His Wedding Ring of Revenge

by Julia James

  And there, walking along the path towards her, was Vito.

  Time contracted, dissolved.

  Eleven years became an eye-blink.

  She was fourteen years old again, and the most beautiful man in the world was walking towards her.

  There was a roaring in her head, and for a brief, extraordinary moment she really did think that she had slipped back in time, had become again that teenage girl, gazing dumbstruck at the Italian male approaching her with lithe, careless grace.

  Just like before he was wearing dark glasses, and as before his chinos were superbly cut, his pale shirt turned up at the cuffs, exposing lean wrists, and open at the neck. Only the sweater draped around his shoulders was missing.

  As she gazed, frozen, as dumbstruck now as she had been then, he paused, his veiled eyes suddenly shifting from the sea beyond to where she clung at the side of the pool.

  And then he too seemed to freeze.

  Was he remembering? Rachel found herself thinking wildly. Remembering that moment eleven years ago?

  Or was he simply repulsed by seeing her now, when he might have thought her having a shower or resting on her bed?

  She didn’t wait to decide, simply let herself drop back into the water, feet touching the bottom of the pool as she twisted lengthwise and started to swim with jerky movements towards the seaward end of the pool. Doggedly she went on, swimming up and down, losing count. When she finally allowed herself to stop there was no sign of Vito.

  The sun was visibly lower too. It was still warm, but the sea breeze ruffled over her wet skin as she emerged from the pool and she gave a little shiver. The shadows were lengthening and the sun was becoming more golden. She wrapped her towel around her, picked up her bag, feeling by its weight that the necklace was still safely within, and headed back to her room.

  She had just showered and washed her hair when she heard a rap on the door from inside the bathroom.

  She opened it cautiously, having wrapped her hair in a turban and wound a bath sheet concealingly around her.

  Vito stood in the bedroom, obviously waiting for her to emerge.

  She tensed instantly.

  His dark glasses were gone, but his eyes, when they rested on her, were as veiled as if he had still been wearing them.

  ‘Yes?’ she said stonily.

  He went on looking at her for a moment, and she started to feel even more uncomfortable. He could see nothing of her except her shoulders and bare arms, yet it was too much.

  A sense of panic suddenly swept through her. What on earth was she doing here, four or five thousand miles from London, about to marry a man who loathed her as much as she loathed him? She couldn’t go through with it! She couldn’t! It didn’t matter how brief the marriage was to be, how totally fake, she just couldn’t do it!

  Anyone, anyone else she could marry—but not Vito Farneste. Please, no. Not Vito…

  He hurt me so much—I can’t take the pain! I just can’t!

  She could feel it eating through her like acid, burning through the years, burning her skin, her flesh. Her heart.

  Her mouth began to tremble.

  ‘The wedding ceremony takes place in an hour and a half. Make sure you are ready.’

  His words cut through the sudden debilitating weakness that had, out of nowhere, swept over her. She bit down on her lip, translating mental pain into physical, forcing herself back to that state of preternatural, emotionless calm that she knew it was essential she hang on to while she was here.

  There was something wrong with his voice, she registered. It was as harsh as it always was when he spoke to her, but it was not that that made it different. She didn’t know what it was—could not tell…

  But whatever it was it did not matter.

  After all, nothing mattered. She had to distance herself from everything that she was doing. Remember only why she was doing it. Because it was the only thing she could do that her mother wanted her to do. It didn’t matter what anguish it caused her, she had to do it.

  For her mother’s sake.

  Taking a deep, sharp breath, she gave a brief nod and went to the door to open it, to let him out again. She didn’t want him in her bedroom.

  She didn’t want him anywhere near him.

  It was much, much too dangerous.

  But he didn’t cross to the door. Instead he turned on his heel, walked out of the French windows onto the veranda, and disappeared to his right.

  The thought that he could gain access to her room from the unlocked French windows made her suddenly nervous, and she hurried to where her handbag lay on the bed. The emeralds were still there.

  Her mouth tightened. Vito Farneste would get them back—but not until his name was on her wedding certificate and his ring was on her finger.

  In an hour and a half.

  She went back into the bathroom to comb out her hair.

  And adorn herself for her wedding.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE sun was a molten orb cradled in crimson clouds. The sea was aflame with dark gold. The palm trees were etched against the burning sky like ebony statues. Music played from speakers hidden in the low vegetation.

  Bach, thought Rachel, though she could not immediately identify the piece, familiar though it was.

  But then her brain wasn’t exactly working right now.

  It took everything she had just to keep walking.

  She walked very slowly. It was difficult to do anything else. The dress she was wearing, bought hurriedly the day before, and costing far more than she’d wanted to pay, was cut on the bias, in softest pale green satin, and shimmered along her body and spread out into a little demi-train. The bodice was softly folded, unadorned. But it needed no ornamentation.

  The glittering green fire of the emeralds around her neck supplied that.

  Fastening them around her throat had been difficult. Not because the catch was tricky, but because, as she’d lifted them out of their velvet bag and draped them around her, she had felt a terrible weight press down on her.

  I’ve got no right to them! None! I’m not a Farneste bride! I’m an impostor, forcing myself on to my Farneste bridegroom.

  Now, as she walked slowly through the warm, balmy air on her high-heeled sandals, towards the waiting group of people under a silk-swathed awning bathed in the rich light of the setting sun, she felt her skin prickle with superstitious dread.

  For one long, crushing moment she thought of the last woman who had worn these emeralds as a Farneste bride. Vito’s mother. The woman whose marriage vows her own mother had conspired to mock.

  Consternation shook her. Accusing her.

  I’ve no right to be here! No right to be doing this!

  But she had to do it. She had to. The living, she knew, had an overwhelming obligation to the dying. Her mother had nothing left—nothing. Only a fevered, desperate fantasy to quiet her final months as her body yielded to its ultimate enemy.

  I have no choice. I have to go through with it.

  Her eyes rested on the group of people, getting closer as she approached them. Only one stood out—and not because of his white skin.

  Vito Farneste. Waiting to marry her. His face like Carrara marble.

  He was dressed in a black evening jacket, and he looked so devastating that Rachel could feel her stomach tighten. She had never seen him in a tuxedo, she realised, and she knew that the image would now be burnt onto her retinas for ever. He looked tall, and lean, and so breathtaking that all she could do was stare at him.

  She tried not to, tried to drag her eyes away from him, to focus on the official who would conduct the ceremony, standing just to the side of a linen-draped table on which Rachel could see was a large, open leather-bound book.

  But she only had eyes for Vito.

  I’m mad! Mad to do this!

  But it was too late for recriminations. Too late for regrets. She was going to marry Vito Farneste, make herself legally his wife, then go home to tell her dying mother that it was
so.

  And never see Vito again.

  He was looking at her, she could tell. But his eyes gave nothing away. As she got closer she found she could not meet them, and her gaze slipped away, towards the setting sun which streamed over the sea beyond the little arbour.

  Again that sense of superstitious dread poured through her. It was as if by mocking such a fairytale setting for a wedding she was calling down on herself the curses of the gods.

  For an instant, a terrible, brief moment, she let herself imagine how it might be if this were a real wedding, and she were in truth, as well as in law, a Farneste bride.

  Then harsh words cut through her vision. Destructive, scathing. Scorning.

  In your dreams…

  Destroying all her hopes, as he had destroyed them once before.

  She reached the arbour and paused. The cluster of Antillians—the celebrant, his assistant and two others, who were, Rachel assumed, there in the office of witnesses, plus, she was glad to see, a photographer with some formidable equipment to hand—all smartly clothed in dark suits were smiling away. The celebrant lifted his hands and opened his mouth to start the ceremony.

  An air of total unreality settled over Rachel.

  Then, before the celebrant could say anything, Vito spoke.

  ‘One moment.’ He turned his head to Rachel. ‘You’ll need to sign the pre-nup first. Or did you think I’d forget?’

  The sardonic tone in his voice made her lips tighten. She said nothing, however, merely turned to where he was indicating with his left hand a document on the table beside the marriage register. It was the same document she’d read on the plane. She didn’t bother to look at it again, simply turned to the last page and signed her name swiftly and carelessly. Then she straightened and went back to her place in front of the celebrant, who was looking studiedly blank about this invasion of harsh financial reality into this most romantic of wedding settings.

  Vito addressed the two witnesses. ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’ he prompted, and dutifully they put their names to the pre-nuptial contract that ensured Rachel would leave the marriage without a penny of Farneste money to her name.

  Vito checked the signatures, and then went to stand beside his bride, his face expressionless.

  My devoted and loving husband, thought Rachel, with a stab of viciousness.

  Around her neck, the stones of the Farneste emeralds pressed with a dead weight, and for the first time she was glad to feel them there. Defiance flooded through her. She had no need to feel guilty! Vito Farneste had used and abused her seven years ago, destroying her innocence for the sake of his determination to wound her mother. That she was her mother’s daughter was not her fault! It never had been! He had had no right to use her as his weapon.

  And because of what he had done to her she had no need to feel compunction about what she was doing. The emeralds were her bride price, and they were buying for her a fine husband, all right!

  A husband she would discard even faster than he could discard her!

  Bitterness filled her, and through it piercing grief. She gazed blindly into the setting sun. An ocean away her mother lay in her hospital bed, filled with painkillers, her life ebbing away day by day.

  The wedding ceremony began.

  Words. She heard herself speaking them. Heard the celebrant. Heard the deep, Italian-accented tones of the man who stood beside her. Consenting to be her husband. Sliding his ring on her finger.

  As the celebrant spoke the final declaration, making her Vito’s wife, she felt totally numb, as if liquid nitrogen had been poured along every vein in her body.

  She did not hear the smiling, professional congratulations of the celebrant, or those of the two witnesses who added their anonymous signatures below hers and Vito’s in the register and on the wedding certificate. She simply stood there, staring out over the sea where the last lip of the sun pencilled a line of gold along the horizon.

  Feeling nothing.

  Slowly she lifted her left hand and spread her fingers. There on her third finger gleamed the curving line of gold that Vito had placed there.

  A flash made her blink. And then another. Surfacing, she realised that the photographer had started to take photographs.

  She forced a smile to her mouth, trying to make herself look like a radiant bride. She needed photographs. Visual evidence to show her mother. Evidence that her daughter was, in truth, a Farneste bride, that Vito had done what his father had refused to do, what Vito himself had scorned to do even when he’d so callously parted her from her virginity and so cruelly dismissed her.

  She stood beside him now, in this mockery of a wedding, smiling at the camera, hoping to God that Vito was not looking as if he were a spectre at the feast. Suddenly, on impulse, she found herself gazing up at him.

  Her breath caught.

  His face was impassive, and yet the kick to her guts was overwhelming. Her eyes distended, drinking him in, feasting on him.

  And then suddenly, out of nowhere, he looked down at her.

  Something blazed in his eyes, and it was like a whip of flame over her skin, scorching her.

  For a second, an instant, she was enveloped in that flame, and then, like a conflagration, there was a flash.

  But it was not her body igniting under that incredible scorching gaze.

  It was the photographer catching the moment.

  She jerked away from Vito, half stumbling forward. The ornate writing on the signed certificate caught her eye, and she turned to pick it up off the table. But Vito was before her. He folded it, slid it into his inside breast pocket. Rachel knew why. She wasn’t going to be allowed to get her hands on it until Vito had his emeralds.

  She stood stiffly while Vito turned his attention to the celebrant and his aides, thanking them for their offices. Then, as they took their leave, Rachel heard the soft pop of a champagne cork, and realised that a waiter had approached from the hotel with a tray bearing an ice bucket and two flutes.

  He set his load down on the damask-draped table and proceeded to pour the champagne. It was the last thing Rachel wanted to do—stand here, under this flowery arbour, in the light of the setting sun, surrounded by tropical palms, and drink champagne. But the waiter was beaming at her as he offered her a brimming glass, and so she took it in nerveless fingers, trying to smile politely as the man offered his felicitations on her marriage. Then he was repeating the office for Vito, and finally leaving them both to it, with a last beaming smile, and heading back for the hotel.

  Rachel watched him go. A sense of hideous tension seemed to net her. She took a sip of the icy liquid, feeling it effervesce on her tongue. Above the sea Venus rode low and luminous amongst the myriad pinpricks of stars.

  Goddess of love, she thought acidly.

  Again that sense of superstitious dread seemed to jitter through her, as though she had, with this travesty of a marriage, dangerously mocked the gods. Well, if she had, it was too late now. Depression settled over her. She gazed out to sea, sipping her champagne.

  Eyes bleak.

  Vito raised the champagne flute to his mouth, his eyes on Rachel’s profile. A sense of gutting disbelief cut through him. He’d done it. He’d married her. Rachel Vaile. Arlene Graham’s daughter. For an instant he felt a kick in his guts, as though he’d just done something quite irreversible. Irreparable.

  He pushed it aside. He’d known what he was doing, and just because he’d now gone and done it, it changed nothing! A civil marriage was not a sacrament. It was a legal transaction, nothing more. The certificate in his pocket made Rachel Vaile his wife only in fact, not in truth. A fact that could be reversed with another simple legal transaction. Divorce.

  All that brief, five-minute ceremony had accomplished was to deliver Rachel Vaile into his hands.

  Along with the Farneste emeralds.

  His gaze shifted. They clung to her pale skin like living green fire, and as he looked he felt that kick come again.

  She had no right to them! No
right at all. She was contaminating them with her touch, let alone her possession of them! He should rip them from her throat!

  And yet…

  The kick came again.

  She looked so perfect in them. The hard green jewels graced her slender, swanlike neck, her throat, as if designed for her and her alone.

  How could she look so right in jewels that were never meant for a woman of her kind?

  His gaze slid upwards. His eyes narrowed.

  The expression on her face was the same as it had been on the plane, as she’d stared out of the porthole.

  As bleak as winter’s snow.

  Something stabbed at him, some emotion he could not name. Almost he felt his hand reach out instinctively to touch her, resonate in some soundless, wordless sympathy.

  And then, like a blade through his skull, he realised the cause of that bleak expression.

  She was thinking of her lover! The man who would not marry her and whose rejection had stung her to get revenge on him for spurning her! That was why she was gazing with that lost, despairing look! Thinking of him. Yearning for him!

  His expression hardened, a cold, cynical light entering his eye as he took another mouthful of champagne.

  Before the night was over Rachel Vaile would have no thoughts for any man but himself! He was going to occupy her entire existence for the night—and as many nights after as he chose!

  Rachel Vaile might be her mother’s daughter, down to the last atom of her being, but that meant she’d inherited her mother’s natural talent! He’d discovered that seven years ago, and now he would rediscover it. Taste it all again in the ripeness of her womanhood.

  Whatever intentions to the contrary she might be arrogantly, foolishly entertaining.

  Her scornful, insulting words to him seared in his brain.