Society Weddings

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘You were right, Isabella,’ he went on harshly. ‘Perhaps we should forget the whole thing. I will not trouble you again.’

  Not until he could prove to her that he believed in her the way she needed him to.

  ‘But, Luis…’ Isabelle began, but she was speaking to empty air.

  Without even another glance in her direction, Luis had marched from the room and she could only stare in silent desperation as the door swung to behind him.

  ‘Forgive me, but I cannot…’ His cold, stiff words seemed to hang in the air, freezing, like the cruel hand that gripped her heart.

  ‘I cannot…’ What? If he could never forget what had happened, then what possible hope of a future was there?

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘ALL alone, my dear?’

  ‘What?’

  Isabelle looked up in surprise, struggling to drag herself into the present as Luis’s father came towards her along the stone-flagged terrace.

  ‘Is that son of mine neglecting you?’

  ‘He—he had business to attend to. Something about one of the vineyards.’

  It was an excuse that would do as well as any other, she told herself. It was the one Luis had used to explain his absences at first.

  But lately he had stopped doing even that. He had just headed out at the start of the day, some mornings even before she was awake, and he was more often than not very late back.

  ‘The vineyards can take care of themselves.’ The duke frowned into the sun. ‘Luis should be here.’

  ‘He will be,’ Isabelle put in hastily, hoping she sounded more confident than she actually felt. ‘I think he just wants to make sure that everything is in order before we leave on our honeymoon.’

  A honeymoon that was now not so far away. The days since she had come to Spain had flashed by so fast that she could hardly believe she had been here a month or more now. Every day had been taken up with some sort of planning or preparation for the wedding so that she had barely had time to think.

  And if she was honest, she’d been grateful for the endless round of fittings, consultations, coffee mornings, visits to relatives that had filled her time and taken her away from Luis’s disturbing absences and his even more disturbing presence in the brief times he had actually spent in the castle.

  ‘How are you feeling today?’

  Don Alfonso always looked pale, and his tall frame hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh on it. But the bronze eyes that were so like his son’s were bright and alert these days, his energy belying his state of health.

  ‘I feel fine,’ he assured her now, a smile lighting up his face. ‘So I was wondering if you’d like that history lesson now.’

  ‘The tour of the gallery?’ Isabelle was already on her feet. ‘I’d love to.’

  It was something that she and the duke had discussed some days before. From the first, Isabelle had been fascinated by the long gallery of portraits of the de Silva family, ancestors of Luis, long-ago dukes and duchesses, dating right back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition. She had wanted to learn more about them, but the time had never been quite right.

  The afternoon passed in total absorption. As Don Alfonso had said, this was a history lesson, but the characters involved were his family. Luis’s family. Her family by marriage now. And for the first time she had a real sense of how Luis must feel, with the weight of all that lineage behind him.

  ‘It must be amazing to know that you have ancestors who were brothers or sisters of kings,’ she said when a couple of hours later they made their way back down the long, sweeping stone staircase into the main hall again.

  ‘It’s an honour and a responsibility,’ the duke added sombrely. ‘Our family has great wealth but we also owe a great deal to our heritage and should never treat it lightly.’

  ‘Living here must make you feel like that. Knowing that this castle has been in the family for so many hundreds of years.’

  ‘And it will be into the future too. That has always been my dream. That is why in our family marriage and children are so important. When Diego died, I thought…’

  He caught himself up, shaking his head, the golden eyes dimmed for a moment, but then he reached for Isabelle’s hand and squeezed it gently.

  ‘But your marriage to Luis will ensure that our line will go on. Your children will inherit the dukedom. Yours and Luis’s.’

  The words caught Isabelle on the raw, stirring uncomfortable memories of yet another reason for her distress over the past weeks. Even the blazing passion that had flared between herself and Luis on that first night in York seemed to have died. He hadn’t even come to her room, hadn’t shared her bed since they had arrived.

  There was a discreet cough behind them, a maid trying to get their attention.

  ‘Don Alfonso… You have a visitor. Señorita del Bosque.’

  ‘Catalina? I thought she was in America.’

  Something in the way the older man said the name, his expression as he looked towards the room the maid had indicated, betrayed the way he was feeling. He would never admit to being tired, but clearly he had had enough.

  ‘Shall I see what she wants?’ Isabelle suggested. ‘I met Catalina once—back in England. I’ll talk to her if you like.’

  Her reward was another of those charming, warm smiles that twisted in her heart with the memories they revived. Memories of the days when she had first met Luis. When his smile had been so swift and so delightful, so easily won.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, my dear. I would appreciate it.’

  ‘Why are you sitting here in the dark?’

  Luis’s voice coincided with the snapping on of the light, startling Isabelle so that she jumped nervously, wide green eyes turning to where he stood in the doorway.

  ‘I—I was thinking.’

  She looked distant, Luis thought, as if her mind was somewhere else. And there was something in the way she sat, a lack of colour in her cheeks, the unsmiling mouth, that made him tense instinctively. He could almost scent trouble in the air but he had no idea where it came from.

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘The wedding.’

  It was the easy answer because she wasn’t yet ready to tell him the truth. What she had thought would simply be a social chat with Catalina had turned into something that had rocked her whole world. Something she didn’t yet know how to handle. For one thing, she needed to be sure, to know that it was actually fact. And to do that, she had to test the water first.

  ‘Oh, that.’

  He had thought it would be more. The realisation that that was all it was should have relaxed him, but there was still something about the atmosphere in the room that did nothing to ease his unsettled frame of mind.

  ‘So, what’s been on your busy schedule today?’

  Luis strolled into the room and settled himself in the chair opposite Isabelle, leaning back tiredly.

  ‘Did you have another fitting for the wedding dress of the year? Or perhaps an important meeting to decide about the colour of flowers?’

  ‘Actually, today I didn’t have anything planned. Most things are just about in hand.’

  Isabelle was frankly surprised by the bite in Luis’s voice. Anyone would have thought that he was—jealous was the word that sprang to mind. But that couldn’t possibly be true.

  ‘Good. Then perhaps in that case you might like to consider having lunch with me tomorrow? Maybe even spending the day together?’

  ‘Well—yes—if that’s what you want.’

  If his mood had surprised her, then this invitation rocked her even more. It broke into the routine they had established. The routine that she had thought worked well. The routine that she believed was the way Luis wanted to run things.

  After lying awake late into the long, lonely hours before dawn on her first night in the castle, after Luis had walked out on her, she had finally come to a decision. There was only one way that she could handle this situation. One way that she could behave so that she could get th
rough the days being the wife Luis wanted and still keep any sort of hold on her sanity and her feelings.

  She was going to have to pretend. She was going to have to put on the act of her life and draw on every last ounce of her dramatic ability and training if she was to be in the least bit convincing.

  She would have to play the newly engaged fiancée, still starry-eyed in the first throes of love. The prospective bride who had every happiness to look forward to and who was planning the wedding of her dreams with heartfelt delight, while all the time she knew that the man she loved felt nothing for her but the dark physical passion that had ensnared both of them on the night he had come to find her in York.

  And she had thought that she might just manage that. Or at least she had done, until today.

  Until Catalina had appeared and let her in on a couple of bitterly painful truths.

  ‘It isn’t a matter of what I want,’ Luis growled. ‘More that my parents are hardly going to believe we’re hopelessly in love with each other if we rarely spend as much as half an hour in each other’s company except at mealtimes.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s always out—“on business”,’ Isabelle pointed out. ‘And there’s a lot to do to plan a wedding—especially the sort of wedding your mother has in mind.’

  ‘It has seemed to be the only thing you think about.’

  It had been impossible to get near her, in fact, Luis thought. Looking back over the past three weeks, it seemed she had been almost constantly occupied, dashing here to choose table decorations, or there to look at flowers.

  She had been perfectly polite and pleasant, but somehow ethereal. Being with her had been like trying to grab hold of a soap bubble. Just when he thought he had it in his hands it would burst and disintegrate into nothing.

  They barely spoke at all. At least not about anything important. And because he had vowed that he wouldn’t touch her until he believed he had the right, all other forms of communication were closed to them too.

  ‘Your mother wants everything to be perfect.’

  ‘I know.’

  Luis’s sigh was low, despondent, and his bronze eyes clouded as he stared at the floor.

  ‘She’s putting her heart and soul into this wedding because it will be the only one,’ he said, unknowingly reviving memories of the way the duke had spoken earlier. ‘She always dreamed of planning Diego’s wedding too.’

  ‘That must be hard for all of you.’

  Something had put an edge into her voice, drawing his frowning gaze to her face, but she simply returned his look with a blank one of her own as she continued.

  ‘I know how you felt about your brother. It must have been a terrible day for you all when he died.’

  ‘I thought my father would never recover.’

  Luis raked his free hand through the black silk of his hair, the shiny black strands catching the sunlight as they fell back over his high forehead.

  ‘Since then I’ve felt I’ve had to be both sons for him.’

  ‘He’s looked better recently. Brighter and happier.’

  ‘He sees the hope of a future and that gives him something to keep going for. You’ve done that for him.’

  ‘Not just me—it’s both of us together. And the wedding.’

  She flexed shoulders that were tight with tension and closed her eyes briefly against the sting of tears. She would have given the world not to believe what Catalina had told her, but with every word that Luis spoke the dread grew darker, her fears stronger that the Spanish woman had spoken nothing but the truth.

  ‘You’re not enjoying it?’ Luis had misinterpreted the reasons for her low spirits. ‘I would have thought that for any woman the chance to have a wedding dress specially designed by a Paris couturier, a wedding in a cathedral, would be like a dream come true.’

  The dream come true, Isabelle reflected sadly, would be to know that the man she was marrying loved her as much as she loved him. With that, the simplest, most inexpensive wedding would be perfect, and without it all the money in the world couldn’t provide compensation for what was missing.

  ‘For some people, perhaps,’ she said slowly, keeping her eyes lowered so as not to have to look into his darkly devastating face. ‘But if you want to know the truth, then I much preferred our first wedding in that little chapel in York.’

  ‘Walking to the church in the rain?’ Frank disbelief rang in Luis’s voice, stilling the restless movement of Isabelle’s hand on the arm of her chair.

  ‘It was only a little shower. Not even a drizzle really.’

  And she had been so happy that she hadn’t noticed the weather at all. The sky might have been dull and grey but in her heart there had been nothing but sunshine and her feet had felt as if they weren’t touching the ground, as if she were floating down the damp pavements towards her destiny.

  ‘And I was so thrilled when I found that dress in a boutique sale. What?’ she asked in some surprise when his head came up, bronze eyes fixed on her face.

  ‘I was just remembering how wonderful you looked in it,’ Luis told her, his voice rough as if it came from a painfully dry throat. ‘So beautiful, so fresh and innocent.’

  Even when he had thought he hated her, he had never been able to erase from his mind the memory of that moment when he had turned and seen her walking down the aisle of the tiny chapel, wearing the simple white cotton dress, carrying a single rose by way of a bouquet. Her golden hair had gleamed in a soft halo around her glowing face, her lips had been curved into a smile of pure delight, and her eyes had never looked so brilliant, shining a wonderful, emerald green.

  ‘Your Paris designer is going to have to work hard to do any better.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll do better—it’ll just be different. In the same way that this reception for five hundred will be so different from…’

  ‘From the picnic by the river?’ Luis supplied when, overcome by memory, she couldn’t supply the words. ‘That was something else.’

  ‘At—at least the sun had come out by then.’

  The darkness in his eyes was tying her nerves into tight, painful knots. Looking into his handsome face now, she was suddenly taken back to that day, remembering the happiness, the hope for the future, she had felt then.

  ‘I couldn’t believe my luck,’ Luis went on, his voice growing even deeper on each word. ‘I kept looking across at you and thinking— She’s my wife. That’s my wife.’

  Abruptly his expression changed, a deep frown bringing his black brows together.

  ‘Should I have made it different for you, Isabella? Should I have swallowed my pride, forgotten the arguments I’d had with my father and brought you here, married you…’

  ‘In a wedding like the one we’re having now? Do you want the truth, Luis?’

  The memory of Catalina’s words that afternoon came back to haunt her, stiffening her pride and tightening her voice.

  ‘Because if you do, then the answer is no. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I loved you so much then. Couldn’t have been happier… This wedding can never be the same. And neither can our marriage.’

  ‘Okay, maybe we can never go back to that innocent, idyllic time, but perhaps we can find something to put in its place.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘Well…’

  Abruptly Luis caught himself up, a prey to a sensation of doubt, as cold and sneaking as if a cloud had just passed in front of the sun.

  I loved you, she had said. Not I love you. He wanted to tell her everything that was in his heart. Let her know that the past didn’t matter—that all that mattered was her and the way he felt about her. But if he did—and she didn’t feel the same way…

  ‘Something’ of that feeling was all she wanted back. Not the whole, heartfelt loving that had once been the most essential part of his life.

  Better not to rush things. Better to take it one step at a time. To offer only a part of what he was feeling and then see where that took them. At
least then, if she couldn’t give him the same love back, he wouldn’t risk the pain of loss all over again. It had taken him two long years to get over that sensation, the feeling that she hadn’t loved him as he had loved her. He didn’t think he could ever recover from it a second time.

  So he caught back the impulsive declaration he had been about to make, stamping down on the protestations of love and belief in her, and instead substituted a careful, controlled explanation of the future they might have.

  ‘We could have a future together—children…’

  Her reaction was not at all as he had anticipated.

  ‘Children? You want children?’

  Any hope she’d had that she’d been wrong, that Catalina had lied, died as soon as she looked into his face. Suddenly too much on edge to stay still, she got to her feet, pacing restlessly about the room.

  ‘Of course I want children. I told you—I want a proper marriage and everything that it entails.’

  ‘Your father wants you to have children too. I get the impression that he’d like us to have them as soon as possible.’

  Luis nodded swift agreement.

  ‘I think it’s the most important thing in the world to him.’

  Abruptly Luis got to his feet, moving to stare out of the huge arched window through which the vast gardens of the castle could just be seen in the moonlight. His head was bent slightly, his shoulders hunched, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his trousers.

  ‘I really believe that he is holding on because of his dream of grandchildren. That he is fighting harder because he wants to stay alive for that.’

  There, it was out. He had never thought that he would ever tell anyone the truth of his beliefs. But he had not been able to hold the words back. Somehow being with Isabelle again had broken into the reticence that was so much a part of his relationship with his parents. To her he had been able to say the things he had never been able to say to his mother or anyone else.

  ‘You could be right.’

  Her voice behind him was surprisingly soft. He turned slowly back to face her.