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Alissandru drove her back to the house in silence, his lean, darkly handsome features clenched with tension. ‘We have to talk about this.’
Isla climbed out, her face still stiff. ‘It’s a little late in the day to talk about it.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ Alissandru shot at her, snapping the key for the front door from her nerveless fingers. ‘If something happened between you at the wedding, we—my mother and I—as your hosts should’ve been made aware of it!’
Anger gusted through Isla in a heady wave as she stalked into the house, her vibrant curls bouncing on her shoulders, her dark blue eyes outraged. ‘I made Tania aware of it and she said I wasn’t to tell anyone else. Believe me, it happened! And it wasn’t “between us”, either. When a man assaults a woman, it isn’t always a shared misunderstanding!’
‘Tell me exactly what happened!’ Alissandru urged her as she paced uneasily round the lounge.
‘Tania sent me upstairs to her bedroom to fetch her bag and your cousin followed me. He tried to kiss me and he put his hand inside the neckline of my dress and tried to touch my breast!’ Isla recounted with a helpless shudder of recollection. ‘He said something disgusting and when I pushed him off me, he fell over the bed, which gave me the chance to get away. Of course, he was drunk and he thought it was all very funny and he started laughing. But I was scared and I was very upset. I was only sixteen, Alissandru... I’d never been touched before and I didn’t know how to handle it.’
His eyes flared as golden as flames in his lean, strong face. The mere idea of Fantino touching sixteen-year-old Isla appalled Alissandru, most particularly because he had seen Isla leave that bedroom closely followed by his cousin and he had put entirely the wrong interpretation on what he had seen. The guilt of that shocking misconception hit him hard. He had caught a glimpse of a suspicious scenario and, instead of immediately being concerned about the welfare of a very young girl, he had assumed she had either been flirting or having sex and had done and said nothing. That awareness went right to the very heart of the prejudice she had accused him of harbouring, and in that instant he knew he could no longer deny that his low opinion of Tania had automatically encompassed her kid sister as well and had coloured his reading of the situation.
‘I am so sorry that happened to you, but Fantino will be even sorrier!’ Alissandru swore in a raw undertone, throwing back his broad shoulders. ‘But I am also sorry that I did not intervene when I might have done that day.’
‘How could you have intervened?’ Isla questioned without comprehension.
‘I saw you coming out of that bedroom. I didn’t see your face, just your back view, and then I saw Fantino coming out some seconds after you. I’m ashamed to admit that I simply assumed you had been having some sort of sexual or flirtatious encounter with him. I didn’t question it.’
It was Isla’s turn to stiffen and stare at him in shock. ‘You thought that at sixteen I would go into a bedroom with a man and have sex in someone else’s house? How could you think that of me at that age?’
‘I have little justification but I did think that,’ Alissandru admitted reluctantly. ‘From the minute I saw you wearing the low-necked dress your sister put you in, I decided that you were just like her.’
Isla groaned, suddenly seeing the whole history of her relationship with Alissandru rewritten in the blink of an eye. He was finally acknowledging that that prejudice had existed, though, and that was a relief, she told herself soothingly.
‘I am sickened that you suffered such an experience in my home. You should’ve been safe there. You were very young. In the absence of a parental figure, it was my duty to look out for your well-being...and obviously I failed,’ he bit out grimly. ‘On the other hand, Tania was very wrong to persuade you to keep quiet about the assault.’
‘Alissandru... I didn’t know any of you and I couldn’t have brought myself to share that story with anyone I didn’t know well. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Tania suggested I might’ve encouraged him in some way while I was downstairs,’ Isla told him. ‘But I hadn’t even spoken to him when he followed me up to that bedroom.’
‘Do you want me to call the police? A sexual assault is a sexual assault, regardless of how much time has passed.’
Isla stiffened. ‘No, I don’t wish to make an official complaint. I’ve put it behind me now but I wouldn’t want to meet him again or be forced to pretend that what happened didn’t happen.’
Alissandru nodded gravely, his dark golden eyes glittering pale like shards of broken glass below his black lashes. He was thinking of the family jokes told about Fantino’s persistent approaches to any attractive woman available. Maybe that wasn’t quite so funny now that Alissandru was seeing the other side of the coin and having to question his cousin’s behaviour. It had never crossed his mind to look on Fantino as a sex pest but that now seemed more accurate. That he should’ve dared to frighten and distress a young guest in Alissandru’s home was inexcusable. He was also thinking guiltily that he too had noticed Isla’s attraction that day and had dealt with it less than honestly by telling himself that she was a shameless little baggage. But he would never have acknowledged that attraction to so youthful a girl, never have given way to it.
‘What the hell was Tania thinking of when she silenced you?’ he ground out on his purposeful path back to the front door.
Wincing, Isla looked pensive and wry. ‘That it would’ve wrecked her wedding...and it would’ve done. Imagine the atmosphere it would’ve created if I’d publicly accused Fantino! I was a complete stranger in a foreign country and Tania was almost as unknown to your family as I was at that stage,’ she pointed out ruefully. ‘Would anyone even have believed me?’
‘Certainly, I hope we would have.’ Alissandru breathed in deep. ‘But it will be dealt with now as it should’ve been then.’
‘Why... What are you going to do?’ Isla asked worriedly.
‘Deal with Fantino,’ Alissandru bit out wrathfully. ‘What else?’
‘So, you believe me,’ Isla gathered.
‘Of course, I do.’
A moment later, he had gone and once the sound of his car had receded Isla paced the wooden floor, amazed at how shaken up she felt after getting that episode six years earlier off her chest. Finally. Her shoulders slumped and she felt relieved that that horrible secret was now out in the open. Naturally, she hadn’t shared the story with her grandparents, who would’ve been horrified. But she had also kept quiet because she had feared that if they knew they would not let her travel alone again and back then she had still harboured the hope that the wedding invitation would lead to other invites from her sister. Of course, that hadn’t happened and the sad repercussions of her encounter with Fantino had lasted a lot longer. For years she had been nervous of men, fearful of an assault coming her way without warning, fearful that something she might wear, say or do might attract such treatment. But she had moved past that eventually, survived, she reminded herself calmingly as she tripped over her bag, which she had abandoned in the hall.
Recalling the pregnancy test in her bag, she pulled it out. In the almost bare study, she lifted the dictionary of Italian words she had bought so that she could translate the directions. Fortunately, the pictorial diagrams were more easily understood and she decided to do the test immediately, rather than stress about it or be forced to attempt to do it when Alissandru was around.
He had been very much shocked by her story about Fantino, she acknowledged, but he would be a great deal more shocked, she reckoned, if she was to conceive again. It wasn’t possible, she told herself as her heartbeat kicked up tempo. Her stupid hormones were still out of sync after the miscarriage and she would have to see a doctor when she got home again. Having convinced herself that the test was a simple formality to rule out an unlikely development, she went upstairs.
Fifteen minutes later, she was reeling in shock at what
was undeniably a positive pregnancy test. Having returned her hire car some weeks before, she climbed into the little runaround that had once belonged to Tania and drove back to the pharmacy to buy a second test. Just to be on the safe side, she told herself. An hour later, she contemplated the second positive result and felt so dizzy and sick with nerves that she could barely breathe. After a few minutes she stood up and went to lie down on top of the bed and think.
Pregnant...again! How was she supposed to deal with the joy rising inside her and the quite opposite effect her news would have on Alissandru? How could it have happened when they had tried to be careful? Yet she knew that no contraception was foolproof. Her head swimming with confused feelings, she tried to imagine telling Alissandru again and immediately thought that maybe she didn’t need to tell him this time, that maybe she should wait a few months to at least be sure she stayed pregnant.
