Kitabı oku: «The Sicilian's Wife»

CHAPTER ONE

TONIGHT he was going to ask her.

The words were clear and definite inside Cesare’s head, voicing the resolve he had held to for years now.

He had been waiting for this day for ever it seemed. Six long years. Too long. It had been a wait that had tried all his patience, straining it to breaking point at times. But tonight the waiting had come to an end. Tonight Megan was going to be his.

The sound of the doorbell ringing through the house jolted him slightly, making him grimace wryly as he snatched his finger off hastily. He was risking sounding more like the police arriving with a warrant for someone’s arrest rather than a would-be lover who had waited longer then he could bear for the woman he wanted more than any other.

‘Mr Santorino!’

The housekeeper sounded flustered and confused as well she might, Cesare reflected ruefully. Normally his visits were well prepared for, notice given of his arrival long in advance. He was an honoured guest in this house, welcomed as a friend as well as a business colleague, so his arrival like this was not only out of the blue, it was also totally out of character.

‘We weren’t expecting you. Mr Ellis didn’t say…’

‘No…’

One lean brown hand came up to cut off her words, brushing aside her nervously apologetic explanation.

‘He would not have said, because he didn’t know. I didn’t tell him I was coming to England, or that I was likely to call.’

‘But…’

Mrs Moore took a small step backwards, obviously feeling that she should invite him in, then hesitated again.

‘I’m afraid Mr Ellis isn’t here. He’s visiting relatives in Scotland. There’s only Miss Megan…’

‘Ah, so Megan is home, is she?’

He was pleased with the tone he managed to use; glad to hear that he sounded both disinterested and faintly surprised. Hearing him, no one would have thought that his visit here tonight had been calculated for just this effect. That he had come to England knowing that Tom was away, and that his only daughter was in the house on her own.

‘I take it she’s back from university now then is she?’

‘That’s right. Finished her degree and everything. She got back at the weekend—on her own, surprisingly.’

‘On her own?’

No. That question had been too sharp, betraying too much of an interest and a degree of shock than was wise.

‘Yes, I thought she’d bring the boyfriend with her.’

Belatedly, the housekeeper realised that keeping her employer’s friend standing on the doorstep was not the most polite approach. Mrs Moore moved further back into the wide, tiled hallway.

‘Won’t you come inside, sir? I’m sure Miss Megan would be delighted to see you.’

Privately, Cesare took the liberty of doubting that she would be any such thing. The way he and Megan had parted the last time he had seen her, at a New Year party given by her father, he had little hope that ‘delighted’ would describe her reaction to him now. When he had resolved on this visit, he had had every confidence that he could soon overcome any initial resistance, but the mention of a boyfriend was an unexpected complication, one he should have forseen but, foolishly, had not.

‘I’ll tell her you’re here…’

‘No!’

Idiota! He reproved himself inwardly at the realisation that once again he had almost given himself away. That ‘No’ had been too quick, the lapse into his native Italian giving too much away.

Hastily he switched on a covering smile, fixing his deep brown eyes on the housekeeper’s face. It was a calculated move, one that had melted far harder hearts than hers in the past, and it had exactly the effect he wanted now.

‘Don’t announce me. I’d like to do it myself—give her a surprise.’

‘Of course. She’s in the library.’

Mrs Moore waved a hand in the direction of a door at the far end of the hall.

‘I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you. If you want my opinion she’s a little run down at the moment—far too pale and thin for my liking. She’s probably been burning the candle at both ends and not eating properly.’

‘Probably.’

It was a struggle to contain his impatience. Would the woman never go?

At last she seemed to realise that he was anxious to move and turned in the direction of the kitchen. But then just as Cesare felt some of the tension that held his muscles taut start to ease she hesitated and turned back again.

‘Should I bring in some coffee? A cold drink?’

‘I’ll ring if we need anything.’

It was the tone he adopted with difficult employees. One that demanded instant, unquestioning obedience—and always got it. It worked this time too. The housekeeper nodded, made a small, awkward movement, almost as if she was coming close to bobbing a respectful curtsey, then turned and trotted away, her heels clicking in the silent hall.

At last!

Cesare gave a deep sigh of relief as he pushed both his hands through his jet-black hair. It was almost as if the housekeeper had sensed his intent, the reason why he was here tonight, and had set herself up as the moral guardian of the daughter of the house, the defender of Megan’s honour, against the dark intrusive force of a sexually mature male.

His beautifully curved mouth twisted slightly cynically as he shut the door quietly. He didn’t want to alert Megan to his presence. Wanted to come up on her unawares. And it wasn’t her honour he wanted to steal. It was her heart.

Megan had heard the doorbell some time earlier but had decided to ignore it. If it was important then Mrs Moore would come and fetch her. If it wasn’t, then the housekeeper could deal with it. The older woman knew much more about her father’s daily life than she did since she had been away at university. And besides, she wasn’t in the mood for company.

‘What am I going to do?’

Sighing, she pushed aside the sleek fall of her auburn hair and propped her chin on her hands, elbows resting on the table at which she sat. A book lay open in front of her, one she had been making a pretence at reading. But it had been simply for something to do, and her mossy-green eyes had been left so unfocused by tears that the words on the pages danced in front of her vision in a totally incomprehensible blur.

‘What am I going to do?’

She had asked the question of herself again and again more times than she cared to remember, but there had never been a hope of an answer in her mind. She didn’t know what to do, or where to turn next.

‘Megan?’

The sound of the door opening jolted her head up, but it was the figure who appeared in the doorway, tall, dark and devastating that had her blinking in stunned disbelief, unable to believe that she was seeing correctly.

‘Cesare?’

Her heart gave one violent, breath-snatching thud against her ribcage, leaving her gasping in shock. Cesare Santorino was the last person she had expected to see here tonight. The last person she wanted to see as well.

But that didn’t stop her foolish emotions going into overdrive simply to see him.

She had once adored every inch of this man’s tall, rangy body, dreamed of losing herself in his arms, of drowning in the deep, molten bronze of his eyes. The image of his forcefully carved features had etched itself into her memory, so that for many nights the last thought in her mind as she drifted asleep had been of the slash of high, slanting cheekbones, the shockingly sensual curve of his wide mouth, the hard strength of his jaw and chin.

‘What are you doing here?’

To her annoyance, her voice came and went like a badly tuned radio and she had to fight to get it under control. It was just the way she was feeling, she told herself angrily. Just the low mood that had already affected her so badly. Nothing more.

She was over Cesare, had been over him for months; ever since that disastrous party at New Year when he had humiliated her so badly. Before then she had worshipped the ground he walked on, but that night he had taken her devotion, her pride, and trampled it underneath his beautifully polished, handmade leather shoes.

‘If you want to see my dad, then he’s not here…’

‘I know,’ Cesare cut in sharply, a faint frown drawing his dark straight brows together. ‘It was you I came to see.’

‘Me?’

That frown, and something in the intonation of his lyrically accented voice set her nerves on edge, raising the tiny hairs on the back of her neck in wary apprehension. She was suddenly painfully aware of the blurred marks of tears on her cheeks, only roughly scrubbed away with the back of her hand.

‘What did you want me for?’

She got to her feet as she spoke, moving away from the direct light of the window, into a more shadowy part of the room.

‘I didn’t think you ever wanted to speak to me again.’

‘Why ever not?’ Infuriatingly it was touched with a thread of amusement that scraped over her skin.

‘You made it plain that you didn’t want to waste your time with me.’

His slow, sexy smile did terrible things to what little composure she had left, making her feel as if a powerful cord was tightening around her heart and tugging hard.

‘Oh, Megan, cara, you weren’t in any fit state to spend time with anyone—waste or not.’

‘I’d had a glass or two of champagne!’

But what she was never going to admit was that it had not been the sparkling wine that had intoxicated her, but the sheer impact of his presence, lethally elegant and stunning in the stark black and white of traditional evening wear.

‘Or three, or four…’ Cesare returned drily. ‘And the problem was that you were hellishly enticing in your tiddly state. Do you have any idea just how sweetly seductive you looked in that slip of a dress?’

‘Sweetly…’ Megan echoed, totally bemused.

Had he really said what she thought he had said? Had he really used the words enticing and seductive to describe her? Even through the haze of misery that clouded her thoughts, the words touched something in her. Something that she had believed was long since dead. Something that still lingered in the heart she was sure she had armoured against him after that last, humiliating, public rejection of her.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Not at all.’

Cesare shook his dark head, moving at last, strolling into the room with the lithe ease of a hunting cat, letting the door swing to silently behind him.

‘It was all that I could do to keep my hands off you.’

The only response that Megan could manage was a loud, unladylike snort, vividly expressing her cynical opinion of that comment.

‘Oh sure! You had such a struggle that you put me aside as if just touching me might contaminate you. And then you…then you ignored me for the rest of the night. No?’

She blinked in confusion as Cesare shook his dark head.

‘No,’ he stated flatly. ‘There was no way I could ignore you, no matter how I tried. I’ve never been able to ignore you. Not from the moment you bounced into my life as a pretty thirteen-year-old, the first time I ever visited this house. I couldn’t take my eyes off you then, and I’ve never been able to since.’

He still couldn’t. If she was in a room, there was only one direction in which his eyes would be drawn. She was like some vivid, bright spark, burning so brilliantly that it almost blinded him. And the hardest thing had been that he could never admit to it; never reveal the way he felt.

Until now.

And she was so much more lovely now; the beauty that had promised as an adolescent becoming reality in the young woman who stood before him. She had hair like the burnished leaves of a copper beech tree, eyes like the deepest, mossy pools above the finest cheekbones he had ever seen. Tall and slender, she was curved in all the right places that declared her femininity, and her skin had the smooth softness of a peach so that his fingers itched to touch it.

But he had given his promise to her father, and had sworn to abide by it until the date of her twenty-second birthday set him free.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘I would never joke about something like this.’

‘Cesare…’

Megan shook her head in bemusement. This couldn’t be happening! Nothing he was saying seemed as if it could possibly be true. And the worst, the bitterest irony, was that these words were the ones she had always dreamed of hearing him say. Dreamed, but known that those dreams would never become reality.

She had had the world’s greatest crush on this man since she had been in her teens. But he was eight years older than her, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan businessman, the owner of the huge corporation of which her father’s firm was just one microscopic, unimportant component. Men like Cesare Santorino didn’t take any notice of girls like her.

‘Stop messing—don’t tease me like this.’

‘What makes you think that I’m teasing?’

Looking into his dark, inscrutable face, she could almost believe that he meant it. There was no trace of amusement in those burning eyes, no hint of a smile on the sensual mouth.

‘But you have to be…’

Again his proud head moved in denial of her protest.

‘No, cara. There is no “have to be” about this. I am telling the absolute truth.’

‘You can’t be…’

All the strength went from her legs and she dropped down into the nearest chair, unable to keep upright any longer. And at least this way she could put some distance between them.

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘Believe it!’

Oh, this was worse than ever! Bending down, he had placed both strong-fingered hands on the arms of the chair, one on either side of her. Imprisoned in the cage made by them and his powerful body, the wall of his chest in the immaculate white shirt a solid barrier between her and escape, she could look nowhere but into the smouldering bronze of his eyes.

And suddenly she was reminded of the volcano Etna on his native island of Sicily. The burn of his eyes made her think of the molten lava that had poured down the mountain’s sides, scorching everything in its path. She felt as if his gaze had just the same heated power, searing over the delicacy of the exposed skin of her face and neck.

He was so close that she could smell the clean scent of his body, mixed with the tang of some citrus cologne, light and invigorating—and painfully stimulating to her already overwrought nerves. Her heart was thudding in double-quick time, her breath coming raw and uneven.

‘Don’t do this to me! Not now! What is this, Cesare—some sort of twisted little game? Do you get some fun out of tormenting me, lying to me? Because—’

‘Would it help if I swore I am not lying now—but that I had lied in the past?’

‘Lied?’

It seemed that with every word he spoke the situation got stranger and stranger, more complicated and tangled, impossible to sort out. It was as if the Cesare Santorino that she had thought she knew had been taken away and someone new and totally alien had been put in his place.

‘When did you lie to me?’

Her mouth had dried painfully and the words came out on an embarrassing croak.

‘When I said I wasn’t interested in you. When I acted as if you bored me. When I—’

‘No—stop it—no, no, no!’

Megan flung her hands up to cover her ears and then rapidly moved them so that they covered her face.

‘Stop it!’ she muttered into the protection of her concealing fingers. ‘This isn’t fair!’

This time last year—on her twenty-first birthday—she would have been overjoyed to hear those words. At Christmas, and even more at that dreadful New Year party, they would have set her heart dancing for joy, made her spirits sing. But now it was too late.

Then she couldn’t think of anything that could have been better. Now she couldn’t think of anything worse. Because if anything Cesare claimed was the truth in any way, then it very soon wouldn’t be when he found out…

‘Stop it!’ she repeated more fiercely this time.

‘Mi dispiace—I am sorry.’

He’d moved too fast, Cesare told himself reproachfully. Impatience had always been a fault of his and this time he’d rushed right in when he would have done so much better to take things slowly.

He had promised himself he would take things slowly. But in the moment that he’d walked into the library and seen Megan in the flesh for the first time in over six months all his control had deserted him. He had struggled to hold on to that control for over six years now, and he hadn’t been able to do so any longer.

‘Forgive me Megan…’

His tone was so rough, so unbelievably raw with some emotion that it forced Megan to lower her protective hands, gazing up at him in shock and bewilderment.

And that bewilderment struck at Cesare like a reproach.

‘Forgive me…’ he said again, lifting his hands swiftly from the chair arms and flinging them up and out in a supremely Italian gesture of surrender.

‘You are right. I was in the wrong to tease you—wrong and cruel. I should never have done it.’

It was only what she had expected, Megan told herself dully as she watched him swing away from her and prowl moodily across the wide, polished wooden floor, his shoulders hunched, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his trousers. She had known all along that he wasn’t telling the truth. That he was just tormenting her as he had done when she was little more than a child, and he had been a sophisticated twenty-two year old.

Then he had mocked her starry-eyed hero-worship of him playing on it mercilessly to have her fetching and carrying for him, taking advantage of her keenness to perform any tiny task she could for the object of her devotion. And now it seemed that he was doing it again.

It was only what she had expected but, right now, with the worry that was always there, just below the surface of her mind, nagging at her and throwing her into total confusion about what she should do, his teasing seemed so much worse.

It hurt. It hurt terribly, adding another layer to the pain of the way Gary had behaved, and the consequences of that behaviour until her head swum sickeningly, and she was unable to think straight.

‘It’s all right,’ she managed stiffly. ‘After all, it’s only what I’d expect from you. But now that you’ve had your fun, would you mind leaving?’

With an effort she brought her chin up, forced her green eyes to meet his dark gaze defiantly.

‘I’d prefer to be alone.’

‘Fun?’

He didn’t seem to have heard the last comment or, if he had, he was deliberately ignoring it.

‘Fun!’

Shock roughed his voice, stopped his restless prowling.

‘You think that this is just un divertimento? That I am playing with you?’

‘Well, isn’t it?’ Her chin lifted a little higher. ‘What else could it be?’ she challenged.

‘La verita!’ Cesare shot back, his tone like the crack of a gun. ‘The truth!’

‘The truth! Oh come on! Don’t…don’t…’

To her horror, her voice began to tremble, so that she stumbled over the words she wanted. It was too much. Too cruel. He’d taken his joke too far. And she was in no fit state to be able to cope with this new, sophisticated form of emotional torture.

‘Don’t do this to me!’ she wailed, her voice high and tight.

The pain in her words was like a blow to his face, making him freeze into stillness, eyes narrowing sharply. Something was very wrong here. Something much more than any distress at his heavy-handed teasing.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

And then, when she could only shake her head in mute, numb misery, he came close—closer—one warm strong hand sliding under her chin and lifting her face to meet his brown-eyed scrutiny.

Her cheeks were wet with tears. Tears that had trickled down her face, dripping off her chin. And more were welling up inside her eyes, making the deep green glisten like polished gemstones.

‘Carina, why are you crying? Meggie…’

Unthinkingly, the word slid past his lips, using the long ago nickname she had had as a child.

‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

It was the name that did it. If he hadn’t said ‘Meggie…’ in quite that way. If he hadn’t used that once familiar, now rarely spoken, nickname, the name only those closest and dearest to her had used in the past, then she might have been able to resist it.

But he had said ‘Meggie,’ and both his voice and his expression had softened on the word. Just for a moment he had pushed aside time and had taken her back to the days when life had been sweet, idyllic, uncomplicated. The perfect bliss of a summer when the sun had always seemed to be shining, and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Days when she had still held on to a dream that one day this man would love her. That somewhere, stretching ahead of her, lay a bright and wonderful future, filled with happy ever after. A future that now was totally beyond her reach.

And suddenly she knew, totally and irredeemably, without a hope of any other possibility, that she was going to tell him the whole sorry story.