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‘I don’t think you’re in danger of burning, Carla. It’s six-thirty.’
With a quick smile at Carla, Dervla followed him indoors. ‘Will you not be so rude to Carla,’ she hissed.
He arched a brow. ‘You wish me to put cream on other women? I think not. I saw your face. You’d have pushed her into the pool if I’d tried.’ He did not sound displeased by the discovery.
The colour flew to Dervla’s cheeks. ‘No, I’d have pushed you into the pool, but this is Carla—she doesn’t mean anything by it.’ Be tolerant, Dervla, be tolerant. ‘She’s like that with all men.’
He gave a grimace of fastidious distaste. ‘You mean she comes on to all men.’
Dervla’s eyes flew wide. She pressed her hand to her stomach feeling suddenly nauseous. ‘She’s never … with you, has she?’
‘A gentleman does not speak of such things.’
‘So that leaves you free to spill the dirt.’
Gianfranco threw back his head and laughed. ‘She is really not my type, cara,’ he promised, lifting a hand to stroke her cheek. ‘And you need not worry about her feelings. She has the skin of a rhino. Short of showing her the door, we’re stuck with her until tomorrow. I suppose we’ll just have to grin and bear it.’
During dinner Gianfranco showed very little inclination to follow his own advice, so it was left to Dervla to supply the extra smiles.
By the time the Italian woman was midway through a lengthy description of the famous people she had rubbed shoulders with at a recent celebrity auction Dervla’s facial muscles were aching from the marathon.
‘What charity was the auction for?’ she asked when Carla paused for breath.
‘For …?’ The older woman looked at her blankly for a moment.
‘The charity it was raising money for?’
‘I really can’t recall.’
Dervla bit her lip, and didn’t dare look at Gianfranco, she knew he’d make her laugh.
‘Did I mention that I spoke to the prince? A charming man.’
Before Dervla had a chance to adopt an appropriate expression of polite enquiry Gianfranco cut in with a dry, ‘Yes, you did, Carla—several times.’
Dervla shot her husband a look of warning from beneath the sweep of her lashes and said brightly to fill the awkward silence, ‘Are you sure you won’t have some of this lemon tart, Carla?’
‘No, no pudding, I’m watching my weight.’ The glance she slid the second slice on Dervla’s plate suggested that she thought Dervla ought to be doing the same. ‘But, you could lend me your husband, just for a few minutes. Boring financial stuff …’ She angled a look of enquiry at Gianfranco. ‘If it wouldn’t be too much of a bother …?’
There was a pause and for one awful moment Dervla thought Gianfranco was going to say yes, it would be too much of a bother, when he got to his feet, his attitude more polite resignation than eagerness. ‘If it’s urgent?’
‘Well, you probably won’t think it is, but I have been worried.’
‘Would you like to come to the study?’ His enquiring glance slid towards Dervla.
‘I’ll wait here.’
Carla smoothed her creaseless skirt down over her slim hips and patted Dervla’s hand. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t keep him a minute.’
The minute Carla had spoken of stretched into an hour while Dervla sat alone at the dinner table drinking coffee. When the maid came in she refused the offer of another pot and told the girl with a smile she could clear away.
Another five minutes and she decided she might as well go to bed. As she passed the door of Gianfranco’s study she heard some very unfinancial-sounding laughter before she shouted her intention of retiring.
‘I’ll be up in a moment!’ Gianfranco called out.
It turned out his grasp of time was just as sketchy as Carla’s. It was actually midnight when Gianfranco finally did join her in their bedroom. Hearing his footsteps in the corridor outside, Dervla leapt into bed, picking up a magazine from the table on her way.
‘What did she want?’
Conscious that this was one of those situations where it would be very easy to sound like a jealous wife, Dervla was careful that nothing in her manner suggested her interest in Gianfranco’s response to her question was anything but tepid.
Actually she had spent the past hour pacing up and down, her eyes drawn continually to the hands on the clock. It wasn’t that she was jealous as such of Carla, and she was sure that Gianfranco did not think of the older woman in that way, but they had a history, a history she was excluded from, memories she did not share.
Carla had been a close friend of Alberto’s mother, Sara. Had the conversation in the library turned to Sara?
While every snippet of information she’d gleaned from Carla had only confirmed her suspicion that Sara had been the love of Gianfranco’s life, some hitherto unsuspected streak of masochism in her made Dervla hungry for the details even though she was tortured by every new proof of how special their love had been.
Gianfranco gave a disgruntled snort. ‘Some stuff about shares, hardly urgent.’
The same could not be said of his desire to join his wife in their bed. The light from the bedside lamp picked out the gold in her burnished hair and made the nightgown she wore almost transparent. His body hardened as he looked at her; her slim, supple curves never failed to arouse him.
‘Finally,’ he said, walking towards the bed where she sat hugging her knees, ‘I have you all to myself.’
She tilted her head and reminded him, ‘This weekend was your idea.’
‘It was a bad idea.’ Slipping the buttons on his shirt, he sat down beside her on the bed. He reached for the magazine in his way and Dervla, catching a glimpse of the cover, tried to snatch it away.
‘What are you reading that you don’t want me to see?’
‘Nothing, nothing, let me have it, Gianfranco.’
The anxiety in her voice made him frown. He leaned back, the magazine in his hand, and turned it over. His teasing smile faded. It was a medical journal.
Dervla sighed. ‘Oh, all right, I didn’t want to tell you this way, but the doctor suggested I read this article …’
‘Article?’ He glanced down. The front cover announced the contents included the latest research on a new drug for breast cancer.
It took his mind a microsecond to make the next sickening leap. He felt as if someone had just reached inside his chest and placed an icy hand around his heart.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, telling himself that his feelings were not important, this was about Dervla and he had to be strong and stay positive for her.
Her eyes slid from his, her lashes brushing her smooth cheeks as she turned her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.’
He cupped her chin in his hand, drawing her face up to him as he moved closer to her on the bed.
‘You are a terrible liar.’ Please, God, let this not be happening. ‘Look, whatever it is we can face it together … It is never hopeless—they are coming up with new cures for …’ He stopped and took a deep breath. He had to stay positive for her sake. ‘Cancer is just a word.’
She gave a small cry of denial, her eyes widening in horrified comprehension. ‘No … no, it’s nothing like that. I promise you, Gianfranco, I’m not ill.’
‘You’re not?’
When she shook her head positively he released a long sigh, his shoulders slumping as the most intense relief he had ever felt in his life washed over him.
There was, he realised, a degree of truth in the old adage that said you didn’t know how much you cared for something until you were faced with the prospect of losing it—or her!
‘You’re sure?’
She caught hold of both his hands and, drawing herself up to her knees, rubbed her nose against his. ‘Totally.’
He jerked her hard towards him and kissed her fiercely on her soft, parted lips. ‘If you ever do that to me again,’ he promised when he finally released her, ‘I will throttle you.’ His eyes went to the slim pale length of her throat. Desire thickened his voice as he added, ‘Do you understand?’
Dervla sank back onto her heels, looking flushed and deliciously tousled but not unduly concerned by the growled threat, and nodded.
‘I understand.’
‘So as we have established you are not dying on me—’ despite the flippancy in his voice he was forced to shove his hands in his pockets to hide the fact they were still shaking ‘—just what are you doing reading that?’
Dervla looked at him through her lashes, her green eyes sparkling with suppressed excitement. ‘You read it,’ she suggested, opening the magazine and stabbing the page with her finger before handing it to him.
It didn’t take him long to skim the relevant article. When he’d finished he closed the magazine and put it on the bed. The article discussed the success rate of a brand-new fertility treatment that would, it suggested, offer hope to women who previously had none.
‘Well?’ she asked excitedly. ‘What do you think? They’re looking for suitable women for the next clinical trial. I know there’s no guarantee, but—’
He cut across her. ‘This is what you have worked yourself into such a state about?’ Shaking his head, he reached for her and she came willingly warm and soft into his arms. He held her close, his fingers meshed in her shiny, sweet-smelling hair, her head pressed to his heart as he reminded her, ‘I told you, Dervla, before we married that I don’t want children.’
‘I know what you said and it was kind—’
‘It was not kind; it was true.’
She pulled away and tilted her face up to his, her smooth brow furrowed and her expression shocked as she impatiently blotted a solitary tear from her cheek with the back of her hand.
Far from swaying or softening his attitude, previously women’s tears had evoked irritation in Gianfranco, but Dervla had never used her tears as a weapon to manipulate him.
She felt things more deeply than anyone he had ever met. Her emotions were incredibly close to the surface, her face as easy for him to read as a neon sign. But despite her almost unnerving transparency she did her crying in private.
‘You really don’t want children.’ She shook her head, a frown pulling her arched brows into a bemused straight line as she added as if speaking to herself, ‘No, that can’t be right. I’ve seen you with Alberto and with the other children. You’re great and—’
‘A baby is a lot of work. Babies kill your social life, cara. Call me selfish—’ better get that in before she did ‘—but I don’t want to come home to a wife who is too exhausted to do more than crawl into bed.’
She looked at him as though he had grown a second head and it wasn’t a particularly attractive one.
‘You don’t mean that, Gianfranco.’
‘It is not me who has changed my mind,’ he reminded her harshly. ‘It is you.’
‘I thought that you’d be pleased that there was a chance,’ she choked in a voice thick with tears and disillusion. ‘Kate is giving Angelo a baby, I want to—’
‘We are not Kate and Angelo. The cases are not similar.’
He watched the pinpricks of bright blood appear on the quivering curve of her lower lip as she released it to say in a voice wiped clean of all expression, ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’
‘I already have a son.’ A son he would gladly have laid down his life to protect … just as his mother had.
It was this knowledge that gave him the strength to withstand the appeal in her eyes. Of course he knew that nobody blamed him for Sara’s death and rationally he recognised it had not been his fault, but the fact remained that had he not been irresponsible enough to get her pregnant, had he not cajoled her into marriage with promises of a luxurious lifestyle and persuaded her against a termination, she would be alive today.
Dervla’s full lower lip wobbled and there was a tremor in her voice as she said bleakly, ‘But we could have a baby together. I don’t have a son. I don’t have a baby. The doctor said there have been incredible advances in IVF over the last few years.’
‘And you went to see a doctor behind my back …’ Gianfranco blocked his growing feelings of guilt with anger.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Gianfranco.’
‘Like what?’ he asked her coldly.
She slung him an exasperated look. ‘I think you’d have been happier if I’d just told you I was having an affair!’ she accused.
Another man—that was funny … Her lips twitched and a burble of borderline hysteria escaped them, causing the fine lines of tension and anxiety around her mouth to briefly smooth out.
Gianfranco watched her, his face like stone. Dervla being touched by another man did not make him feel like laughing or even smiling. It ignited a rage deep inside him.
Dervla sighed and shook her head in a slow negative motion. She made a conscious effort to lower the escalating antagonism.
‘I wasn’t going behind your back—just wanted some facts before I discussed it with you. I didn’t see any reason to raise your hopes, and he said that—’
Gianfranco cut across her; he didn’t want to hear what any doctor had said. It had been a doctor who had told him that the diabetes that Sara had developed during pregnancy was no cause for concern. Gestational diabetes, he had explained, was common but rarely a problem after the birth.
And like a fool he had believed him.
Far from vanishing after the birth, Sara’s condition had progressed to full insulin-dependent diabetes requiring daily injections.
And again he had been won over by the confident medical assertion that there was no reason that Sara could not live a full normal life.
It had been three months later that he had buried Sara, who had died of an accidental overdose of insulin.
‘I thought our marriage was based on transparency?’
‘No our marriage—’ She bit back, pushing herself off the bed … God, if she didn’t she’d have strangled him! ‘What about what I want, Gianfranco? What I need?’ Pushing her arms into a robe, she turned and threw him a look of challenge.
‘I thought I gave you what you want and need.’
‘I want this baby.’
‘There is no baby, Dervla.’
‘There could be, there could be!’ she wailed, frustrated by his refusal to even consider what she was saying.
‘I know people who have been down the IVF route. It took over their lives, put a lot of strain on their relationship, not to mention the emotional and physical strain being pumped full of chemicals has on the woman.’
‘Some people think it’s worth it … and if you never even try you’d always wonder.’
