.
‘We could have made a better job of it,’ she began but Ricardo had launched into speech at the same time.
‘If you hadn’t felt trapped you would never have left—would never have gone to some doctor hundreds of miles away. Someone you’d never seen before.’
It seemed to Lucy as if the atmosphere in the room had totally changed again, so that she felt as if the earth were shifting under her feet, dangerously rocking her sense of reality.
‘But I needed help.’
‘You could have had help. You did have help.’
‘I did?’
That was too much to take in. Lucy’s hand went to her head to try and ease the intolerable pressure there as she fought to absorb what was happening.
Had she got this so terribly wrong?
‘You could have come to me—you should have come to me. If we had had any sort of a marriage, if I had been any sort of a husband, I would have been there for you. I was there for you. All you had to do was ask.’ Fire blazed in Ricardo’s eyes, burning away the dazed look that she now realised had been there before. ‘Why did you not come to me? Did you not trust me?’
That wasn’t anger in his voice. It was pain—a real, deep, soul-destroying pain. She had hurt him. Not just by running out on their marriage, on Marco, but, earlier than that, worse than that, by not trusting him, not telling him that she needed help and giving him the chance to offer it.
‘We didn’t have that sort of a marriage. I knew that what mattered most to you was your child. I knew you’d fight anything, destroy anything that threatened his safety.’
‘Did you truly think that I would destroy you?’
The raw hoarseness of his voice gave her the answer to that question and the painful sting of her conscience had her reaching out, catching his hands and holding them tightly. He let his fingers lie in hers, not responding, but at least he didn’t pull away.
‘I was afraid,’ Lucy managed, her own voice not much stronger than his, but it had to work. She had to make him believe what she was saying. ‘Afraid that you’d throw me out.’
‘And so you pre-empted my actions—the actions you thought I’d take. You didn’t wait around for me to throw you out. You went yourself.’
‘I thought that was my only way out. I didn’t know how to talk to you. You were always so busy. And we hadn’t made love for weeks.’
‘You were the one who moved into another room. And I let you go because I thought that you were tired—exhausted from having the baby.’
‘I was…’ Lucy put in but Ricardo continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘You went away for days and would never say where you’d been.’
Lucy felt tears burn at the back of her eyes as she recalled the flippant, careless way she had dismissed his questions, the way she had felt that he was criticising her, trying to control her life.
‘The truth was that I didn’t know where I’d been—I was living in a haze most of the time. I just went out, went over to the mainland and walked…’
‘I should have gone with you—followed you. I should have tried harder. I knew that something was wrong but I was too damn blind to see what it was. When I met you I wanted you so badly—you seemed so fresh and so innocent. So different from any woman I’d known before.’
But then she had turned him down at that first meeting. Only to fall into his arms—into his bed—when she had met the real Ricardo Emiliani a few days later.
‘I always regretted saying no to you that first time. You don’t know how much I regretted it—wished for a second chance. When I got that second chance I knew I had to grab at it with both hands—not risk letting it escape me again. I didn’t even stop to think…’
Something was different, though, she realised. He was actually holding her hands now, having twisted his own round in her grip until his fingers were the ones curled around hers. It was a little thing but it was progress.
‘I wanted you to be different. I was starting to believe that you could be different. But when the spending started—it was the pattern I’d seen before. I was so disappointed. So angry that it blinded me to any other possible reason for your behaviour.’
‘I actually thought that the things I bought would make me feel better,’ Lucy admitted. ‘That this dress or that top would be the one that would restore my self-esteem, make me look good again. But then, when I got it home, it wasn’t the magic I needed. And…’ Her voice caught on the words, a small gasping sob escaping from the rawness of her throat. ‘I wanted you to see me again—really see me. I wanted you to think that I was beautiful…’
That got a reaction from him. His head came up sharply, black eyes blazing into blue.
‘But you were so beautiful—more beautiful then than at any time since I’d met you.’ Ricardo freed one hand, lifting it and smoothing it through her hair before cradling her cheek in his palm. ‘Except for now,’ he murmured. ‘From the moment I saw you on the beach, I knew I was lost. I wasn’t prepared to admit it to myself at the time, but I knew that I had to have you back in my life. No matter what it took.’
‘Even to the extent of declaring that you didn’t want a proper marriage?’ Lucy risked, and a tiny bubble of joy danced in her throat when she heard his faint laughter in response.
‘And implying that I had had other women since you left—that was another lie too,’ Ricardo acknowledged. ‘Not one of my better decisions, I admit. But I was determined to take things steady this time, work with my head, not the passion I feel for you. The passion that scrambles my thoughts, makes me act irrationally—crazily. This time I wanted to keep a clear head.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘I didn’t manage to last very long.’
‘Nor did I,’ Lucy reminded him. ‘It was what we both wanted.’
‘But it was too soon—too fast—just like the first time. That was when we made the mistake. This time I wanted us to have space to get to know each other. Time to…’
Lucy’s breath caught in her throat. Time to…Had he been about to say time to learn to love each other? But Ricardo didn’t complete the sentence.
‘If you had known me better when Marco was born, then you might have been able to talk to me. You should have been able to talk to me but I failed you. Do you know what it did to me when you said that you had been afraid to talk—afraid of me?’
There was no need for words to describe what he’d felt. It was there in the sheen on his eyes, the tremor of pain in his voice, the way his hands tightened around hers. She could be in no doubt as to what he’d gone through, hearing those words.
‘I felt that I’d lost you—that there was no way back from that. That was when I decided I had to let you go.’
‘I tried…’ Lucy broke off sharply, her breath catching in her throat as she felt Ricardo’s strong arms come round her. He drew her close, held her against his side. And it was not a sexual approach, not at heart, but a gesture of comfort and support, warm and gentle.
She would almost dare to say it was a gesture of love.
‘I was wrong to make you feel that,’ he admitted deeply. ‘At the time you didn’t seem t
o need me. I know now that you needed me more than ever before in your life, but I was too blind to see that. I’ll never forgive myself…’
He broke off as Lucy’s hand came over his mouth to still the words.
‘But you must! You must forgive yourself. If I can forgive you—and myself—for what happened then, you can. You must!’
Her heart leapt as she felt the pressure of his kiss, soft and warm against her fingers. Looking up into those deep, dark eyes, she drew on all her courage to ask the most important question. She felt she knew that the answer she wanted was there, but she needed to hear it, to have him say it.
‘Ricardo, you said that you wanted to set me free. Why did…?’
‘Because I can’t keep you here in a marriage you don’t want. It would be like caging a beautiful bird and I can’t do that to the woman I love. If you don’t want our marriage then I want you to be happy. I want you to be free—free to go out into the world and find someone you can love, as I love you. As I will love you for the rest of my life.’
...someone you can love, as I love you. As I will love you for the rest of my life.
What more could she ask for? What more did she need? Everything she had dreamed of, longed for, was in those two sentences. Words that would sustain her for as long as she lived.
‘I don’t think I can,’ she said slowly and saw his dark head go back, his eyes widening in shock as he looked down into her intent face. ‘I don’t think I can ever be free—that I can ever want to be free. I can’t go out into the world and be happy because I can’t leave our marriage—it would kill me to do so. And I can’t find someone to love—because I’ve already found him…He’s here…’
Slowly, carefully, she lifted her hands and rested them on either side of his handsome face, cupping it between both of her palms, and she met his searching gaze with a whole new confidence.