CESARE STOOD IN the massive fortified gateway that led to the walled courtyard of the castello, watching the Marchese’s car wind its stately way down the hairpin road snaking into the valley below. Then he turned away, walked back into the castello.
The visit of Francesca and her parents had been a complete success, and now she was going with her parents to the family seat in the north of Italy before flying back to the USA to settle her affairs there.
There was no immediate rush for them to marry—the date was set for late summer, and Francesca’s mother was intent on enjoying every moment of the lavish preparations. Also, Francesca wanted to see if she could secure a post-doctoral position at a physics department in Italy. When she returned from America, visited the castello once more, Cesare would start to take her out and about with him on prenuptial social engagements. Start his personal courtship of her, the woman who would be his bride.
As the woman he had set aside could never be.
Could never be in his life again in any way.
As it always did, the guillotine sliced down in his head. That subject was still not safe. With iron self-discipline—a self-discipline that he seemed to need increasingly now, but which, surely to God, would fade as time passed—he put aside the thoughts he must not have, the memories he must not recall.
He strode indoors, but as he did so, he glanced up the massive oak staircase that led to the upper floor of the staterooms. That floor was dominated by the full-length galleria, once the exercise space for the ladies of the house in bad weather, which now contained the bulk of the artworks here at the castello.
Including the Luciezo-Caradino triptych.
As if impelled, Cesare felt himself heading towards the base of the stairs. Then, abruptly, he pulled away. No, he would not go and look at it. To what purpose? He knew what it looked like. Knew why he wanted to go and look at it.
His expression steeled. His ancestor might have been born at a time when a man could ‘have it all’, but those times were gone. There could be no honour in thinking otherwise—not a shred of it.
I have made my choice and I will abide by it. Carla is in the past now, and she must stay there. My future is with Francesca. And Francesca has made her choice too—she has chosen to be my wife.
He walked into his study, sitting himself down at his mahogany desk, ready to catch up on work after several days of entertaining Francesca and her family. His eyes flickered. He had made his choice—Francesca had made hers. But Carla—Carla had not made a choice, had she?
For a moment—just a brief, flashing moment before that guillotine cut down again across his mind—he saw her that final morning.
Naked, stripped bare of everything that she’d thought she had—everything she had presumed.
The guillotine sliced down. Harsh thoughts sliced down with it. It was a harshness that was necessary. Essential. And not just for Carla.
Well, she should not have presumed! He had given her no cause to do so—none! He could acquit himself of that! He had never—not once—given her to think otherwise! And she hadn’t needed any such reminder from him! She’d said she’d always known, always accepted the necessary limitations of their time together. That it would be...could only be...for a fixed duration.
To our time together.
That had been his very first toast to her. Right from the outset. And their time together had now ended. That was all there was to it.
Impatiently, ruthlessly, he switched on his computer. It fired up and he flicked to the Internet to check his emails. The home page of a leading financial newspaper sprang up, and there, in lead story position, was a headline that stilled him totally.
He had made his choice, Francesca had made her choice, and now it seemed that Carla Charteris, after all, was making hers...
Marriage merger keeps Viscari Hotels in the family—Falcone’s ambitions thwarted!
He stared, seeing the headline. Seeing the photo that went with it.
Feeling the jagged emotion, like a serrated blade, knifing into him.
* * *
The sonorous music swelled, lifting upwards to one last crescendo before falling silent. The hushed murmurings of the congregation stilled as the priest raised his hands and began to speak the words of the ancient sacrament in the age-old ceremony.
Inside her breast Carla could feel her heart beating like a hammer. Crushing all compunction about what she was doing—what she was making Vito do so bitterly against his will.
Emotion filled her and she felt a low, fine tremble go through her, as if her whole being were about to shatter as she stood there, gowned in white, her face veiled. Stood beside the man who was her bridegroom. Waiting for him to say the words that would unite them in marriage.
That would free her, finally, from the hell in which she lived.
But there were no words. There was only silence.
At her side, Vito stood immobile. He had not touched her since she’d walked stiffly down the aisle, her back aching with tension—tension that had kept her in hell for weeks now. A hell she had dragged Vito into as well.
But she didn’t care—could not care. Could only keep going with the desperate remedy her mother had offered her—a remedy that was, she knew with the last fragment of her sane mind, poisoning her.
She would not let Vito go. She could not—dared not. If she let him go she would plunge down into the abyss. She had to marry him—she just had to! She would not be safe until she did. Safe from everything that was devouring her.
When I’m married to him I can be safe! I can be Signora Viscari and have a role to play, a person to be. Being his wife will give me protection.
Her mother thought it was only protection from the sneers of the world, the gossip and the jibes, that she wanted, but that was not the protection that she so desperately sought. She needed protection from herself.
Without Vito’s ring keeping me safe, keeping me here in Rome, keeping my days spent organising my wedding, without all that I’d be terrified...terrified...
Cold snaked down her back. It was terror—the absolute terror that possessed her.
That she’d go to Cesare and beg him...beg him...
Beg him to take her back on any terms—any terms at all!
In her vision she saw again that damnable triptych—the lordly Conte flanked by his pure, perfect wife...and his lowly mistress.
Her stomach hollowed. Once she had thought herself far above comparing herself to the Caradino beauty. In this day and age there could be no such role for any woman. None.
How desperately wrong she had been.
Love makes slaves of us. Strips everything from us. Craves only the object of our heart...
She felt herself tremble again as she stood beside Vito, waiting for him to say the words that would keep her safe. Safe from all that tore at her.
Her mother’s cruel description seared in her head. ‘Cesare’s mistress’, she’d called her daughter. And there had been more words too...
‘No happy ending.’
Except for Cesare. Cesare with his beautiful, clever, aristocratic bride—the perfect Contessa.
‘Do you love her?’
The agonising question she’d hurled at him haunted her, seared in her head now, as she stood rigid with tension beside the man she was forcing to marry her.
And in her head Cesare’s reply came again.
‘Love is an irrelevance.’
Her face convulsed beneath her veil. Words tumbled through her head, hectic and desperate.
And it will be irrelevant for me too! I don’t love Vito, and his emotion for me is only loathing and bitter hatred for what I’ve done to him, for the price I’m making him pay to get his family shares back. But when I’m safe—truly safe—I can let him go. In six months...a year...he can get on with his life again. I’ll ask for an annulment and release Vito and then he can go and find that blonde of his if he really wants to. He can have it all—the shares, the blonde, everything... It won’t be the end of the world for him, for her. They can sort it out between them if they really want to.
As for herself—well, this time around it would be her choice not to be married! She would be the one to end it!
I’ll walk out with my head held high—no one will pity me! No one will think me scorned ever again! And Cesare and his beautiful, nobly born, terrifyingly clever, oh-so-damn-wonderful bride can go on having their wonderful life together and I won’t care—I won’t! I’ll have shown him that I can do very well without him! That I’ve survived.
As if surfacing from a deep, suffocating dive, she became aware that the silence was lengthening. That Vito was still not saying the words she needed to hear—the words that would rescue her from this hell she was in.
Her head jerked towards him, her eyes distending. Filling with urgency.
Then finally Vito was speaking. But it was not to the priest. It was to her. His face stark, he was turning towards her. Saying words that drained the air from her lungs.
‘I won’t do this, Carla.’
She heard his words. But they came from a long, long way away. There was a roaring in her head...
* * *
‘No, Mum—I said no!’
Carla’s voice was like a knife. Her mother was arguing with her, trying to make her go back to Guido’s villa with her. But she could not bear another moment of her mother’s company.
Raging, shouting, almost hysterical, Carla sat in the vestry, on a hard bench, her nails digging into her palms.
‘I’m going back to my apartment.’
How she’d got there she could not remember—one of the wedding cars, she supposed, waiting by the rear entrance to the church, had taken her away from the avid, buzzing speculation of the congregation. But now she was finally there in her bedroom, standing in her wedding dress.
Palest white, like the decor in her apartment. As if she might disappear into it...
A bead of hysteria bubbled in her throat. She fought it down. She must not let it out. She must keep it deep inside her. Must, instead, reach behind her back and with stiff, aching arms undo, hook by hook, the gown she had put on less than three hours ago at Guido’s house.
I was so nearly safe—so nearly! And now...
She felt terror beat up in her—had to fight it down. Fight down the cold, sick feeling inside her that was running in every vein like liquid nitrogen.
He jilted me. Vito jilted me. Turned me down. Rejected me. Refused to marry me... Refused, refused, refused...
She felt the hysteria in her throat again, felt her eyes distend, felt pressure in her head as if it might explode. Felt her fingers tremble as the last of the hooks were undone and the heavy, beaded satin and lace gown plummeted to the floor.
She stepped out of it, twisted out of her shoes. God knew where her veil was—she’d torn it from her as she’d gained the vestry, with Vito’s arm clamped around hers. If it hadn’t been she’d have fainted on the spot. As it was she’d swayed, felt the church whirling around her, and heard a choking noise come from her throat.
She could be glad of that—glad that it had given her a lie to cling to.
‘The bride is indisposed...’
Hysteria clawed again. Yes, ‘indisposed’—that was what she was.
Not jilted, not rejected, not spurned.
Somewhere in the depths of her head she knew, with a kind of piercing pain, that she had only got what she deserved.
I forced Vito to the altar—behaved shamefully...selfishly.
Desperately.
She walked into the bathroom, yanking on the shower. She stepped under the plunging water, still in her underwear, her hair still pinned into its elaborate coiffeur, soaking herself in the hot, punishing water.
How long she stood there, she could not say. She knew only that it seemed to take an agony of time to peel off the underwear clinging to her streaming wet body—to free herself from the silken mesh of her stockings, push down her panties, yank off her bra, until she was standing there, a mess of lingerie in the shower tray, her hair covering her face, her back, standing there in the scorching hot water, shivering violently...
With shaking hands she turned the water off, pushed the dripping locks from her face, clambered out of the cubicle to seize a towel for her hair, for her body, her feet. She was still shaking, though her skin was red and overheated.
Somehow she made it to her bed. Somehow she thrust the wet towels from her, crawled under the covers like a wounded animal. Somehow, she curled her body, knees drawn up, arms wrapped about herself, her still wet hair damp on the pillow.
She felt the world recede and the blessed mercy of sleep came over her. The oblivion she sought.