Книга - A Sicilian Marriage

A Sicilian Marriage
Michelle Reid






Michelle Reid grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. But now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet, and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning, and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.




A Sicilian Marriage


by

Michelle Reid




www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


CHAPTER ONE

NINA did not want to listen to this. In fact she was so sure she didn’t that if she hadn’t been sitting in her own home she would have seriously contemplated getting up from the lunch table and walking out.

As it was, all she could do was stare glassy-eyed at her mother and silently wish her a million miles away.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Louisa said impatiently. ‘You may like to think that the state of your marriage is none of my business, but when it is I who has to listen to ugly speculation and gossip about it then it becomes my business!’

‘Does it?’ Her daughter’s cool tone said otherwise. ‘I don’t recall ever questioning you about the many reports on your various lovers throughout the years.’

Her mother’s narrow shoulders tensed inside the fitted white jacket she was wearing, which did so much for her fabulous dark looks. At fifty-one years old, Louisa St James could still pass for thirty. Born in Sicily, the youngest of five Guardino children, Louisa had taken the lion’s share in the beauty stakes, along with her twin sister Lucia. As small girls they’d wowed everyone with their black-haired, black-eyed enchantment, and when they’d grown into stunning young women besotted young men had beaten paths to the Guardino door. Now in her middle years, and with her twin sadly gone, Louisa could still grab male attention like a magnet. But a lifetime spent being admired had made Louisa so very conceited that Nina could sometimes see by her expression that she was bewildered as to how her womb had dared to produce a child that bore no resemblance to her at all.

Nina was tall and fair, and quiet and introverted. She looked out on the world through her English father’s cool blue eyes, and when trouble loomed she locked herself away behind a wall of ice where no one could reach her. In her mother’s Sicilian eyes the burning fires of all the passions were alien to her daughter, and she tended to treat Nina as if she did not know what they were.

‘Your father made me a widow ten years ago, which means I am allowed to take as many lovers as I choose without raising eyebrows,’ Louisa defended, completely ignoring the way she’d been taking lovers for most of Nina’s life. ‘Whereas your marriage is barely out of the honeymoon stage and already gossip about it is hot!’

Hot? Nina almost choked on the word, because the last thing she would have called her marriage was—hot. Cold, more like. A soulless waste of space. A mistake so huge it should be logged as an official disaster!

‘If it’s just gossip you’re concerned about then you’re talking to the wrong person,’ she responded. ‘Rafael is your culprit—go and talk to him.’

With that she got up, not quite finding the courage to walk out of the room but doing the next best thing by going to stand in front of the closed glass doors that led out onto the terrace.

Behind her the thin silence feathered her slender backbone. Her cold indifference to whatever her husband was doing had managed to shock her mother into stillness—for a moment or two.

‘You are a fool, Nina,’ she then announced bluntly.

Oh, yes, Nina agreed, and she stared out towards the glistening blue waters of the Mediterranean and wished she was on the little sailboat she could see gliding across the calm crystal sea.

‘Because it is not only gossip. I saw them together for myself, cara and even a blind woman could not mistake the chemistry they were generating it was so—’

Hot, Nina supplied the word because it seemed much more suitable now than it had earlier.

Her mother used a sigh. ‘You should keep him on a much tighter leash,’ she went on. ‘The man is just too gorgeous and sexy to be left to his own devices—and you know what he’s like! Women fall over themselves to get closer to him, and he doesn’t bother to push them away. He could charm a nun out of her chastity if he put his mind to it, yet how often are you seen at his side? Instead of isolating yourself up here on your hilltop you should be out there with him, making your presence felt—then she would not be trying to get her claws back into him and I would not be sitting here having to tell you things that no mother wants to—’

‘Where?’ Nina inserted.

‘Hmm?’

Turning around, Nina was in time to watch her mother blink her lovely long black eyelashes, having lost the main plot of her exposé because she’d been so much more comfortable lecturing her daughter on things she knew very little about.

‘Where did you see them?’ She extended her question.

‘Oh.’ Understanding returned, sending those slender shoulders into an unhappy shrug. ‘In London, of course…’

Of course, Nina echoed—London being the place Rafael spent most of his time these days, which was pretty ironic when she was the Londoner and he was the Sicilian.

‘I was eating out with friends when I spotted them across the restaurant. Someone’s mobile was ringing. When it just kept on, I looked up, and that is when I saw them. I was so shocked at first I just stared! I watched him pick his ringing cellphone up off the table, and without taking his eyes off her face he switched it off and put it in his pocket!’ Louisa took a tight breath. ‘I had this horrible feeling that it was you calling him, so to watch him do that made me—’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Nina said, though she had a good idea who the caller had been.

‘I am so relieved to hear you say that. I cannot tell you how it felt to think that you might need him and he—’

‘Did they see you?’ she cut in.

Her mother’s smile was dry, to say the least. ‘Darling, they were being so intense across that candlelit table for two that they didn’t see anyone,’ she said. ‘I thought about going over there to confront them—but, well… It was just a bit embarrassing to witness my son-in-law getting it on with my niece in public.’

‘So you left them to it?’

‘It could have been innocent.’

But it wasn’t, Nina thought—and how did she know that? Because this particular woman was more than just her mother’s niece.

‘And that is not all of it,’ Louisa pushed on. ‘I saw them again later on, going—going into your apartment building.’

‘How unfortunate for them,’ Nina drawled. ‘Did you follow them there, by any chance?’

Dark eyes gave a flash of defiance. ‘Yes, if you must know. I did not like what I was seeing, so I thought I would keep an eye on them! She should not even be in London,’ she tagged on stiffly. ‘New York is her hunting ground, and it would have been better for all of us if she’d just stayed there.’

‘So you spied on them going into our apartment building…?’ Nina prompted.

Louisa looked pained suddenly. ‘I could see them through the glass doors, Nina! They were standing there, waiting for the lift to come. He—he was touching her face while she gazed up at him. It was all so…’

Oh, my… Nina thought, and had to turn away again so that her mother wouldn’t see what was happening to her face.

Another thick silence crawled around them while her mother brooded over what she’d said and Nina stared at the view. The little sailboat had gone, she saw, disappearing round the headland to her right, where the ancient city of Syracuse clustered around the tiny island of Ortigia.

When her gaze drifted to the left she could just make out Mount Etna in the distance, shrouded in one of her hazy mists. The volcano had been very active lately, spewing out the most spectacular paratactic displays throughout the long hot summer. Now winter was here, and although the days were quite warm for December, the gentle plume of smoke she could see rising from Etna’s peak said the volcano had cooled her ardour to suit the cooler temperature—for now, at least.

‘How does she look?’ she asked after a minute.

‘The same,’ came the flat reply. ‘As beautiful as ever, if not—’ More so, was the observation left hanging in the air. ‘She reminded me of her mother,’ Louisa added huskily.

Nina smiled a bleak little smile. The beautiful dark-haired Lucia had produced a beautiful dark-haired daughter and oh, how Louisa had always envied her twin for doing that.

‘What are you going to do?’ her mother asked after another of those heavy silences.

Do—? Nina turned to face the room again, wearing a smile that was so paper-dry it actually hurt her lips as they stretched. ‘Rafael paid a high price for my loyalty and he’ll have it, whatever he decides to do. I’ve already told you that you’re talking to the wrong person about this.’

‘Oh Nina…’ The pained sigh matched her mother’s expression as she watched Nina cross back to the table. ‘How did you and Rafael ever get yourselves into this state?’

‘Money, darling,’ Nina drawled in her very best boarding school English as she sat down again. ‘Our appalling lack of it and his abominable excess.’

‘Rubbish,’ Louisa dismissed. ‘You adored each other. Rafael was besotted with you from the first moment he looked at you, and you were so in love with him that even that—that prissy manner your father insisted on breeding into you used to melt for him.’

A game, Nina cynically named that little deception. It had all been just a very clever game they’d played out for the sake of anyone who happened to be interested. Rafael had set the rules by which their marriage would run and Nina had agreed to keep to them—for a price. They were to show a loving front to the world, and in return he would keep the great Guardino name clear of bankruptcy.

Some price for him to pay for what had only been a face-saving exercise, Nina conceded, recalling just how much it had cost him to bail her grandfather out. But then saving face had always been of paramount importance to Rafael. The monumental size of his pride demanded it.

That and some deeply hidden hang-ups he never spoke about but which ruled his life far more than he realised.

‘It was the sole reason why she went away in the first place,’ Louisa insisted. ‘Once she realised what was happening between the two of you she really had no other option but to step back and leave the field clear.’

And there, Nina thought, was the deception. ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

Rafael had been hovering on the brink of asking her beautiful cousin to marry him when Marisia had discovered something about him she couldn’t accept and walked out. She’d walked out on his love, his fabulous wealth and, most important of all, she’d walked all over his precious pride as she went.

‘You used to be so happy together.’

‘Delirious.’

‘Rafael used to eat you with his eyes and he did not care who saw him doing it.’

Nina found a wry smile for that observation—wry because in an odd way her mother was right. Rafael had eaten her with his eyes.

With his eyes, his lips, his tongue, his…

But that had only been for the first few wild months of their marriage, when they’d set out to fool the world and had done it so successfully that they’d actually managed to fool themselves at the same time.

And the special ingredient to aid and abet this deception?

Sex. She named it grimly. They’d been so bowled over by the discovery of a wildly passionate and very mutual sexual attraction to each other that it had shocked them stupid for a time. Blinded them to the reality of what they really felt for each other.

Blinded her anyway, Nina amended as something worryingly close to despair began to swell up inside her. Blinded her enough to let her believe that they were actually in love.

Love. She could scoff at the very word now. As far as Rafael was concerned he had simply played the game, as any man would play the game, and taken what was on offer because it had been there to take, whereas she…

Well, blinded as she had been, she had committed the ultimate sin in his eyes, by taking their relationship one step further—unwittingly crossing into forbidden territory—and in doing so had forced Rafael to open her eyes to the size of her mistake.

Since then—nothing.

Nothing, she repeated, feeling the desolation of that nothing echoing in the deep, dark void of her now empty heart.

Louisa must have seen it, because she reached across the table to cover one of Nina’s hands. ‘I know you have been through a bad time recently, darling,’ she murmured very gently. ‘God knows, we all suffered the loss with you, believe me…’

Nina stared at their two hands, resting against pristine white linen, and wished her mother would just shut up.

‘Your grandfather still blames himself.’

‘It was no one’s fault.’ Her reply was quiet and stilted, her thoughts even more so—cold and bleak.

‘Have you told him that?’

‘Of course I have. Countless times.’

‘Have you told Rafael the same thing…?’

Suddenly she wanted to run from the room again. ‘What is this?’ She sighed. ‘An inquisition?’

‘He worries me—you worry me—No, don’t get angry…’ Louisa begged as Nina reclaimed her hand and shot back to her feet. Louisa stood too, her tone suddenly anxious. ‘It’s been six months since you lost the baby…’

Six months, two weeks and eight hours, to be precise, Nina thought.

‘Before that the two of you were never seen apart and now you are never seen together! You just shut everyone out, Nina—Rafael more than anyone! And—OK,’ Louisa said, ‘I understand that you needed time to recover, but after what I’ve just told you, surely you must see that it is time for you to put that tragic loss aside if you don’t want your marriage to end in tragedy too!’

For an answer Nina spun on her heels and walked away, hating everything—everyone—and despising herself. She didn’t want to think about her poor lost baby; she didn’t want to think about Rafael!

Her heart ached, her bones ached. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the mirror hanging on the wall and was shocked into stillness by what she saw. Her skin was pale by nature, but it had now taken on the consistency of paste. Her eyes looked bruised, her mouth small and tight. Tension was gnawing at the fine layer of flesh covering her cheekbones, making her look gaunt and wretched—and she was not going to cry! she told herself furiously. She just was not going—

‘He is not a man to neglect like this, cara,’ her mother persisted. ‘She wants him back. And you have just got to face it!’

I won’t faint if you say her name, you know,’ she drawled.

It was like a red rag to a bull. Her mother’s response was incensed. ‘Sometimes I find it difficult to believe that you’re my child at all! Do you have any of my Sicilian blood? Marisia—yes—that is her name, and you did not faint! Your cousin Marisia was in love with your husband long before you came on the scene, and by the way she is behaving I would say that she is still in love with him—yet you stand here looking as if you could not care less that they are conducting a very public affair!’

‘So you want me to do—what?’ Nina swung round, blue eyes offering up their first flash of real emotion since this whole horrible scene began. ‘Am I supposed to jump on the next flight to London and face them with what you’ve told me? Then what?’ she challenged, moving back to the table to glare at her mother across it. ‘You tell me, Mamma, how my half-Sicilian blood is supposed to respond once I’ve dragged it all out in the open—do I draw out my dagger and plunge it into both their chests with true Sicilian vendetta passion?’

‘Now you are being fanciful just to annoy me,’ Louisa said crossly. ‘But, having asked me the question—si!’ she retorted. ‘Some drama from you would be a lot healthier than looking as if you don’t give a damn!’


CHAPTER TWO

MAYBE I don’t give a damn, Nina thought later, when she was alone in her bedroom. She didn’t know if she cared one way or another what Rafael was doing.

And that was her problem—not knowing how she felt about anything.

A sigh slipped from her. Her mother’s final volley before she’d left in a huff was still ringing in her ears.

‘I suppose you will manage to drag yourself down from the hilltop to be present at your grandfather’s birthday party tonight?’

Her weary, ‘Of course I’ll be there,’ had made Louisa’s lovely mouth pinch.

‘There is no of course about it. You are in danger of becoming a hermit, Nina. For goodness’ sake, snap out of it!’

‘I had lunch three days ago in Syracuse with Fredo,’ she’d retaliated. ‘Hermits don’t do that!’

‘Hmph.’ Louisa hadn’t been impressed. ‘That man is about as much use to you as the plethora of kind words and sympathy he will have dished out. You need to be pulled out of it, not encouraged to sink further in your wretched misery!’

Stopping what she was doing, Nina stood for a moment, blue eyes lost in a bleak little world of their own. Inside she could feel her heart beating normally. She breathed when she needed to and blinked her eyes. Her brain was functioning, feeding in information, and she was able to get information out, but when it came to her emotions, everything was just blank—nothing there, nothing happening. It was like living in a vacuum, with a defence space around her as big as a field.

‘Oh, what’s happened to me?’ she breathed, looking around at the bedroom she’d used to share but now had to herself. Even in here the only sign that life was still going on was the black dress hanging up, which she was going to wear tonight.

Snap out of it, her mother had said, and Nina truly agreed with her. But—into what?

The sound of a car coming up the driveway stopped her thoughts and sent her over to the bedroom window. The prospect of yet another unexpected visitor dragged a groan from her throat that was cut short when she recognised the sleek, dark limousine.

It was Rafael.

Her heart gave a sudden tight little flutter—not with pleasure, but with a sinking sense of dismay. He wasn’t due back from London for days, so what had brought him back here sooner than he’d intended?

Had someone told him about her mother’s visit? Could he know what that visit had been about?

No, don’t be stupid, she told the second sharp flutter that now had her freezing to the spot. He might be equipped to throw power around like thunderbolts, but even Rafael couldn’t get from London to Sicily in the space of two short hours.

The car slowed to take a sweep around the circular courtyard, then came to a stop at the bottom of the shallow steps that led up to the house. Rafael didn’t wait for Gino, his personal bodyguard and chauffeur, to climb out and open his door for him. With a brisk impatience that was his nature he pushed open the door and uncoiled his long frame from the back of the car. The top of his dark head caught the light from a golden sunset, then slid down to enrich the warm olive skin of his face as he paused to look at the house.

He was tall, he was dark, he was arrestingly handsome—a perfect example of a man in his prime. Black hair, golden skin, hard, chiselled features, straight, thin nose, and a firm and unsmiling and yet deeply, deeply sensual mouth.

Nina traced each detail as she stood there, despising herself for doing it yet unable to stop. Everything about him was so physically striking—the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he frowned with a restless impatience that was inherent in him. His dark silk suit was a statement in design architecture, tailored to a body built to carry clothes well—the wide shoulders, long arms and legs made up of steely muscle, wide chest and tight torso behind a white shirt.

But the really important things about Rafael had nothing to do with his physical appearance. He was frighteningly intelligent, razor-sharp, and ruthless to the core. The kind of man who had come from nothing and made himself into something in spite of all the odds stacked against him, amassing his wealth with a gritty determination that came from his fear of having nothing—again.

He was, Nina thought as she watched him turn to speak to Gino, a very suave, very sophisticated—mongrel. And she used the word quite deliberately. Rafael did not know where he had come from, so he’d spent most of his adult life hiding what he feared he might be by surrounding himself with status symbols of the kind of person he wanted to be.

Rejected by his mother before she had even bothered to register his birth, he had lived his childhood in a Sicilian state orphanage. The only thing that faceless creature had given him to cling to when she’d dumped his helpless newly born body on some unsuspecting stranger’s doorstep had been a note pinned to the blanket he had been wrapped in.

‘His name is Rafael,’ the note had said, and he had gone through the latter stages of his childhood fighting to hell and back for the right to use that name.

The orphanage had called him Marco Smith, or Jones, or some Sicilian equivalent. For the first ten years of his life he had truly believed it to be his name, until the day something—an inbuilt instinct to be someone, probably—had sent him sneaking into the principal’s office to steal a look at his personal file.

From that day on he had answered only to Rafael. Sheer guts and determination had brought him fighting and clawing to the age of sixteen, with his name legally changed to Rafael Monteleone—the Monteleone stolen from the man on whose doorstep he had been dumped.

But tenacity should be Rafael’s middle name—or the one Nina would add in if she could. From the minute he’d left state care he had set out like a man with a single mission in life—which was to trace the mother who had abandoned him.

To finance his search he’d worked hard and long at anything, and for anyone who had paid a fair wage, until he had accumulated enough money to risk some of it on a little speculation—thereby discovering his true mission in life: to make money—pots of it—bank vaults of it—Etna-sized mountains of it in fact.

Strangely, though, as the money mountain had grown so his need to know his roots had diminished. Rafael had succeeded in becoming his own man. If you did not count some deeply buried fears that lurked beneath the surface of his iron-hard shell, which forced him to struggle with the most incredible inferiority complex.

‘The mongrel syndrome’. Rafael’s term, not Nina’s. ‘I could come from the loins of anything.’

Rafael lived with the awful fear that the blood running in his veins might be rotten. It didn’t seem to help that the man he had built himself to be was so morally upright, honest and true that any suspicion of him being rotten inside was actually laughable. He could never know that for sure, so he dared not let his guard on himself drop for a moment—just in case something dreadful crept out.

How did Nina know all of this? The man himself had told her, during one of those long rare nights when they lay still closely entwined after the kind of loving that had always seemed to blend them into one. They’d swapped secret hopes and fears in the darkness because it had seemed so right, sharing—sharing everything. Bed to bodies, souls to minds.

That was the same night that she’d foolishly let herself believe he loved her, Nina recalled. To hear that soft, deep, slightly rasping voice reveal all its darkest secrets had, to her at least, been confirmation of something very special growing between them. She had discovered later that it was just another aspect of his complicated make-up that Rafael could bare his soul to her whilst keeping his heart well and truly shut.

It wasn’t long after that night when she’d discovered they were going to have a baby. She’d been ecstatic; to her way of thinking a child of their very own would only bond them closer together. What it had actually done was drive them wide apart. And she would never forgive him for the brutality he had used in forming that gulf.

They had barely communicated since. From that moment on their lives had reverted to the original plan—she being the beautiful well-bred trophy wife Rafael had bought to shore up his bruised ego, and he the man she had sold herself to so he could keep her family in the luxury they were used to.

The only blot on this otherwise squeaky-clean landscape Rafael had made for himself was Marisia—his first-choice bride. The Guardino granddaughter with the pure Sicilian pedigree who’d walked out on him the moment she’d discovered his mongrel beginnings, leaving his pride in tatters at his feet.

‘I will not marry a man who can’t say who his mother is, never mind his father!’ Marisia’s harsh words to Nina echoed through the years. ‘If you are so concerned about his feelings then you marry him. Trust me, cara, he will take you—just to leech onto your half-Guardino blood.’

He had done too—taken her—and it was pretty lowering to remember how eagerly she’d jumped at the chance. But then, she’d already been in love with him, though thankfully no one else knew that—including Rafael. He’d put his case in practical business terms, pointing out the financial advantages in marrying him and, because he was ruthless enough to use any persuasion, he had made her aware of other advantages by more physical means.

Oh, where had her pride been—her self-respect? How was it that she’d only had to look into his eyes to convince herself that she could see something burning there that made her cling to hope?

The sound of his laughter floated up to the window. Looking down, she saw his mouth had stretched into a grin. He had not done much of that recently, she mused.

Was that Marisia’s doing? Had her cousin put the laughter back into Rafael?

Were they sleeping together?

Had it gone that far?

Did she care?

Nina turned away from the window, tense fingers coiling around her upper arms to bite hard. She wasn’t ready to answer that question. She wasn’t ready to face Rafael.

Oh, why did he have to come back here today of all days, when she needed time to think—to feel something, for God’s sake?

The moment Rafael Monteleone stepped through the front door he felt the lingering residue of laughter he’d just shared with Gino die from his lips as a chill washed right over him.

It was the chill of cold silence.

He paused to stare at the perfectly symmetrical black and white floor that spread out in front of him like a chequered ocean—flat, cold, and as uninviting as the black wrought-iron work forming the curving staircase and the pale blue paint that coloured the walls.

Home, he mused, and thought about sighing—only to tamp down on the urge. Instead tension grabbed at his shoulders, then slid up the back of his neck before linking like steel fingers beneath his chin. He employed an army of staff to help keep this miserable if aesthetically stunning house running smoothly, yet but for the sound of Gino moving the car round to the garages he could be entirely alone here.

The sigh escaped—because he allowed it—because he needed to ease away some of his tension before he went looking for his wife.

Wife, he repeated. There was yet another word that had become a term of mockery—within the privacy of his mind, at least. He did not mock Nina—did not mock her at all. He mocked only himself, for daring to use the word in reference to the ghost-like image of that once beautiful person which now haunted this house.

He knew exactly where she was, of course. He’d felt the chill of her regard via her bedroom window from the moment he had stepped out of the car. If he closed his eyes he could even picture her standing there, slender and still, observing his arrival through beautiful blue eyes turned to glass.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’

Ah, a real human being, Rafael thought dryly, then had to laugh privately at that when he lifted his eyes to the ancient silver-haired pole-faced butler, who’d come with the house and all of its other soulless fixtures and fittings.

‘Good afternoon, Parsons,’ he returned, and felt himself grimace at the very English sound of his own voice.

But then, this house was English—a small piece of England placed upon Sicilian soil like a defiance. Nina’s father had had it built as a summer home for his wife and daughter to use when they visited. When Richard St James had died, leaving his wife and daughter virtually penniless, they’d been forced to sell up their fourteen-thousand-acre family estate in Hampshire and come to live here, bringing their faithful butler with them. The house belonged to Nina now, left to her in her father’s will, along with a trust fund aimed to ensure that she completed her education in England.

And if all of that did not add up to a man with an axe to grind on his beautiful Sicilian wife’s faithless hide, then he could not read character as well as he’d thought.

‘There are several telephone messages for you.’ Parsons’ smooth voice intruded. ‘I placed them in your study. One, from a—lady, sounded particularly urgent…’

Ignoring the slight hesitation before the word lady, Rafael offered a nod of his head in acknowledgment to the rest, but made no move towards his study. Instead he turned and headed for the stairs. Urgent messages or not, he had a chore to do that must take precedence.

Knowing and respecting this small ritual, Parsons melted away as silently as he had arrived, leaving Rafael to make the journey up the curving staircase to the upper landing, and from there through an archway which would take him to the bedroom apartments of a house he had agreed to live in only to please his wife.

A mistake? Yes, it had been a mistake, one of many he had made with the beautiful Nina, and all of which he intended to rectify—soon.

On that grim thought he arrived outside the bedroom suite, paused for a moment to brace his shoulders inside the smooth cut of his dark silk jacket, then gripped the handle and opened the door.

He never knocked. He found it beneath his dignity to knock before entering what he still considered to be their bedroom, even though they had not shared it for months.

Serenity prevailed—that was his first observation as he stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. She was wearing a blue satin wrap that covered her from throat to ankle and she was sitting at her dressing table, quietly filing her nails. Her hair was up, scraped back into an unflattering ponytail, and her face looked paler than usual—though that could be a trick of the fading light.

When she turned her head to look at him he met with a wall of blue glass.

‘Ciao,’ he murmured, keeping his voice pleasant, even though pleasure was not what he was feeling inside.

‘Oh, hello,’ she returned, ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today.’ With that excruciatingly indifferent comment, the blue glass dropped away again.

Irritation snapping at the back of his clenched teeth, Rafael let the hit to his ego pass. He crossed the room to an antique writing desk on which sat a silver tray complete with crystal decanter and glasses. The ever-discreet Parsons had begun this small piece of thoughtfulness at the beginning of their marriage, when they’d used to spend more time in the bedroom than out of it, and had determinedly continued the habit though he must know that their marriage was now in tatters.

The decanter held his favourite cognac. Lifting off the smooth crystal stopper, he placed it aside, then turned to look at Nina.

‘You?’ he invited.

She gave a shake of her lowered head. ‘No, thanks.’

It was like talking to a dead person. Turning back to the tray, he poured himself a small measure, took it with him over to the window, then unclenched his jaw and drank.

Ritual rules, he mused as he stared out at the deepening sunset. Give her a minute or two and she was going to find an excuse to get up and leave the room.

Only this time he was going to stop her. This time he was going to stop the rot taking place in this room by bringing her—screaming and kicking if necessary—out of hiding and into reality.

His stomach warmed as the cognac reached it, and somewhere else inside him a different sensation gathered pace. The call to battle. He had wrecked this beautiful creature once, and now it was time to put her back together again.

With a bit of luck she would give him a chance to fortify himself with brandy before battle commenced, he mused wryly, unaware that the subject of his thoughts was already struggling to stay where she was.


CHAPTER THREE

TIMING was everything, Nina was reminding herself as she sat there fighting the urge to get up and go.

It was part of the ritual Rafael had developed, aimed to hide the true sickness in their relationship from the servants. He always came directly to her room when he arrived home, and stayed long enough to consume a measure of cognac. He always asked her if she wanted to join him in a glass and she always refused. After a suitable length of time one of them—usually her—would make up an excuse to leave.

But today was different. Today he had come in here wearing the shadow of another woman’s kiss on his lips, and there was no way she could sit here playing this the way it usually played out. She either said something, or left. It came down to those two options, she told herself tautly.

Rafael turned. ‘Nina, we need to talk—’

‘Sorry.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going for a shower.’

‘Later,’ he frowned. ‘This is important. I want to—’

‘So is my shower,’ she cut in. ‘Y-you should have warned me you were coming home, then I could have told you that I am out tonight.’

‘Your grandfather’s birthday—I know.’ He nodded. ‘That is what I want to talk to you about.’

Not Marisia? ‘Why? What has he done now?’ she asked, in the wary voice of one who knew her devious grandparent well.

‘Nothing,’ Rafael said. ‘I have not heard from him in several weeks. He is not the reason why I—’

‘Then he’s up to something.’ Nina cut in on him yet again. A sigh escaped her. ‘I suppose I had better try and find out what so I can—’

‘I would prefer that you didn’t…’

Just the way he said that was enough to put her nerve-ends on edge. Her chin came up. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ she demanded, finding herself suddenly in danger of almost—almost making contact with his eyes. She looked away again—quickly.

If he noticed her avoiding gesture he kept it to himself. ‘It means,’ he murmured levelly, ‘that I already know what he’s up to, so you don’t need to get involved.’

‘He’s my grandfather, Rafael. I have a right to know what he’s doing if it means—’

‘Not when it involves money, you don’t,’ he responded. ‘That is my territory.’

The implication in that certainly hit where it hurt. ‘Then I won’t,’ she answered stiffly. ‘Taking care of my family is why I married you, after all. Thank you for reminding me.’

‘I did not mean it like that.’ He uttered a short sigh. ‘I simply meant that I am able to handle him better if you don’t interfere!’

Well, there you go, Nina thought. You are an interfering wife, as well as a useless, faithless, traitorous one. Things are on the move—hence the reintroduction of Marisia into his life, she supposed.

‘I did not come home early to fight with you over your grandfather. I have something I need to tell you before—’

Time to leave, she decided. ‘Tell me later.’ Spinning away, she began walking quickly towards the bathroom, her spine tingling out a mocking challenge to the cowardly way she was retreating from this.

‘Take a very healthy piece of advice, mi amore and don’t do it…’

It was the silken edge to his voice that brought her to a wary standstill, with her fingers already gripping the handle to the bathroom door. Past experience with that tone warned her to beware—because the silkier Rafael’s voice became the more dangerous he became. If she dared to open this door now then he would not hesitate to react.

‘OK.’ She turned, slender shoulders pressing back against the door. ‘Say what you have to say,’ she invited.

He was still standing by the window, so his face was shadowed by the sunset coming from behind him. But she could see the tension in his jawline; could feel





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