The Veranchetti Marriage(21)

She was ill with mortification, forced to take the seat and smile in the man’s general direction. Alex glanced up, an abstracted half-smile softening his expression. Sofia moved about, pouring the coffee, pressing Kerry for a breakfast order. But if she ate, she would very likely throw up, she acknowledged. She had been so distressed that day. The lawyer had remained coldly impersonal while she had begged him to speak to Alex for her, had begged him to convince Alex that he had to come and see her face to face. “That is not my client’s wish, signora,” he had intoned expressionlessly.

In retrospect, she marvelled that she had survived that period. A shudder of fearful repulsion snaked through her as she surveyed Alex from beneath her copper lashes. “Excuse me.” She got up on cotton-wool legs with a slightly bowed head. “I’ll leave you to your business discussion.”

Strolling into the house, she could feel Alex’s questioning glance burning into her back. She went out to the terrace at the rear of the villa. How could she sit and make polite conversation with a man who had witnessed and played a part in her humiliation? It was too much to demand of her. But Alex was an unfeeling, insensitive brute. He probably didn’t even remember that Carreras was the one.

There were too many cracks to paper over. This marriage could never work. Even her innocence could not wipe out the memory of a nightmare. Yesterday she had let herself float with the tide because she loved him and she had wanted to cling to the fragile hope that he had meant it when he talked about a fresh start. What a fool she had been!

She was standing by the sea wall, gazing down sightlessly at the waves crashing white foam against the rocks far below, when firm hands curved hard to her shoulders from behind. She flinched.

“They’re gone,” Alex drawled roughly.

So he had remembered…my God, how could either of them ever forget?

“You’ve got to let me go, Alex,” she whispered. It was the only answer that she could see.

His fingers bit painfully into her slender forearms. “No,” he gritted. “Why should you talk like this now?”

“You’re hurting me.”

His hold loosened, his thumbs rubbing soothingly over the indentations of his hard fingers. “I didn’t mean to. I think I have bruised you. Forgive me.”

An hysterical laugh bubbled up in her convulsed throat.

“I remembered too late to protect you from that embarrassment. It won’t be repeated. It was an unfortunate oversight. You will not have to see him again.”

The laugh escaped this time, high-pitched and unnatural. “What are you going to do? Tell him he’s no longer welcome in your home because he once performed a certain task at your behest?”

“I will transfer him somewhere. He will not suffer by it. I can do no more. If you are so upset by the sight of him, I can no longer entertain him,” Alex retorted with abrasive practicality.

She gulped. “I see. Are you planning to do that with everybody who might talk? The staff in the house in Florence, the security men, your secretarial staff in Rome who never put through my calls, the personal aides who ensured my letters were returned…what about the other lawyers involved?”

Spinning her round, he gave her a little shake. Perspiration gleamed on his hewn dark skin, lines of strain grooved deep between his nose and mouth. “Stop this now,” he insisted in a ragged undertone.

She turned up her tear-stained face in a movement of despair. “You’re not being logical, Alex. Athene may not descend to gossip, but a lot of your friends must be in the know. I know what a hotbed of gossip Roman society is, and the way rumours go, I should imagine that the word is that you walked into an orgy by now…” She faltered out of all control and restraint. “Doesn’t it bother you that people are going to mutter and sneer behind your back?”

His hands sprung wide as he released her. He backed off several steps as if he could not trust himself too close. Slowly she shook her head, Titian hair flying about her in fiery glory. It had had to be said, all that Alex did not want to hear, for as those things happened she would be the one to pay the price.

“Don’t you see that you will take your anger out on me?” she pressed hoarsely.

“Cristo!” The muscles in his strong brown throat worked. “How can you believe that of me?”

Her arm steadied her weary body against the wall. “You can’t turn the clock back, Alex. You’ve got to see that. It was over for us a long time ago. You should have left me alone. You saw me in hospital and you acted on an ego-ridden whim. There is no going back. Let me go…”

He swung away from her, his brown hands clenching into impotent fists. She did not know whether his aggression was aimed at her for ripping the lid off the reality he ignored or aimed at all those faceless people who might dare to whisper. He punched one fist into his palm with a thud which tremored through the hot, still air. His golden gaze struck sparks from hers in an uncompromising refusal to yield.

“I believe I would sooner see you dead than let you go. I want you too much, and I am not afraid of gossip. Nor should you be, for who would dare to insult you to your face?” he demanded fiercely. “It will be a brave man who dares to offend me. This is between us and nobody else, don’t you see that?”

“I can’t take it, Alex,” she said in a stifled whisper. “I was content as I was.”

A black brow shot up. “You will be content with me. If you can accept me in bed, it is only a matter of time before you accept me everywhere else.”

“Never! It’s too late.” Hectic pink searing her cheekbones at his blunt reminder of her weakness, she tried to walk away. The intensity of the powerful emotions simmering between them had exhausted her. Alex would never admit to a wrong decision. He would manoeuvre and manipulate and calculate to the bitter end in an effort to make it a right one. But when he talked of removing Carreras from the scene, he was touching the tip of an iceberg, and evading the issue. Carreras had only been an instrument, a highly paid professional man doing his job. It was the man behind the instrument who had driven her nearly crazy with grief.

Only black storm clouds loomed ahead. Alex was not omnipotent. He liked to think he was, though. He had been born into wealth beyond most people’s wildest dreams. His Midas touch had transformed wealth into legend. Her supposed infidelity was probably the only situation that Alex had ever met which was outside his control. She had offended in a way no other living person would have dared to offend. He still regarded her as his, indisputably his, and no man and no woman could be permitted to take what belonged to Alex before he chose to discard it. She was the one slap in the teeth Alex had ever had, and with masochistic fervour Alex was seeking to redress that slur on his masculinity. How stupid she had been to believe Nicky his main motivation in this marriage!

“I wish I could go back and change some of the actions I took.” The harsh confession was dredged from him. “But even if I could, I do not believe I could have behaved differently…”

An anguished smile twisted her pale face. How like Alex it was to lament and negate in one savagely candid statement.

“You were very young and I was hard, but I suffered too,” he asserted roughly. “On three separate occasions I flew to Florence during those six months.”

She stilled and whirled jerkily back.

“Once I got as far as the gates of Casa del Fiore before I told the driver to turn back.” The dark eyes had no shimmer of gold. They were black and deep as Hades. “And you should be glad I turned back. I did not trust myself near you.”

A picture of Alex flying into Florence and backtracking in triplicate frankly astonished her. Her imagination balked at the vision of Alex controlled by rampant indecision. But that he had tried to make himself approach her, that he had been drawn against his own volition, softened the dead-weight of resurrected bitterness which Roberto Carreras had aroused. Instinctively she moved back towards him. “W…What did you want to say?” Her voice was almost inaudible.

His jawline clenched rock-hard. “Why? Why, that is what I wanted to say. Was it because he was younger than I, better-looking, more exciting? Was it out of badness or out of need?” he selected in a savage undertone which froze her in her tracks with a sudden onslaught of throat-constricting fear. “Was he good? How often did he take you, how did he take you? That was all that was on my mind!”

His slim, beautifully shaped hands folded over the balustrade of the wall, the knuckles showing white. A surge of frightening anger had him in its merciless grasp. She was sentenced to appalled stillness by the horrific reality of how deeply Alex had been affected. She wanted to speak, she wanted to drag her sister kicking and screaming into his presence and wipe it all out. But common sense kept her quiet. In the mood Alex was in, the explanation would sound like fanciful nonsense. It would enrage him even more.

“And still sometimes it is on my mind. Because I never got my hands on him, and if I ever did I would kill him.”

She trembled. “But…if you’d actually seen me, don’t you think you might have had other…things to say?” she whispered.