The Veranchetti Marriage(26)

CHAPTER NINE

“THE DOCTOR wants you to stay in bed for a few days.”

Kerry emerged from beneath her hair. “I hate you!” she screamed.

Alex’s black hair was ruffled, his tie was loose and his strain was palpable. She went back under her hair again, racked by the cruel injustice of it all. He didn’t love her, she was going to be dumped in Florence again and left to suffer well out of Alex’s radius. That doctor didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her that things would be different this time around.

“You realise—you must realise that I cannot agree to an abortion,” Alex delivered, knotting the rope, did he but know it, round his own throat. “I…I couldn’t live with that. I wish I could, but I couldn’t. Perhaps it will be a false alarm.” He sounded very much as if he hoped it was.

What sort of man was he to even think of such a solution? Horror darted through her in wrathful rejection. But desperate straits demanded desperate measures, she decided. When Alex was adapting to a strategic retreat from the battlefield of their marriage, fate had sprung a rear attack on him. Once again he was being condemned to fatherhood with a woman he didn’t love, couldn’t respect and couldn’t live with.

“I’ll never forgive you for even mentioning the possibility,” she mumbled feverishly. “How could you even think about it for a moment? How could you even say that?”

“I?” Alex unleashed, suddenly springing free of his unusually quiet manner and doing so loudly enough to make her look up in dismay. “I…” He pointed to himself in raw, flaring Latinate emphasis. “Not want my own child? Dio, I am jubilant!” He slung the assurance at her, stressing each syllable so that the words rolled off his tongue in fluid provocation. “And I’m not about to apologise for it, either. This time I will be able to watch my child grow. This time I will not be on the outside!”

It was eleven that evening before Alex reappeared. Having run the gamut of her emotions and vaguely appreciated that, no matter what stance Alex took, she would still be unreasonable, she was very quiet.

“I am taking time off to see that you look after yourself,” he announced aggressively in the darkness. “If I could suffer for you I would, but I can’t. I just don’t want you to think that I am leaving you alone.”

He gathered her resistant body close with determined hands. His fingers spread protectively over her flat stomach in a movement which was uniquely revealing. “How soon will we know?” he prompted impatiently.

He was holding her, at last he was simply holding her. But the baby had inspired the warm attitude of concern. He really was pleased, she realised. He had switched his possessiveness from her to the life inside her womb. So might he have patted an incubator. All of a sudden, everything else took second place. She sniffed. The numbness had faded again. Of course it had. Loving Alex was a life sentence. It really didn’t matter what he did. It would always be the same.

Over the next three days he drove her scatty. She was deluged with fancy nightwear and the latest books, and adjured not to move a muscle. He seemed to be stocking her up to spend the next twenty years flat on her back. One of his sisters did him the cruel disservice of presenting him with a book on pregnancy. By the time Alex emerged, much stricken from its overly informative depths, a headache would have had him rushing her to the nearest hospital.

“Are you dying?” Nicky whispered from under her arm one afternoon. “I heard Nonna say Daddy thought you were dying?”

He rocked her with laughter. He made her see the funny aspect to Alex’s over-zealous attitude. When the doctor called, she asked him to speak to Alex. Otherwise Alex was never going to believe that she was fit to travel to Florence.

It was an hour before Alex appeared. “You don’t look healthy to me. Have I been making a fuss?” he prompted tautly.

It was her fault he had been, she acknowledged guiltily. How many times had she referred to previous sufferings? Had that been to punish him for his absence then? She did not like the picture. He was sincerely worried about the baby, and she was not an invalid.

“I think the doctor was right. It’s not going to be as it was before, and even then there was no danger of a miscarriage,” she pointed out.

Alex stiffened. “Why does it have to be like this?” he drawled in weary bitterness. “All I ask of you is that you have this baby and love it, even though it is my child.”

She blinked back stinging tears. “You don’t have to say that to me, Alex. Don’t you understand? I panicked, my nerves probably made me feel sick!” she teased shakily. “You don’t have to feel…”

“Guilty?” His eyes were dark and sombre. “I took no care of you that night. I thought only of my own needs. This did not need to happen.”

She frowned, cursing the childish recriminations she had hurled. “Alex, I’m an adult too. I didn’t think either, and it’s not…it doesn’t have to be a disaster. We both want this baby, don’t you see? That’s something we can share.”

His ebony brows pleated. “It will be all that we share. We will live separately in the same household. That is what you wanted from the very beginning. It was unreasonable of me to demand anything else.”

Shot from shock to the unalterable discovery that what she had once believed she wanted was now as far removed from her present feelings as Alex appeared to be, she searched his face dazedly. “Unreasonable?”

“Yes, it was. You saw more clearly than I. We must hope that we make better friends than lovers,” he quipped smoothly. “It will certainly be less explosive.”

Her fingers knotted into the sheets. “Friends?” she parroted to herself.

Alex vented a humourless laugh. “I see the prospect confounds you, but why not? How else may we live together peacefully? When I forced you to marry me, I asked the impossible from us both. I have accepted that.”

“Yes.” She saw that he had reached that acceptance. He had dug down to the roots of his desire for her and exorcised it. If he no longer viewed her as a sexually attractive woman, he could banish his jealousy. Friends. Her mind boggled. She didn’t want Alex as a friend, she couldn’t suddenly switch off now. It was too late.

He smiled at her ruefully. “So you see, there will be no further distressing scenes between us. I feel a lot happier knowing that.”

It was just as well somebody was in the mood to celebrate. Kerry wasn’t. Didn’t he see that those days on Kordos had been a necessary period of adjustment? Before that ghastly scene on the beach had erupted, a new and fragile understanding had been under formation, in spite of his jealousy. His behaviour had shattered her that day, and perhaps, she grasped now, it had shattered him too. He was really acting quite predictably. He saw a fault in himself. He rooted it out. After all, she might be the cause of the fault, but he was truly stuck with her now. Alex had brought logic to bear on their problems, and Alex’s cool logic had never been less welcome.



APART FROM a little nausea during the flight to Pisa airport, she was fine. The closer they got to journey’s end, however, the more tense she became. Casa del Fiore had been her prison during their separation. She associated the eighteenth-century villa with unhappy memories. But evidently sentimentality had no such hold upon Alex.

The house was on the outskirts of Florence, set in the lush, rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside, which was already blossoming with the softening green veil of spring. The day they had viewed Casa del Fiore, it had been surrounded by an overgrown meadow of wild flowers, its dulled and neglected fa;alcade gleaming a faint pink in the dying sunlight. After the agent had gone, Alex had tumbled her down and made love to her among those flowers. She reddened and paled again with self-loathing. Memory looked like being her sole comfort. He had got tired of her even before that fight, she was convinced of it. When had Alex ever denied himself anything he still wanted?

“Welcome home,” he murmured as the limousine swung between the tall, eagle-topped pillars at the foot of the long driveway.

Casa del Fiore seemed to drowse in the blaze of the noonday heat, the soft yellow walls of the rambling villa complemented by the terracotta roof tiles. The arrow-shaped cypresses lining the avenue cast thin shadows in the car’s path.

She had chosen this house, not Alex. Her enthusiasm had been undiminished by the mountain of improvements required inside and out, and Alex had let her have her way. She had flung herself into transforming the drab interior, struggling with Italian workmen brought up to “Domani” and forever going over her head to talk to Alex, who had never had the time or the interest to deal with them. When he had left, she had stopped decorating, leaving only a few rooms complete.

Nicky scrambled out of the car first, eager to explore. Alex had never brought him here. He had closed the house up with only a caretaker. The staff were all new, smilingly grouped in the front hall. The ghastly cherry-red carpet she had mistakenly chosen for the floor still darkened the entrance.

Lucrezia, the housekeeper, beamed at her cheerfully and, as soon as the introductions were over, Kerry forgot about Alex and went off to explore. It was like moving into a timeslip. Everything was exactly as she had left it. The kitchens were still untiled. The rooms she hadn’t touched were still empty and shuttered. An incredible medley of styles reigned supreme wherever her immature taste had lingered. The rear sitting-room still rejoiced in lamentably quarrelsome floral fabrics.