IT WAS STILL afternoon in New York, despite the hours since she’d fled Rome. But her mind was in some strange, dislocated no-man’s-land which let her stare out of the taxi’s window at the busy concrete canyons passing her by on her way through Manhattan.
She’d texted ahead from the airport and received a directive to go straight to her mother’s apartment. As she whooshed up in the elevator, having collected a key from the concierge, a little ripple of nausea hit again, but she banked it down. A wave of weariness followed—weariness that went much deeper than the physical, was much more than jet lag. She needed to sleep—to claim oblivion from the devastation in her head.
Inside the apartment, she found the spare room she’d used before, and dumped her case. Her eyes felt as if they were being pressed with weights—she could barely take off her shoes before collapsing down on the bed, pulling back the covers to slide beneath the quilt.
Moments later she was asleep.
She must have slept for hours, adjusting overnight to New York time, for it was morning again when she surfaced. She opened her eyes, blinking. A cup of coffee was being placed on the bedside table beside her.
She shuffled up to a sitting position, pushing her long hair out of her eyes, looking at the person who had put it there, who was standing looking down at her with a questioning look on her face.
She took a breath. ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Eloise.
* * *
‘Let me get this straight.’
Eloise’s mother’s voice was clear, and it penetrated right into her head like a drill.
‘You let some spoiled, self-indulgent Italian playboy pick you up—literally!—and you went off with him without a thought, without the slightest hesitation or consideration, got tumbled into bed by him within twenty-four hours, and then you trotted along at his heels like a little poodle, only to discover—’ her expression was scathing ‘—that, lo and behold, he not only turns out to have a fiancée waiting for him in Rome, but fully intends to keep you as his handy mistress on the side! Eloise, how could you waste yourself on a man like that?’
Eloise closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know...’ she whispered. But she did know—knew exactly how it had happened. Why it had happened. ‘He seemed so wonderful,’ she said brokenly.
Her mother snorted. ‘Yes, well, women make fools of themselves every day.’ She took a breath. ‘I should know. I made an idiot of myself over your father.’ She gave a heavy sigh and got to her feet. ‘Well, you can stay here as long as you want—though don’t waste your time moping over the man! You’re well rid of him!’ Her voice changed, becoming businesslike. ‘Best to start working again. I’ll ask around my acquaintances for anyone who might need a nanny—that will take your mind off him.’
Eloise’s face paled, and a look of anguish came into her eyes.
Her mother’s expression changed again. ‘You’ll get over it, Eloise,’ she said bluntly, but there was a resigned thread of sympathy there as well. Her voice softened a fraction. ‘And you got out just in time—unlike me, with you already born and your father deserting us for his brood mare! With you, however, it’s completely different. No repercussions—thank heavens!’
She glanced at her watch.
‘I must go,’ she said, back to her habitual brisk tones. ‘I’m late for work.’
She brushed her cheek briefly against her daughter’s, then walked out, leaving Eloise lying back against the pillows, her face bleak as an Arctic waste.
No repercussions, her mother had said. But she was wrong. Totally wrong.
* * *
There was a dark, bleak look in Vito’s eyes. It had been there for days—ever since he’d opened that curt, damming text from Eloise. The words were incised into his brain as if with a chisel.
You are the most despicable man I know. Stay away from me for ever. Eloise.
For days, he had rejected her order, continuing to bombard her with texts and voicemails with an increasing sense of desperation...longing for her. He had to find her, talk to her, explain—
But he hadn’t found her. She had headed to the airport and vanished. Presumably she had gone back to England—but with dismay he realised he had absolutely no idea where she might be. She’d worked as a live-in nanny—she didn’t have an address of her own. She could be anywhere...
He’d set investigators on to it, but they’d drawn a blank. All further texts and calls to her mobile had been blocked.
She does not want me to find her. Wants nothing more to do with me.
And with every passing day, and still no way of finding her, that was what he had to accept.
Eloise was gone.
Her absence from his life was a vast, desolate hollow opening inside him—a sense of loss that gave him a bitter answer to the question he had asked about her ever since she’d come into his life.
I wanted to know if she was truly special to me—if she was coming to mean more to me than any other woman I’ve known.
His mouth twisted painfully. Well, now he knew. She had become far, far more than just one of the women in his life. He knew now that she’d been quite, quite different. Knew by his constant longing for her, his need to see her there, in front of him, holding out her arms to him, lying beside him in his embrace, being with him, at his side, all the time...
To know the answer to that question now, with her absence so unbearable to him, was a cruel irony indeed. As cruel as the pain of missing her so much. As cruel as the frustration that bit into him.
I begged her to wait and hear me out—to let me explain why I said what I did in front of Carla! If she had only given me a chance to explain about Marlene and the shares. Explain about Carla and her manic need suddenly to have a fiancé!
But she had not—she had vanished instead. Rejected him totally.
I thought she would be sympathetic, understanding—like she always was! Always there for me.
But only the malign shadow of Carla was there now, her manic bitterness unabating. He could see it in the blindness of her eyes, the gauntness of her face. He did not care.
And as with each passing day he became bleakly resigned to the fact that he could not find Eloise, he felt a kind of slow fatalism numb him. If Eloise was gone—if she could not be found—then what reason was there to balk any longer at this grotesque way of fulfilling his deathbed promise to his father? Saving Viscari Hotels from dismemberment. Protecting the legacy he had been born to guard.
So, with grim decision, he determined to let Carla have her garish wedding, announcing to the world she had not been rejected by her aristocratic lover but that she was making a dynastic match of her own to fulfil her mother’s obsession. But, he spelt it out freezingly to his gaunt-faced step-cousin, within six months the marriage must be annulled. Carla could give any face-saving reason she wanted—he would not care. He would keep Guido’s shares, handing over their market value to Carla when they parted.
And then it would be done. Over.
The dreary, crushing numbness pressed down on him. The numbness that would never lift now.
* * *
‘Time to tidy up your toys, Johnny.’
Eloise’s voice was bright. As bright as it was brittle.
Her four-year-old charge was a happy lad, and unspoilt despite his parents’ wealth. It was Eloise’s task to keep him that way. She had been glad—grateful—to find a post so quickly, via her mother’s contacts, and had moved out to the Carldons’ massive mansion on Long Island.
Johnny’s father was based on Wall Street, at the family banking house, where his mother Laura worked as well, though she planned to work part-time from home once she had her second child. Until then young Johnny needed a live-in nanny. His parents usually stayed mid-week at their Manhattan apartment, putting in the punishing hours that top jobs on Wall Street demanded, so they could spend long weekends on Long Island with their son, so Eloise was often in sole charge of Johnny, alone in the Long Island mansion apart from the Carldons’ housekeeper Maria and chauffeur Giuseppe.
It had been an uncomfortable jolt to hear the married couple speak Italian to each other, but Eloise had gritted her teeth and endured it.
Just as she was enduring her entire existence.
There was a bleakness inside her...a tearing misery she could not shed. Her mother’s bracing admonition ‘You’re well rid of him!’ seemed only to make the world bleaker still. She knew the truth of her mother’s words—but all they did was pain her more. As painful as the tormenting memories of how happy she had thought she’d been with Vito, of the shining hopes she’d been filled with.
She could tell herself all she liked that she’d tried to be cautious about her whirlwind romance, that she’d warned herself that it might be nothing more than a starry-eyed infatuation, an intoxicating dream.
Her expression bleached. It hadn’t been that at all, though, had it? Not a dream—nothing but a sordid, clandestine fling with a man promised to another woman.
I wanted to know what I felt about him! Wanted to know if he was going to be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with! I found out the truth too late...
That was the cruelty of it. Her hopes and dreams had already started to weave around him—and now, four thousand miles away from him, they still had the power to haunt her.
A toxic mix of anger and misery filled her, rising up with a familiar sick feeling in her stomach. She fought it back. Oh, what use was there in feeling like this? Her mother was right! She had to get over it—had to put Vito in the past. Stop her useless anguish over it all! There was no choice for her but to get over him—turn off, smother, kill whatever it was she’d felt for him. No matter what those feelings had been—or might have become—it didn’t matter now.
Now, and for her entire future, only one thing was important. There was only one joy to look forward to, only one meaning for her life. Only one way to heal her bruised and battered heart. Only one outlet for the love inside her.
She lifted her chin, fighting the dumb misery inside her. She would not let it win. She must not. Her future was changing—changing for ever—and that was all she must focus on now!
Emotion welled up in her, fierce and protective. Her time with Vito had been a disaster—but out of it had come a blessing she had not looked for and which now would be the reason for her life.
The only reason.
Another wave of nausea hit her...
* * *
Vito stood, stiff and immobile, at the altar rail of the church of Santa Maria della Fiore. Its showy, baroque splendour fitted the tastes of his bride, who was burning with desperation to show the world she was not a discarded, spurned creature, too lowly to be contessa of an ancient name, but was instead the enviable bride of one of Rome’s most eligible and desirable bachelors, her glittering wedding as lavish as Marlene could devise.
All Vito was required to do was go through with it.
Keep his promise to his dying father. Get back his uncle’s shares. Make the Viscari legacy safe at last.
Whatever it cost him to do so.
Into his head fleetingly, like a bird soaring high and out of reach, memory flashed.
Eloise—her arms opening to him, drawing him close to her, the scent of her, the fragrance of her hair, the silk of her skin, the warmth in her eyes, the tender curve of her mouth—
He shook the memory from him. She was gone from his life. What she had been to him was over. What she might have become he would never know.
He shifted his stance. What use to think of Eloise now, as he stood on the brink of marrying another woman? A woman he did not want, did not desire. But who brought with her the means to safeguard what his family had built up for over a century.
All around him he heard the organ music swelling, the choir’s voices lifting, and knew that his bride was approaching. He heard the congregation rising to its feet, saw the officiating priest start to step forward. In minutes now he would commit himself to marriage.
Words thrust themselves into his head as he stood there, rigid and immobile, as if chained where he stood by forces he could not defy. Making himself endure it with a strength he had to find.
Is this what you want me to do, Papa? Is this how you want me to get back your brother’s shares? Is this the price you want me to pay for them?
The choir’s soaring voices reached a crescendo before stilling.
Every muscle in Vito’s body tensed, as if he were forcing himself to stand stock-still. Carla was beside him, the folds of her couture wedding dress brushing his leg, her lace-veiled figure as rigid as his, the rich fragrance of her heavy perfume cloying.
He did not look at her. Could not. Could only sense the tension racking her as she stood beside him. Driven by her own demons.
And she was taking him with her, and for that he damned her utterly.
The sonorous voice of the priest sounded over his head. Latin words were murmured and intoned as the words of the wedding service proceeded. Words that would bind them in holy matrimony.
A cold, icy shudder went through him. Clearing the numbing blankness in his mind. The priest was talking again, saying the most potent words of all. Would he take this woman for his wife?
Vito’s eyes were on the priest, then on the altar beyond. Then he turned his head slightly, to look at Carla’s veiled figure, trembling with tension. He had to do this. He had come this far, had done all this, to fulfil his promise to his father. What choice did he have now?
What choice? The question seared in his head. Demanding he answer.
For one long, endless moment he stood silent as that question burned in his head. Then he took a breath and gave his answer...
Everything seemed to have gone into slow motion. Or perhaps it was just his brain that was going slow. He watched the priest incline his head towards him, as if he had not quite caught his response. Behind him, he heard a kind of susurration, like the buzzing of insects. And beside him he could hear Carla give an intake of breath that was like a razor in its sharpness.
And its disbelief.
He turned his head to look at her. She was staring at him. Staring at him through her veil with an expression in her eyes that was something like an alien out of a sci-fi film.
He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. ‘I won’t do this, Carla,’ he said.
His voice was quiet, audible only to her. But there was a certainty in it that infused every word.
‘I won’t do it to me—and I won’t do it to you. This is a travesty. An abhorrence. This is not what marriage is about—on any terms, or for any reason. You deserve better. And so do I.’
And so does Eloise—she didn’t deserve what I did to her.
A low, scarcely audible sound came from Carla’s throat. Her eyes distended and she swayed, her body starting to fold. Instantly Vito’s arm came around her. The priest stepped forward to help support her between them, and then Carla’s mother rushed forward, consternation on her face as they escorted Carla to the vestry. His own mother hastened after them, anxiety all over her face.
As he helped the stricken Carla to a chair, he turned towards Marlene. His voice, when he spoke, was very calm—but with unbending steel in it.
‘I will not go through with this, Marlene,’ he said, his eyes boring into hers as fury leapt in her face. ‘You may tell everyone that Carla couldn’t face marrying me, or that she is ill—whatever you want to say to protect her. But I will no longer be party to your machinations. I will pay you twice what Guido’s shares are worth—but I will no longer be blackmailed by you. Do your worst, if you must.’
Behind him came a cry of anguish. It was his mother, rushing forward to clutch his arm. He turned to her, leading her a little way away to give them privacy. This was nothing to do with Marlene or her daughter. This was between his mother and himself.
And his father.
He felt the strength of his resolve to hold dear every value he possessed. Every value that made life worthwhile—that had to guide every life in order for it to be...honourable.
‘Mamma,’ he said now, and his voice was as gentle as his hold on her, though the resolve, the strength, was still in his expression. ‘When you stood beside my father at your wedding you promised to love and honour him. And I, too, honour him—which is why I will not bind myself to the promise I made him. To marry Carla would be...dishonourable. Whatever the reasons for such a marriage, they cannot be justified. Neither for her, nor for me.’
He took an unsteady breath.
‘I’m sorry that I have not had the courage or the resolution to say this until this moment. I have tried to do my best by my heritage, by my promise to Papa. But not at this price.’
He looked at her stricken face, into her anguished eyes.
‘To marry Carla like this would be to dishonour all that I hold dear—all that you and Papa taught me to value. Self-respect, honesty, integrity... I will not strike this devil’s bargain—’ he cast a punitive look towards Marlene, huddled with Carla ‘—because it would shame me, it would shame my father, and it would shame you.’
Gently he put his arm around his weeping mother’s shoulder. ‘Time to go home, Mamma,’ he said. ‘There is something I must do. Someone I must find.’
Find Eloise.
And find out what she means to me once and for all.