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‘The moment it becomes known that I’m back on the open market—then I’m going to have to contend with ambitious women, women a little like you once were, who might decide they’d like to be the next Signora Cardini. Who’d like a sexy Sicilian with a big…’ his black eyes mocked her; he was enjoying see her wriggle uncomfortably ‘…bank account,’ he finished provocatively as he stretched his arms lazily above his head. ‘So you see, in order to grant you a divorce—well, you’d have to make it worth my while, wouldn’t you?’
She could feel all the blood drain from her face. But surely he didn’t… He couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he was hinting at. ‘I’m not quite sure what it is you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, I think you are,’ he said softly. ‘You want a divorce, and I want you. One last time.’
Emma’s fingers crept up to her throat as if that would ease the terrible tension there—for she could barely suck air into her empty lungs. She shook her head, as if she’d misheard him. ‘You can’t mean that, Vincenzo—’
‘But I do. One night with you, Emma. One night of pure and unequivocal sex. To kick over the traces of something which still feels faintly unfinished. One night, that’s all.’ His black gaze spotlighted her, a smile of unknown origin playing around the corners of his mouth. ‘And then I’ll give you your divorce.’
There was a long, disbelieving silence as they stared at one another across the vast expanse of the office.
‘You…you…you’re nothing but a monster!’ Emma choked out, still not quite believing that this was happening. That the man she had married should be asking her to behave like a…like a woman who would sell her body to the highest bidder!
Vincenzo smiled, feeling the heady rush of pleasure adding to his aching sense of desire as he watched her eyes widen, her face blanch. For this was the woman who had hurt him—who had taken him for a ride, who had hidden the truth from him and ultimately turned her back on him. And he must never forget that, even if she did have the bluest eyes he had ever seen and lips which still begged to be kissed. ‘You married me,’ he observed caustically. ‘You must have known that I had a somewhat…ruthless streak. So how about it, Emma? You can’t deny that you still want me.’
She shook her head in denial. ‘No, I don’t.’
His black eyes hardened and so did his groin. ‘You little liar,’ he drawled. ‘But then, lying was always one of your talents.’
She stared at him, flinching from the accusation which was blistering from his black eyes. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. The answer is no. You can go to hell,’ she said, grabbing her coat from the back of the chair where she’d left it. ‘On second thoughts, hell would be too good a destination for you—they’d probably refuse to let you in!’
He was laughing softly as she headed for the door, watching as she hoisted her handbag over her shoulder, her blonde hair flying wildly behind her, like a pale banner. ‘Arrivederci, bella,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you.’
Ignoring the startled looks of the glamorous brunette outside his office and the Madonna still sitting at the reception, Emma didn’t stop running until she was well away from the building and was certain that nobody was following her. She panted her way to the first bus stop she could find and swallowed down the hot tears which burned at her eyes.
Of all the humiliating propositions he could have put to her—that topped the list. The man was a monster—a monster! Stepping onto the lumbering double-decker bus, she pulled out her cell phone, but thankfully the screen remained blank. At least there had been no emergency calls from Joanna, which meant that Gino must be all right. And they weren’t expecting her back until much later.
The large red bus moved slowly along in the bus lane and normally Emma might have admired the glittering circle of the London Eye, which looked so futuristic compared to the ancient Houses of Westminster—but she could see nothing. Feel nothing. Her mind and her body felt numb—as if what had just happened had been like a horrible dream.
An outsider might have urged her to play her biggest card of all—and to tell the proud Sicilian that he was now a father. But some bone-deep fear stopped her—the very real fear that he would step in to take over or, even worse, try to take Gino away from her. And given his power and his wealth—when measured up against her lack of skills and poverty—wouldn’t he stand a chance of being able to do just that?
Emma shook her head as she put her travel card back inside her purse. She couldn’t tell him—how could she? And even if she did, he wouldn’t believe her—for hadn’t it been her supposed infertility which had driven the last terrible wedge between them and finally ended their unhappy marriage?
She clamped her eyes closed and bit her lip to try to keep the memories at bay, but that didn’t seem to work. Her mind had ideas of its own and it took her back—right back—to a time before all the acrimony and bitterness.
A time when Vincenzo had loved her.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_e53f3d98-2269-549f-a54f-9086c74d2d5f)
EMMA had met Vincenzo when she was coming out of a vulnerable period of her life—not long after the death of her mother, Edie. Edie’s illness had been sudden and Emma had dropped out of catering college to care for the woman who had given birth to her. She’d done it out of love and, yes, out of a certain sense of duty—but also because there was no one else to do it.
But Edie had fought her prognosis every bit of the way. The disease had dragged on and on and those final months had been spent in pursuit of an impossible cure. The slightest hint of any new treatment would be enough for the instant signing of cheques. Edie had gone to faith-healers and psychics. She had eaten nothing but apricots and drunk nothing but warm water for a week. She had undergone ice-therapy in an exclusive Swiss spa but nothing had made any difference; nothing could have done.
It had been a miserable time culminating in an angry death, and afterwards Emma had been left feeling empty, unwilling to go back to life at catering college, which she had seemed to have grown out of. Almost as an antidote to grief, she had taken a job in a shop while Edie’s affairs were sorted out and the lawyers worked out how much money remained.
And that was when Emma had discovered that there was virtually nothing left. Huge debts had been run up to support all the alternative treatment—the family house had needed to be sold and after all the bills had been paid there had been nothing more than a few hundred pounds in the kitty.
Uncharacteristically, Emma had decided to blow the money. She’d seen too much sadness to want to plan for a future which no one could guarantee—and such a small amount could give her nothing in the way of security anyway. Life had suddenly seemed too short to measure out a cup of sultanas. She’d wanted sun and history and beauty of the harsh and uncompromising kind, so she had gone to Sicily.
And met Vincenzo.
It was one of those days which would for ever be etched on her mind in rich and vibrant colours. A rare break from her cultural tour of the island, and it found her on a stunning beach with her hat and her book, letting the warmth of the sun soak into her pale skin.
She was very aware that her blonde, English looks excited attention wherever she went and took care to cover her head and shoulders when she visited churches and cathedrals, as local custom demanded. Her dresses were always knee-length and her make-up kept so light as to be almost non-existent.
But on the day she discovered a deserted little cove not far from where she was staying, she gave in to what she had been longing to do. She peeled off her dress to reveal a sleek one-piece swimsuit and began splashing in the water as the dark cares of the last months were gradually washed away.
Afterwards she must have fallen asleep, because she awoke to see a shadow falling over her and a man standing looking down at her. He was dark and lean and muscular, his black hair ruffled by the faint breeze which blew in off the sea. But she had noticed him before—who wouldn’t? She remembered seeing him while drinking her morning coffee in the square and he had zipped past on one of the little scooters which all the Sicilian men seemed to ride.
Up close, he was even more amazing—and he was looking at her now with a lazy and yet blatant sexual scrutiny. Maybe she should have been frightened, and on one level perhaps she was—but on another…
Something in his black eyes and faintly cruel lips cried out to some deep, elemental core which she hadn’t believed existed—certainly not in her. Because Emma was a dreamer, a reader—and she had never met anyone who could match the romantic and physical impact of the characters she read about in novels.
Until now.
He was wearing a pair of faded jeans and an equally faded T-shirt and his bare toes dug into the soft, silvery sand.
‘Come si chiama?’ he questioned softly.
It seemed crazy—rude—not to give him an answer, and impossible, too, when those ebony eyes were searing into her and demanding one. ‘Emma. Emma Shreve.’
‘Ah, you understand Italian?’
She shook her head, telling herself that she shouldn’t be striking up a conversation with a total stranger, but feeling carefree for the first time in ages. ‘Not really, but I try—I’m not one of those people who go somewhere expecting that everyone should speak my language. And Italian’s not too bad.’ She sighed. ‘It’s Sicilian which is the killer.’
She hadn’t known it at the time but it was exactly the right thing to say to a fiercely proud Sicilian. ‘And what is your name?’ she questioned politely.
‘It’s Vincenzo. Vincenzo Cardini,’ he replied, watching her carefully.
It was to be a while before Emma was to learn about the far-reaching influence and power of the Cardini family. That day she assumed he was just a regular guy—though one with extraordinary charisma which seemed to sizzle off him in a searing dark heat. He sat down beside her and shared her water. He made her laugh. And when the sun was too hot, he took her for lunch in a luscious restaurant and bought her sarde a beccafico—the most delicious meal she’d ever eaten, and a dish whose complexity she would later learn displayed great wealth.
He spoke of the island of his birth with a passion and a knowledge which made all her guidebooks seem sorely lacking. He sighed when he told her that he came here only on vacation these days, and that his business was based mainly in Rome. She asked him lots of intelligent questions about his work, mainly to try to focus on something other than the rugged beauty of his face.
But when he tried to kiss her before they parted, she stopped him with a shake of her blonde hair.
‘Sorry, I don’t kiss strangers.’
He smiled a lazy smile. ‘And I don’t take no for an answer.’
‘This time you do,’ said Emma, but she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been regretful as he put her fingertips to his lips instead and captured her eyes in a stare which made her feel weak.
Uninvited, he called at the small hotel where she was staying and naturally she agreed to see him again. How could she not, when already she was halfway in love with him, and he with her? A colpo di fulmine, he called it—but with the air of a man who had been visited by something unwelcome. A thunderbolt, he said darkly.
By day he showed her his island home—though he kept her away from any of his family. His own parents were dead, he had been reared by his grandmother and had hundreds of Cardini cousins who ‘would not approve of us seeing one another, cara,’ he told her lazily.
But what did she care about that when each night he took her a little further towards a pleasure she could not have dreamed existed? She had wondered if he might think her a clumsy innocent, but Vincenzo seemed to enjoy tutoring her as much as he enjoyed her instinctive restraint. He told her that it proved she was not easy, as so many of her compatriots were. The girls who came to Sicily looking for a dark and proficient lover and gave their bodies as casually as they gave their orders at the bars.
Everything seemed perfect until the night she at last allowed him to share her bed and the see-sawing of terrible emotions which followed their lovemaking. Pain, disbelief, joy—and then, finally, a red-hot kind of anger as he sat up in bed and stared at her as if he had been visited by a spectre.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he roared.
Emma shrank back against the rumpled sheets. ‘I didn’t know how to!’
‘You didn’t know how to?’ he repeated. His voice was bitter. ‘And so you have allowed this to happen.’ He shook his dark head. ‘I have robbed you of your virginity—the most precious thing that a woman possesses.’
But by next morning his rage had abated and in those next last few days he taught her how to love her body—and his. So that when he came to the airport to say goodbye, Emma wept for all that she had found and now would lose for ever.
She didn’t expect to hear from him again, but unexpectedly he turned up in England—telling her furiously that he couldn’t get her out of his mind, as if she had committed some kind of crime for being the cause of his obsession. When he discovered that she had no ties nor permanent job, he took her back with him to Rome—where she realised that she was actually dating a fabulously wealthy man.
Installing her in his luxury apartment as his mistress, he bought her a brand-new wardrobe, dressing her up as if she were a doll and transforming her into a woman who turned heads. Emma blossomed beneath his attentions, though she was slightly shocked to discover that her transformation had unleashed a terrible kind of jealousy. He suspected even his friends of coveting her.
‘You know that they want you?’ he demanded.
‘I can assure you that the feeling isn’t reciprocated.’
‘I cannot bear the thought of another man having you!’ he raged. ‘Not now—and not ever!’
Was it to possess her utterly and completely that he married her—or was it simply because he felt that he had compromised himself by robbing her of her innocence? But marriage also meant acceptability from his family in Sicily, and provided the respectable arena for something else Vincenzo wanted more than all the wealth in the universe.
‘A son,’ he breathed on their wedding night as he stroked her flat, bare belly and moved over her with dark intent. ‘I will put my son inside your body, Emma.’
Who wouldn’t have thrilled at that avowal? Certainly not a woman swept up in the dizzy whirl of love. But the tenor of their lovemaking seemed to change from that very moment. There seemed to be a purpose to it which had not been there before. And the inevitable disappointment each month when his longed-for son failed to materialise made Emma begin to get twitchy.
On one of their periodic visits to Sicily, even his favourite cousin Salvatore, who clearly still disapproved of her—marriage or no marriage—was heard to allude to babies. Or, rather, the lack of them. Emma felt both insulted, and hurt.
Soon the subject began to dominate their thoughts, if not their conversation—for Vincenzo flatly refused to discuss it—and, driven to despair, Emma went secretly to see an English doctor on the Via Martinotti in Rome.
The news was devastating enough, but Emma was frightened into stuffing the letter into a drawer, supposedly to disclose to Vincenzo when she found the ‘right’ time—though quite when she imagined that time might be always perplexed her afterwards. For how did you find the words to tell a man that his greatest wish was destined never to be fulfilled?
Vincenzo found the letter. Was waiting for her one afternoon with it crumpled in his hand, his face dark, an expression in his eyes she had never seen there before and which sent shivers of foreboding icing over her skin.
‘When were you going to tell me?’ he questioned, in a voice which sounded flat and unfamiliar. ‘Or perhaps you weren’t going to bother?’
‘Of course I was!’
‘When?’
‘When the time seemed right,’ Emma answered miserably.
‘And when would that be? Is there an optimum time for announcing to your husband that you are unable to have his child?’
Emma bit her lip. ‘We can investigate fertility treatment… adopt,’ she ventured, but there was no answering light of hope in the stony black eyes. ‘Or I can see another specialist for a second opinion.’
‘If you say so.’
She had never seen Vincenzo like this before, like a tyre which had been lanced by a shard of glass—all the air and the life seemed to have left him.
Her infertility drove a further wedge between them—that was as clear as the stars in the night sky—but Vincenzo preferred to focus instead on her deceit. The fact that she had gone to the doctor in secret. That she had kept the fact hidden from him. Until one day Emma realised that, no matter how much she tried to explain or justify her reasons, he needed someone to blame, and who better than her? He had swum against the tide by marrying an English girl instead of a Sicilian one—but he had made a bad choice and chosen one who was barren, too.
It became one of those simple if heartbreaking decisions. Was she going to allow their marriage to wither away completely in front of her eyes, destroying even the few good memories left—or was she strong and brave enough to give Vincenzo his freedom by walking away?
He didn’t fight her when she told him she was leaving—though his face became as hard and as forbidding as some dark stone. He probably wouldn’t even notice when she was gone, she thought bitterly—for wasn’t he just spending longer and longer days at the office, sometimes not even bothering to come home in time for dinner?
The icy chill which greeted her decision lasted until she reached the door, and then she turned to say goodbye for the last time, something in his eyes stopped her.
‘Vincenzo?’ she said, hesitantly.
And then he started to kiss her—and all the sadness and bitterness and lost love bubbled up and spilled over as he drove into her up against the wall by the front door. He made her miss her plane and then carried her upstairs one last time for one long night of exquisitely heartbreaking sex.
She opened her eyes as he was getting dressed and that was when his face grew hard and cold and he said it: ‘Get out of here, Emma, and do not come back—for you are no wife of mine.’ And then he turned away, and walked out of the room.
Later that morning her plane had taken off and she had been blinded by tears.
And about a month later had discovered she was pregnant….
‘Next stop Waterloo!’ The bus driver’s voice broke into Emma’s reverie and with a start she realised that the bus was slowing down outside the railway station. And that nothing had been resolved.
Like a woman walking in her sleep, she got off the bus and went into the station concourse to find a coffee shop, barely noticing the crowds of people milling around. It felt strange to be out on her own without a little baby in her care. How peculiar to just be able to walk up to a table and sit down without having to negotiate a buggy, or worry that he wouldn’t want to sit still.
She stared at the creamy mounds of foam on her cappuccino as the dull feeling of disquiet refused to leave her—and it went much deeper than just the worry of how she was going to survive. No, her uneasiness had been provoked by seeing Vincenzo again—and no longer being able to deny the glaring truth.
That Gino was his living image!
Pulling her little photo wallet out of her bag, she stared down at the most recent snap of him and the sight of his gorgeous little face made her heart clench with pain and guilt. Had she been deliberately blocking out just how like his father he was? As a safety mechanism to protect her own broken heart, without thinking of their needs?
At that moment, the phone began to ring and she grabbed it. An unknown number. Yet Emma knew exactly who it was.
Heart pounding, she clicked the connection with a trembling finger. ‘Hello?’
‘Have you thought any more about my offer, cara?’
And suddenly Emma knew that she couldn’t keep running away—because she had reached a dead end and there was nowhere left to run. And neither could she keep the truth from her estranged husband any longer. He needed to know about Gino and she needed to tell him.
‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve thought about nothing else. I need to see you.’ And why not get it over with? What would be the point of having to arrange another day of babysitting when she was already here in the capital? ‘I can meet you later, after all.’
So she had changed her mind, as he had known she would. In one lustful rush, Vincenzo experienced triumph, anticipation, and yet it was accompanied by a bitter kind of disappointment, too. For hadn’t he admired the feisty way she’d thrown his admittedly insulting offer back in his face? Hadn’t there been echoes in that of the woman he’d fallen in love with—the one who had shown restraint, who had refused to tumble into bed with him just because he had wanted her to?
But no. It seemed that he had been right all along, and that everyone had their price—even Emma. His mouth hardened. Especially Emma.
‘I’m tied up with meetings all afternoon. Do you know the Vinoly Hotel?’ he questioned coolly.
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Meet me there at six—in the Bay Room bar.’
Emma closed her eyes with relief. A public place. She could tell him there and that was the best possible option—for surely even Vincenzo wouldn’t lose his rag in the middle of some fancy hotel. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘Ciao,’ said Vincenzo in a silky voice as he replaced the phone.
