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He nodded again. Rachel Monk had been divorced for some time when he had met her; it had been hard to tell what she would have been like under normal circumstances because the day they had met had not been normal.How did a mother respond when her daughter announced she had married a man the week before in Las Vegas and—cue drum roll—here he is?
He hadn’t anticipated being welcomed into the bosom of the family, and he’d been prepared for worse than he’d got, but his own parents had more than made up for it. Luckily he’d been about ten when he’d last cared about their disapproval…or maybe that was when he’d started enjoying it.
After the initial shock, his new mother-in-law had been polite but not warm and on the handful of subsequent occasions they had met she had never relaxed in his company, continuing to view him as a threat to her daughter’s happiness. She’d been proved right.
He remembered Beatrice mentioning the second marriage in passing, but she had not dwelt on the circumstances and he hadn’t thought it warranted much curiosity in a world where very few marriages lasted long term, and those that did last, much as his parents’, did not because they were happy, but because ending it would be too costly.
‘They divorced years ago?’
‘Yes, thank God!’ There was nothing at all in passing about this emotional declaration.
‘You didn’t like him?’
‘He was vile.’ Beatrice aimed for statement of fact but it came out more hissing vehemence, which made it pointless to claim that time had done anything to lessen her feelings when it came to her stepfather.
Dante froze… His eyes went black; a chill slid down his spine. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. ‘He hurt you?’
‘Not me, no.’
The bunched aggression in his pumped muscles lowered fractionally, but the nerve beside his mouth continued to beat an erratic rhythm.
‘He wasn’t violent, he never raised a hand.’ People always assumed that abuse was physical, but torture came in many forms. ‘He didn’t need to,’ she said with quiet emphasis. ‘And he never really bothered much about me. I was not his target. It turned out there are some inbuilt advantages in being too tall and gawky, which I was at that age.’
Dante’s eyes swept across her face, taking in at once the soft, moulded contours of her smooth cheeks, the sensual curve of her full lips and her expressive cobalt blue eyes beneath the sweep of dark brows. It was hard to fit that face, those glorious supple curves, into an ugly duckling analogy. Impossible to imagine her anything other than jaw-droppingly beautiful.
But it might explain why she put so little store by her own beauty. Beatrice was the least vain woman he had ever met, with the most cause to be vain.
‘He always liked to be the centre of attention, certainly Mum’s attention, and he didn’t like competition for it. He didn’t consider me pretty or clever—people didn’t smile when I walked into a room, unless I fell over my own feet.
‘But he took against Maya from the start. She was so pretty, “like a doll” people would say—she actually hated that, she was a bit of a tomboy. And she was gifted—a precocious talent, they called it—and, you know, I think he sensed her bond with Mum… It was special.’
She paused, her blue eyes clouding with memories before she made a visible effort to compose herself.
‘Mum and Dad always told her she was special because they didn’t want her to feel second best when I came along. They wanted her to know that she was as much their real daughter as I was.’
‘I had forgotten she was adopted.’
The description of the family dynamics brought his protective instincts to the surface. It seemed to him that it was inevitable the well-meaning parents had favoured their adopted daughter.
‘What about you?’
She looked at him, startled, and shook her head.
‘While Maya was being told she was special and enjoying her bond…?’
She gave a laugh and shook her head. ‘No, I’m not explaining this very well.’ Frustrated by her inability to describe the dynamics when they were growing up, she paused a moment before trying to explain. ‘Mum and Dad wanted us to know we were both special, and the Maya and Mum thing…you can be loved by both parents but closer to one. I was a daddy’s girl,’ she admitted with sadness in her eyes. ‘I was always closer to Dad than Mum.’ He watched a shadow cross her face before she turned her head in a sharp negative gesture as though she was dislodging memories. ‘We were just a happy family, even after Dad died. We had each other and then—’
He watched as she swallowed. She seemed unaware of her actions as she pressed a hand to the base of her throat.
‘Everything changed almost overnight, but we clung together, and it was getting better. At first it was lovely to see Mum happier and getting dressed up. Maya and I would help her with her make-up before a date, and Edward was a charming man.
‘Until they were married—he changed then. It was insidious, the way he cut Mum off from everything, everyone, including us. You didn’t see it at the time and we were just kids. And he was careful to appear caring in front of Mum, but when she wasn’t there, one of his weapons of choice against Maya was finding fault.’ It sounded innocuous when she said it, but the cumulative effect had been devastating. ‘He just chipped away at her on a daily basis. Nothing she did was good enough. He ridiculed her, laughed at anything she did and told her she was hopeless.’
In the end her sister had believed it.
Bea’s eyes lifted from her determined contemplation of her clenched fingers in response to the harsh curses that Dante spat. They were not Italian words she was familiar with but she got the gist without a dictionary.
‘He had a sadistic streak. He wanted to see her cry.’
