by Lynne Graham
From the bedroom window, she looked out over the textured terracotta roofs that lent such warmth and colour to the panoramic view of the old town as the medieval houses beneath them stepped down the hillside. Her memory served up cherished images of the relationship they had created between them. He had bought her a gilded image of a saint in the market at Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, which he had insisted reminded him of her. She thought the resemblance was in his imagination alone. Possibly that was the first thing he had said and done that he should not have in the first forty eight hours of their stay in Italy, she mused unhappily. There was no room for such frills and fancies in a practical marriage of convenience.
But then there had been very little practical about the experiences they had shared. In the tour of Tuscany that Cesario had treated her to, he had walked hand in hand with her like a lover through winding streets and alleyways, happy to shop in tiny traditional workshops and sample the freshest of food in the picturesque restaurants. The same male who had warned her not to fall in love with him had moved the goalposts without telling her and she had been afraid to remark on it lest it change the wonderful ambience between them. They’d had picnics amongst the wildflowers on deserted hillsides and long chatty romantic evening meals on the elegant loggia at the house listening to the classical music she loved. She had adored Florence and Siena, but had found both cities too hot and crowded at this time of year and he had promised to bring her back once the height of the tourist season had passed. Now, she wondered if he would ever keep that promise.
She had learned that he was human too, once she came to appreciate that he occasionally suffered from shockingly bad migraines, which he flatly refused to talk about. Indeed he seemed to look on any admission of feeling unwell as the behaviour of a wimp and his ridiculous stoicism brought a tender smile of remembered amusement to her lips. Somewhere along the line, she acknowledged ruefully, their holiday had turned into a proper honeymoon.
He had bought her a fabulous designer bag in Florence and a painting that she found so ugly she had threatened to dump it while he believed it would grow on her and refine what he saw as her unsophisticated taste in art. And then there was the jewellery…he really loved to give her jewellery and to see her wear it. Her fingers touched the delicate choker of golden leaves that curved round her throat like an elegant question mark. He had bought it for her thirty-first birthday, which he had remembered without any prompting from her. He had also insisted that she had to have a diamond pendant and earrings if she was not to look only half dressed beside Alice when they dined out with the other couple.
He had shown her Etruscan tombs and magnificent palazzos and taught her to distinguish a good wine from an indifferent one. He had laughed when she’d told him that she had not known what cutlery to use on that disastrous first dinner date and she’d had to explain how intimidating she had found that because, born into wealth and fine dining as a way of life, Cesario had not initially understood the problem.
She had fallen in love with her husband and did not know how she could possibly have avoided doing so, because Cesario di Silvestri had somehow succeeded in making himself indispensable to her comfort and happiness.
Over dinner that evening, Cesario was still demanding that she name her mole concerning his reputation and she finally took pity on him and confided that her parents lived next door to his former housekeeper.
Cesario frowned. ‘She signed a confidentiality agreement. All my staff have to. I can’t believe she’s gossiping about my private life…’
Jess winced. ‘I should have kept quiet and I probably shouldn’t have listened either. Dot does seem to cherish a certain resentment over being put into retirement before she was ready to go.’
‘Because an audit revealed that she was helping herself to the household cash and selling off wine on the sly,’ Cesario chipped in drily. ‘That’s why she was put out to grass and Tommaso was brought in.’
Jess was shocked by that explanation. ‘But you didn’t prosecute her?’
‘She’s quite an age and had worked for the Dunn-Montgomery family all her life. Rather than make an example of her in my role as the new owner of the Halston estate, I thought it best to just write it off to experience and replace her.’
They walked hand in hand back to the little hotel. Three quarters of the way across the moonlit piazza he paused and kissed her with a slow, deep hunger that made her heart crash against her breastbone.
‘I misjudged you,’ she confided in a guilty rush. ‘I believed all the bad stuff. I thought the very worst of you from the moment we met.’
Cesario looked down at her in the moonlight, dark eyes gleaming above classic high cheekbones. ‘But you don’t now.’
‘Are you a love cheat like the tabloids say?’ Jess asked abruptly, allowing her need to know free access to her deepest insecurities.
Cesario groaned out loud in dismay at that blunt query. ‘Is my answer going to be held against me?’
‘Probably,’ Jess declared.
‘I did cheat sometimes when I was younger and sex was still a game, but even then I didn’t lie about it or make promises I couldn’t keep,’ Cesario answered. ‘Growing up with my father, who always had more than one woman on the go, I saw the cost of that kind of deception time and time again. I’ve never wanted to live my life the same way. Screaming rows, jealous scenes and bitter break-ups are better avoided.’
‘Deception is the one thing I couldn’t forgive,’ Jess confessed. ‘Honesty is incredibly important to me.’
Cesario screened his gaze, his lean, strong face hollowed by unmistakeable tension. Glancing up at him in the small hotel foyer, she surmised that she had got too serious and made him feel uncomfortable. Were her standards of behaviour too high for him? It was an unsettling suspicion. Perhaps he even suspected that she was trying to get him to make her promises and the notion brought colour to her cheeks, for she wanted nothing from him that he did not choose to give her of his own accord.
Long after Cesario went to sleep that night, Jess lay awake by his side and wondered what their future held. Or even how far that fragile future might extend in front of her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A DAY and a half later, on the eve of her return to England, Jess stared down in consternation at a pregnancy test wand and its indisputable result.
There it was, ironically, the outcome she had secretly come to fear most. Seemingly it had taken hardly any time at all for Cesario to get her pregnant and it was a discovery that ripped Jess into emotional shreds and plunged her into violent conflict with herself. She hadn’t expected to conceive so quickly and had simply assumed that it would take at least a year. One half of Jess wanted to get up and dance round the room and tell everyone and anyone who was willing to listen that she was expecting her first child. For so long she had dreamt of becoming a mother and now the opportunity had finally come her way and she knew that she ought to be feeling ecstatic.
But the other half of Jess was cast into complete turmoil by the positive result. Would this result mean that her marriage to Cesario was now effectively over? Confronted by that threatening fear, it was impossible for her to be ecstatic or even accepting. She loved Cesario, she was not yet ready to lose him, could not see when she would ever be ready to. Would she now be returning to Halston Hall alone, there to wait out the course of her pregnancy with nothing more than occasional phone calls from the man who had fathered her child? In the circumstances, how much more involved could she expect Cesario to be in her life? The whole point of their marriage had been to conceive a child, she reminded herself bleakly. He would not have married her otherwise. Now that the baby had become reality Cesario would be free to return to his former lifestyle of wine, women and song, a possibility that made Jess feel quite sick with apprehension.
Of course, it was perfectly feasible that the result was wrong, Jess began to reason frantically, surveying the discarded packaging and deciding all of a sudden that it looked like a
cheap and unreliable testing kit. Her bowed shoulders began to rise again. She just knew that Cesario wouldn’t be overly impressed by the news that she had run her own test. She really would need to see a doctor to get a proper diagnosis and it would be much simpler just to wait until she got back to England where she could easily make an appointment at the village surgery. Her frown of worry ebbed. It would be crazy to burn all her boats at once, so she would keep the unconfirmed result of the test to herself until she had irreproachable proof of her condition, she decided, her spirits recovering from their temporary dive into the doldrums. She really couldn’t be too cautious. Wouldn’t it be dreadful to tell Cesario that she was pregnant and then discover that she had made a ghastly mistake?
Of course, in the short term, she would be careful to take every possible precaution with her health in case she did receive a positive confirmation, Jess reflected. At the very least she would stay off alcohol and be careful of what she ate. To date, however, she was feeling her normal healthy self. Admittedly she was tiring a little more quickly than usual, but that tiredness and the tenderness of her breasts were the only physical changes she had noted and nothing she couldn’t live with. Torn in two by her conflicting feelings, she rested a hand against her still-flat belly and wondered if there really was a baby growing in her womb.
Attired in a simply cut crimson dress that flattered her slender curves with a close fit, Jess went downstairs for lunch. Agostina, their housekeeper, mentioned that Alice was with Cesario. Jess was about to go in the rambling main reception area to join them when she was startled to hear Cesario exclaim angrily, ‘No! That’s out of the question!’
‘But I can hardly meet her eyes as it is,’ Alice was arguing in a tone of distress. ‘Jess deserves to know the truth, Cesario. How is she going to feel if you don’t tell her?’
Round a corner and hidden from the view of her husband and his companion, Jess was frozen to the spot by the dialogue she had almost interrupted. Now her imagination was flying free and she was eavesdropping, wanting and desperately needing to know what they were talking about that had got both of them so worked up.
‘What Jess doesn’t know won’t hurt her. It’s a fallacy that the truth is always preferable or kinder.’
‘But I feel so guilty whenever I’m with her—’
‘You won’t be with her again for quite some time. We’re leaving for England tomorrow morning—’
‘It doesn’t matter how you wrap it up. What we’re doing is wrong,’ Alice argued emotively. ‘She’s being cheated!’
‘I refuse to discuss this with you any more, Alice,’ Cesario cut in with icy finality.
What we’re doing is wrong. She’s being cheated. Oh, my goodness, Oh. My. Goodness! Jess thought sickly as she stumbled blindly back to the hall and headed like a homing pigeon for the stairs again to take cover in privacy. They were having an affair behind her back and Alice was feeling guilty? Alice, it seemed, actually wanted to come clean about the affair, but Cesario was all for keeping their adultery a secret. Of course, he had excellent reasons for wanting to keep quiet, didn’t he?
Had he owed her such an honest explanation of where his heart really lay when they first embarked on their marriage of convenience? Possibly not, for fidelity and deeper emotions had not featured in what she had innocently believed that marriage would entail. What was in his heart had been nothing to do with her when he had only married her to ensure that any child they conceived was born within wedlock. And he still needed a child to ensure he could inherit Collina Verde, so naturally he wouldn’t want Alice to rock the boat with ill-judged confessions of unfaithfulness just at this moment.
It all made perfect sense to Jess and she felt dizzy and sick with shock and disillusionment. She dropped down on the edge of the bed. Her skin was clammy and her tummy was on a nauseous roll. On every level of her being she was appalled by what she had just discovered because she had expected better of the man she had married. For a start, Cesario and Stefano were as close as brothers. Both were only children and had grown up together; Cesario, in particular, had spent a lot of time with Stefano’s family following his mother’s premature death. Jess would have sworn that Cesario was deeply attached to his cousin, and that Stefano was a doting husband who would be devastated to find out that the wife he adored was sleeping with his best friend. How could Cesario betray Stefano like that? Jess called herself a fool, a blind, trusting fool, for not being more suspicious of a woman who, having once been Cesario’s lover, still remained on such openly warm terms with him. How often were such continuing friendships purely platonic? And Alice was an extremely beautiful woman…
Jess squeezed her eyes tight shut and knotted her fists. Maybe she should not have been so quick to dismiss the daunting tabloid reports of Cesario’s sexual exploits and heartless nature. Having fallen in love with him, she had wanted only to think good things of him and had happily assumed such rumours to be lies couched to entertain readers who enjoyed being shocked by the shameless shenanigans of the rich and famous. Cesario had certainly misled her, so it was hardly surprising that he had also misled his cousin into believing that his relationship with Alice was innocent.
Jess asked herself what she did now. As the saying went, she was neither fish nor fowl and really had no idea what her status was as Cesario’s wife. Was he currently sleeping with Alice? Or was that intimacy being reserved for when his relationship with Jess ended? Or was she kidding herself in thinking that the lovers might be practising that kind of respectful restraint? At the same time, Jess had spent almost every waking hour with Cesario since their wedding and she could not think when Alice and Cesario could have had the opportunity to cheat. He had enjoyed no unexplained absences or trips anywhere and had never failed to answer his mobile phone when she had called him; if he was having an affair with Alice it was an incredibly discreet one and he was being unbelievably careful not to rouse suspicions. Was it possible that there was another explanation for the mysterious conversational exchange she had overheard?
Wondering if she was being silly even to think that she might be mistaken, Jess went back downstairs. Cesario entered the dining room at almost the same time.
‘Isn’t Alice joining us?’ Jess asked, to let him know that she was aware of the other woman’s visit.
Cesario gave her a level look that carried not a shred of discomfiture. ‘No. I asked her to stay but she has guests arriving this afternoon for the weekend. Before I forget, she left a gift for you. I believe it’s a belated birthday present,’ he advanced, striding out of the room and reappearing a minute later with a package, which he extended.
Jess frowned. ‘What is it?’
‘I think she’s painted something for you,’ Cesario said carelessly.
Jess removed the wrapping paper and the bubble-wrap beneath and found she was looking at a very charming framed drawing of her dogs lying in a group on the shaded loggia. She did recall Alice sketching out there one day but had simply assumed that she was drawing the magnificent view. ‘It’s really beautiful,’ she remarked in shock at the generosity of the gift, noting how Alice had carefully managed to capture the traits of each animal. ‘She’s very talented.’
‘You’re much more impressed with that than you were with the painting I bought you,’ Cesario noted with an incredulous lift of his expressive ebony brows.
Jess studied the delightful drawing of her pets, which she would cherish, and guilty discomfiture engulfed her. She could not credit that the woman who had taken the time and effort to give her such a well-chosen, personalised present could, at the same time, be having an affair with her husband. Did that make her foolish and naive? However, now Jess could not believe that Alice was capable of such dishonesty while simultaneously behaving like a caring, considerate friend. She had no idea what Alice had been arguing with Cesario about, but she was increasingly convinced it could not relate to the two of them being involved in a secret affair. Was it possible that she herself was guilty of b
eing just a little bit paranoid about Cesario? Was she more jealous of his bond with Alice than she had any reason to be? Seemingly she had leapt far too fast to the wrong conclusion and envy was the most likely cause. Her face warmed at the idea.
‘You’re very quiet this afternoon, piccola mia.’
‘It’s very hot. I’m kind of sleepy,’ Jess said truthfully.
‘You do look tired. But then I never leave you to sleep the night through in peace,’ Cesario remarked with a rueful hint of discomfiture. ‘But tonight I will—’
‘No, you won’t,’ Jess objected before she could even think about the bold statement she was making when she disagreed. ‘I’ll have a nap now.’
A potent sexy grin curled Cesario’s mouth at that offer, his lean dark features reflecting his amusement. ‘I like being in demand very much, moglie mia.’
But if he knew she might already be pregnant, would he still want to be in demand? Or would he suddenly appreciate that all his options were open again and that the intimate phase of their marriage was over and done with? In spite of those misgivings, Jess fell asleep within minutes of lying down on the bed in the shaded bedroom and she slept the afternoon and early evening away.
When she got up again, she tracked Cesario down in the room he used as an office. Glancing up, he saw her hovering in the doorway, bright as a butterfly in a lilac top and skirt. ‘Come and see this,’ he urged with a frown.
Jess wandered over and stared down at the sheet of paper he was poring over. ‘What is it?’ she prompted uncertainly.
‘Rigo sent a scan of it to me this afternoon.’