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she had never had the wherewithal to indulge herself. She was really touched that Cesare had made such a gesture and without fanfare, without even mentioning it…taking her quite by surprise. She reminded herself that she had entered a different world, one where people dressed for dinner every night, not just when they had guests, and thought that it had been very thoughtful of Cesare to foresee that reality and quietly take care of it for her.
As soon as she was ready, she hurried breathlessly downstairs, her high heels ringing across the tiled floor of the entrance hall. All of a sudden she couldn’t wait to see Cesare. A manservant followed her and as she hesitated, not knowing where to go, he pushed open a door.
The sun was setting in a magnificent blaze beyond the tall, narrow casemented windows at the far end of the room. Cesare was standing there, the light glinting off his ebony hair, a white dinner-jacket accentuating his stunning dark good looks. He took her breath away when what she had childishly wanted to do was steal his but she couldn’t read his gaze in that light.
‘You look every bit as pleased with yourself as I thought you would,’ he murmured softly.
Her skin flushed, her eyes brilliant, she took the comment at face value. ‘The clothes were a wonderful surprise,’ she told him in a rush. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it. If my wife were poorly dressed, it would reflect on me,’ Cesare told her drily. ‘And undoubtedly there will be times when I entertain here. It would be embarrassing if someone mistook you for one of the servants.’
Mina recoiled as if he had slapped her in the face. She heard him speak to the manservant whom he addressed as Paolo. A brimming glass of champagne was offered to her on a silver salver. She grasped it with an unsteady hand.
‘What shall we drink to? The institution of marriage?’ Cesare said with a sardonic smile. ‘Or your withdrawal from the world you love so much?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Mina couldn’t help the tremor that interfered with her voice. In the space of a few sentences, Cesare had ripped away her illusion that he was softening towards her.
He strolled gracefully out of the strong light into greater clarity. His lean golden features were taut with grim satisfaction as he absorbed her bewilderment. ‘You may not be dressed like one but you are about to embark on a life as constricted as that of a nun in a closed order,’ he imparted softly.
‘Have you been drinking?’ Mina whispered, that being the only explanation she could find for such an extraordinary forecast.
Cesare threw back his dark head and laughed with unashamed amusement. ‘You never did ask where you were going to live,’ he reminded her. ‘So now I’ll tell you. You will live here.’
‘Here…?’ Mina echoed uncertainly.
‘I’m not taking you back to London.’
‘But I assumed that we would be living in Lon——’
‘You assumed wrong. I can run my companies from anywhere. Technology makes that possible. I’ll have to make occasional trips but you’ll remain here keeping the home fires burning and devoting your energies to being a mother to our daughter,’ Cesare spelt out. ‘A role which will no doubt challenge you to the utmost.’
Mina gulped down champagne purely to wet her dry mouth. She gazed at him as if he had confessed to sudden madness, her amethyst eyes wide with incredulity. ‘If this place is as isolated as you said it was, it’s not suitable for Susie!’ she objected shakily, that being the first thought that came to mind.
‘It’s extremely suitable. I subsidise a very modem and well-equipped nursery and combined primary school in the village four miles from here. The younger generation were being forced to move away because of the lack of proper educational facilities for their children. The estate requires workers and the old people need their families near them. We are a mutually dependent community.’
‘Susie doesn’t even speak the language, for goodness’ sake!’ Mina gasped, taken aback by the speed and assurance with which he had answered her protest and the uncomfortable awareness that the subject was obviously something Cesare had already considered in depth.
‘And should she not learn? This is my home and therefore her home as well,’ Cesare responded. ‘Children of her age pick up another language very quickly. She will grow up bilingual.’
Belatedly, Mina understood his cracks earlier about the castello’s distance from the nightlife and fashionable boutiques. Evidently he believed that such things were highly important to her and he was determined to deprive her of any such frivolous pursuits. Actually, Mina had not been talking for effect when she’d said that she loved country life but she sensed that Cesare was threatening her with an isolation more akin to imprisonment than anything else.
She was appalled. Did the idea of marooning her here, far from her family and everything familiar, appeal to him that strongly? Was he trying to punish her for putting him in a position where he felt he had to marry her to gain proper access to his daughter? Was he so bitter that he was determined to do everything possible to make their marriage an unhappy one?
‘Dinner,’ Cesare murmured, pressing a lean hand to her taut spine and pushing her gently towards the door. ‘You’re in shock, aren’t you?’
‘I can’t think of one good reason why you should be behaving like this!’ she exclaimed helplessly. But she could think of a whole lot of bad reasons calculated to appeal to Cesare’s dark, vengeful nature.
‘If you take a lover, I’ll kill you. Try that for size,’ Cesare whispered silkily in her ear as he bent over her. ‘Much wiser simply to deny you the possibility of temptation, don’t you think? Now you won’t be tempted to stray and I won’t be tempted to commit a crime of passion.’
She stared blindly at the beautifully set candlelit dinner-table and sank down slowly into the seat pulled out for her. ‘If you take a lover, I’ll kill you.’ How on earth on their wedding-day could Cesare even be thinking of her taking a lover? It was so preposterous that he could even imagine that she might be unfaithful that she simply sat there in bemused silence, wondering which one of them was going mad.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PAOLO shook out her napkin and placed it on her lap with a flourish. He uncorked another bottle of champagne, filled their glasses and stood back to proffer a short speech in Italian.
‘In case you’re interested, Paolo was advancing the fervent good wishes and blessings of our staff and forecasting the tasteful hope that our union will be fruitful and bring children to the household again. He will no doubt be delighted when he realises we were one up in that department even before the wedding!’
Mina reddened fiercely. ‘Cesare…I don’t know where you got the idea that I might——’
