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The pain and the anxiety had always melted down to the same source. Love. Such a cruel emotion to the unlucky. It was love which was stalking her like Nemesis now. She had never managed to kill her love for Alex. She had dug the weakness down deep and sought to bury it, but it had lingered, preventing her from finding peace even with herself. When had loving Alex ever caused her anything but pain? She did not marvel at her own reluctance to admit her vulnerability. Pride and simple fear had warred against the admission.
“Sofia tells me that you are not feeling well.”
“It’s just a headache. I’ll lie down for an hour.” Her voice emerged perfectly normally and she turned.
Alex was on the threshold, dark and tawny and compellingly masculine. Concern showed clearly in his narrowed, probing scrutiny.
“Leave me, I’ll be fine,” she insisted when he continued to stare.
“Are you in love with Steven Glenn?”
The unexpectedness of the quiet demand took her by surprise. His eyes were cool and level. The weather might have been under discussion.
“Why should you think that?”
His arrogant head tilted back, black hair gleaming in the filtered sunshine. “I was curious, and it’s wiser if we don’t have any secrets between us.”
“You’ve got everything else, Alex,” she heard herself riposte drily. “I’m afraid you don’t have access to my every thought too.”
Fury glittered in his gaze. The illusion of cool was abruptly cast aside. “Then you will understand if I prevent you from returning to England in the foreseeable future,” he delivered crushingly.
As he withdrew, the door rocked on its hinges. A sick tide of bitterness rose like bile within her. How could he think that she could love another man and still abandon herself to him? It certainly clarified Alex’s view of her. As far as Alex was concerned, she was enslaved by her own promiscuous nature. Already he was suspecting his conviction that there had been no other men. He would have her watched like a thief when he was abroad. He would never trust her out of his sight. But she understood why he could live with her moral deficiency. It was her weakness, not his. Had his surveillance of her life included a photo of Steven? A humourless smile curved her lips. Steven was a very handsome man. Well, let Alex live with his suspicions! Steven was at a safe distance. If Alex had to distrust her, Steven was a harmless focus.
When she returned to the terrace after lunch, Alex was not there.
“Kyrios Veranchetti has gone fishing.” Sofia answered her enquiry cheerfully.
She got a pair of binoculars and located him out in the bay.
“He with old Andreas like when he was a boy,” Sofia burbled, sketching an impossibly miniature Alex with a workworn hand.
She could see two figures in the shabby caique. Sunlight glinted off a can of beer in Alex’s hand. She put the binoculars away guiltily and spent the afternoon sunbathing. He came back just before dinner, angling her a flashing, sensual smile on his way past. “I won’t take long to change.”
He talked with animation over the meal. Their earlier conversation might never have happened. As she went to bed, she was wondering how she was to survive another decade of Alex’s supreme self-sufficiency. He didn’t care if she loved another man. He had her in body, he didn’t need her in spirit, too. She was almost asleep when he came to her. Her drowsy, muffled protest was silenced by the tender caress of his mouth. If he had been storm and passion the night before, he was seduction and silence now. But this time she was agonisingly conscious of his withdrawal afterwards. He quietly removed himself back to his own room. Actually sleeping with her appeared to be an intimacy Alex could not bring himself to contemplate.
She woke up to the sound of the helicopter landing. When she walked out on to the terrace Alex was chattering in Italian on the phone, and two dark-suited men, one standing, one sitting, were with him. Her colour evaporated as she recognised one of them. The older one with the greying hair was Roberto Carreras, the lawyer Alex had sent to Florence with the separation papers. Just looking at the man brought back hideous recollections.
“Some coffee, kyrie?” Sofia bustled past, carrying a laden tray, and the men turned their heads, seeing her slim figure for the first time. It was too late to retreat.
Carreras immediately stood, his suave features betraying not an ounce of discomfiture as he politely spun out his chair for her. “Buon giorno, signora,” he said, and passed some meaningless comment on the magnificent view.
She was ill with mortification, forced to take the seat and smile in the man’s general direction. Alex glanced up, an abstracted half-smile softening his expression. Sofia moved about, pouring the coffee, pressing Kerry for a breakfast order. But if she ate, she would very likely throw up, she acknowledged. She had been so distressed that day. The lawyer had remained coldly impersonal while she had begged him to speak to Alex for her, had begged him to convince Alex that he had to come and see her face to face. “That is not my client’s wish, signora,” he had intoned expressionlessly.
In retrospect, she marvelled that she had survived that period. A shudder of fearful repulsion snaked through her as she surveyed Alex from beneath her copper lashes. “Excuse me.” She got up on cotton-wool legs with a slightly bowed head. “I’ll leave you to your business discussion.”
Strolling into the house, she could feel Alex’s questioning glance burning into her back. She went out to the terrace at the rear of the villa. How could she sit and make polite conversation with a man who had witnessed and played a part in her humiliation? It was too much to demand of her. But Alex was an unfeeling, insensitive brute. He probably didn’t even remember that Carreras was the one.
There were too many cracks to paper over. This marriage could never work. Even her innocence could not wipe out the memory of a nightmare. Yesterday she had let herself float with the tide because she loved him and she had wanted to cling to the fragile hope that he had meant it when he talked about a fresh start. What a fool she had been!
She was standing by the sea wall, gazing down sightlessly at the waves crashing white foam against the rocks far below, when firm hands curved hard to her shoulders from behind. She flinched.
“They’re gone,” Alex drawled roughly.
So he had remembered…my God, how could either of them ever forget?
“You’ve got to let me go, Alex,” she whispered. It was the only answer that she could see.
His fingers bit painfully into her slender forearms. “No,” he gritted. “Why should you talk like this now?”
“You’re hurting me.”
His hold loosened, his thumbs rubbing soothingly over the indentations of his hard fingers. “I didn’t mean to. I think I have bruised you. Forgive me.”
An hysterical laugh bubbled up in her convulsed throat.
“I remembered too late to protect you from that embarrassment. It won’t be repeated. It was an unfortunate oversight. You will not have to see him again.”
The laugh escaped this time, high-pitched and unnatural. “What are you going to do? Tell him he’s no longer welcome in your home because he once performed a certain task at your behest?”
“I will transfer him somewhere. He will not suffer by it. I can do no more. If you are so upset by the sight of him, I can no longer entertain him,” Alex retorted with abrasive practicality.
She gulped. “I see. Are you planning to do that with everybody who might talk? The staff in the house in Florence, the security men, your secretarial staff in Rome who never put through my calls, the personal aides who ensured my letters were returned…what about the other lawyers involved?”
Spinning her round, he gave her a little shake. Perspiration gleamed on his hewn dark skin, lines of strain grooved deep between his nose and mouth. “Stop this now,” he insisted in a ragged undertone.
She turned up her tear-stained face in a movement of despair. “You’re not being logical, Alex. Athene may not descend to gossip, but a lot of your friends must
be in the know. I know what a hotbed of gossip Roman society is, and the way rumours go, I should imagine that the word is that you walked into an orgy by now…” She faltered out of all control and restraint. “Doesn’t it bother you that people are going to mutter and sneer behind your back?”
His hands sprung wide as he released her. He backed off several steps as if he could not trust himself too close. Slowly she shook her head, Titian hair flying about her in fiery glory. It had had to be said, all that Alex did not want to hear, for as those things happened she would be the one to pay the price.
“Don’t you see that you will take your anger out on me?” she pressed hoarsely.
