‘The day he came to see me.’
Surprise resonated through the room as though an atom bomb had been dropped. ‘Before we were married?’ she responded angrily, her voice high pitched and stringy. ‘Before we were married? You’ve known this whole time. Oh, my God.’
She stood up jerkily, looking around the room as though she didn’t recognise it. As though it were simply a set and she an actress—a character in a play with no real meaning, no real plot. Nothing was real.
She blinked, clearing the confusion from her mind and trying her hardest to hone in on what mattered. There would be time to come to terms with Pietro’s betrayal. But in that moment more was at stake.
‘How bad is it?’
‘He’s dying,’ Pietro said, the words thick and guttural. He stood slowly, but didn’t attempt to move towards her. ‘He told me it was a matter of months. If that.’
‘No. I don’t believe you.’
She stared at him, all her grief and confusion and the bereft state of her soul silently communicating themselves to Pietro.
‘My father is... He’s never sick.’
Pietro’s expression was bleak. ‘The cancer is throughout his body.’
The words were like strange sharp objects. She could barely comprehend them. Her daddy was ill? Why had he sent her away? Was he in pain? Was he lonely? The thought of him going through something like cancer without anyone to hold his hand brought a lump to her throat.
‘And you let me stay here with you, knowing I had no idea? Knowing that my whole world—’ She stabbed her hand into her chest, her eyes wild in her face. ‘—my father, my only family, was dying on the other side of the world? How dare you make that decision for me? How dare you lie to me like that?’
‘He wanted it this way.’
‘It doesn’t matter! You should have told me!’ she roared, turning her back and stalking out of the lounge.
She took the stairs two at a time, pacing down the corridor and into his room, which they’d been sharing for weeks. She pulled clothes out of the closet at random. Jeans, a few skirts, shirts... She had more clothes at home—she didn’t need to pack much.
Home. Annersty. The words whispered through her with sombre realism.
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he said with muted anger in his words. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Why couldn’t you?’ She spun around to face him, her eyes accusing.
‘He made me promise and I owed it to him to keep that promise.’
‘Even knowing how it would hurt me?’
‘I didn’t want to do that,’ he said thickly. ‘You must believe this is true. I was in an impossible situation...’
‘Damn it, Pietro.’ The words reverberated around their room. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me about impossible situations! This wasn’t impossible. It should have been easy.’
‘Your father—’
‘Yes, yes...’ She waved a hand in the air, cutting him off. ‘You’ve told me. He didn’t want me to know. But what did you think?’
He froze, the question so direct that he hadn’t expected it.
‘You must have thought about it. Did you think I wouldn’t care? Did you think I’d be able to forgive you this?’ She zipped her suitcase with such ferocity that her nail snagged in its closure and she swore under her breath. ‘You’ve been sitting on a time bomb.’ She dashed a hand over her eyes, wiping away her tears.
He made a visible effort to pull himself together, straightening his shoulders and wiping his expression clean. ‘You want to go to him?’
Her eyes bore into his. ‘Of course I do. I would have gone to him weeks ago if anyone had told me what the hell was going on.’
‘Good...fine,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll organise my plane...’
‘No.’ She reached for her phone with fingers that shook. ‘I’ll book myself on the next available flight.’
Her meaning was clear. She didn’t want his help.
‘I have a jet at the airport. It will take hardly any time to fuel...’
‘I don’t want your stupid jet,’ she snapped. ‘I just want to get to him.’
‘This is the fastest way,’ he promised. ‘I know you’re angry, but let me do this.’
Emmeline looked away, panic and worry making her uncertain.
Pietro’s voice came to her as if from a long way away. He spoke into his phone in his own language, ordering the flight preparations to begin. In some part of her mind she was glad. She was furious with him—furious in a way she doubted she’d ever forgive—but she wasn’t sure she could face this completely alone.
He disconnected the call and she spoke without meeting his eyes. ‘When?’
‘Now. Come. I’ll drive.’
She kept her eyes averted as he lifted her suitcase easily, carrying it down the stairs and past the car he’d given her only hours earlier. She ignored the anguish that churned her gut.
Mrs M. What a joke. She’d been nothing to him. Was this why he’d married her? To keep this lie? To deceive her?
All her ideas that their marriage had begun to mean something real were obviously just stupid, childish fantasies. There was no way that he loved her as she loved him. If he’d cared for her at all he would have found a way to break the truth to her sooner.
She stared out of the window as he took the car to Fiumuncino, the countryside passing in a blur that eventually gave way to the built-up cityscape and then more industrial outlying buildings. Finally, it pulled up at a small air terminal.
‘Here.’ He nodded towards a hangar that was guarded by a single soldier.
It wasn’t Emmeline’s first time flying in a private jet—her father’s was permanently stationed in the States—so it was no surprise for her to be ushered through a private building and customs area before being whisked across the deserted Tarmac to a jet bearing a golden ‘M’ on its tail.
He handed her suitcase to an attendant, but it wasn’t until he climbed the stairs with her that it occurred to Emmeline he might be coming along for the trip. That she might have given herself a rather long flight with a man she never wanted to speak to again.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her words as cold as ice as she paused at the top of the plane’s steps.
‘What do you think?’ He walked deeper into the plane, pausing at an armchair and waiting for her to follow.
She shot him a pointed look, but moved towards him. Fine. If he wanted to join her—to sit with her—then she’d make him sing for his supper. He could damned well give her some answers to the questions that were crashing around inside her.
‘So he told you before you and I had even agreed to the marriage?’ she said, sitting down in the armchair and buckling her seatbelt in place.
Her fingers were trembling so she clasped them firmly in her lap. Shock was a wave that was spreading around her, swallowing her in its depths.
‘He bullied you into marrying me,’ she murmured, her eyes locking on the view beyond the window. She had to focus on this conversation or she’d fall apart.
A muscle jerked in Pietro’s cheek at her characterisation of their marriage. ‘He asked me to help him.’
She pulled a face. ‘To help him manage me? God! This was meant to be my decision. My first step to freedom.’
There was a throb of anxious silence, and if Emmeline had lifted her eyes to Pietro’s face she would have seen the aching sympathy there. But she couldn’t look at him. His face was now inextricably linked with betrayal.
‘He was worried about how you’d cope. He didn’t want you to see him unwell.’
Emmeline stared out of the window, the lump in her throat growing bigger by the minute. Was he in pain? Was the housekeeper Miss Mavis looking after him? Was he scared? Tears filled her eyes and she didn’t bother to blink them away.
‘I didn’t agree with his decision, but I had to honour it.’
She whipped her head around, barely able to see him through the fog of her grief. ‘Don’t say that. You
can’t have it both ways! If you didn’t agree with his decision then you should have told me.’
‘I wanted to tell you.’ A frown was etched across his face. ‘I’d decided I would tell you one day, when the time was right.’
Her laugh was a harsh sound of fury. ‘You just said he has months, maybe weeks, to live. What were you waiting for?’
‘Excuse me, signor? Signora?’ An attendant practically tiptoed down the centre of the plane, her expression professional. ‘We’re ready for take-off. Can I get you anything to eat? Drink?’
‘No,’ he snapped curtly.
‘Yes. Scotch. Neat,’ Emmeline demanded. ‘And some aspirin.’
‘Yes, signora.’
Pietro leaned forward and put a hand on her knee once privacy had been restored. ‘This changes niente—nothing about what we are.’
‘Like hell it does!’ Her disbelief was a force-field of shock. ‘You have been lying to me this whole time. This whole time.’ She sat back in her seat, all the fight in her evaporating as quickly as it had appeared.
When the attendant appeared with her drink she threw it back, then lifted the aspirin.
‘Don’t take those,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve just had a ton of alcohol...’
She glared at him angrily and tossed the pills into her mouth. ‘Go to hell.’
* * *
She woke somewhere off the coast of the States. Her head was pounding, her eyes were scratchy and there was a heaviness in her heart that didn’t initially make sense. She was disorientated and confused.
She blinked her eyes open and looked forward.
Straight into the brooding stare of her husband.
The smile that was always so quick to come to her lips when she saw him did not come.
Sadness and grief sludged through her instead, and then it all came rushing back. The lie. The secrecy. The betrayal. Her father’s cancer.
The fact that he was going to die.
And she hadn’t been with him.
Instead she’d been living in Italy, believing everything was amazing, pretending she was normal, truly thinking herself to be happy.
‘You told me I could trust you,’ she said, so quietly he had to strain to hear the words. ‘Do you remember?’
‘Si.’
‘You were talking about Bianca and the other women. But I took it to mean you were generally trustworthy.’
‘Your father trusted me,’ he said softly, darkly, the words slicing through her resolve.
The betrayal—by both the men she loved—cut her to the quick.
‘I can’t believe he told you and not me. How dare he? How dare you?’
‘He was concerned that you would be very vulnerable when he is no longer with us. You will inherit an enormous fortune, and he felt you hadn’t had the experience necessary to remain safe from less desirable elements. He wanted to know you were protected. Is that so awful?’
‘Yes!’ she spat angrily. ‘He was afraid of wild dogs and so he sent me to live with a wolf.’
Pietro’s eyes flashed with suppressed frustration.
‘Don’t you get it? I will never believe anything you say again. You begged me to trust you and I did. Apparently I was just as naïve and stupid as Daddy thought.’
She glared out of the window, her heart thumping hard when land appeared below. She was back in her country—or the airspace above it, at least—and she never planned to leave it again.
She was home. At least, that was what she told herself.
* * *
‘Oh, sugar.’ Miss Mavis pulled the door inwards, her face lined with tears. Her middle was comfortingly round and she pulled Emmeline against her, holding her tight. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Emmeline was aware of everything in that instance. Miss Mavis’s sweet scent—like lemon and sugar and butter all rolled into one—the sound of an aeroplane droning overhead, the way Pietro stiffened at her side, and the way her own heart lurched and rolled with the certainty that it was too late.
‘I came as soon as I heard. How is he?’
‘Oh, Miss Emmeline...’
Miss Mavis’s face crumpled and Emmeline knew. She just knew. Even the light was different as it glistened across the front of Annersty. The sun was bleak, mourning his loss.
‘When?’
The quiet question came from behind her—a voice as much stained by grief as her heart was. And she didn’t doubt the truth of his sadness. Pietro had loved Col like a father. Had loved him enough to marry her just to give Col some semblance of reassurance at the end of his life.
‘An hour ago,’ Miss Mavis sobbed. ‘We tried to call you, but your phone...’
Miss Mavis, whom Emmeline had known from five years of age, was like family. She ran a hand over Emmeline’s back, holding her tight, comforting her.
‘Can I see him?’ Emmeline whispered, sounding like the little girl she’d been the year Mavis was hired.
‘Of course you can.’
Miss Mavis stepped inwards and Emmeline followed, but then she spun around, her eyes fiercely accusing as they locked to Pietro’s.
‘Don’t.’
She lifted a hand to emphasise her point, then fixed her gaze somewhere over his shoulder. She didn’t want to look at the pallor of his face, the haunted eyes. She didn’t want to think about the fact that he’d lost someone he loved as well. That he was possibly as wrenched apart by sadness as she was.
‘Don’t you dare come into my house.’
He flinched as though she’d hit him. ‘Cara...’
‘No. Don’t you dare.’
Miss Mavis’s hand on her back offered strength and comfort. She was feeling more and more like herself again.
‘If I’d never married you I would have been with him. I would have been with him.’
Pietro braced a hand on the side of the door but otherwise made no effort to move inside. ‘It’s not what he wanted.’
‘He was wrong. You were wrong.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘You should have told me. I should have been here. I’ll never forgive you for this.’
She stepped backwards and slammed the door shut, sobbing as it latched into place.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ON THE THIRD day after her father died—the morning of the funeral—she found a note stuffed in a book. It had fallen beneath his bed, and she’d pulled it out, was unfolding it slowly, when a knock at his door startled her. She spun guiltily, jamming the piece of paper into her vintage Dior clutch.
Pietro stood in the opening, dressed in a black suit, his dark hair styled back from his face, and he looked so strong and handsome, so supportive and sexy, that she wanted to throw herself across the room and take every bit of strength he was willing to give her.
But she didn’t. Because he’d destroyed what they were. Or maybe what they’d never been. The illusion of their marriage seemed like a dream now—one she would never have again. He’d kept his distance since they’d arrived at Annersty, and yet he’d always been there. Dealing with the lawyers, the servants, the mourners who arrived unannounced.
‘It’s time to go,’ he said quietly, his face lined with sympathy and sorrow.
The childish urge to tell him to stay the hell away from the funeral evaporated in the midst of what she knew her father would have wanted and expected. Col had loved Pietro, and she knew her husband well enough to know that it was mutual.
‘I’m not going with you.’ She settled for that instead.
‘Yes, you are.’
He pushed the door shut, leaving him on the bedroom side of it, and walked towards her. She froze like a deer in the headlights—as she had on their wedding night.
She tilted her chin defiantly, remembering all that had happened since that night. Changes had been wrought on her personality and her confidence—changes that couldn’t be undone now.
‘We will go together because if we arrive separately it will cause gossip and scandal.’
‘Oh, heaven forbid anyone should cast asper
sions on the great Pietro Morelli’s marriage—’
‘I don’t give a damn what the papers say about me,’ he interrupted firmly, his expression showing grim sympathy, ‘but your father, on this day, deserves the focus to be on him. I will not provide the media with any distraction from the greatness he achieved in his long career of public service.’
‘Oh, God.’ She gripped his shirt for support as her body weakened, a wave of nausea rolling over her at the recognition of what this day was. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I can’t!’ she sobbed, shaking her head from side to side. ‘I can’t bury him. I can’t. I can’t.’
‘Hush...hush.’
He stroked her back, her hair, held her tight, whispered words in his own language—words she didn’t try to translate. She didn’t need to understand what he was saying to feel comforted.
‘I’m here with you.’
And he was. He stayed by Emmeline’s side throughout the awful, necessary ordeal. As she said goodbye to the hundreds of lawmakers, donors and friends who’d come to pay their final respects. Pietro’s mother and brother were there too, and it was strange to see them here in the church at Annersty. Her new family merging with her old.
Only they weren’t her family.
And Pietro wasn’t really her husband.
The funeral was a time to say goodbye to more than just Col. It was an ending of all things.
Late that night, when everyone had left and it was just Emmeline and her grief, Pietro found her on her knees in a room that he quickly surmised had been hers as a girl.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked without looking, the tone of weary defeat thick in her words.
He crouched down beside her and handed her a mug. ‘Coffee?’
She took it, her eyes red-rimmed. ‘Thank you.’ She curled her fingers around it and sat down on her bottom, staring around the room. ‘I was just wishing I could lift a corner of the blanket of time and slip beneath it.’ Her smile was vague. ‘I want to be a little girl again.’
‘The room is very...pink.’
She nodded. ‘My favourite colour.’
‘I’m surprised,’ he said quietly. ‘I would have thought perhaps green or red.’
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