by Lynne Graham
‘Yes,’ Mina conceded, reeling from his blunt and raggedly voiced confession. Whatever her own private thoughts on the subject might have been, the depth of remembered bitterness in Cesare’s delivery told her that he was recalling feelings that went far beyond the sting of a dented ego. He might not have loved her but he had been hurt and humiliated, she acknowledged, pained by that awareness, and if he would not believe her there was nothing she could do to take away those bitter memories. They would always stand between them.
‘But that night at the benefit everything went haywire,’ he intoned with a humourless laugh. ‘Instantaneously I wanted you again. I looked at you and you looked back at me and I knew you felt the same way, even though I was an unwelcome and dangerous echo from the past.’
‘I——’ For a split-second she was on the brink of arguing the point out of pride and then she too remembered how she had felt. Her skin burned. That intense hunger had been mutual. Even when they were fighting like cat and dog that hunger remained.
‘If you had admitted what you had done I would have behaved differently,’ Cesare stressed, and as her lips parted he shifted an expressive brown hand in a silencing motion. ‘I don’t want to get into that again.’
‘But——’
‘Leave it in the past where it should have stayed,’ he interposed in grim interruption. ‘Who am I to talk about stainless-steel ideals? I’ve had money all my life. I’ve always been able to do whatever I wanted to do and I suppose I must take that for granted. I can understand that you were tempted——’
‘But I——’
‘Dio… aren’t there more important things?’ Cesare shot at her with sudden raw frustration. ‘Can’t you see that this endless rehashing of the past is tearing us apart?’
Mina lost her angry colour, her stomach cramping up. ‘I wasn’t aware there was an us to be torn apart,’ she said tightly.
The silence went on and on and on.
Cesare gazed back at her, very pale and taut, brooding dark eyes intently pinned to her. ‘Finding out about Susie devastated me…’
‘I should have told you,’ Mina breathed in a guilty undertone. ‘I should have told you when she was born.’
‘I would have liked to have been there from the beginning,’ he admitted very quietly. ‘But now I’ve come to terms with the shock I’m simply grateful that she exists. I should have apologised before now for the accusations I made that afternoon. First impressions weren’t on anyone’s side and I wanted to hit back at you for keeping her a secret. You felt like the enemy that day.’
Mina nodded.
‘First Clayton squaring up to me like a Viking version of a Rottweiler,’ he recalled, ‘then your sister behaving as if I were some maniac on the loose…and then out of nowhere…Susie! I was shattered but also blazingly angry with you. It was easier to ignore you and concentrate on Susie than risk dragging out those feelings before the wedding…’
She recognised what an effort it was for him to admit how angry and bitter he had felt—ironically much the same as she herself had felt until she’d blown a gasket yesterday and said a lot of things she didn’t mean in a frantic last-ditch effort to save face. Yet what she had flung in anger had shaken Cesare enough to make him begin talking to her.
But then he was thinking about Susie, wasn’t he? Clearly remembering his own less than idyllic childhood with unhappily married parents, he had been forced to see that he was doing everything possible to create the same situation.
‘We didn’t have any privacy at the manor.’ But even as Mina said that she realised that both of them had avoided being alone together. Pride had made her equally guilty of a desire to avoid a direct confrontation and she had wanted Cesare to have time to simmer down. However, she’d really known deep down that, left to his own devices, he was more likely to boil than cool off.
‘Dio mio, that is not a problem here at the castello, but then let’s face it, we’re not the average newly-weds.’ Cesare vented a sardonic laugh that cut through her like a knife. ‘We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. I have the villa we can use on the coast.’
Concessions, Mina thought, comprehension spiralling through her. Without ceremony, Cesare had laid aside his desire to punish her. It had finally dawned on him that he couldn’t hurt her without hurting Susie as well. No wonder he looked so desperately on edge, and sounded so stilted: he was compromising those ‘stainless-steel ideals’, bending them for his daughter’s benefit. Welcome to the marriage of convenience you thought you could settle for a few weeks ago, Mina reflected in an agony of pain.
‘Mina…?’
‘Whatever you like,’ she said flatly, with the unspoken clarity of someone who didn’t give a damn where they went.
‘It’s…nice.’ Mina stared down fixedly at the twisted rope wedding-ring, her colour high. She imagined it turning into a real rope which she could pull tight round Cesare’s throat. The image was so innately enervating that she snapped shut the jewel box again. Cartier’s, she noted without surprise. Not a fake this time…but still an empty symbol, she told herself painfully.
‘Try it on,’ Cesare suggested.
‘Later.’ She thrust the box into her bag. She would put it in the drawer with his other gifts. She didn’t want to wear them either. Cesare seemed to think that keeping her happy meant spending a fortune on jewellery. He had already given her a fabulous gold watch and an emerald and diamond bracelet…not to mention a hideous stuffed fish in a glass case!
Freddy Fish, as she had christened him, had been an experiment to see whether or not she was right to assume that Cesare would buy absolutely anything she chose to admire. So yesterday she had admired the fish in an antique shop just to see how far he was prepared to go with his current policy of extravagantly flashing his wallet at every possible opportunity.
He had paled…but the grotesque fish had duly been purchased at an outrageous price. And Cesare, demonstrating a deviously disgusting desire to keep her sweet, had even sunk low enough to say that Freddy was a fascinating rarity. To punish him, Mina had said how wonderful it would be if she could make a collection of such things.
It was ten days since Cesare had tactlessly told her that they were scarcely the average newly-weds. And indeed they were not, Mina conceded miserably. Far from lolling about in indolence and idyllic passion, they had ‘done’ Sicily. From dawn to dusk, with Cesare in relentlessly energetic mode, she had been culturally forcefed with ruins, castles and cathedrals. They had spent several nights at Cesare’s luxurious villa on the coast.
At dusk, they generally went out for dinner, over which they made very polite conversation or discussed Susie, always a saviour when the conversation threatened to flag or veer into controversial territory. And in the early hours…they fell into their separate beds.
‘I would like you to wear a wedding-ring,’ Cesare delivered softly now.
It was a seriously challenging tone. In ten days seriously challenging was the closest Cesare had allowed himself to get to angry. He really was putting immense effort into being civilised, charming and considerate. But he was like a tiger in chains underneath the smooth front, and with every passing day of such treatment Mina became more depressed. She was convinced that Cesare was secretly bored out of his mind with her. Yet nobody could deny that he was doing everything possible to make their marriage of convenience work for Susie’s benefit.
‘Mina,’ he murmured.
‘I don’t want to wear a ring.’
For a split-second smouldering gold flared under the lush black lashes which she so envied and then he veiled his gaze. His sensual mouth compressed but he said nothing.
Mina watched him from behind her sunglasses. Breathtakingly good-looking and incredibly sexy and he didn’t want her any more. Having taken revenge out of the equation, Cesare appeared to have found a complete cure for the hunger which he had assured her would never be satisfied. Presumably his desire for revenge had previously lent her a quality of c
hallenging excitement which was now wholly absent. She now seemed to exude as much attraction for Cesare as Freddy Fish, she thought wretchedly.
He snapped his brown fingers for attention and settled the bill for their lunch. As he rose lithely upright, shrugging his broad shoulders back to straighten his jacket, Mina followed every fluid movement from behind the safe screen of her glasses. Her heartbeat was in earthquake mode, her breathing pattern shamefully fractured. In a devastatingly well-cut designer suit, his exquisitely tailored trousers defining every muscular line of his very long, lean legs, he held her entire attention.
‘Something wrong?’ he enquired lazily.
‘Nothing!’ Her voice emerged shrilly as she recalled him saying that on a physical response level he had been able to read her like a billboard four years ago. The idea that she might still be that easily read petrified her.
‘I think it’s time you met some of my friends,’ he announced without warning. ‘It would be a shame not to call in when we’re practically on their doorstep.’
He made a call on his mobile phone before he swung into the Ferrari again. He dealt Mina a sizzling smile that made her skin prickle. ‘I’m sure we’ll have an entertaining afternoon with Franca and her brother. Franca’s an actress. Roberto’s a producer.’
The Ecchio villa looked remarkably like a building on an extravagant filmset. It was palatial, furnished with a preponderance of faux marble pillars and grand gilded furniture. They had only got as far as the giant foyer when a tall and stunningly beautiful brunette with a waist-length mane of curling dark hair appeared. She was wearing something very short and flimsy in leopard print. Her equally stunning figure gleamed with golden perfection through every strategic cut-out. Indeed the outfit was so arresting that Mina gaped.
She needn’t have worried that her behaviour would be noticed. The brunette walked right past her as if she were invisible and fell on Cesare, kissing him passionately full on the mouth.
‘Franca…’ Cesare purred, making little attempt to detach himself from the indecently close press of that next-door-to-half-naked heavenly body.
Franca burst into a flood of exuberant Italian, slid an arm round him and proceeded to walk him away. Cesare replied at similar length and then glanced back with reluctance at Mina, prompting the actress finally to notice his companion.
‘Tina needs to freshen up,’ Franca said in perfect English, liquid dark eyes skimming over Mina’s simple yellow sundress pityingly as she signalled to a maidservant standing near by.
‘It’s Mina actually,’ she responded with cheeks that burned hotter than hellfire.
But Franca had already turned back to Cesare to lead him away. ‘The English dress so badly,’ she was saying in a stage-whisper which could have been heard a mile away. ‘Where on earth did you dig her up?’
Mina was shaking with shock and mortification by the time the maid had shown her into a cloakroom. She couldn’t believe that Cesare had simply walked away with that woman without making the slightest attempt to introduce her as his wife.
She looked in the mirror at the linen-mix dress which was two seasons old. This morning it had been immaculate but now it was badly creased. She cringed. All of a sudden, not wearing the clothes Cesare had bought her seemed a stupid and childishly rebellious act. Maybe he had been too ashamed of her appearance to admit that she was his wife, she found herself thinking painfully.
She had to find her own way to the social gathering by following the sound of voices out to a fabulously landscaped outdoor pool. A passing waiter paused to offer her a drink from the laden tray he was carrying. Mina accepted a glass. Three young women were sunbathing topless by the pool. Mina had only ever sunbathed topless in her twin’s presence…she could feel her skin turning brick-red again as she hurriedly glanced away from the surfeit of naked female flesh on display.
Cesare was seated at one of the tables beside Franca and several other men. Catching sight of Mina in the doorway, the brunette sprang up and advanced. ‘Tina…let me show you the swimwear.’ She planted a determined hand on Mina’s spine and propelled her across the tiled floor into a luxurious changing-room.
‘My name is Mina,’ Mina said quietly.
‘Whatever,’ Franca dismissed imperiously, making no attempt to open any of the built-in storage units as she studied Mina with irritated dark eyes. ‘You’re his secretary or something, right?’
‘Wrong.’
‘You’re a relative?’ Franca pressed dubiously.
‘No, we’re——’
Franca gasped in horrified disbelief. ‘He’s not——?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Mina was shattered by her crude assumption.
‘I’ll call a car for you. You should leave now,’ Franca told her with a smile of suppressed rage. ‘If I hadn’t been away on location, you wouldn’t have got a lookin! Cesare is mine.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mina retorted drily.
Franca spat something at her in voluble Italian, her magnificent breasts heaving against the flimsy beach cover-up. Then, disconcertingly, she laughed and dealt Mina a look of supreme scorn. ‘Stay, then, and watch me in action.’
‘I can hardly wait.’
‘Cesare is a living legend between the sheets. I hear he’s an animal in bed,’ Franca purred with rich appreciation and enormous complacency. ‘You couldn’t begin to compete with me.’
With that parting shot, Franca departed. Exit stage left, Mina reflected, in no doubt that the flamboyant brunette was an actress after her theatrical display and decidedly relieved that Franca had apparently not had hands-on experience of Cesare’s legendary attributes in the bedroom.
She drained her glass of champagne and dragged open one of the closets to rifle through the swimwear available. All of a sudden she was desperately keen to be rid of the yellow sundress. Ten minutes later, she emerged from the changing-room somewhat self-consciously sheathed in a brief black bikini with chain clasps on the hips and top.
‘Bella! Bella!’ a male voice exclaimed and a hand captured her wrist as she attempted to walk past his table and held her fast.
Bemused, she stared down at the man.
‘I am your host, Roberto Ecchio…and, unlike my sister, I love British women.’ He pressed a practised kiss to her inner wrist, shooting her a smouldering upward glance clearly intended to make her collapse gratefully at his feet.
Mina couldn’t help it. She laughed.
He gave her a pained look, drawing her down on to the vacant chair beside him. ‘You’re in love with Cesare?’
‘Mind your own business,’ Mina told him, her attention roaming over to the far table where Cesare was in deep conversation with Franca, their dark heads intimately close. Her stomach cramped up, perspiration moistening her upper lip. It crossed her mind that, although she did not expect Cesare to stick to her like superglue in company, since they had entered the villa she could well have dropped dead without him noticing.
‘Crazy about him,’ Roberto Ecchio decided. ‘What a waste of your emotion, cara. Cesare’s a loner and not the faithful type. Here today, gone like greased lightning tomorrow. You’ll never hold him. He’s a professional heartbreaker.’
Mina tensed. ‘How well do you know him?’
‘We went to school together,’ Roberto laughed, pushing a brimming glass towards her. ‘A lot of women have cried on my shoulder about Cesare.’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘But you will.’ Roberto cast a meaningful look in Cesare’s direction. Franca was running a caressing finger playfully along his strong jawline and laughing at whatever he was saying. ‘Franca’s been after him for a long time and I’m afraid my sister doesn’t listen to warnings. Don’t worry about it. She’ll get her fingers burnt too.’
‘Very probably.’ Mina wondered if Franca had deliberately set her brother on her to keep her away from Cesare. Not that Cesare was exactly fighting to escape the brunette’s attentions.
‘He’s not the marrying kind
.’
‘He is,’ Mina said gruffly. ‘He’s married to me.’
Roberto Ecchio looked at her fixedly.
‘We got married ten days ago. Ask him if you don’t believe me,’ Mina continued defensively.
‘Then what the hell is he playing at?’ the other man demanded with a frown.
‘Perhaps you should mention it to your sister.’
Roberto gave her a staggered glance and then bewildered her by roaring with laughter. He snatched up her hand again, surveyed her with eyes still alight with dancing amusement and murmured, ‘So very pleased to make your acquaintance, Signora Falcone. But break news like that to Franca when there’s an audience around to hear her hysterics? You have to be joking! As for Cesare…he deserves to have the bars of his cage rattled…’
With that incomprehensible assurance, Roberto Ecchio carried her fingers up to his mouth and started kissing them one by one.
Mina was so taken aback by his behaviour that she froze and simultaneously collided with an electrifying look of stunned censure from Cesare. Eyes across a crowded room, she thought numbly—eyes that went for the jugular would have been a more appropriate description. Abruptly freeing himself from Franca’s clinging hands, Cesare sprang upright. His vibrantly handsome features a mask of dark fury, he thrust the table out of his path. Mina was transfixed and she wasn’t the only one trapped in sudden paralysis. Everybody was looking.
Roberto squinted sideways as he slowly raised his head, even greater amusement marking his mobile face. ‘So! One violently jealous husband erupts out of nowhere! Dio mio! Cesare Falcone, Mr Cool himself, so jealous he makes a public scene,’ he savoured smugly, lounging back unconcerned in his seat. ‘He won’t hit me. I’m his best friend.’
He was right. Cesare didn’t hit him. He threw him in the swimming-pool.