But now she shifted uncomfortably, a sudden wistfulness sending her thumbpad on a stroke of the empty space where her rings should be.
‘Do you want them back?’
Catherine jumped, severely jolted by the fact that he wasn’t only looking at her now, but was doing it enough to miss nothing!
‘It seems—practical,’ she said, using the same flat tone as he. ‘To avoid any—speculation. For Santo’s sake.’
For Santo’s sake. She grimaced at the weakness of her excuse, and even though she didn’t check she knew that Vito was grimacing too. Because they both knew that if she put her rings back on she would be doing it for her own sake.
Pride being another sin they were all victim to in different ways. And her pride wanted her to wear the traditional seal of office that stated clearly her position in Vito’s life. That way she could hold her head up and outface her critics—of which she expected to meet many—and feel no need to explain her arrival back to those people who probably believed their marriage had been dissolved long ago.
The car moved on up the hillside, and the higher it went the bigger the residential properties became and the more extensive and secluded became the land surrounding them. As they reached a pair of lattice iron gates that automatically swung open as they approached them, Catherine’s attention turned outwards again, her interest picking up as she viewed the familiar tree-lined approach to her old home and found herself watching breathlessly for the house itself to come into view.
The gardens were a delight of wide terraces, set out in typically Italian formality, with neat pathways and hedgerows and elegant stone steps leading down to the next terrace and so on. There were several tiny courtyard areas fashioned around tinkling fountains framed by neatly clipped box hedgerows of jasmine and bougainvillea that were a blaze of colour right now.
As they rounded a bend in the driveway the house suddenly came into view. The Villa Giordani had been standing here for centuries, being improved on and added to until it had become the most desired property in the area.
Bright white walls as thick as four feet in places stood guarding an inner sanctum. Good taste and an eye for beauty had always been present in the Giordani genes. There was no upper floor terrace exactly, but each suite of rooms had its own balcony set flat against the outer wall and marked by a thick stone arch and balustrade supported on turned stone supports. The balconies went deep—deep into the house itself—in an effort to offer shade to their occupants, who might want to sit there and enjoy the view over the Bay of Naples, which was nothing short of breathtaking from this high on the hill.
In keeping with the upper floor, the ground floor kept to the same arched theme, only the low stone balustrades had been extended out to the edge of the wide terrace which circumvented the whole house.
Nothing had ever been skimped on in the creating of the Giordani residence. Even the four deep steps leading up to the terrace had been designed to add to the overall grandeur of the place.
The driveway continued on to curve round towards the back of the house, where Catherine knew the garages lay along with a stable block, two tennis courts and a swimming pool tucked away in a natural bowl in the landscape. But Vito brought the car to a halt at the front steps and shut down the engine.
Santo was already scrambling at the back of Catherine’s seat in an effort to get out. ‘Hurry up, Mummy!’ he commanded impatiently. ‘I want to go and surprise Nonna before she knows we’re here!’
Climbing out of the car, Catherine unlocked the back of her seat to set her impatient son free, then stood watching as he raced off towards the house, bursting in through the front doors with a, ‘Nonna, where are you?’ at the top of his voice. ‘It’s me, Santo! I’m home!’
I’m home... Catherine felt her mouth twist in bitter rueful acknowledgement at just how much ‘at home’ her son had looked and sounded as his dark-eyed, dark-haired little body had shot him through those doors without a thought given to knocking first. And the words had burst from him in free-flowing Italian, as if it was the only language he knew how to speak.
As if he belonged here.
On the other side of the car, Vito stood watching also. And as her top lip gave a quiver in response to an unacceptable hurt she was suddenly feeling, he murmured, ‘Here...’ and Catherine turned only just in time to catch what it was he was tossing to her. ‘A sweet to follow the bitter pill,’ he drawled sardonically.
Frowning slightly, puzzled by both the cryptic remark and what he had tossed to her, she looked down to find that she was holding the keys to the Mercedes in her hand.
Her frown deepened, and for a confused moment she actually wondered if he was ordering her to go and garage the car! Then enlightenment struck. The sardonic words began to make sense.
He had not been watching their son; he had been watching her. And the sweetener remark had been a sarcastic reference to her reaction to the confidence with which Santo knew his place here!
But, worse than that, the keys had not been tossed to her to use to garage anything.
Vito was making her a gift of this beautiful Mercedes!
Her eyes shot up to clash with his, shaded lenses trying to probe through shaded lenses in an effort to try and discover before she responded if this was some kind of joke! Out here beneath his native skies he looked more the arrogant Italian than he had ever done. The darkness of his hair, the richness of his skin and the proud angle at which he held his head all sent the kind of tingling messages running through her that she did not like to feel.
Sexual messages. Without her being able to do a single thing to control it, the soft, springy cluster of curls nestling at the crown of her thighs began to tingle and stir beneath the covering of her thin jade summer dress. And her nipples gave a couple of sharp pricking stings in response.
It was awful, like being bewitched. She even found it shamefully sexy to note the way he had rolled up the sleeves on his pale blue shirt—as if it came as supremely natural for him to have them settle at just the right place to draw attention to the hair-peppered strength in his forearms.
‘I can’t accept this!’ she burst out shrilly—and secretly wondered if it was the car or the man’s sexual pull that she was refusing to accept. ‘It’s too much, Vito,’ she tagged on hurriedly. ‘And I have a car tucked away here somewhere,’ she remembered, glancing around her as if she expected her little Fiat runabout to suddenly appear of its own volition.
‘It lost the will to live over a year ago,’ he informed her with yet more dry sarcasm. ‘When no one else bothered to use it.’
And when she still hovered there in the sunlight, so conditioned to accepting nothing from Vito that she couldn’t bring herself to accept this gift now, she heard him release a small sigh. ‘Just bite the bullet and say thank you graciously,’ he grimly suggested.
‘As gracious as you were in offering the car to me?’ she couldn’t resist flashing back.
His grimace acknowledged her thrust as a hit. And he opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was stalled by the sudden appearance of his mother on the terrace.
In her sixties now, Luisa was still a truly beautiful woman. Only slightly smaller than Catherine, and naturally slender, she was a walking advert for eternal youth. Her skin was as smooth as any twenty-year-old’s, and her hair kept its blackness with only the occasional help from her talented hairdresser.
But it was the inner Luisa that drew people to her like bees to the sweetest honeypot ever found. There wasn’t a selfish bone in her body. She was good, she was kind, she was instinctively loving. And if she had one teeny-teeny fault, then it was an almost painful refusal to see bad in anyone.
And that included her daughter-in-law, most definitely her son, and of course her goddaughter—Marietta.
‘Darling, I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to see you standing here!’ Luisa murmured sincerely as she walked down the steps and right into Catherine’s open embrace. ‘And you look so lovely!’ she
declared as she drew away again. ‘Vittorio, the Giordani eye for true beauty did not escape you,’ his mother informed him. ‘This woman will still be a source of pride to you when you are both old and grey.’
Off with the old, on with the new, Catherine wryly chanted to herself. In true Luisa form she was discarding the last three intensely hostile years as if they’d never happened.
‘Come,’ Luisa said, linking her arm through Catherine’s and turning them both towards the house. ‘Santo is already raiding the kitchen for snacks, and I have a light tea prepared in the summer room. The special carrier bringing your luggage will not be here for another couple of hours, so we have time to sit and have a long chat before you need worry about overseeing your unpacking...’
Behind her, Catherine was aware of Vito’s shaded gaze following them as arm in arm they mounted the steps. And there was an unexpected urge in her to turn round and invite him to come and join them. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. That kind of gesture had no place in what they had with each other.
Yet...
With her fingers curling around the bunch of keys she still held in her palm, she paused on the top step that formed the beginning of the wide terrace.
‘Wait,’ she murmured to Luisa. And on impulse turned and strode back down the steps to where Vito was still standing where they had left him.
An excuse? she asked herself as she drew to a stop in front of him. Had she needed an excuse to justify coming back to him? Yes, it was an excuse, she answered her own question. And, yes, she needed one to approach Vito in any way shape or form.
‘Thank you for the car,’ she murmured politely.
He was gazing down at her through those dratted glasses, though in a way she was glad they were there so she didn’t have to read his expression.
She saw his mouth twitch. ‘My pleasure,’ he drawled with super-silken sardonicism.
It put her set teeth on edge. ‘I really do appreciate the thought,’ she added through them.
‘My heart is gladdened by your sincerity,’ he replied with taunting whimsy.
Her eyes began to flash behind the glasses. Maybe he caught a glimpse of it, because his hand suddenly shot up and in the next moment both pairs of sunglasses had been whipped away and tossed casually onto the back seat of the car.
Stripped bare of her hiding place, Catherine didn’t know what to do other than release a stifled gasp. Then, on another move that left her utterly floundering, he dipped his head and caught her parted mouth with his own.
His kiss was deep and very intimate, and his body heat was stifling. The way his fingertips were sliding featherlight caresses up and down her arms was just another distraction she would have preferred to do without.
But her lips softened beneath his, and she swayed even closer to the source of heat, and the shaky sigh that escaped from her was really a shiver of pleasure at what his fingers were doing to her.
‘Now I feel thanked,’ he murmured as he drew away again. ‘And my mother is enchanted. That is two birds killed with one small stone, Catherine. You may commend yourself.’
‘You sarcastic rat,’ she hissed at him, stepping away from him with a sudden flush to her cheeks that had nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure.
‘I know,’ he agreed, still smiling that sardonic smile as he leant back against the car and folded his arms across his pale-blue-covered chest. ‘But it was either sarcasm or ravish you,’ he said, and when she blinked, he grimaced. ‘You turn me on, hard and fast, Catherine. I thought you were aware of that. Watching you walk up the steps to my house was, in fact, the biggest turn-on I’ve experienced in a long—long time.’
‘You’re over-sexed,’ she snapped, turning away from him.
‘And under-used,’ he tagged on dryly.
Catherine walked off back to his waiting mother with her chin up and her expression a comical mix of angst and sweetness. The angst was for Vito, the sweetness a sad attempt to show Luisa that everything was fine! But she dropped the Mercedes car keys on the nearest flat surface she passed as she entered the elegant Giordani hallway—and gained a whole lot of satisfaction from knowing that Vito had arrived at the front door in time to see her doing it.
He knew why she had done it. He knew she was discarding both him and his sex appeal—and the darn gift—with that one small gesture. But, in usual arrogant Vito form, he ignored it all, politely declined to join them for refreshment and went off instead to find his son—which was all that really mattered to him anyway.
Afternoon tea was surprisingly pleasant, mainly because both Luisa and Catherine were careful not to broach any tricky subjects. Afterwards Santo came looking for his mother, so he could take her up to show her his bedroom. They spent a while in there together, looking at and discussing all the surprisingly well-used things he had in there. There was a nice informality about the place that touched her a little, because it was really only a bigger version of Santos’s bedroom at home.
Home. Once again the word brought her up short. Home is here now, she told herself sternly. Home is here...
After that Santo was taken by his grandmother to visit friends he had in the area, and after watching them stroll away hand in hand down one of the pathways towards the lowest part of their huge garden, where Catherine remembered there was a small gate which led out onto the road, she decided to fill in her time by making a tour of the house, to reacquaint herself with all of its hidden treasures.
Nothing had changed much, she noted as she strolled from elegantly appointed room to room. But then, why mess with perfection once you’d achieved it? Most of the rooms were furnished with the kind of things which had been collected through several centuries, by Giordanis adding to rather than discarding anything, so the finished result was a tasteful blending of periods that gave an impressive picture of the family’s successful history.
Vito was proud of his heritage. And it meant a lot to him to have a son to follow after him. Coming here for the first time, Catherine had admitted to feeling rather in awe of the kind of rarefied world she was being drawn in to. But by then it had already been too late to have second thoughts about whether she wanted to marry a man who in name alone was a legend in his own country. Already heart and soul in love with Vito, and pregnant with the next Giordani heir, she’d had her freedom of choice taken away from her.
And there had been so many people very eager to remind her of just how lucky she was to be marrying Vito. He was special, and being treated as special had also made him arrogant, she thought dryly, as she stood gazing around the huge ballroom which still looked exactly as it had done in the early eighteenth century when it had been constructed. To her knowledge it was still used for formal occasions.
Her own wedding ball had taken place here, she recalled. It had been a wonderful extravagant night, when the house had been filled with light and music and laughter, and the gardens hung with romantic lanterns so their guests could take the air if they felt like it. A reminiscent smile touched her lips as she watched herself being danced around the vast polished floor in the arms of her new husband in her flowing gown of gold which had been specially designed for her.
‘Have I told you today how beautiful you are?’ Vito’s softly seductive voice echoed back to her through a trail of memories. ‘You outshine every woman here tonight.’
‘You’re only saying that because it flatters your own ego,’ she’d mocked him.
She could still hear the sound of his burst of appreciative laughter ringing around this room even as she drew the doors shut on the ballroom. And she was smiling wryly to herself as she turned to make her way to the elegant central stairway. For Vito had laughed like that because the man was conceited enough to know that having a beautiful wife flattered his ego for choosing her, not her ego for being her.
That was the way it was with a Giordani, she mused whimsically as she strode along the upper mezzanine and in through one of the many doors that lined the elegant two-winged landing.
To them, other people were the satellites which revolved around their rich and compellingly seductive world. It was supposed to be a privilege to be invited to enter it.
Enter where? she then thought suddenly, and brought her wayward attention to an abrupt standstill along with her feet, when she realised just where it was she was standing.
A bedroom. Their bedroom. The one she’d used to share with Vito before she ran away.
Her heart began to thud, her throat closing over as she took on board just what she had done while her mind had been elsewhere.
She had walked herself right into the one room in the house she had been meaning to steer well clear of.
Her first instinct was to get out of there again as quickly as she could! Her second instinct had her pausing instead, though, giving in to an irresistible urge to check out the one place where she and Vito had always managed to be in harmony.
The bedroom. The bed, still standing there like a huge snow sleigh, made of the richest mahogany and polished to within an inch of its life. The width of three singles, it still had the same hand-embroidered pure white counterpane covering its fine white linen, still had its mound of fluffy white pillows they’d used to toss to the floor before retiring each night.
Then she recalled why they’d used to toss those pillows away so carelessly, and felt the tight sting of that memory attack the very centre of her sexuality.
Was that all to begin again? she asked herself tensely. All the rowing and fighting, followed by the kind of sexual combat that used to leave them both a little shell-shocked afterwards?
It has already started again, she reminded herself. And on that grim acknowledgement let her eyes drift around the rest of the room to discover that not a single thing had been changed since she’d last stepped into it.
Yet, she had changed. She wasn’t the same person she had been three years ago. In fact, at this precise moment she felt rather like a lost penny that had found itself being tossed back, only to land in the wrong place entirely.
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