Wife in the Shadows (11 page)

With an abrupt sigh, he re-started the car and pulled out on to the road.

As he approached the next long bend, he heard the sound of another vehicle’s horn, blowing in warning, and, with that, a lorry came round the corner in the act of being overtaken by a dark blue Maserati.

Angelo was already braking, his mind filled with a confused impression of the lorry driver’s white face and a fist being shaken, as he swerved, swiftly and urgently, hearing the crunch of metal as his wing made glancing contact with a concrete block lying in the grass at the side of the road.

He stopped a few yards further on, and sat for a moment aware that he was shaking, his heart going like a trip-hammer. He’d had near misses before, but that was the closest he’d ever come to total disaster.

Santa Madonna,
he thought. If I’d been doing any real speed …

He saw that the lorry had also come to a halt, and the driver and another man were running back to him.

The Maserati, however, had vanished.

As if on auto-pilot, he assured his anxious questioners that he was not injured, and that the damage to his car was slight. An annoyance only that could have been so much worse.

‘And I did not even get the number of the car,
signore.’
The lorry driver shook his head in disbelief as he prepared to depart.
‘Dio mio,’
he added from the heart. ‘Women drivers!’

‘Yes,’ Angelo returned softly and grimly. ‘Women drivers.’

Because he had recognised the car, so he already knew its number, and who had been at the wheel, and cold, burning anger was building inexorably inside him as he resumed his journey towards Vostranto, as well as a sense of grim determination.

Ellie watched Giorgio close the massive door, and listened with a sense of almost overwhelming relief as the car roared away down the drive, taking her unwanted guest away at last.

Feeling as if she’d been wrung out, mentally and emotionally, she turned to the major domo. ‘I have a slight headache, Giorgio. I’m going to rest for a while.’

She refused his concerned offers of tea, painkillers or a cold compress for the forehead, and returned upstairs to the room she’d left only a few minutes before.

It hadn’t changed in any material sense, but it was different all the same. Silvia still seemed to be there, scrutinising everything, insisting on seeing even the bathroom and the dressing room, where her eyes had narrowed at the display of clothes on the hanging rails.

‘At least you will look the part in public,
cara,
if he ever allows you to be seen there with him,’ had been the first comment to grate across Ellie’s nerve endings.

No detail seemed too small to be spared a remark.

But the focus of her attention had been the bed. She’d stood, unmoving, staring at it in silence, a smile playing about her full lips until Ellie had wanted to scream.

She’d said at last, ‘I am trying to imagine you in the act of surrender on this bed, but strangely I find it quite impossible. You still look so innocent—so sadly untouched, it makes me wonder if he has ever taken the trouble to consummate the marriage. He will have to do so eventually,
naturalmente,’
she continued musingly. ‘It is his duty to his family to have a son, as I am sure Contessa Cosima has told him, so you can be of use for that, if nothing else. I wonder what has been holding him back? Maybe he still thinks of what might have been—with me.’

Ellie forced herself to meet Silvia’s mocking gaze. To speak levelly, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

The smile widened, and became laughter. ‘I shall not have to, Elena
mia.
He will tell me himself soon enough.’

She’d gone to the door, then suddenly paused and walked back, bending to run a caressing hand across the magnificence of the bedcover.

Her voice had been quiet but very distinct. ‘It isn’t over yet,
cara.
You have to understand that. Because I still want him. And I shall have him, just as I would have done that night. Except he had to be punished. But now I think he has suffered enough—don’t you?’

And she had smiled again and left, hips swaying in her red dress, her hair a golden coronet in the late afternoon sun, while Ellie followed, numb with disbelief and some other emotions not quite so easily defined.

Now looking at the bed, seeing again Silvia’s possessive fingers stroking its cover as if they were someone’s skin, she felt as if she’d been somehow coated in slime. And, for a moment, terribly afraid—as if the sun had gone out forever, leaving her in darkness.

Oh come on, she adjured herself impatiently. You’ve just had an unpleasant hour or so, and it’s thrown you because your own cousin’s become someone you only thought you knew.

But for the moment at least, she found she did not want to lie down on the bed, and having tried and failed to get comfortable on the
chaise longue,
she decided to attempt a different ploy.

She walked into the bathroom, shedding her clothes as she went, and turned on the shower, gratefully allowing its powerful cascade to stream over her, washing away the foam from the scented gel she’d applied to her skin and with it some of the tensions and sense of unease left in Silvia’s wake. And, if she was honest, some of the pain too.

Some, but not all, she thought as she stepped dripping out of the cubicle, reaching blindly for a towel.

Only to find herself being firmly enveloped in a bath sheet, then carried, swaddled and helpless, back into the bedroom where she was set on her feet.

‘Buona sera,
my sweet wife,’ Angelo said softly. ‘Does a shower cure a headache? I did not know that.’

Her lashes felt gummed together by the water, but she prised them open somehow staring up at him with mingled anger and shock.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded breathlessly, stepping back and trying not to trip on the trailing bath sheet. Trying, too, not to blush and failing miserably. ‘How dare you—walk in on me like that?’

The sculpted mouth curled. ‘And how dare you invite your
sciattona
of a cousin here in my absence?’ he retorted coldly. ‘Did you think I would welcome such a guest—or simply hope I would not find out? I am waiting to hear.’

She’d had a rotten afternoon and now this—this hideous embarrassment of knowing he’d seen her naked for a second time. She longed for the floor to open and swallow her, but it was clearly not going to do so, so she lifted her chin defiantly. ‘I do not have to explain myself to you,
signore.’

‘Think again,’ he invited crisply.

‘Most of your family have visited us here.’ She was hardly able to believe she was saying these things. That she was being such an idiot. Almost as stupid, she thought mutinously, as he was arrogant. What right had he to—turn up out of the blue
like this and challenge her? ‘Am I not allowed to see my only living relative in return?’

‘I am astonished you should wish to do so.’ The dark gaze narrowed. ‘Or do you have more in common than I thought? Did the pair of you perhaps work together to fool us all that night at Largossa?’

She wanted to slap him hard across the face for that, but her arms were confined inside her wrapping, and she dared not try to free them in case the beastly towel slipped or fell off altogether.

‘Believe whatever you want,’ she snapped. ‘It makes no difference to me. Now will you please go and allow me some privacy.’

‘Privacy?’ Angelo queried derisively.
‘Santa Madonna,
what has there ever been in this marriage but privacy?’

She stiffened defensively. ‘I’m sorry if you’re not satisfied with your bargain.’

‘And you are?’ He looked her over in such a way that the sheltering towel seemed, disturbingly, no longer to exist. ‘Perhaps I no longer believe that.’

‘As I said before—think what you wish.’ She was beginning to shiver in the damp folds, and did not want him to conclude that she was trembling. That she feared him in any way.

But—there was something different about him today. His unannounced arrival in her room was not the kind of aloof, courteous behaviour to which she’d become accustomed. Besides, his whole attitude seemed edgy—challenging, and this change in him bewildered her. Made her—anxious.

She added in a low voice, ‘Angelo—please go.’

‘When I am ready,’ he said. ‘Also when you have told me the truth about your cousin. Why was she here? What did she want?’

The bald answer to that was—‘You,’ but Ellie hesitated to return it, instinct telling her that these were dangerous waters when she was already out of her depth.

She said quietly, ‘She wished to see the house. And, of course, to laugh at me.’

Oh God, she thought, I didn’t intend to say that.

His gaze sharpened. ‘For what reason?’

She swallowed. ‘Because I’m completely out of place here. And everyone must know this.’

He said slowly, ‘Elena, you are the Contessa Manzini. There is not a soul beneath this roof who does not regard you with affection and respect.’

Except yourself …

Dismissing the thought, Ellie bent her head. ‘How can you say that when they know—they all must know that we’re only pretending to be married.’
And Silvia in particular …

‘Forgive me, but I did not think you would be concerned.’ His voice was level.
‘Dopo tutto,
you have never given that impression.’

She stared at the floor. ‘Perhaps it was today—seeing Silvia here—looking again at the portraits of the previous Contessas in the
salotto
and the dining room and seeing how beautiful they were, just as she is.’ She added bitterly, ‘How they would all have known how to behave—what was expected of them all the time—instead of being a fish out of water like me.’

The hardness of his mouth relaxed a little, and he spoke more gently. ‘Elena, let me assure you that you do not resemble any fish known to the mind of man.’

‘I’m being serious!’

‘I am glad to hear it, because it is time we spoke seriously.’

She still didn’t look at him. She said with faint breathlessness, ‘Is that why you’re suddenly here in the middle of the week—to tell me that you’ve decided to end the marriage?’

For a brief instant, Angelo was sorely tempted to tell her the whole truth—that he’d been on the brink of spending an enjoyable afternoon in bed with a beautiful girl he’d met at a dinner party two nights earlier, but had suddenly changed his mind for reasons he could not explain even to himself.

That he’d decided to return home on another apparent whim, but that the incident on the road which could so easily have
left him seriously injured or dead had turned an impulse into resolution.

Which now prompted him to offer her honesty along with the new beginning which had now crystallised in his mind.

Starting with the moment he had seen her standing naked in the shower, the tendrils of soaked hair hanging round her face, the droplets of water running down over the pale skin of her breasts to her midriff and the slight concavity of her belly, and glistening on her slender thighs.

Recalling too how his body had stirred under his sudden sharp desire to lick each tiny trickle from her flesh and watch her rosy nipples lift and firm to hard peaks under the glide of his tongue.

Had he forgotten, he wondered in astonishment, or had he simply not noticed on that far off night just how lovely she looked without clothing?

Then paused, just in time as he realised the exact nature of his prospective confession.

‘Sciocco,’
he apostrophised himself silently.
‘Idiota.’

Dio mio,
his near-miss must have affected his brain if he imagined for one moment that might be what she wanted to hear from him.

No, he thought, it would be far better—wiser to use the opportunity she had given him, and, leaving all other issues aside, start by answering the question she had asked.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘That is not why I am here.
Al contrario.’

She looked up at that, her eyes widening, but, he thought, in apprehension more than pleasure, and took a swift mental step backwards.

He went on, ‘I regret if my displeasure at your cousin’s visit caused me to speak roughly to you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ The grey-green eyes slid past him as if she was looking at the bed. ‘Although you couldn’t possibly imagine I would actually invite her here.’

‘Perhaps,
mia bella,
I was not thinking too clearly. But I am a little more lucid now, and I have a proposition to put to you.’

He paused. ‘Elena, I would like you to reconsider the terms of our marriage.’

She repeated ‘Reconsider?’ as if she had never heard the word before. Then: ‘In what way—reconsider?’

‘You said earlier that the other Contessas knew what was expected of them, and that is true. They were aware,
per esempio,
that a priority in their lives was to provide an heir for the Manzini dynasty, to ensure our ancient name did not die.’

She did not move. It was as if, he thought, she’d been turned to stone inside the towel that swathed her.

‘And I have the same wish—the same dream of a son to follow me. I am asking you, therefore, to make our marriage a real one. To live with me as my wife, and become, in time, the mother of my child.’

She stared at him, lips parted, her gaze almost blank and he continued hurriedly, ‘I do not require you to answer me now, Elena. I realise you need time to think.’ He paused. ‘I hope we can discuss the matter later—over dinner
forse.’

He smiled at her swiftly and, he hoped, reassuringly, then turned and walked to the door.

Ellie watched him go, with a sense of total unreality, as Silvia’s mocking words buzzed in her head.
‘His duty to his family to have a son,’
her cousin had said. And
‘You can be of use for that, if nothing else …’

This is crazy, she thought. It cannot be happening to me. I must be having a bad dream while I’m sleeping off my headache.

And even if it was all true—if he’d really been here asking her to change her entire life, her hopes for the future—her answer, now and for all time, was ‘No.’