The Italian’s Rightful Bride (13 page)

‘No, you don't, do you? That's one thing we can agree on. You've never understood anything about me. Not then, not now.'

She stormed off, climbed out of the dig in a rage, ran to the car and drove away.

She got halfway back to the house before common sense returned and she remembered that he had no means of transport. Groaning, she turned back and drove until she saw him.

‘Get in,' she said through gritted teeth. ‘And don't say a word to me, ever again, do you understand?'

‘No,' he said in a hollow voice. ‘I don't understand anything.'

‘Then just keep quiet anyway.'

 

Over the next few days the full extent of the treasure was revealed, and it was greater than anyone's hopes.

Joanna's professional pride warred with her personal frustration and misery.

She could have had it all and she'd thrown it away because of some stupid, niggling bother.

No, she stopped herself there. It hadn't been stupid. And she couldn't have had it all. She could have had only the small portion Gustavo had been willing to offer. He could love her
if
…

And that ‘if' damned him. If everything else was right. If he could keep his pride as well. With Crystal he'd thrown all other thoughts to the winds. With her there was an ‘if'. And though it broke her heart a second time, she would not accept a conditional love in return for her wholehearted one.

There were plenty of other things to think of. It was time for Billy to go back to England and the boarding-school he attended. He liked being there, but she knew everything would have been happier if she'd settled in Italy and brought him to live here.

Freddy was taking him to England and staying a couple of days before returning to Rome and settling in a
hotel near Crystal. He, at least, was over the moon about developments. So was Crystal, according to Freddy.

On the night before Freddy's departure Gustavo forced himself, like a good host, to join his unwanted guest in the library.

‘May I get you another drink?' he asked politely.

‘Don't mind if you do.' Freddy held out the glass and Gustavo refilled it.

‘Is your packing all done?'

‘Yes, don't worry, I'll be out of your hair first thing in the morning.'

‘I hope you don't feel that you haven't been welcome here,' Gustavo said, forcing himself to remain courteous.

‘Oh, I can make myself welcome anywhere,' Freddy said, slightly changing the meaning. ‘It's been a good visit. I've seen plenty of my son, and I'm easier in my mind about you.'

‘About me?' Gustavo said in surprise. ‘Why should you be concerned about me?'

‘I'm not. You can jump off a bridge for all I care. No offence, of course.'

‘None taken,' Gustavo assured him.

‘No, I'm thinking of you and Joanna. Plus, of course, you and Billy. But Billy says you're OK.'

‘That's very kind of him,' Gustavo said cautiously. ‘But I don't quite see—'

‘Oh, for the love of heaven!' Freddy groaned. ‘You and Joanna have been pussyfooting about for twelve years. Don't you think that's enough?'

‘I think you've misunderstood the situation—'

‘You mean you weren't engaged? Funny, everyone said you were.'

‘If you were at my wedding I'm surprised you didn't get the whole story then.'

‘I did, in several versions. Never quite known which one to believe.'

‘Well, let's leave it that way.'

‘How can we leave it?' Freddy demanded, aggrieved. ‘Sooner or later you're going to marry Joanna and be Billy's stepfather—'

As always when the conversation turned to personal matters Gustavo felt himself grow tense.

‘I don't know where you get such an idea—' he began.

‘Everyone knows. Here, fill that up again, there's a good fellow.'

He held out his glass and Gustavo refilled it mechanically. Then he filled his own glass, drained it, refilled it.

‘Then everyone is mistaken,' he said firmly. ‘There's no question of it.'

Freddy gave vent to an extremely rude word, expressive of disbelief and derision.

‘What's the matter with you two?' he demanded. ‘You're crazy about each other, so where's the big problem? Lord, if I ever knew such a pair! Just because you made a mess of it once it doesn't mean you have to go on making a mess of it, does it?'

‘Signor Manton—'

‘Call me Freddy. It won't kill you, after all the other names you've been calling me under your breath. I know you don't like me. So what? I don't much like you.'

‘Would you be good enough to tell me what I've done to incur your dislike?' Gustavo said, at his most wooden.

‘Damned well ruined my marriage.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘I can believe that,' Freddy said, a tad wildly. ‘You're exactly the fellow who wouldn't have any idea what I was talking about. I'm talking about my wife being in love with you, that's what I'm talking about.'

‘Joanna was never in love with me.'

‘Don't tell me. I lived with her for eight years and I know her a sight better than you do. I was in love with that girl. D'you know, I was faithful to her for
four whole years
, including when she was pregnant.'

‘You are to be commended,' Gustavo snapped with an irony that was lost on Freddy.

‘That's what I think. Four years. It makes me faint to think of it, even now. Where's that decanter?'

He filled his own glass again. Gustavo was staring at him.

‘Four years,' Freddy repeated, sounding more dismayed by the minute. ‘And much good it did me. We never had a chance. And why? Because she was in love with you from the first.'

Gustavo found his voice at last.

‘But that is not true. Joanna was delighted to end our engagement—'

‘Oh, for pity's sake!' Freddy said impatiently. ‘Wise up. Of course she didn't want to end it, but what did you expect her to do? Wear the willow for you, and let the world see how much she minded? Do you think she has so little self-respect?'

The air seemed to be singing in Gustavo's ears.

‘She told you this?' he asked in a strange voice.

‘Not in so many words, but bit by bit I've pieced it together. At your wedding nobody could talk about anything else but the groom marrying one girl when he'd been engaged to another one a week earlier.

‘When I met Joanna I thought you were off your head to have let her go. My goodness, she was a cracking little dancer! How we kicked up our heels that night! It was her way of showing the world that she was fancy-free. Which she wasn't.'

‘That is not what she told me,' Gustavo said slowly.

‘She told you what she knew you wanted to hear. The fact is that she was madly in love with you, but she saw you kissing the other girl, so she gave you your release papers, and fed you some cock-and-bull story to make it easy for you.'

He paused to see if Gustavo would speak, but there was no sound. Gustavo's eyes seemed to burn into him.

‘When we met again a year later, I thought she might be over you,' Freddy went on. ‘But she wasn't. Mind you, I wasn't sure until after we were married. I may not be the sharpest tool in the box but I know when I'm making love to a woman who's pretending I'm another man.'

Like a shaft of lightning a memory came back to Gustavo.

‘More than one way of being unfaithful,' he murmured. ‘That's what you said.'

‘That's right. Jo was always strictly faithful to me in the technical sense, but there were always three of us in the bed, if you know what I mean.'

‘But…' Gustavo struggled for the right words, trying not to yield too easily to the spurt of joy that was mounting inside him ‘…this is only a theory. You might have misunderstood—'

‘Well, I didn't. I know that because we once had a bit of a barney and she virtually admitted it. She was fond of me in her way, and it was a good marriage to start with. We can share jokes, you see, and that can paper over a lot of cracks for a while. But when it came down to it, you were always the one.

‘That's partly why I turned up at Etta's wedding, because I'd heard a rumour that you and she were going to be there together, and you were divorced. I wanted to
talk about Billy as well, but, as Jo pointed out, I could have done that by phone.

‘I needed to see you, get the lie of the land. That's also why I barged in on you in that rude way. I wanted to catch you unawares. Yes, yes, I know I'm a vulgarian. Let's take that bit as read. Anyway, I found out what I wanted to know.'

‘And what do you think you found out?'

‘She's nuts about you, you're nuts about her. End of story. Or it should be if you weren't such a pair of chumps. Get on with it, for Pete's sake, before I lose patience.'

Gustavo sat in silence, feeling as though something had winded him.

‘Did it really never occur to you,' Freddy asked kindly, ‘that Jo did what she knew you wanted, and broke her own heart in the process?'

Gustavo shook his head.

‘Damned if I see how you could have missed it.'

Gustavo gave a faint smile, directed at himself.

‘Maybe I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, either,' he admitted.

‘No “maybe” about it. Isn't it time you did something? Or are you going to wait another twelve years?'

Gustavo slammed his glass down.

‘No,' he said. ‘I'm not.'

 

In the hall he met Billy.

‘Have you seen my dad?'

‘In the library. Have you seen your mother?'

‘In her room.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Thanks.'

He marched into Joanna's room without knocking. She
was just drying off after stepping out of the shower, and she whirled on him indignantly.

‘You've got a nerve—' she said, trying to grab the towel.

‘I have now. I lost my nerve for a while but I've got it back. We've got to forget all the nonsense we talked the other night because…'

It should have been so easy, he thought distractedly. Where were the speeches of love, the declarations of passion that had come so easily the other time?

But the other time hadn't mattered like this, and suddenly he was tongue-tied. The only words that would come were—

‘Is your ex-husband an honest man?'

‘What?'

‘Is he an honest man? When he says you love me, that you've always loved me, going right back to last time—can I believe him?'

She stared at him, incredulous. He met her eyes, his own filled with a terrible intensity that showed what this meant to him. For a moment the whole world seemed to hang in the balance.

‘Yes,' she said at last. ‘You can believe him. I fell in love with you back then. I knew you didn't love me but I'd have married you and hoped for the best. I was going to make you love me. Only then Crystal turned up and I knew it was no use. You can't make people love you.'

‘No,' he said slowly. ‘You can only wait and hope that their eyes will open and they'll see the truth before it's too late.'

He grasped her shoulders so urgently that the last of the towel slipped to the floor. She didn't notice.

‘Tell me it isn't too late for us,' he begged.

Her eyes shone. ‘It will never be too late as far as I'm concerned.'

‘Since we met again I've known that you were the one and only, but telling you so was impossible. There seemed to be so many things in the way, but they were all fantasies. I'd have known that if I were seeing straight.

‘I said once that you shouldn't have released me, but if you hadn't it would never have worked out well for us. We could never have had then the marriage that we're going to have now.'

‘Are we?'

He took her in his arms. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘we are.'

It was a kiss to mark the end of the lonely years and seal a promise.

‘Tell me that you love me,' he whispered against her lips.

‘I've always loved you, and I always will. Gustavo, my darling, are you quite sure?'

‘I've never been more sure of anything in my life.'

‘People will call you a fortune-hunter.'

‘They can call me what they like as long as you call me husband. I was blind for far too long. But now I can see the way ahead, and it's there for both of us.'

He lifted her up in his arms, holding her against his chest.

‘Come, my darling,' he said. ‘No more waiting. Our time has come, and nothing will ever part us again.'