by Julia James
She hadn’t told her mother—anyway, Arlene was cruising with Enrico in his yacht off the French Riviera, so her last postcard had said.
After years of being an exemplary pupil at the strict boarding-school restlessness had swept through her, a yearning for something more than studying and sport and music lessons. A longing for excitement. Adventure.
Romance.
Cold broke down her spine as memory washed over her.
Romance?
She’d been yearning for romance—but what she had found was something quite, quite different…
She felt her fingers clench.
If I just hadn’t gone to Rome. If I hadn’t gone to that party the night we arrived. If Vito Farneste hadn’t gone. If, if, if…
But she had gone. Dressed up in one of Jenny’s evening outfits that showed off so much bare flesh she’d been shocked by it, her face and hair done by Zara so that a golden waterfall had cascaded down her bare back, her eyes huge, her mouth lush.
A totally different Rachel Vaile from the boring schoolgirl she had always been.
She’d thought she was so sophisticated, so mature, so grown-up…
But she’d been like a kid playing games. Games she hadn’t even known she was playing.
If I just hadn’t gone to that party…
But she had gone, and so, by malign chance, had Vito Farneste. And he had taken his opportunity, handed to him on a plate by a stupid, gullible eighteen-year-old.
Such a vulnerable age.
Against Vito Farneste, at eighteen, she’d had no defences whatsoever.
Most pitiable of all, she hadn’t even wanted any.
Her mouth twisted and tightened.
It had been like taking candy from a baby.
All he’d had to do was look at her, that beautiful, sinful mouth smiling at her, his dark eyes washing over her, telling her with his sweeping, long-lashed gaze that she was pleasing to him.
He’d spent that whole party by her side, and he had been the only person in the room for her. Her whole being had focused on him.
She’d recognised him immediately, and frozen, but miraculously he hadn’t seemed to recognise her. She’d known that four years on she must look very different from that briefly glimpsed, scathingly dismissed gawky fourteen-year-old in a swimsuit. Moreover, she’d still borne her father’s name, not her mother’s—and had he ever even known her first name? She’d wondered whether she should tell him who she was, but as the evening had worn on she’d known she could not. Could not bear to risk him dismissing her as cruelly as he had done four years earlier.
He had been like a dream come true. A secret fantasy made real.
He’d whisked her away from the party as it had got rowdier, and driven her around Rome by night in a powerful, open-topped Italian thoroughbred of a car. And she’d sat, gazing round at the beauty and excitement of the Eternal City, entranced by the Spanish Steps—so crowded with tourists, whatever the hour—then the Via Corso and the Pantheon. They’d driven along to the glistening white wedding cake of the Victor Emanuel monument, and then through the ancient Roman Forum to sweep past the sinister mass of the dreaded Coliseum.
But it hadn’t just been Rome that had captivated her.
Her hungry gaze had been as much for Vito Farneste, disbelieving that he was fantasy made flesh—here, now, beside her.
She’d assumed, when he’d finally dropped her off at Jenny’s apartment after midnight, that she would never see him again, but he’d turned up the next day, after breakfast, and whisked her off again to see Rome by day.
Jenny and Zara, as thrilled for her as she was herself, had done her up to the nines again, and once more she had had the bliss of seeing Vito Farneste smiling down at her, knowing she was pleasing to his eye despite her youth, her Englishness and her obvious lack of worldly-wise sophistication.
It had been like a fairytale. Two, beautiful, exquisite, wonderful, gorgeous weeks of having Vito all to herself, during which she had basked like a flower beneath the sun. She’d floated three feet off the ground, it seemed, as Vito had showed her Rome and the lovely, rolling summer countryside of Lazio, with its pine forests and cooling lakes, and the coast and the seaside. Everything had been touched with magic—gazing awestruck, neck cricked, at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, wandering around the shady avenues of the Borghese Gardens, watching the children at play and avoiding their madly pedalled go-karts, and the mandatory tourist ritual of throwing a coin, backwards over her shoulder, as tradition demanded, into the majestic Trevi Fountain. As she had turned, her return to Rome guaranteed, Vito’s arm had come around her shoulder, guiding her through the press of jostling tourists who’d flocked around the edge of the Fountain, cameras flashing, guides expounding, a polyglot of different languages.
The feel of his arm around her had made her almost faint with joy. He’d paused at a nearby gelataria, and she’d hovered, delicious with indecision, over the myriad flavours to choose from. Then they’d strolled along, cornet in hand, back towards the Via Corso, across the busy shopping street into the Centro Storico to seek out the glory of the Pantheon.
He’d told her about Rome—all the tourist things, the history things, the modern, gossipy things—smiling at her, laughing with her, and she’d been enthralled, enchanted.
Blinded. Completely blinded.
Completely unable to see what he’d been doing.
There had been a clue she should have seen—a massive clue, totally obvious with hindsight. But not at the time. Not to her—not poor, stupid, little inexperienced eighteen-year-old her.
In all their time together he had barely touched her. Nothing beyond that arm around her shoulder at the Trevi Fountain, or an accidental brushing of fingers when he’d handed her an ice-cream, or the touching of her arm as he’d pointed something out in the Roman Forum.
But nothing else. Nothing else at all.
Until that last fatal night.
Anguish pierced her. Roughly she drew the shabby curtain across the wardrobe alcove and went into the tiny kitchenette, hardly more than a cupboard, to run water for the kettle.
She didn’t want to remember! She didn’t want to remember that night. That night—the last one she was to spend in Rome—when, instead of taking her back to Jenny’s father’s apartment, as he always had done every night, after a last coffee in one of the old piazzas, he’d taken her instead to an elegant eighteenth-century building which housed the baroque splendour of the Farneste apartment.
Where, with all the skill and experience of the consummate Italian playboy lover, Vito Farneste had seduced her.
She could feel her eyes sting, pain buckle through her.
It had been an effortless seduction. She had gone into his arms—his bed—rapturously, breathlessly, adoringly. So, so willingly. Her mouth melting under the kisses with which he had dissolved her frail, hopeless resistance to him.
But what eighteen-year-old girl could have resisted Vito Farneste? Could have resisted that lean, svelte body, that beautiful, sculpted face, that sable hair, those dark, long-lashed eyes and that skilled, sinful mouth…?
In two blissful, dreamlike weeks she had fallen so helplessly, so hopelessly in love that giving herself to Vito had been an act of homage, of adoration. She had clung to him, clasped his body to her, as his honeyed stroke had opened to her a heaven she had not even known existed, could ever exist.
And in the morning he had thrust her into hell.
A hell so agonising she had never known she could feel such pain.
She had awoken, naked in his arms, after he’d taken her through the gates of paradise itself, and lain dazed with bliss and happiness in the huge, ornate bed. Then, horror-struck, had heard the sound of the front door opening, and voices, felt Vito tensing suddenly, every muscle rigid, and then, like some slow, endless nightmare, the bedroom door had opened and her mother had walked in.
She could see, as if in slow motion, her mother’s face frowning at the closed he
avy drapes, her head turning to see the naked figures in the bed.
And recognition dawning on her horror-struck face.
Even now, seven years later, she could still feel the horror of it all. Still feel cold sweat break out down her spine.
Her mother screaming. Screaming with fury, with outrage. Enrico charging in, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Herself cowering, mortified, beneath the sheets covering her nakedness, wanting only to die.
And Vito.
Shameless. Unashamed.
Callous, uncaring.
So cruel.
She could hear him now. She would always hear him.
Her mother yelling at him in Italian, her face distorted. Enrico angry, his hand slashing through the air.
And Vito. Vito coolly climbing out of bed. Uncaring that he had not a stitch on. Pulling on his trousers and drawing up the zip with insolent unconcern.
Turning to Arlene.
‘Seduce her?’ he had drawled in a tight, hard voice, making sure he was speaking English so Rachel could understand it, understand exactly what he was saying. ‘Hardly. She was gagging for it.’
Water splashed over her hands, jarring her back to the present. She shut her eyes, trying to block out the memory, block out the past.
But she couldn’t. It was there now, piercing her flesh, those vile, ugly words searing through her again, as they had that hideous morning eight years ago. When she had finally, bitterly realised just what Vito Farneste had been doing all along.
Deliberately, cold-bloodedly taking her inexperienced, naïve, gagging for it eighteen-year-old self to bed for one purpose only.
To part her from her virginity.
And by so doing strike at the woman he loathed with every fibre of his being.
Her mother’s words, hurled at her in that hideous aftermath, when Vito and Enrico had gone, had stung like a whip.
‘My God, you fool, Rachel. You fool!’ Arlene had screamed at her. ‘Couldn’t you see what he was doing? Didn’t you find it just a tiny, tiny bit suspicious that a man like Vito Farneste should show the slightest interest in an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl? Vito doesn’t waste his precious time on anyone who isn’t a supermodel or a film star! He’s got women eating out of his hand! They queue up for the privilege! Couldn’t you see he was that kind of man? Didn’t you realize he couldn’t possibly be interested in you?’
Her mother had shaken her daughter’s shoulders, fingers digging into her skin.
‘He got you into bed to get at me! He knows how protective I am of you! So he thought it would be really amusing to seduce you. He hates me like the plague—he’d do anything to get at me!’
Anything—even to the point of forcing himself to have sex with a schoolgirl virgin.
Who’d been gagging for it…
No!
By force of will she blocked her mind and switched on the kettle. She mustn’t think, wouldn’t think.
Not about the past seven years ago. Not about the past two hours ago.
How could I have gone to him and asked him to marry me? How could I have?
She must have been insane to think that she could force his hand like that.
Anguish buckled through her all the same.
But I had to try! I had to!
The force driving her to confront him this afternoon had been compelling. A force so great she had not been able to walk away from the obligation to at least make the attempt. Two emotions, each unbearable, twisted within her to make a formidable, unopposable imperative.
Grief.
And guilt.
Again, as she poured boiling water over the teabag slumped in the chipped mug, her hand shook and a wave of grief and pain washed over her.
Her mother was dying. Lying there in her hospital bed, her face and body ravaged by the rogue cells that were devastating her, consuming her. The cancer had spread so fast, and the chemotherapy and radiation treatment needed had been so aggressive that Rachel had not needed the drawn faces of the doctors to know that Arlene was losing the battle for life.
Vivid, ghastly in her mind’s eye, sprang the image of her mother’s ravaged face. Once so beautiful, so perfect, now gaunt with pain and disease.
And alongside the rawness of her grief came the bitterness of guilt.
In the years following that hideous debacle in Rome, when she was eighteen and Vito Farneste had coldly, callously used her as a weapon against his mother’s hated rival, she had withdrawn almost completely from her mother.
Arlene had been vehement in her demand that Enrico force Vito to marry her—as though, Rachel thought, gall rising in her throat, she had been some kind of deflowered and disgraced Victorian maiden, ‘ruined’ for the rest of eternity without the saving sanctity of a wedding ring on her finger.
Of course Enrico had refused—refused to listen to his mistress’s rantings—and Vito’s scornful, mocking laughter had been even worse. Neither of them had given a toss, Rachel knew, that Arlene’s bastard daughter had lost her virginity. And to Rachel her mother’s ranting had been even more mortifying than Vito’s treatment of her. Hadn’t Arlene seen that?
But she’d been obsessed by her determination that Vito should marry the girl he’d seduced, however hopeless, however mortifying that determination had been to Rachel.
In the end she had bolted back to England—but not to school. She had gone to her aunt, whom her mother seldom contacted any more, finding her humble lifestyle grating, and got herself a job waiting tables in a Brighton café. From now on, she had vowed, she would be financially independent of Arlene—and that meant independent of Enrico Farneste.
And besides, she’d had one more impelling reason to sever links with Arlene…
Her mind sheered away from the memory. Too much grief on grief.
She had enough to keep her going now. And the guilt that went hand in hand with it.
Dully, she poked at the teabag with a teaspoon, watching the dark brown colour stain out through the hot water. She reached inside the tiny fridge, with its half-broken seal around the door, and extracted a carton of milk, pouring it into the mug and continuing stirring. Still running on automatic. Her mind a clouded turmoil of thoughts and feelings.
Guilt. Such a powerful, corrosive emotion. Eating like acid through her life. Accentuating and exacerbating her grief until the combination was unbearable—making her do the wildest, most insane things.
Like trying to force Vito Farneste to marry her.
Just to ease her mother’s dying.
She lifted the teabag from the mug and dropped it into the sink, the teaspoon with it. Then, cradling the mug, she wandered back out into the centre of the room, crossing to the window. The net curtains veiled the back alley below, with its rubbish bins and flybown, flapping posters, scrumpled litter.
She had not felt guilty about cutting Arlene out of her life. Why should she have? She had swanned off with Enrico Farneste to live in elegant prostitution. With all the puritanical certainty of a teenager Rachel had known that there was no romance, nor remorse, to soften the brutal fact of Enrico’s and Arlene’s adultery—neither one of them had cared tuppence that Enrico still had a wife living, nor that Arlene was living her lavish existence as the kept mistress of another woman’s rich husband.
She raised the mug to her mouth and sipped the hot tea, not even tasting it.
How wrong, how totally and completely wrong she had been about Arlene.
But she had not known that until too late.
Until her mother had become ill.
Then and only then had Rachel seen her mother in a quite different light.
‘I did it all for you, my darling girl,’ her mother had whispered, powerful painkillers making her mind wander and at the same time releasing, at last, the emotional detachment she had layered over herself all through Rachel’s life.
‘I wanted you to have something more than I ever had! Your father disowned you—despised me! Thought me some little council house t
art, good enough for sex but nothing more! I hated him for that! Hated him! So I wanted you to grow up to be the kind of person he and his precious family could never despise! You were to have the best education, the best upbringing, mixing with the kind of people your father and his family were! And that’s why I gave you his name—even though I couldn’t put it down on the birth certificate. He knew I would never make a claim on him, or his precious estate. He disowned us both. When he smashed himself up in that car of his I was glad! He’d had his punishment for what he’d done to you. To me. Refusing to be your father. Laughing at me for not being good enough to marry him!’
Arlene’s hand clutched at Rachel’s. Anguish seared in her eyes.
‘Why was I never good enough to marry? Why was I only ever good enough for sex? Enrico never wanted me to be anything other than his mistress! Never! I was good enough for sex—that was all.’
The breath rasped in her throat, and her chest rose and fell agitatedly. Rachel sat there, reeling, as her mother went on to make her final, heart-rending confession.
‘I loved Enrico so much! And he never loved me back. Never! Not for a second, not a moment! I was just his mistress, that’s all. I tried never to show I cared—if I showed too much he got angry, annoyed. Thought I was trying to pressure him to divorce his wife! But I knew he never would. Not because she was a Catholic—or him!—but because—’ the bitterness was etched into her voice again ‘—because even if he’d been free he would never have married me! I was just his mistress. Never good enough to marry. Just good enough for sex.’
Rachel stood now, mug in hand, staring blindly. Anger for her mother churned in her.
More memories pounded in her head. Her mother lying there, eyes huge and strained in her gaunt, shrunken face, her body so slight against the white of the sheets and pillow. Her voice low and anguished as she’d spoken to her daughter, her hand clutching Rachel’s.
