'Oh...oh, dear,' Darcy muttered, so shaken by that shattering revelation that she couldn't for the life of her manage to come up with anything more appropriate.
Ilaria was sobbing herself hoarse in the centre of the hall. Darcy tried to put her arms round the girl and got pushed away. Ilaria shot an accusing, gulping stream of Italian at her.
'I'm sorry, but I was absolutely lousy at languages at school.' Darcy curved a determined hand round the girl's elbow and urged her into the drawing room. 'I know you're very upset...but try hard to calm down just a bit,' she pleaded.
'How can I? Luca will never forgive me!' Ilaria wailed, and she flung herself face-down on a sofa to sob again.
Sitting down beside her, Darcy let her cry for a while. But as soon as Luca entered the room she got up and said awkwardly,
'Look...I'11 leave you two alone—'
'No!' Ilaria suddenly reached out to grab at Darcy's hand. 'You stay...'
'Yes...because if you don't, Darcy,' Luca muttered in the strangest tone of eerie detachment from his sister's distress, 'I may just kill her.'
'You're nearly as bad as she is!' Darcy condemned roundly as Ilaria went off into another bout of tormented sobbing. 'You won't get any sense out of her talking like that.'
'I know very well how to get sense out of her!'
Luca rapped out a command in staccato Italian which sounded very much like a version of pull-yourself-together-or-else.
'I'm sorry...I'm really s-sorry!' Ilaria gulped brokenly then. 'I panicked when I realised that Darcy was the woman you met that night... Because you had married her I thought you had guessed...and that you had brought me over here to confront me with what I did!'
'Your brother wouldn't behave like that,' Darcy said quietly.
Luca shot her a curious, almost pained look, and then turned his attention back to his sister. 'How did you do it?'
'You shouldn't have been at the apartment at all that evening because it was the night of the ball.' Sitting bolt-upright now on the sofa, clutching the tissue that Darcy had fetched for her use, Ilaria began to shred it with restive, trembling hands. 'I needed money and you'd cut off my allowance...refused to let me even see Pietro...! was so angry with you! I was going to run away with him, but we needed money to do that—'
'You were seventeen,' Luca cut in harshly. 'I did what I had to do to protect you from yourself. If you hadn't been an heiress that sleazy louse wouldn't have given you a second glance!'
'Let her tell her story,' Darcy murmured, watching Ilaria cringe at that blunt assessment.
'I h-had a key to the apartment. I knew all the security codes. One day when I had lunch there with you, you went into the safe and I watched you do it from the hall,' Ilaria mumbled shamefacedly. 'I thought there would be cash in the safe...'
'Your timing was unfortunate.'#p#分页标题#e#
'All there was... was the Adorata,' Ilaria continued shakily. 'I was furious, so I took it. I told myself I was entitled to it if I needed it, but when I took the Adorata to Pietro, he...he laughed in my face!
He said he wasn't fool enough to try and sell a famous piece of stolen goods. He said he would have had Interpol chasing him across Europe in pursuit of it...so I planned to put the ring back the next morning.'
"That was a timely change of heart,' Darcy put in encouragingly, although one look at Luca's icily clenched and remote profile reduced her to silence again.
'But you see, you went back to the apartment that night and stayed there...you found the safe open and the Adorata gone...I was too late!' Ilaria wailed.
'What did you do with the ring?'
'It's safe,' his sister hastened to assure him. 'It's in my safety deposit box with Mamma's jewellery.'
Momentarily, Luca closed his eyes at that news. 'Porca miseria...' he ground out unsteadily. 'All this time...'
'If you'd called in the police I would have had to tell you I had it,' his sister muttered, almost accusingly. 'But when I realised you believed that the woman you'd left the ball with had taken it...' She shot a severely embarrassed glance at Darcy, belatedly recalling that that woman and her brother's wife were now one and the same.
'I mean—'
'A/e...it's all right,' Darcy cut in, but her cheeks were burning.
'You see...' Ilaria hesitated. 'You weren't like a real person to me, and it didn't seem to matter who Luca blamed as long as he didn't suspect me.'
Darcy studied the exquisite Aubusson carpet fixedly, mortification overpowering her. She could well imagine how low an opinion Ilaria must have had of her at seventeen: some tramp who had dived into bed with her brother the same night she had first met him.
Disconcertingly, Luca vented a flat, humourless laugh. 'Aren't you fortunate that Darcy disappeared into thin air?'