The Veranchetti Marriage(22)

“I knew you were not well. I was kept informed by your doctor. If I had come to you and you had lost our child, I could not have lived with myself.”

It was not an answer to her question. But it had been a sentimental question. At no stage had Alex seen the smallest hope of a reconciliation.

“And that day at the hospital, after Nicky’s birth, I looked at you,” he breathed, “and I hated you for what you had done to us both. I never wanted to look upon you again, but I could never put you behind me where you belonged.”

Was that what this marriage was aimed at achieving? Deep down, was that what Alex was really seeking? He had called her a fever in his blood. He would secretly despise such a weakness in himself, but he would not admit to it in self-denigrating terms. She was suddenly convinced that, whether he appreciated it or not, Alex was hoping to look at her with perfect indifference at some time in the future.

“And you still believe we can make a new start?” she queried.

His proud profile tautened. “It is natural for us to drag up all the feelings that we never shared then. By doing so, we will lay them to rest.”

If more honest sessions akin to what she had just undergone lay ahead, a quick, merciful dive off a cliff would be kinder to her twanging emotions.

“I didn’t deliberately seek to hurt you then.” Alex looked down at the seas battering the rocks below and emitted a harsh laugh. “I was not really myself. If it had been drugs, drink, illness…insanity, anything but infidelity, I would have stood by you.”

He stepped away from the wall. “Do not ask me to let you go again. I don’t like this view you have of yourself as a prisoner,” he admitted. “You have everything that any normal woman could want, and I take very little in return.”

He was daring her to disagree. His anger had gone, but he would have relished a good rousing battle to blow off the cobwebs. When she thought about it, she was the only person she had ever known who argued with Alex. “You take everything,” she contradicted painfully, and this time she did manage to walk away.

It was lunch before they came together again. Alex was back on the rails of cool, implacable good humour. He suggested they spend the afternoon on the beach and he wouldn’t let her brood. “You see, you are not unhappy,” he stated with arrogant emphasis the first time she laughed at one of his sallies. “You only think you are, and perhaps you want to be, but you are not.”

“Were you very unhappy when I left you in Florence?” he asked, with a na;auiveté which could only astound, in the depths of her bed that night.

His limbs were still damply entangled with hers, his breath warming her cheek. In itself, the question was a miniature breakthrough in intimacy. Alex was normally edging away by that stage, making her wonder melodramatically if he hated himself in the aftermath of their passion. It was also the first time that he had ever made a personal enquiry as to her state of mind then.

“Scared,” she muttered. “Lonely.”

His lean body stiffened in the circle of her arms. His damp, silky hair brushed her brow as he lowered his head. “For him?”

“Oh, go to hell, Alex!” After an outraged second of disbelief that he could even think that, she yanked herself violently free of him. “How can you say that? I loved you, God, but I loved you!” She buried her contorted face in the pillows, her narrow back defensively presented to him.

“From love of so fine a strength, a man would surely take great comfort…” he raked back at her in cruel cynicism. “The love I got from you I bought. Your head was turned by my money and your body was ripe for a man’s possession. Do not call that love!”

He slammed out of the room. Something went crashing noisily down in the corridor and she heard a groaned profanity. He had hit himself on the small table she had put outside to carry a vase of flowers. She sincerely hoped it had hurt like hell. If he wanted to play musical beds in the middle of the night and throw right royal rages, he deserved everything he got.



“I’M SORRY…how often must I say it?” Alex thundered across the table at lunch time the next day. “Yes, Alex, no, Alex, if you like, Alex! What kind of conversation is this?”

Sofia had almost dropped the coffee-pot. Out of the corner of her eye, Kerry noted her hasty retreat from the roar of Alex driven beyond endurance by silence. “I can’t get very chatty about the idea that I married you for money and sex,” she said bitterly. “Somehow you have twisted up our whole relationship. I didn’t cost you a groat in comparison with anybody else’s ex-wife. You got off really cheap,” she pointed out coldly.

“I didn’t want to get off cheap.”

“Of course you didn’t! If I’d ripped off every penny I could get, you’d have loved it. It would have proved that I was grasping.” Breathing tempestuously, she settled back, wearing a baleful expression. She had hardly slept last night. She had been furious. On half a dozen occasions she had been tempted to wade into his room and bawl him out like a fishwife. Sorry wasn’t always good enough.

“What do you want me to do? Get down on my knees?” he replied caustically.

“I’d kick you if you did, so I shouldn’t bother,” she responded tartly, catching the disorientating twitch of his mouth. Her own anger dissipated rapidly. They were squabbling like a pair of children.

He drove his fingers through his black hair and studied her. “Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested ruefully.

Beyond the house, he dropped an arm round her tense shoulders. “I lost my temper,” he sighed. “And perhaps I lost it because what you said upset me.”

He turned her round and dropped a kiss on the crown of her head. His careless action had the most outsize effect upon her. It was the first gesture of affection he had shown in an entire week. Up until now he had only ever held her as a prelude to making love, and last night she had angrily decided that that would happen no more. Now she was swerving again. Could a physical relationship bring them close? The lack of one would certainly drive them apart. But she suffered from the insecure fear that she was simply adding to his low opinion of her. Would he have respected her more, would he have been more inclined to listen to her if she had found the willpower to deny them both that outlet?

“I wasn’t a very attentive husband then, was I?” he mused when they were on their way back to the house. “You must often have been lonely, even when we were living together. Why the hell didn’t I go with you to that party in Venice?”

Her face shadowed.

“Shall I tell you why? It was so trivial. I was making a point. I was taking a stand. I worked late on into the evening, and then all of a sudden I got angry. I lifted the phone and ordered the jet to go on standby. I felt very self-righteous.”

“Don’t…” Should she try to explain? He seemed in an unusually quiet and approachable mood. As she hovered on the brink of an explanation that might well have proved momentous in the face of Alex’s candour, someone came out of the house and waved.

“Spiros. The post must have come in,” Alex sighed. “He remembers the workaholic I used to be.”





CHAPTER EIGHT

SOFIA HAD coffee waiting for them in the lounge. Alex, flicking through the envelopes, suddenly paused and strode over to her where she sat. “For you,” he said.

He dropped the letter into her lap and she lifted it, recognising Steven’s impossibly neat copperplate handwriting. She tucked the envelope in her pocket and collided with Alex’s dark, intent scrutiny. She didn’t realise what was wrong until he finally breathed, “Aren’t you going to read his letter?”

He had recognised the postmark, of course. “Why, do you want to read it too?” she enquired in exasperation. “Honestly, Alex, Steven is my friend and my partner, and he has never wanted to be anything else.”

“That has not been the impression I have received,” he parried icily.

She had had enough, and he had barely begun. If Alex was even going to question her mail, what hope did they have? Could adultery be committed on paper? He really would not be satisfied until he had her locked away in a little cage. Warding off the urge to leap down his throat, she murmured gently, “You’re going to have to learn to deal with your jealousy, Alex.”

Even as she said it, she could have bitten out her tongue. She might as well have dropped a burning rag on the surface of something highly inflammable. He went up like a Roman candle. “Jealousy?” he erupted in raw rejection. “Of what would I be jealous?”

She paled. “Maybe possessiveness should have been the word I used. I don’t know. But I do know that there is a problem.”

“And shall I tell you what it is? My wife does not have male friends. Either you sell out your interest in the partnership or you give it to him. I don’t care,” he grated. “But you will sever the connection completely.”

For the second time he missed out on the coffee. Kerry wiped at her damp eyes. The illusion of greater understanding between them was destroyed. She no longer wondered why he had brought her to Kordos. The men in the village held Alex in the highest esteem. None of them would have dared eye up his wife. He owned the island, he was their benefactor. Whether Alex saw it in himself or not, he really wanted to wall her up alive and prevent her from coming into contact with other men. What hope did she have of combatting his distrust? Vickie, what did you do to us both? she questioned miserably.