His Wedding Ring of Revenge

by Julia James

  Her throat was tight as she answered, and her voice husked.

  ‘Thank you. She has so little time left.’

  He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to it. ‘Then let us show her that her final dream for us has come true.’

  He turned the handle of the door and led her inside her mother’s room.

  As his gaze rested on the figure lying in the bed his first thought was that he surely could not be in the right room. Could the gaunt, stricken woman with greying hair lying there be the woman who had tormented his adolescence? His father’s expensively dressed mistress, with her immaculate maquillage and perfect hair and varnished nails? Had Arlene Graham come to this?

  As he halted Rachel was walking forward, up to the bed.

  ‘Mum?’ she said softly. There was something in her voice that made Vito’s throat tighten.

  The woman in the bed stirred slightly, her head moving on the pillow so that she was looking towards the source of the voice. Her eyes focused and Vito, with another jolt to his system, realised it was an effort for her.

  ‘Rachel—my darling.’ Arlene’s voice was faint, but Vito could hear the joy in it.

  Then the gaze shifted slightly, moving from Rachel to him.

  And something quite extraordinary happened.

  The gaunt face lit, as though the sun were shining through her eyes.

  ‘Enrico—is it you? Is it really you?’

  A frail, veined hand lifted from the bedclothes, then fell back.

  At his side, Vito could feel Rachel stiffen. He took a step forward, coming up to the bed. Pale eyes searched his face with an expression in their depths that he would have been blind not to recognise.

  Dear God, Arlene Graham had loved his father. Only love could light her stricken face like that, just for a moment making the illness vanish from her features, just for a brief moment making beauty reappear.

  ‘Enrico…’

  The faint, beseeching voice came again.

  He reached out his hand, pressing it down over her frail fingers.

  ‘Si. I’m here, mi amore.’

  How could he deny her that at such a time?

  For a moment something flickered in her eyes, and with a sense of dread in his heart Vito realised what it was. It was hope.

  Then it faded, and into her eyes came a shadowed look.

  ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Not Enrico. I was never his love.’

  The faded eyes searched Vito’s face, and then a new wonder came into them.

  ‘Vito.’ His name was a slow exhalation. Her eyes moved slowly towards her daughter, standing back a little, her expression full. ‘Rachel—then it is really true?’

  Vito turned and drew her forward. He could see the tears spilling in her eyes and his throat tightened even more.

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’ He spoke quietly to the woman lying there at the end of her life. ‘Your daughter is my bride. My wife. And she is more than that—so much more. She is the woman I love—have always loved, will always love. And I ask—’ his voice thickened ‘—I ask your blessing on us.’ He paused, hardly able to go on. ‘For the sake of your love for my father, which I never… I never knew.’

  The frail fingers pressed his briefly, with no strength, then slipped from his grasp. But it was with more vigour that she spoke, as if surfacing from some other place where she now almost always dwelt.

  ‘He did not want me to love him. But I did all the same. Just as your mother loved—’ Arlene’s voice stopped. A sad, bitter smile haunted her mouth. ‘We had more in common than we wanted. Each loving a man who did not love us…could not love us. Poor Sylvia. At least I could be with Enrico openly—your mother did not even have that. All those nervous attacks she had to endure. They gave her the reason she needed to flee to her chalet in the mountains, where he could come to her…’

  The blood was running cold in Vito’s veins.

  ‘Who?’ The question breathed from him.

  Arlene’s misted eyes looked at him. ‘She never told you? No—she would not. She has protected him always. The scandal would be terrible. Even now, as a widow. As Enrico’s wife—she would have been destroyed.’

  Disbelief was emptying through him.

  ‘Who?’

  The urgency in his voice reverberated in the room. Beside him, Rachel was standing motionless.

  Her mother looked at Vito with clouded eyes.

  ‘You called him Tio Pietro—’

  Vito’s expression froze. ‘Por Dio—’

  Tio Pietro—an old family friend. And a cardinal of the church.

  ‘There was never an affair. Your mother never even had that. Only an emotional friendship that could never be more because of his vows. Poor Sylvia…’

  Arlene’s voice weakened, her eyelids closing as she succumbed once more to the drug-induced sleep that shielded her from pain.

  Vito stared sightlessly. The world he had grown up in had dissolved beneath his feet. All these years of seeing his mother as a victim. And all along…

  He turned away, hunching, hands fisting at his side.

  Arms came around him. Folding him to her. She pressed her cheek against his back. The only support in a world which had just been rocked to its core. Rachel said nothing, only let the bitterness buckle through him. Then, at last, she spoke.

  ‘Vito—it was their lives. We cannot judge them. We must not. We must only—’ her voice cracked as she spoke ‘—only be glad that their lives are not ours. That we have been given a chance—a choice—for happiness, love, that they did not have. Was your father capable of loving a woman? Certainly not my mother, though she loved him. And your mother—doomed to love a man who could never love her as a woman. We cannot judge them—we can only pity them. And be glad, so very, very glad, that our path is different from theirs.’

  Her arms turned him around and her hands slid to cup his face, her eyes gazing imploringly into his blank, wounded eyes.

  ‘We have so much compared to them.’

  A long, deep shudder went through him, and then, as something passed from his face, he reached to take her hands and hold them in his.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, and at the moment when he saw the pain lance through her eyes at his words he bent to kiss her. Sweetly, tenderly, lovingly and eternally. He lifted his mouth from hers. ‘We have everything. Because we have each other.’

  And he lowered his mouth to hers again.

  Thin sunlight filtered through the branches of the trees, bare still, yet with the green flush of spring returning. Life returning.

  But Rachel’s eyes were only on the gaping darkness of the earth as her mother’s coffin was slowly lowered into its final resting place. Tears slid ceaselessly down her cheeks.

  ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection…’

  The priest’s sonorous tones rose and fell. At Rachel’s side the tall, somber figure of her husband stood by her, head bowed. And on her other side stood another figure, shorter than her, very elegantly dressed in black, her graying head also bowed.

  The committal ended, the priest came over, taking her hands, murmuring words of kindness and comfort. Then, with a brief word from Vito, he nodded gravely and walked a little way away. Rachel took a step forward. Into the grave she let fall the posy she had been clutching in her hands. Tiny pink and white rosebuds, as delicate as a baby’s breath.

  Then she stepped back, and Vito was there to fold her to him.

  ‘My dear child.’

  Another voice spoke. Italian-accented, soft and low, veined with sorrow. Rachel lifted her head and turned, blinking tears from her eyes.

  The other woman kissed her gently on each cheek.

  ‘Your tears must only be for yourself—not for your mother. Grieve for your loss, but do not grieve for her.’ The woman reached out a hand and gestured to the gaping grave, and to the other grave beside it, with its marble headstone and iron railings all about. ‘She is with him at last,�
� she said quietly. ‘Nothing can separate her from him now.’

  Rachel swallowed painfully. ‘It’s so very good of you—’ she began in a low voice, but the other woman interrupted.

  ‘No! It is her place. It was never mine—never. I should never have married Enrico—I knew I did not love him. I knew my heart would for ever be Pietro’s—even though he did not want it—even though his vocation called him to the priesthood. But your mother loved Enrico, and her place in death is at his side. And your place…’ she paused, and Rachel could hear the break in her voice ‘…is with my son.’

  She paused again, emotion filling her face, taking Vito’s hand and Rachel’s together as they stood in the quiet cemetery where Arlene Graham now lay beside Enrico Farneste.

  His widow’s dark eyes rested on her son, and on her daughter-in-law.

  ‘Out of all this pain, all this sorrow, time has healed us all. And you have been the healing. Your love for each other has made recompense for the past—the past that belonged to me and Enrico, and Arlene and my Pietro. We caused you pain, both of you, yet your love for each other is my comfort and my consolation.’

  She smiled then, a sad, sorrowful smile, but it had acceptance in it. And benediction.

  ‘And now there is a new generation—a new blessing. Your mother died in the knowledge, my dear child, that the grandchild for whose sake you placed that posy in her grave will shortly take its place in the world. And it will have the greatest blessing a child can have—parents who love each other, who stand by each other, loyal and true. Your parents could not give you that blessing—and much grief came of it for you—but you can give that blessing to your child. So come now, let your mother be with the man she loved, and let the past cease to pain you. The future awaits you—the birth of your child awaits you.’

  She pressed her hands on theirs one last time and walked away, to speak a little to the priest.

  Vito’s arm came around Rachel again, and his hand rested on the swell on her abdomen. She leant her head against him.

  ‘My mother has spoken the truth,’ he said. ‘We must let the past go, for it does not belong to us. Only the future belongs to us—and to our child. But—’ his breath caught ‘—our happiness will be our gift to them all—and to our child. Our children.’

  He kissed her gently, tenderly, his lips brushing the tears from her cheeks. A deep, abiding peace filled her.

  ‘Oh, Vito—I love you so very much…’

  He kissed her lips with soft reverence, his eyes lit with love.

  ‘And I you. For all eternity.’

  Together they turned and walked away from the past, and into the bright future that awaited them.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-5910-6

  HIS WEDDING RING OF REVENGE

  First North American Publication 2005.

  Copyright © 2005 by Julia James.

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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