by Helen Brooks
'I do not want emotional commitment, Claire.' He turned fully to face her now, his handsome face white except for a streak of dark colour across the hard cheekbones. 'When Bianca died…it was almost worse than when she had been alive. I felt such guilt, such terrifying guilt, that I could be relieved she had gone. She was young, she had her whole life ahead of her, but the feeling of release from the horror was so intense all I could feel for a long time was a tangle of emotions that woke me in the night in a cold sweat and made me fear for my own sanity.'
'But she was sick.' Claire wasn't aware she had clutched hold of him in her urgency. 'She was ill, Romano, you said so yourself.'
'And I was her husband and responsible for her,' he ground out bitterly. 'For months, years, since the first weeks of our marriage, I had looked into the future and seen a long, dark road that was hell on earth stretching before me. It made the loneliness, the rejection I had endured in my childhood seem like paradise in comparison. But I was her husband. I had made vows to care for her in sickness and health before God and man. There could be no escape.'
'But…but that was different.' She was out of her depth, struggling to put her heart's cry into words, to reach out to him, to help him. 'With Bianca it was different. You would never have that situation again. When you meet someone you can love—'
'I have met someone I can love, Claire.' It was said gently, but with a terrible remoteness that made her flesh go cold. 'I loved you from the first moment I saw you at the airport, with your face lifted up to the sunlight and your hair a blaze of colour in the midst of all the bustle and rush. Oh, I fought the knowledge, of course, every step of the way. Love is an illusion, remember? A mythical prop, propagated by others for their own ends. But all the time I knew I loved you, and then you told me you loved me, so bravely, so courageously…' The black eyes were bitter, his voice flat.
'I wanted to believe what we had was merely a physical attraction, something I have felt for other women and which, once sated, has ceased to be of importance. But when you confessed your love it made me face up to what I have been running away from for months. I love you.'
'Romano…Romano, we can make it work—'
He cut off her feverish entreaties by rising abruptly, the smouldering emotion evident in his glittering eyes and chiselled features immediately banked down at her pleading. 'No—no, we cannot, Claire. I am a coward, you understand this? You look at me and you see a big, strong man, sì? Someone who is brave, who will fight the dragons? But the last two weeks have made me face that I am a coward. I love you, but I cannot take on the responsibility for another human soul again.'
'You wouldn't have to,' she babbled desperately, rising too and clutching hold of his arms, frightened he would turn and leave before she could make him see. 'It's not like that. I love you and you love me. Everything will work out—'
'No.' He shook his head slowly. 'I cannot bring you into my hell, Claire, the hell that still exists in here.' He tapped the side of his head angrily. 'I was not lying to you when I said I believed love did not exist. Until I met you I felt that way. I had never experienced it, you see, with my parents, with my wife—'
'But Donato and Grace—they love you. And Lorenzo—'
'That is different. They do not really know me—not the Romano deep inside who is not all he should be.' His voice was heartbreakingly sad. 'They see what I present to them.'
'No, no, they don't. You're wrong,' she said urgently. 'We all have secret fears and insecurities, things that wake us in the night sometimes, failings that dog our footsteps. That's why it's so important to have someone to stand in the gap with us, for us at times, to love us in spite of ourselves. Your childhood, the terrible time with Bianca—of course they are going to affect you—'
'But I want you to have someone who is strong,' he said, with a flat grimness that frightened her still more. 'You deserve the best.'
'You're strong—don't you see that you're strong?' she said helplessly, knowing she wasn't getting through to him. 'All that you've gone through has given you an insight, a depth of understanding that is far beyond what the average person could have. Oh…' She gazed at him as the handsome face remained stony. 'Stop being so…so Italian! I love you—I love you. Doesn't that count for anything?' She flung herself on him, her face awash with tears, beyond caring about anything but the need to make him see. 'You don't have to be macho man all the time.'
He hesitated for one moment, as she pressed herself into him, before crushing her against him so fiercely she felt as though her bones would crack. For a second, a stunningly sweet second, she thought it was going to be all right—and then he pushed her away, holding her gently as he gazed into her swimming eyes, his own wet too. 'I love you too much to let you do this. One day you will see it is for the best,' he said brokenly. 'You want someone young and fresh and wholesome, without any darkness and shadows to mar and destroy. I am old—far, far too old in my head.'
'You don't mean that—you don't' She twisted in his hold to get closer to him, but his arms tightened to steel and he continued to hold her at arm's length. 'What about Attilio? He was young and fresh and wholesome, wasn't he? And you didn't want me to have him.'
'I did not say I could stand being around to see it,' he said grimly. 'If I saw another man touch you, hold you…' He shook his head slowly. 'Let us just say that is not possible.'
'Romano, I love you.' She became quiet in his hold, still, her eyes great luminous pools of pain and her face lint-white. 'I can't bear this.'
'Listen to me—listen.' He shook her gently, his eyes mirroring her agony. 'One day you will meet someone else. You are young—you have your whole life before you.' She would have spoken then but he said, 'No, listen to me, Claire. You will meet someone else, fall in love, get married, do all the right things. I did not want…I did not want you to go away thinking that it was you, or to allow anything that this Jeff had said to you in the past to continue to haunt you. You are beautiful—incredibly, breathtakingly beautiful. I did not think it was possible for someone to be so beautiful inside and out.'
'But I'm not beautiful enough to make you change your mind,' she said wretchedly, unable to stop the tears coursing down her cheeks. 'That's what you're really saying, isn't it?'
'You will always have my heart, Claire, always. I shall never marry and I shall never love again—'
'Stop it.' She jerked away from him now so fiercely that she almost overbalanced. 'Do you think that makes it better? Do you? Because it doesn't,' she hissed angrily as her temper rose at what he was putting them both through. 'I don't want just your heart, I want you—flesh-and-blood you—every day. I want to see you in the morning when I wake up, be with you at night, make love with you, feed you, laugh with you, have…have your children…' She couldn't speak now, her sobs choking her.
'Goodbye, Claire.' His voice was husky and strained, and as he turned to leave her throat constricted with fear. He was really going to leave. What could she do? God, help me, give me the words, make him see…
'Romano?' She stood there stricken, despair squeezing her heart so tightly she couldn't breathe, and watched him walk out of her life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
July. Claire stared out of the window into the driving rain outside and sighed wearily. No one could believe it was the middle of July; the month had had the worst weather on record. Day after day of torrential rain, sharp winds and it was cold. She had even brought her winter jumpers out.
She turned now, surveying her bedroom in the early-morning light that was grey and sombre. Not that she minded really, if she was honest. She felt so bad inside, so wretched, so utterly, utterly hopeless… The tears started and she blinked them away furiously, scrubbing at her face with her hand before walking over to her wardrobe and selecting leggings and a long baggy jumper in bright red, in total defiance of her mood.
The nights were for crying, the days for getting on with life—painful though that was. It was a decision she had
made her first night home after that awful journey from Italy, when she had felt she was going mad with pain and grief and rage as she had howled her misery into her mother's ample bosom while her father had forcibly prevented her brothers from getting on the first plane to Italy. She had realised then, after that initial letting down of the floodgates, that for the sake of the rest of the family she had to at least give the appearance of coping with this thing.
It wasn't easy, but she was managing it, and certainly the overwhelmingly generous cheque she had found tucked away in her luggage from Donato and Grace had helped. It meant she wasn't desperate to find an immediate job in England and that she could do something she had wanted to do for a long time: work voluntarily at the home for mentally and physically handicapped children that was situated on the outskirts of the town in Kent where she lived.
She had rung Grace the minute she had found the envelope, protesting that it was too much, that what she had done she had done for love, that she didn't want any payment at all. But when Grace had begun to get upset at her refusal to accept the cheque she had capitulated, and Grace had been thrilled when she'd learnt what the money was indirectly being used for.
So now, as she dressed quickly after a warm shower, fixing her hair into a high pony tail at the back of her head and not bothering with any make-up, she checked that no trace of the tears was left. The children she worked with had problems, enormous problems, and for them she had to be seen to be bright, cheerful and positive, whatever she was feeling like inside. Strangely, when she was with them it wasn't too difficult—her respect and admiration for their bravery in the face of sometimes impossible odds causing her to put her own misery to the back of her mind.
But the nights—the nights were a different matter. Once she was alone in her room, and the rest of the house was sleeping, she lay for hours tossing and turning as she conducted endless post mortems that served no useful purpose at all, and her pillow was always wet when she eventually drifted into a troubled and restless slumber.
Romano loved her, but the prospect of making any pledge, however small, was beyond him. She hadn't demanded a ring on her finger, or vows of undying eternal love, but she had wanted a deep, emotional commitment before getting physically involved with him. She couldn't have coped with the light affair he had wanted at first; she just wasn't made that way. It would have destroyed her, feeling as she did, never to know from one day to the next if their relationship was over, to be unable to ask anything of him, not to have the right to get close.
She had regretted her stand at first through the anguish of the long, lonely, tear-soaked nights, feeling she should have taken anything, anything he offered rather than endure this misery. But in the cold light of day, when she examined her heart and the essence of what made her tick, she knew she couldn't have acted any differently.
Loving him as she did, she wouldn't have been able to bear the constant cycle of wild happiness when she was with him, nagging uncertainty when she wasn't, fear that any day he would tell her their relationship was at an end, anger, pain, contempt at her own weakness—oh, everything an affair with him would have involved. No, she had been right to hold out for more, even if that had resulted in his coming to terms with the fact that he loved her and the ultimate decision that had brought him to.
And that was that. Another stage of her life over and finished. The pale, sad-eyed girl in the mirror stared back at her, the expression in the velvety brown eyes belying the valiant stance, and she grimaced in disgust. 'Snap out of it, Claire, you've a job to do so get on with it,' she said aloud. And she was not going to wallow in self-pity and despair. She was not. Well, only for a bit longer anyway…
The day was hectic but she welcomed the fast pace, the constant challenges, the relentless pushing of mental and physical resources. It gave her less time to brood if every moment was occupied, and it certainly was at Grassacres. But, as always, when she left the big redbrick building and walked down the long pebbled drive bordered on each side by green sweeping lawns, she was so tired she could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Nevertheless she always walked home, Grassacres being just a fifteen-minute stroll from her house, whatever the weather. It gave her a chance to build up a stockpile of determined cheerfulness and resolve for the evening ahead with her family, until she could legitimately escape to the sanctuary of her room and howl her eyes out for what might have been.
As she walked through the big, institution-style iron gates that were constantly left open, and onto the path beyond, her thoughts were on nothing more disturbing than the weather. In strict contrast to the rain and wind of the morning the evening was mellow and quiet, warm, even, with a shy, delicate sun peeping nervously through the clouds and the very English smell of woodsmoke flavouring the air.
It was so pleasant after the torrential rain of the last three weeks that she stood for a second just savouring the air, shutting her eyes and lifting her head to the shaft of sunlight glancing through the big oak tree to her right as she drew on the moment of natural tranquillity.
'Pardon me, but isn't this where I came in?'
She hadn't noticed the big car that had been parked a good way down the street and that at her exit from the home had edged rapidly forwards. But now, as the deep, heavily accented voice met her ears, she went deathly white, turning to face the big, dark man who was leaning out of the window. She stared at him for one endless moment—and then she ran, taking to her heels and flying along the path bordering the walled grounds of Grassacres on one side and the main road on the other, as though her life depended on it.
She heard him call her name but she didn't stop, and then there was the sound of the car engine, a screech of brakes, and a moment or two later a steel hand locked on her arm, stopping the headlong flight and swinging her round to face him.
'Claire?' His voice was wretched now, deep, full of pain, and as she looked into his face, that dear, dear face she had never expected to see again, she lost the last of what little control she had.
'How could you? How could you?' She beat against his chest with her fists as she wailed her anguish out loud, without really knowing what she was railing against. It might have been the desolate vacuum of the last few weeks, the knowledge that she had lost him, that she would never marry, have children, be a half of a whole, or it might even have been just that lazy, assured greeting, when he had spoken as though the nightmare that had been her days and her nights hadn't affected him at all. Whatever, she was hysterical now and he recognised it.
'No more. No more, my love.' He held both her wrists in one hand as he folded her struggling body into the protection of his, his strength eventually subduing her frenzy until she collapsed against him and would have fallen to the ground but for his arms about her. She continued to cry, helplessly and in total abandonment to the torment and suffering she had endured, as he lifted her up into his arms and carried her over to the car, placing her inside as though she were the finest Meissen porcelain.
She shut her eyes and lay back against the seat, utterly exhausted, as he walked swiftly round the bonnet and slid into the car, and then her eyes snapped wide as it suddenly occurred to her what a fright she must look. She had never been able to cry prettily, the way some women could. From a little girl her nose had gone bulbous and red, her skin blotchy, and her eyes gave the impression she had done a few rounds with Mohammed Ali.
'Here.' A large, crisp white handkerchief appeared under her nose in the next moment. 'Blow.'
'I don't want to blow.' It was childish but she had to keep a mental distance from him. She dared not even begin to think, hope, what his presence in England—in her part of England—might mean.
Nevertheless, she knew in the next second or two that her nose was going to behave in a most unladylike fashion, and so she snatched the handkerchief without looking at him, drying her face with the scented linen and then giving her nose the requisite blow.
&nb
sp; 'Better?'
It was the tender note that did it, that and the fact that she made the mistake of turning her head and looking at him. He looked gorgeous, devastatingly gorgeous, and tired, shattered—haggard, even—but still possessed of the sort of dark hypnotic magnetism that would make a fortune if it could be gift-wrapped.
And, contrary to every sensible, logical, self-protecting principle she had hammered herself with for the last few weeks, she fell against him, her face lifted up to his and her hands going round his neck in a bear hug that would have crushed a lesser man. 'I hate you…' And then his mouth had claimed hers, violently, possessively, ravaging her with a need that exactly matched the burning desire that was consuming her from head to toe.
'Claire, for crying out loud…' It was a low, deep groan, and then she found herself literally lifted back into her seat from lying across his lap. The next moment the car's engine had growled into life and they were moving into the flow of traffic.
'Fasten your seat belt.'
'What?' She stared at him, unable to respond to the terse command as ice froze her limbs.
'I said, fasten your seat belt—and stop looking at me like that, dammit. Did you want me to take you in the front of a hired car with half of the Kent population passing by?' he asked grittily. 'Because in one minute more that's exactly what would have happened.'
'I wouldn't have minded,' she said, with touching honesty.
'Well, your brothers would. I have had two of them breathing down my neck for the last half an hour while I talked to your parents, and it was not something I wish to repeat.' It was said with significant emphasis. 'And I understand the one who is still at work is the biggest of them all.'
'You've been to my home?' she asked incredulously.
'Of course I've been to your home. How do you think I know where you work?' he asked softly, glancing at her for one moment and then swerving violently away from the kerb as his eyes became fixed on her swollen, ravished mouth. 'Hell, you're going to kill us both.'
