CHAPTER FIVE
CONSTANTIN HAD DISCARDED his tuxedo and tie and unfastened the top buttons on his shirt to reveal the bronzed skin of his throat, and a few curling black chest hairs. He was leaning back against the sofa cushions, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his arms crossed behind his head in an attitude of indolent relaxation that was far removed from the stomach-squirming tension that gripped Isobel as she stared at his handsome face.
‘I saw you leave and assumed you had gone home.’
‘I went to get something from my car and borrowed your door key so that I could let myself back into the flat. You were talking to the police officer, and I guess you didn’t notice me go into the kitchen.’ He nodded to the cup and saucer on the coffee table. ‘I made you a cup of tea.’
Isobel was less interested in the tea than the holdall on the floor by his feet.
‘I always keep an overnight bag in the car,’ he explained, following her gaze, ‘in case I decide to stay away from home for some reason.’
No doubt ‘some reason’ meant an invitation from a woman to spend the night together. Isobel felt a shaft of pain at the idea of him making love to one of the numerous gorgeous females he had been photographed with in the newspapers during the past two years. Jealousy burned hotly inside her—another unwanted emotion to add to the list of unpleasant experiences tonight, she thought grimly.
The discernible gleam of amusement in his eyes was the last straw. She gave him a tight smile. ‘I hope you find somewhere comfortable to stay tonight.’
He laughed softly and patted the cushion. ‘I’m sure your sofa is very comfortable. I’ll let you know in the morning.’
‘There’s absolutely no reason for you to stay.’ Constantin made her feel more unnerved than David did, albeit in a different way, Isobel thought ruefully. ‘I’ll put the double lock on the front door, and, unless the stalker is Spiderman, he won’t be able to climb through a window on the fourth floor.’
Constantin merely gave her a lazy smile. ‘Humour me, hmm, cara?’
‘This is ridiculous. I don’t want you here.’ Her tone was unknowingly desperate. He unsettled her way too much for her comfort.
He stood up and strolled towards her. Isobel sensed that beneath his laid-back manner he was utterly determined to have his own way. ‘If I leave, I will demand the immediate return of my personal property, which you took without my consent.’
‘What personal property...?’ She stiffened as he took hold of the hem of her tee shirt, his tee shirt. The shirt reached to just below her hips, and the light brush of his fingers against her thigh felt as if a flame had burned her flesh. Her breath caught in her throat as he slowly began to raise the hem.
‘You really want this old shirt back?’ she said in a choked voice.
‘I particularly like this shirt.’
If he continued to lift the tee shirt up he would reveal her bare breasts. She gave a little shiver—half excitement and half apprehension—as she imagined him stripping her and cupping her breasts in his hands. She would be a fool to take this route again, but when had she ever behaved sensibly where Constantin was concerned?
Constantin was tempted to whip the shirt over her head and then pull her close, trace his hands over her body to rediscover every delicious dip and curve before taking the same path with his mouth. It was how they had always communicated best, two bodies joined and moving in perfect accord. The suspicious brightness in Isobel’s eyes warned him that her emotions were on a knife-edge. The stalker had scared her more than she had admitted to him or the police, and what she needed from him now was not passion but compassion.
‘Stop fighting me, Isabella,’ he said gently. ‘You know you won’t win. Sit down and drink your tea before it gets cold.’
If she didn’t feel like a wrung-out rag she would tell him where to go, Isobel thought. But she must be suffering from delayed shock or something because her legs refused to support her and she sat down abruptly. She wished she had chosen an armchair when Constantin joined her on the sofa, and she sipped her tea, trying to ignore her awareness of him.
‘I was looking at your photos,’ he remarked, glancing at the montage of photographs on the wall.
‘I’ve kept a pictorial record of every city where the Stone Ladies have performed.’ She recognised his ploy to keep her mind off the stalker and went along with it. ‘Often we only play at a venue for one night before moving on to the next town but I have a list of places I’d like to go back and visit properly.’
‘I’ve always wondered about the name of the band,’ he mused. ‘Why did you call yourselves Stone Ladies when two of the band members are male?’
She smiled, and Constantin was glad to see evidence that some of her tension had eased. ‘The name refers to an ancient stone circle on the moors near to the village in Derbyshire where we all grew up. The legend says that a group of ladies from the royal court loved to dance so much that they risked the wrath of the king by dancing on the Sabbath, and as a penalty they were turned to stone.
‘Our group, Carly, Ben, Ryan and I, felt a lot of sympathy for the ladies because we had similar difficulties playing our music when we wanted to. None of us were allowed to practise at home.’ She sighed. ‘My father thought I should be studying, not singing, and Ryan’s father expected him to spend all his spare time working on the family farm. Our parents couldn’t understand how much our music meant to us. I had countless arguments with my father, who thought music was a waste of time and that I should focus on passing my exams and getting a proper job.’
The bleakness in her voice caught Constantin’s attention. ‘Your father must be proud of you now that you and the band are so successful?’
‘Dad died a few months ago.’ Isobel shrugged. ‘He wasn’t interested in my music or how well the band was doing. I couldn’t live up to the expectations he’d had of me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My brother was Dad’s favourite. Simon was really clever at school and had planned to go to university and train to be a doctor. My father was so proud of his son and he was devastated when Simon died. I’m afraid I was no substitute. I wasn’t interested in academic subjects and Dad ridiculed my dreams of making a living as a musician. I couldn’t be the person my father wanted me to be.’ She glanced at Constantin. ‘When we married, I couldn’t be the person you wanted me to be, either,’ she said flatly.
He frowned. ‘I did not have expectations of you. When we married I thought, hoped that you would be happy to fulfil the role of my wife.’ His face darkened. ‘But it wasn’t enough for you.’
‘What you wanted was a glamorous hostess who would organise dinner parties and impress your guests with her witty conversation and sublime sense of style,’ Isobel said bitterly. ‘I failed miserably as a hostess, and the designer clothes I wore were not my style, they were what you decided I should wear.’
‘I admit there were occasions when your hippy-chick clothes were not suitable. DSE is synonymous with style and superb quality, and I needed my wife to help me to represent those qualities. The tie-dyed, flowers-in-your-hair look was not a good advertisement for the company,’ he said sardonically.
‘But it was me. The hippy look, as you call it, was my style. You didn’t object to the way I dressed when we first met.’
He had not taken much notice of her clothes because he had been more interested in getting her out of them as quickly as possible, Constantin acknowledged cynically.
‘You were determined to mould me into the perfect wife, in the same way that my father had tried to mould me into the perfect daughter,’ Isobel rounded on him, her eyes flashing. ‘But neither you nor my dad were interested in me as a person. And like my dad, you never showed any interest in my music or encouraged my singing career.’
His mouth tightened. ‘When we were first
married, you were not hell-bent on pursuing a music career. You’ve said yourself that we were happy living in London at the time, and you gave the impression that you were content to be a wife and soon-to-be mother to our child.’
His words sliced through Isobel’s heart. ‘But I didn’t get the chance to be a mother.’ Her voice was raw. ‘It’s true that in the early months of our marriage I was absorbed in my pregnancy,’ and in you, she thought to herself, remembering the man she had married. Constantin had been a charming and attentive husband and she had let herself believe that her happiness would last.
‘After we lost Arianna I was left with nothing. For reasons I didn’t understand, you had become a remote stranger and I felt that I hardly knew you. All I had was my music. Writing songs and singing with the band were my only comfort in those terrible days when I sometimes wondered if I would go mad with grief.’
She swallowed the lump in her throat. Revisiting the past was always painful, but tonight, when her emotions were ragged after her scare with the stalker, being bombarded with memories was unendurable.
‘This conversation is pointless,’ she told Constantin as she jerked to her feet. ‘We should have had it two years ago, but we didn’t and now it’s too late. One of the reasons I left was because you refused to talk about the things that mattered, like the miscarriage. You might have been able to forget about our baby but I felt desolate and unsupported by you.’
He leapt up and raked a hand through his hair. ‘Perhaps we might have talked more if you had spent more time at home. I lost count of the number of times that I arrived home from work to be told by Whittaker that you were out with your friends.’ His blue eyes glittered as cold and hard as sapphires. ‘Don’t put all the blame on me, Isobel. We couldn’t work on the problems with our marriage because you were never there.’
She shook her head. ‘It was you who was absent from our relationship. I don’t mean in a physical sense, but on an emotional level you had distanced yourself from me. My friends gave me what you seemed incapable of giving—emotional support. You never allowed us the opportunity to share our feelings about the loss of our daughter. Even now, whenever I mention Arianna you clam up.’
‘What’s the point in going over and over it?’ Constantin saw Isobel flinch at his raised voice and knew she was startled by his violent outburst, as well she might be, he thought grimly. He never lost control.
Only once in his life had he seen his father show emotion—on the day of Constantin’s mother’s funeral. He had been eight years old, and had managed to get through the church service and watching his mother’s coffin being lowered into her grave without crying because he knew it was what was expected of him. ‘De Severino men never cry,’ his father had told him many times. But later, on his way up to bed, Constantin had heard a noise from his father’s study, a sound like a wounded animal in great pain that had chilled his blood.
Peeping round the door, he had been startled to see his father lying curled up on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Franco’s outpouring of grief had been shocking and terrifying to witness for an impressionable young boy. Constantin had felt sad that his mother had died, but his father’s agony had scared him. At the age of eight he had decided that he never wanted to feel such pain. He never wanted to love so intensely that love’s dark side, loss, would bring him to his knees.
He dragged his mind from the past and found Isobel staring at him with a bitter expression in her eyes.
She might have guessed that Constantin would not show even a flicker of response to their daughter’s name, Isobel thought angrily.
‘You really are made of stone, aren’t you? On the surface you are a man who has everything: looks, wealth, power, but you’re an empty shell, Constantin. Inside, you are an emotional void and I actually feel sorry for you.’
Her words rankled. What did she know about the emotions he kept buried deep inside him? What did she really know about him? But the fact that she did not know him was his fault, taunted a voice inside Constantin’s head. He had not dared open up the Pandora’s box of his emotions to Isobel for fear of what he might reveal about himself.
He looked at her wearing the baggy tee shirt that disguised her shape, and was infuriated by the realisation that even if she wore a sack that covered her from head to toe he would still want her more than he had ever wanted any other woman. Goaded by the accusation in her eyes, and by the knowledge that he had failed her when she’d had the miscarriage, he shot out his hand and caught hold of her wrist.
‘I don’t need your pity, mia bella. There’s only one thing I ever needed from you,’ he told her, pulling her towards him. ‘You keep saying that you wished we had talked more, but the truth is neither of us wanted to waste time talking because we were so damned hungry for each other.’
‘Sex would not have solved our problems,’ Isobel cried, panic filling her as she tried vainly to break free from him. In truth, his grip on her wrist was not very tight. It was his grip on her heart that prevented her escape.
As she watched his dark head descend she wondered if, when their marriage had been falling apart, sex might have been a solution that would have given them a way to communicate again. But ever since Constantin had suggested that they make love two months after the miscarriage, and she had rejected him, a chasm had opened up between them and he had not approached her again.
At the time she had been angry with him for what she had perceived as his lack of support. But perhaps he had been trying to reach out to her, she thought with hindsight. In bed they had always understood each other perfectly and their desire had been mutually explosive and fulfilling.
While her mind had once again been focused on the past, she had forgotten the danger of her present situation. When had Constantin unclamped his fingers from her wrist and slid his arm around her waist? Her breath rushed from her lungs as he tugged her against him, making her agonisingly aware of every hard muscle and sinew on his whipcord body as he locked his other arm around her. Her eyes flew to his face, but her demand for him to release her died in her throat as his mouth came down on hers and he made demands of his own, his kiss hot and potent and utterly ruthless in its mastery.
He moved one hand down to clasp her bottom, jerking her pelvis into burning contact with the solid ridge of his arousal. She found his dominance shamefully thrilling. Beneath his civilised façade Constantin was all primitive, passionate male. It had been so long since she had felt him inside her. The thought weakened her resolve to resist him and when he slipped his hand beneath the hem of her shirt and stroked his fingers over her stomach and ribcage, she held her breath and silently willed him to move his hand higher and touch her breasts.
He had always had the ability to read her mind, and when he brushed his thumb pad across one swollen nipple she gave a choked cry. He took advantage of her parted lips to push his tongue into her mouth. Isobel’s senses were swamped by him. The scent of his cologne was achingly familiar. She remembered the first time he had made love to her; she had been overwhelmed by the responses he had drawn from her untutored body, and afterwards she had pressed her face into his neck and tasted salt on his sweat-sheened skin.
He transferred his hand to her other breast and rolled her nipple between his fingers, causing a shaft of exquisite sensation to shoot through her. With a soft moan she melted against him and tipped her head back as he traced his lips down her throat. Constantin pushed the neck of the too-big tee shirt over her shoulder and trailed kisses along her collarbone.
‘Mio Dio!’ His savage imprecation shattered the sensual mist as he stared at the livid red mark he had uncovered. ‘What happened to your shoulder?’
Isobel had noticed the beginnings of the bruise while she had been undressing for bed, but when Constantin had kissed her she had forgotten everything but her need for him. ‘He...the stalker caught hold of me as I ran for the lift, but I managed to get
away from him.’ She shivered as her mind flashed back to those terrifying moments before the lift doors had closed, when she had turned and seen David’s face contorted with fury. She had tried to convince herself that he had meant her no harm, but the memory of his wild-eyed expression was stuck in her mind.
Constantin glimpsed the fear in Isobel’s hazel eyes and felt a surge of anger at the stalker, but also at himself. She had run to him for safety. He choked back a mirthless laugh. The bitter truth was that, far from being safe with him, she was innocently unaware of the danger he posed to her. His—as it turned out—unfounded jealousy of Ryan Fellows was proof that he had inherited a dark side to his nature from his father. The monster that had been inside Franco De Severino also lived within Constantin and the only way to control the beast was to avoid awakening it.
So what the hell was he doing coming on to Isobel?
He stepped away from her and raked an unsteady hand through his hair. ‘I’m going to stay here tonight,’ he said roughly. She could argue all she liked, but the welt on her shoulder was a stark reminder of the terror she must have felt when the stalker had confronted her outside her flat.
He frowned as he remembered something she had said after the attack. ‘What did you mean when you said that the stalker gave you funeral flowers?’
‘Oh, the white lilies.’ Isobel wondered if she had overreacted when the stalker had presented her with the flowers, and she felt silly that she’d mentioned them to Constantin. ‘I don’t suppose David meant anything sinister, but I’ve always hated lilies since my brother’s funeral. The church was filled with them. My strongest memory of that awful day was the sickly perfume of lilies.’ She shuddered. ‘Since then I’ve always considered it the scent of death.’
‘I had no idea you disliked them,’ Constantin said slowly. He remembered that he had taken a bouquet of lilies to Isobel in the hospital after she’d had the miscarriage. Of course, giving her flowers had been a totally inadequate gesture when she had lost their baby, but he hadn’t known what else to do. He had felt helpless to comfort her in her grief. Standing outside her room listening to her sobbing had ripped his heart to shreds. But from boyhood he had learned from his father to suppress his emotions. He had been unable to respond to Isobel the way she had needed him to, and was incapable of voicing his own devastation at the loss of their baby girl.
To Wear His Ring Again Page 7