Santina's Scandalous Princess(38)

* * *

She wasn't what he had expected or anticipated, Caesar acknowledged.  That wheat-blonde hair wasn't Sicilian, nor those sea-green eyes-even if  she did carry herself with the pride of an Italian woman. She was  around medium height, fine-boned and slender-almost too much so, he  thought, catching sight of the narrowness of her wrist with its lightly  tanned skin. The oval shape of her face with its high cheekbones was  classically feminine. A beautiful woman. One who would turn male heads  wherever she went. But her air of cool serenity was, he suspected,  worked for rather than natural.

And what of his own feelings towards her now that she was here? Had he  expected them? Caesar turned away from her so that she wouldn't be able  to see his expression. Was he afraid of what it might reveal to her? She  was a trained professional, after all-a woman whose qualifications  proved that she was well able to dig down deep into a person's psyche  and find all that they might have hidden away. And he was afraid of what  she might find in him.

He was afraid that she might rip away the scar tissue he had encouraged  to grow over his guilt and grief, his pride and sense of duty, over the  dreadful, shameful demands he had allowed them to make on him. So was it  more than just guilt he felt? Was there shame as well? He almost didn't  need to ask himself that question when he had borne those twin burdens  for over a decade. Had borne them and would continue to bear them. He  had tried to make amends-a letter sent but never replied to, an apology  proffered, a hope expressed, words written in what at the time had felt  like the blood he had squeezed out of his own heart. A letter never even  acknowledged. There would be no forgiveness or going back. And, after  all, what else had he expected? What he had done did not deserve to be  forgiven.

His guilt was a burden he would carry throughout his life, just as it  had already been, but that guilt was his private punishment. It belonged  solely to him. After all, there could be no going back to change  things-nor, he suspected, anything he could offer that would make  recompense for what had been done. So, no, being here with her had not  increased his guilt-he already bore it in full measure-but it had  sharpened its edge to a keenness that was almost a physical stab of pain  every time he breathed.

They were speaking in English-his choice-and anyone looking at her would  have assumed from the understated simplicity and practicality of her  plain soft blue dress, her shoulders discreetly covered by simple white  linen, that she was a certain type of educated middle class professional  woman, on holiday in Sicily.

Her name was Louise Anderson, and her mother was the daughter of the  Sicilian couple whose ashes she had come to bury in this quiet  churchyard. Her father was Australian, also of Sicilian origin.

Caesar moved, the movement making him aware of the letter he had placed in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

* * *

Louise could feel her tension tightening like a spring being wound with  deliberate manipulation by the man watching her. There was a streak of  cruelty to those they considered weaker than themselves in the Falconari  family. It was there in their history, both written and oral. He had no  reason to behave cruelly towards her grandparents, though. Nor to her.

It had shocked her when the priest to whom she had written about her  grandparents' wishes had written back saying that she would need the  permission of the Duke-a ‘formality', he had called it-and that he had  arranged the necessary appointment for her.

She would rather have met him in the bustling anonymity of her hotel  than here in this quiet, ancient place so filled with the silent  memories of those who lay here. But his word was law. That knowledge was  enough to have her increasing the distance between them as she stepped  further back from him, this time checking first to make sure there were  no potential obstructions behind her, as though by doing so she could  somehow lessen the powerful forcefield of his personality. And his  sexuality …                       
      
          



      

A shudder racked her. She hadn't been prepared for that. That she would  be immediately and so intensely aware of his sexuality. Far more so now,  in fact, than …

As she braked down hard on her accelerating and dangerous thoughts, she  was actually glad of the sound of his voice commanding her  concentration.

‘Your grandparents left Sicily for London shortly after they married,  and made their home there, and yet they have chosen to have their ashes  buried here?'

How typical it was of this kind of man-a powerful, domineering, arrogant  overlord-that he should question her grandparents' wishes, as though  they were still his serfs and he still their master. And how her own  fiercely independent blood boiled with dislike for him at that  knowledge. She was glad to be given that excuse for the antagonism she  felt towards him. No-she didn't need an excuse for her feelings. They  were hers as of right. Just as it was her grandparents' right to have  their wish to have their ashes interred in the earth of their forebears  fulfilled.

‘They left because there was no work for them here. Not even working for  a pittance on your family's land, as their parents and theirs before  them had done. They want their ashes buried here because to them Sicily  was still their home, their  land.'

Caesar could hear the accusation and the antagonism in her voice.

‘It seems … unusual that they should entrust the task of carrying out  their wishes to you, their grandchild, instead of your mother, their  daughter.'

Once again he was aware of the pressure of the letter in his pocket. And  the pressure of his own guilt … ? He had offered her an apology. That was  the past and it must remain the past. There was no going back. The  guilt he felt was a self-indulgence he could not afford to recognise.  Not when there was so much else at  stake.

‘My mother lives in Palm Springs with her second husband, and has done so for many years, whilst I have always lived in London.'

‘With your  grandparents?'

Even though it was a question, he made it seem more like a statement of fact.

Was he hoping to provoke her into a show of hostility he could use  against her to deny her request? She certainly didn't trust him not to  do so. If that was indeed his aim, she wasn't going to give him the  satisfaction. She could hide her feelings well. She had, after all, a  wealth of past experience to fall back on. That was what happened when  you were branded as the person who had brought so much shame on her  family that her own parents had turned their back on you. The stigma of  that shame would be with her for ever, and it deprived her of the right  to claim either pride or privacy.

‘Yes,' she confirmed, ‘I went to live with them after my parents divorced.'

‘But not immediately after?'

The question jolted through her like an arc of electricity, touching  sensitive nerve-endings that should have been healed. Not that she was  going to let him see that.

‘No,' she agreed. But she couldn't look at him as she answered. Instead  she had to look across the graveyard-so symbolic, in its way, as a  graveyard of her own longings and hopes which the end of her parents'  marriage had brought about.

‘At first you lived with your father. Wasn't that rather unusual for a  girl of eighteen? To choose to live with her father rather than her  mother?'

Louise didn't question how he knew so much about her. The village priest  had requested a history of her family from her when she had written to  him with regard to the burial of her grandparents' ashes. Knowing the  habits of this very close Sicilian community, she suspected enquiries  would have also been made via contacts in London.

The thought of that was enough to have fully armed anxiety springing to  life inside her stomach. If she couldn't fulfil her grandparents' final  wishes because this man chose to withhold his permission because of her …

Automatically Louise bowed her head, her golden hair catching the stray  beams of sunlight penetrating the green darkness of the cypress-shaded  graveyard.

It had been an unwelcome shock, and the last thing she had felt prepared  for, to see him, and not the priest as she had anticipated. With every  look he gave her, every silence that came before another question, she  was tensing her nerves against the blow she knew he could deliver. Her  desire to turn and flee was so strong that she was trembling inside as  she fought to resist it. Fleeing would be as pointless as trying to  outrun the deathly outpouring from a volcano. All it would achieve would  be a handful of heart-pounding, stomach-churning, sickening minutes of  time in which to imagine the awfulness of her fate. Better, surely, to  stand and defy it and at least have her self-respect intact.