The Veranchetti Marriage(29)

“You said that the clock could not work in reverse,” he reminded her. “You were correct. Even before they came to see me yesterday I had already seen this. I had also come to appreciate that a…loving husband would not have behaved as I did four years ago. I might have seen that if my wife did end up in another man’s arms, my own behaviour had undoubtedly contributed to the betrayal. But then I was not capable of seeing that…”

“Alex…I…” she faltered, torn by his pain but held back by his icy control.

He rose abruptly to his feet and moved a silencing hand. “No, don’t tell me not to say these things. I must say them. I fell in love with you because you were so full of life, and then I proceeded to crush it out of you,” he breathed contemptuously. “Worse,” he continued before she could argue that his faults had not been so severe. “I didn’t even notice I was doing that to you.”

Her fingernails bit into the velvet beneath her hand. “It wasn’t so bad as that,” she protested weakly.

The dark head flung back. “Do not be so generous to me,” he grated. “When was I ever generous to you? Had I left you in the life you were contented with, I would feel less like some Dark Ages tyrant now. But no, once again I had to come into your life and make a mess of it, even to the point of making you pregnant again. And why did that happen? Because I blackmailed you into bed. I might as well have raped you.”

Kerry was trembling. So much of the understanding she had once longed for had been locked up inside him. It must have existed before yesterday. Alex could not have put all this together overnight. But what she was hearing was too extreme, too terrifyingly linked with a hard, bitter finality for her to receive any comfort from it.

He drew something from his inside pocket. “This is the contract I forced you to sign.” He tore the document violently in half and cast the pieces into the grate. He straightened again, pale but controlled. “Now you have no restrictions. I will leave you to lead your life as you choose to lead it. If you do not want me to see Nicky,” his voice roughened and dropped low, “this I will accept, too.”

Shock was coursing through her in waves. Dear God, it was happening all over again! Only this time he had had the decency not to send a lawyer to do the dirty work. A searing memory of the letters she had written and the calls she had once made sealed her lips rigidly on any protest. If he was leaving, she would let him leave. Why should she tell him that she loved him, when her feelings weren’t returned? She refused to make the smallest move to argue his decision.

“You married me just to get revenge, didn’t you?” she accused with stark eyes. “And once you’d got it, it was worthless, wasn’t it?”

His dark eyes flamed golden. “Yes…worthless.” His low-pitched response was wry. “And I know that to give you your freedom back when it should never have been taken from you is poor recompense. But it is all that I have to give.”

All that he had to give. The statement rippled through her slight body, burning and wounding wherever it touched. It took her anger away. It numbed her. “And what am I supposed to do now?” she asked woodenly.

“You do whatever you want. I will do nothing. You can have a divorce, a separation, whatever you choose. Where you live is also your decision,” he laid out tautly. “Naturally, I will leave this house…”

“That’s very generous of you, but I can be generous too,” she assured him shakily. “I’ll pack for you!”

“I have already asked Lucrezia to take care of it,” Alex murmured tightly. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s what I want. My God, Alex, you don’t think I’m about to argue, do you?” she gibed, half an octave higher.

A tiny muscle jerked in the corner of his compressed mouth, as if her venom had thrust fully home. In a torment of blind rage and despair, she watched him leave the room. She listened to his steps ringing up the stairs, and it seemed no time until they came down again. Still she had not moved. The slam of the car door echoed through the window. Unexpectedly, the door opened again.

Alex hovered there, shorn of his usual cool poise. But then, the last time he had walked out, he had not had to tolerate an audience or a conscience. She observed him with cold eyes. “Did you forget something?”

Alex, you bastard, how could you put me through this again? But she didn’t speak. As he turned on his heel, she crammed a shaking hand to her wobbling mouth and bowed her head over the chair which was still supporting her. Why was it that no matter what she did he could still walk away? Here she had been, expecting at first guilty discomfiture upon his part but inevitably the same release she had experienced after Vickie’s revelations. But the one salient fact she had overlooked was that Alex did not love her. Alex had reacted according to his principles. He had forced her into this marriage. In apology, he was removing himself from her life again. She was fiercely glad that she had let him go thinking that she was delighted to see the back of him. Once before, loving him had humiliated her. It had not done so this time.

A quiet like the grave settled over Casa del Fiore. The staff seemed to creep about. Lucrezia, full of enormous Florentine compassion, looked upon her with great, tragic eyes and endeavoured to tempt her flagging appetite. At the end of a week, Kerry was emptied of tears. Her misery had stirred Nicky into rampant insecurity, and she had to pull herself together for his benefit. After the strain of smiling all day, she ended up ringing Steven late one evening. It was a long call, and forty-eight hours later Steven arrived on the doorstep.

Nicky greeted him boisterously and, under Lucrezia’s dazed scrutiny, Kerry threw her arms about him too. “That’ll have to be some shoulder,” she sniffed.

His classic features pulled a clownish grimace, and his blue eyes were rueful. “It’s one of the very few things I’m good at.”



“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell him how you felt?” he asked later, when Nicky was in bed.

“There was no point.” Her tone brooked no argument.

“I’ve never met Alex…”

“Aren’t you the lucky one?” she muttered, blowing her nose. “He was a jealous, suspicious toad the first time around, but you know, this time he was worse…he was so nice all the time, it was like living with a saint over the last few weeks. Not my idea of Alex at all.”

Steven looked understandably a little at sea, and tried to be constructive. “My gut reaction is that in clearing out he thought he was doing the decent thing, like somebody out of one of those ghastly melodramatic plays they enjoy in Greece.”

Kerry was unimpressed. “If he hadn’t wanted to let me go, he wouldn’t have. Let’s talk about something more cheerful. He’s gone and that’s it, and I never, ever want to see him again. Do you hear me?” She snatched at another tissue and wiped at her overflowing eyes.

Steven stayed only for three days, and mentioned that he would be selling up the business. Barbara had convinced him that he would cope much better with a simple workshop in a town where there would be more demand for his services, and she was thinking of looking for a job closer to home. Kerry had to quell the unpleasant feeling that everybody else’s problems were working out, while her own simply increased in complexity.

She let the workmen back into the house. Her life wasn’t going to fall apart again, she assured herself. She had got by without Alex before, she would do so again. She kept herself busy and she fell into bed every night exhausted. Alex had been gone exactly three weeks when Athene arrived without so much as a polite call to advertise her intent.

Kerry, surprised with a scarf round her head, wearing a pair of jogging pants and a stripy rugby shirt Alex had once worn, stiffened as Athene strolled in, her cool, dark appraisal sweeping her in obvious recoil. “Perhaps I should have warned you that I was coming.”

Kerry showed her into the small sitting-room, since the salon was being redecorated. Athene shed her coat and inched off her gloves. “If it is not too impertinent a question, may I ask who the young man was that you had staying?”

Off-balance, Kerry stared back at her.

Athene quirked a silvery brow. “Your housekeeper is related to one of my servants. Such news travels fast,” she remarked drily.

Kerry reddened. Athene in this formidable mood could only be compared to the iceberg which sank the Titanic. She found herself hurriedly making an explanation, and alluding carefully to Barbara’s existence in Steven’s life.

Athene’s Arctic cool melted slightly. “Ah,” she nodded. “This makes greater sense. You don’t look to be thriving upon my son’s absence.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Kerry parried proudly.

“I am not quite in my dotage,” Athene fielded, and her thin lips almost smiled. “This outfit you wear can only be an expression of grief.” She paused and then looked up. “I did not come here easily. You and I have only Alex in common, and I have come for Alex’s sake.”

“Alex left me…” Kerry began spiritedly.