AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Like this... Catherine repeated to herself, looking down at herself with the kind of blank eyes that said she couldn’t see, as he could see, the changes that had come over her in a few short, devastating minutes.
Stopping at the end of the drive, Vito Giordani looked at this woman who had known more than her fair share of pain, heartache and grief in her life, and felt the air leave his lungs on a constricted hiss.
‘How many have you missed?’ he questioned flatly.
Catherine lifted those wretched dull grey eyes to him and a nerve began ticking along his jawline as he set the car going again, taking them not down the hillside but up it, out into open country.
‘You can count as well as I can,’ she answered dully.
Vito grimaced. ‘I am afraid my eyes glazed over when I noticed that yesterday’s was still there.’
Yesterday’s, the day before—and the day before, Catherine counted out bleakly. A contraceptive pill for each day since Vito had come back into her life, in fact.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve been messing up my life since I was twenty-three years old, and here you are, six years on, still messing it up.’
About to remind her that it wasn’t him who’d forgotten to take the damn pills, Vito bit the words back again. ‘Getting embroiled in a fight about whose fault it is is not going to solve the problem,’ he threw at her instead.
‘Nothing can solve it,’ Catherine countered hopelessly. ‘The damage has already been done.’
Mouth set in a straight line, Vito said not another word as he drove them higher and higher, until eventually he pulled the car off the road and onto a piece of scrub land that overlooked the kind of views people paid fortunes to see.
They didn’t see the beauty in it, though. There could have been pitch-blackness out there in front of them for all they knew. And they were surrounded by perfect silence. Not a bird, not a house, not another car, not even a breeze to rustle the dry undergrowth. In fact they could have been the only two people left in the world, which suited exactly how they were both feeling.
Two people alone with the kind of problem that shut out the rest of the world.
‘I’m sorry,’ Vito murmured.
Maybe he felt he needed to say it, but Catherine shrugged. ‘Not your fault,’ she absolved him. ‘It’s me who’s been unforgivably stupid.’
‘Maybe we will get lucky and nothing will come of it,’ he suggested, in an attempt to place a glimmer of light into their darkness.
‘Don’t count on it,’ Catherine replied heavily. ‘Twice before we’ve taken risks, and twice I got pregnant. Why should this time be any different?’
Why indeed? was the echo that came back from the next drumming silence.
‘There has to be something we can do!’ he muttered harshly. And on a sudden flash of inspiration said, ‘We will drive to the doctor’s. Get that—morning-after pill—or whatever it is they call it...’
Catherine flinched as if he had plunged a knife in her. ‘Do you know what they call those pills, Vito?’ she whispered painfully. ‘Little abortions,’ she informed him starkly. ‘Because that’s what they do. They abort the egg whether it is fertilised or not.’
‘But you also know what they told you,’ he reminded her. ‘Another pregnancy like the last one could be dangerous.’
Her tear-washed eyes shimmered in the sunlight. ‘So I abort one life to safeguard my own life?’
The anguish she saw in his eyes was for her; Catherine knew that. But she couldn’t deal with it. And on the dire need to escape from both him and the whole wretched scenario, she opened the car door and climbed out.
Leaving Vito sitting there staring ahead of him, she walked, barefooted, across the dusty ground to a lonely cypress tree and leaned against its dry old trunk.
First she had almost lost Santo, due to mid-term complications. She had managed to hold onto him until he was big enough to cope outside his mother’s womb, and the doctors had assured her that the same condition rarely struck twice in the same woman. But they had been wrong. And the next time it had happened she’d almost lost her own life along with her baby.
‘No more babies,’ they had announced. ‘Your body won’t take the physical trauma.’
No more babies...
A movement beside her made her aware that Vito had come to lean a shoulder on the other side of the tree. For a man who had only had enough time to drag on the first clothes that came to hand he looked remarkably stylish in his light chinos and a plain white tee shirt. But then, that was Vito, she mused hollowly. A man so inherently special that no one in the world would believe that anything in his life would ever go wrong for him.
His marriage had. From its unfortunate beginning to its tragic ending.
Catherine didn’t count this latest encounter. Because in truth she no longer felt married to Vito; if anything, she felt more as she had done when she first met him: alive, excited, electrifyingly stimulated. Which was why they’d ended up in bed making love like there was no tomorrow. It was a taste of the old days—irresistible.
