He sighed. ‘Let’s concentrate on the present, shall we?’
‘Yes, let’s.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘So in the present, where do you sleep?’
‘My room is through that door.’ He gestured to a third, closed door.
‘Which I hope is locked.’
His eyes glittered in a way that made something curl inside her. ‘You clearly don’t know me very well if you think I’m the kind of man who forces himself on women.’
‘Oh, I don’t know you well at all, Ettore. But I do know that you’re the kind of man who manipulates women.’
‘One woman. You. And you could have refused me. Which says as much about you as it does me. Because I know you, Dulcie. I know your price. But be very clear, you are going to earn it. My father needs to believe in us. If we’re going to pass as a happily married couple who have seized a second chance at love, you can’t be like this. We won’t get away with it. We need to feel connected. Close. Which means no more jerking away from me if I ask you to pass the salt at lunch. Or try and hold your hand.
‘Because, in case it’s slipped your mind, at some point we are going to have to kiss, so perhaps you should start getting your head round that now. In fact, might I suggest you get in a bit of practice?’ His eyes snaked from her face to her clenched fist.
‘Although you might want to adjust the position of your thumb. Unless, of course, you’d like me to help in person.’
As she watched the door close behind him, she felt her cheeks grow warm. One night, in bed, she had admitted to Ettore that, before she’d got a boyfriend, she had practised kissing by making an O shape with her thumb and forefinger.
Only now it appeared she had been telling her secrets to a stranger. Was this the real Ettore? Maybe. But then this wasn’t a real marriage.
She felt suddenly furious with herself but mostly with Ettore. It had taken her every single day of the last two years to get her life back on track and in that entire time he hadn’t so much as texted.
But when he’d needed something from her, he had simply turned up on her doorstep, or as good as, offering her that wrecking ball of a choice.
Come to Italy as his wife or refuse and knowingly turn down money that could help Oscar turn his life around.
She hated that it was all so easy for him. That he could just ambush her like that and cold-bloodedly use their marriage as a bargaining chip. But most of all she hated that this was her life now and for the foreseeable future.
Chapter Five
‘SO,DULCIE. Let me look at you.’ Edoardo Marchesi smiled. ‘I see that your name is entirely appropriate. It is beautiful, and you are a very beautiful woman.’
Ettore watched in silence as his father leaned forward to gaze deeply into Dulcie’s eyes. ‘It comes from the Latin word “dulce”, meaning sweet.’
Despite having an oxygen canister placed near his wheelchair that sat discreetly at the edge of the room, the old man was an incurable flirt.
Women liked him, they always had. He was handsome and very masculine without being lecherous or toxic. Which no doubt explained why he’d had so many affairs.
And he liked women. He liked their company. He liked hearing them laugh. Liked making them laugh. Even now, in his eighties, he had what Sofia called ‘riz’. Charisma and charm and, unlike other men his age and younger, he was not having plastic surgery or hair transplants. On the contrary, he had turned ageing into an act of elegance.
‘Ettore told me that when we first met, didn’t you, darling?’
He felt his body tense as Dulcie glanced across the table and smiled at him, one of those lush smiles that were as rare and warming as winter sunlight. In the past, he had been a collector of such smiles in the same way that his great-great-grandfather had once collected fine art from around the globe.
And superficially, certainly to his father and the staff who were hovering discreetly at the margins of the room, it looked real, as if all those weeks and months and years of silent impasse were not a vast, invisible and unassailable chasm between them.
‘I did.’
Ettore shifted minutely in his seat so that he could better meet Dulcie’s teasing gaze. Back then, it wasn’t just her smiles he’d collected. He had studied her greedily as any student in love with his subject would pore over his books. In the past, he had been attuned to her body, to her breath, to the slightest tilt of her chin and he could see from the slight creasing around her eyes that she was faking it.
Of course she was faking it, he thought irritably. That was the set-up. It was hypocritical of him to mind, and yet he found that he did. Minded more that she was making it look so effortless because, despite expectations to the contrary, he was finding it harder than he’d thought.
His jaw tightened. He should just be pleased that Dulcie was doing what he’d asked her to do.Toldher to do.Threatenedher into doing?
The vice around his chest ratcheted up a notch.
Had he threatened her? Not explicitly. But there had been a threat implied, of consequences that would follow if his conditions weren’t met.
