The Veranchetti Marriage(25)

“He wants to make sure that you join me on my next walk along the beach, I suppose,” Kerry gathered with bitter distaste.

“No, of course he doesn’t.” Carina pressed her hand in reproof. “He feels that you need a woman’s company. Do you feel like dinner?”

She nodded. “Where’s Alex?”

“Down in the taverna, getting drunk,” Carina flushed. “Ricky left him there. You were shocked by what he did. Don’t you understand how upset he is?”

Kerry’s face shuttered as she got off the bed, keen to have a bath and a change of clothes. “It’s not remorse, I’m sure. How was Dave?”

“He was all right,” Carina repeated, a tinge of disapproval in her tone. It was heartless of Kerry to enquire a second time about her amorous assailant when her husband was drinking himself into oblivion down in the village. “His friends took him away. They were not decent young people, Kerry. That same young man insulted a fisherman’s daughter in the village last night and started a fight.” Gathering steam, she looked up. “And two girls and three men on a boat, none of them married. This speaks for itself. You are too trusting, Kerry.”

In the privacy of the bathroom, Kerry appreciated how a few hours of grace had altered Carina’s views. She could not see fault in Alex for long. Thus she had reduced Alex’s violence by making the tourists into promiscuous troublemakers. Kerry was no doubt in the wrong for speaking to them at all, and excused for her over-familiarity by a gullible nature. Or were Carina’s suspicions running parallel with Alex’s now that her brother had done something so appallingly uncharacteristic as hitting the bottle?

He had to let her go now for both their sakes. On that beach, she had seen her na;auive hopes for the future shattered by hard reality. Even if Vickie and Jeff did approach him, she seriously doubted that Alex would even give them a hearing. The poison had got too deep a hold in four years apart.

“Do…do you love Alex?” Carina blurted out over dinner, her plump face primed for a snub.

“Love’s not always enough,” she answered heavily. “He doesn’t love me, but he has to keep me to prove something to himself. Letting go would be as healthy for him as it would be for me. We can’t live in the past now.”

It was too deep for Carina. She chewed her lower lip. “How can you talk about leaving him? You are only newly married again. Alex was happy when we arrived. Why are you so hard on him?”



MUCH LATER, Kerry turned over in her bed, and her lashes flickered up on the dark silhouette of the figure sunk in an armchair in the corner of the room. “A…Alex? Good lord, what time is it?” she whispered, shaken by his silent presence.

“Does it matter?”

She rested back again, shrouded by the same numb depression. “No.”

“You should not be afraid of me,” he breathed harshly. “Earlier you behaved with me as if I was…Cristo!” He sprang upright fluidly, his eyes glittering in the moonlight as he emerged from the shadows. “You are my wife, you are the mother of my child…what happened today? It was not my fault. For that to occur again—to see you with another man—naturally I lost my temper.”

“Some day you might do it with me…”

“No!” He roared it at her in fierce rebuttal. “Whatever you did, I would not touch you. I am not a violent man.”

But his passions were. They ran at gale-force turbulence with her. Everywhere else in Alex’s life control and restraint ruled the roost. He was punctual, tidy, organised, immaculate in appearance. He carried enormous responsibility. He was a rock for his dependent and less able brothers and sisters to lean upon. He was in every other field a strong, principled and honourable man, worthy of respect. She was the fatal flaw that rocked Alex dangerously off balance.

“You’ve got to let me go,” she repeated wretchedly.

The mattress gave under his weight. He leant over her. “These are teething problems. You are over-sensitive. All you can think about is running away. I do not run away from trouble. I face it,” he said hardily. “And you will face it with me.”

“We’re poison for each other.”

“Dio, such melodrama!” he growled. “And stop lying there as if I am about to attack you!”

Helplessly, she turned her head away. It was a mistake. His fingers laced into her hair and his mouth covered hers in hungry retribution. He found no answer in her. She was as inanimate and as empty as a waxen doll. He flung his dark head back, his ruptured breathing pattern breaking the stillness. “You can never be there for me when I need you,” he condemned raggedly. “Why should I curse myself with a wife who has no love for me? Forgive me for forgetting that you are only here on sufferance. I will not disturb you again.”

She knew then that the same process was working within him. Alienation. It would only be a matter of time before Alex let her go. He was too proud to hang on to a wife who could not respond to him in bed. It was the ultimate offence, and what a pity it was that she had not contrived the miracle sooner. Since she was seeing the hope of freedom again, she could not understand why tears should wet her cheek and why she should ache at Alex’s roughened belief that she turned her back on him when he most needed her. He had never talked about needing her before. Why did he have to talk about it now?



THREE DAYS LATER, she was uncompromisingly sick the instant she got out of bed. One of the maids heard her retching in the bathroom and fetched Sofia. Sofia arrived to beam meaningfully at her while she clung to the sink, trying to subdue a second debilitating bout of nausea. Her pinched face had a greenish pallor and her eyes were haunted. She had woken up feeling sick, the last two mornings. She hadn’t wanted to think about the fact. She had suppressed the awareness that there had been no comforting physical proof as yet that she was not pregnant.

Oh, God, please, no, was all she could think now. They were leaving for Rome this morning. Alex had been distant and civil for the past forty-eight hours. All the portents were that he was withdrawing from her, slowly but surely, with the rigid control of a reformed addict staving off the need for another fix. Steeling herself to kill Sofia’s hopeful smile, she said, “Is there something wrong?”

The housekeeper frowned. “Is the Kyrie ill?”

“I don’t think last night’s fish agreed with me. I’ve been feeling unwell all night.” Kerry tilted her chin.

Sofia retreated. Kerry splashed her face with unsteady hands. It couldn’t happen, it just couldn’t happen now. Her system could be upset by travel, the change in climate, the alteration in diet…by sheer nerves. But that night in London was all she could think about. One reckless night at the wrong time. The nausea, the dizziness and the lassitude were all horribly familiar. Alex had impregnated her and she wanted to scream blue murder. It wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair when she was already practically at her last gasp.

“Are you feeling well?” Carina enquired over breakfast. “You seem very pale.”

“I had a restless night.” She studied the table. She felt like a plague carrier. She felt as if someone had painted a cross on her forehead. She was too self-conscious, too petrified to look anywhere near Alex. But in another sense she wanted to rage at him for his rotten potency. All she could think about was the horrendous misery of her months carrying Nicky, memories inextricably interwoven with what had been going on in her life simultaneously. The mere threat of repetition bereft her of all rationality, and if he found out he would never let her go.

How she got through the helicopter trip she never knew afterwards. It was mind over matter. She had suffered dreadfully from travel sickness, even in a car, when she was pregnant with Nicky. But air travel was the worst of all. On the flight to Rome, mind over matter was no longer sufficient to subdue the churning in her stomach. She spent most of the flight in the washroom, or so it seemed. Concealment had become impossible.

Carina hovered, muttering worriedly about food poisoning. Alex was pale and suspiciously silent after the receipt of one single glance of burning reproach from Kerry. The whole event might have been masterminded by fate to reveal her secret. The only time Alex had ever seen her airsick she had been pregnant. It did not take a lightning bolt of amazing perception for him to suspect the cause.

He insisted on carrying her off the plane. He had recovered his colour, but he looked guilty as hell. It gave her a malicious pleasure that he should understand exactly how she felt. A doctor was waiting for her at the townhouse. Carina helped her into bed. By then, the penny had dropped with her, too.

“I was never like this. No wonder you are miserable,” she soothed sympathetically. “It is very hard to be pleased when you feel so ill.”

“One swallow does not make a summer,” said the doctor glibly. “No pregnancy is a blueprint of another. There may well be small similarities, but with rest and calm you could enjoy excellent health this time.”

Kerry saw nothing but misery ahead. As soon as he had gone and Alex’s sisters and Athene had given up offering advice, she turned over in bed and wept inconsolably. The axe had fallen. Her body wasn’t her own any more. How easy it was for the uninitiated to talk about the redeeming joys of motherhood when they did not have eight months of purgatory stretching in front of them, and a marriage that had already stopped being a marriage beforehand.