by Lynne Graham
“I wish he had hit me.” Kerry was not even listening to her.
“How can you say that? Alex would never touch you. He thought you were being assaulted. Any man would have…no,” Carina sighed unhappily. “It was not right what he did. We saw one thing. He saw another. We saw the girl swim out towards the boat. It was obvious that there was nothing questionable. But Alex…Alex is crazy jealous of you.”
Kerry was enveloped in her own despair. She didn’t hear Alex come in, but his wrathful, “Who are you to keep me from my wife?” penetrated. She shifted away in automatic recoil. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at him.
“You animal,” she whispered, unable to silence the reaction.
His flushed complexion lost colour.
She realised that he wouldn’t leave her alone without an explanation. Woodenly, resentfully, she summed up a brief hour spent chatting to some young holidaymakers. It was punctuated and interposed by Alex’s imprecations.
“Ah…you start talking to strangers, not even strangers from your own background,” Alex gritted. “Cheap tourists. Perhaps you forget who you are. You don’t belong with such people.”
No, it was Alex she did not belong with. Once he had been a stranger. He would have remained one had she not possessed a bright, outgoing personality and the thick-skinned bravado of a friendly teenager. “I spoke to you in a lift,” she murmured helplessly.
To her surprise, he was quick to grasp the connection. “That was different.”
No, it hadn’t been different. She had always talked to people around her. She had always liked meeting new friends. Alex had been attracted by her vivacity, but he had caged her for the same trait. He chose to forget too that those cheap tourists came from a background of greater prosperity than her own.
“Is that how you met? In a lift?” Much intrigued, Carina was eager to lighten the brooding atmosphere.
Kerry’s eyes were wry. “He practically cut me dead.”
“Per dio…;” Alex raked. “You go back six years to complain!”
She had still to look at him, though she didn’t need to look. His lean, strikingly handsome features were permanently inside her head.
“I’ll leave you alone.” Carina escaped uncomfortably.
As the door shut, Alex planted himself where she could no longer avoid visual contact. “What is the matter with you? Hmm?” he demanded, dulled golden eyes pinned to her in derision. “You were flirting. How else did you get into the situation? They didn’t even know who you were. My wife does not mix with people who trespass on private property. Have you no sense of propriety? No sense of discretion? Must I have you watched every place you go?”
Every harsh word lashed into her. She had no answers for him. A thick, impenetrable wall of glass separated them in understanding. She was only twenty-three years old, and just over a year of that time had been spent in the goldfish bowl of Alex’s elitist society. But Alex had never granted her trust. She recognised how he had confined her with his family and vetted everyone she met. Her only escape route had been through Vickie. Alex had subconsciously behaved from the outset as if her betrayal was written into the stars. Somehow it helped to see that his excessive possessiveness had existed even then without just cause. She was not responsible for its birth.
“I want to leave with Ricky and Carina,” was all she said.
Their relationship was impossible. The poison of distrust and jealousy infiltrated every corner of Alex’s mind. A flirtatious glance, a little animated chatter with a man anywhere between twenty and fifty and Alex would be suspicious. It would only get worse. He would imprison her and suffocate her until only enmity and resentment lay between them.
“No!” Alex seethed on another feverish blaze of anger.
It hurt that she should know exactly what he was thinking. He was incredulously reacting to the news that he was in the doghouse when he had only done what any Greek husband would have done to a man making advances to his wife. He was furious that she had not made a more detailed explanation. He was outraged that she was not ashamed of herself. And at the back of it all, he honestly believed that she had encouraged Dave. That was riling him too. He had punished the perpetrator, but not the instigator. His own code wouldn’t let him lay violent hands upon a woman. But for how long could that restraint hold out?
She slept for a while, her own constant lassitude nudging and not quite connecting with some nebulous recollection. Carina was there again when she woke up. “I’m staying for a few days,” she announced.
Kerry sat up. “But you’re supposed to be going to New York tonight,” she objected.
Carina smiled. “Ricky can survive on his own for a few days. It’s a service apartment and he’ll be working all the time.”
“You don’t need to stay.”
“Alex asked me to,” she revealed reluctantly. “He’s worried about you.”
“He wants to make sure that you join me on my next walk along the beach, I suppose,” Kerry gathered with bitter distaste.
“No, of course he doesn’t.” Carina pressed her hand in reproof. “He feels that you need a woman’s company. Do you feel like dinner?”
She nodded. “Where’s Alex?”
“Down in the taverna, getting drunk,” Carina flushed. “Ricky left him there. You were shocked by what he did. Don’t you understand how upset he is?”
Kerry’s face shuttered as she got off the bed, keen to have a bath and a change of clothes. “It’s not remorse, I’m sure. How was Dave?”
“He was all right,” Carina repeated, a tinge of disapproval in her tone. It was heartless of Kerry to enquire a second time about her amorous assailant when her husband was drinking himself into oblivion down in the village. “His friends took him away. They were not decent young people, Kerry. That same young man insulted a fisherman’s daughter in the village last night and started a fight.” Gathering steam, she looked up. “And two girls and three men on a boat, none of them married. This speaks for itself. You are too trusting, Kerry.”
In the privacy of the bathroom, Kerry appreciated how a few hours of grace had altered Carina’s views. She could not see fault in Alex for long. Thus she had reduced Alex’s violence by making the tourists into promiscuous troublemakers. Kerry was no doubt in the wrong for speaking to them at all, and excused for her over-familiarity by a gullible nature. Or were Carina’s suspicions running parallel with Alex’s now that her brother had done something so appallingly uncharacteristic as hitting the bottle?
He had to let her go now for both their sakes. On that beach, she had seen her na;auive hopes for the future shattered by hard reality. Even if Vickie and Jeff did approach him, she seriously doubted that Alex would even give them a hearing. The poison had got too deep a hold in four years apart.
“Do…do you love Alex?” Carina blurted out over dinner, her plump face primed for a snub.
“Love’s not always enough,” she answered heavily. “He doesn’t love me, but he has to keep me to prove something to himself. Letting go would be as healthy for him as it would be for me. We can’t live in the past now.”
It was too deep for Carina. She chewed her lower lip. “How can you talk about leaving him? You are only newly married again. Alex was happy when we arrived. Why are you so hard on him?”
* * *
MUCH LATER, Kerry turned over in her bed, and her lashes flickered up on the dark silhouette of the figure sunk in an armchair in the corner of the room. “A…Alex? Good lord, what time is it?” she whispered, shaken by his silent presence.
“Does it matter?”
She rested back again, shrouded by the same numb depression. “No.”
“You should not be afraid of me,” he breathed harshly. “Earlier you behaved with me as if I was…Cristo!” He sprang upright fluidly, his eyes glittering in the moonlight as he emerged from the shadows. “You are my wife, you are the mother of my child…what happened today? It was not my fault. For that to occur again—to see you wit
h another man—naturally I lost my temper.”
“Some day you might do it with me…”
“No!” He roared it at her in fierce rebuttal. “Whatever you did, I would not touch you. I am not a violent man.”
But his passions were. They ran at gale-force turbulence with her. Everywhere else in Alex’s life control and restraint ruled the roost. He was punctual, tidy, organised, immaculate in appearance. He carried enormous responsibility. He was a rock for his dependent and less able brothers and sisters to lean upon. He was in every other field a strong, principled and honourable man, worthy of respect. She was the fatal flaw that rocked Alex dangerously off balance.
“You’ve got to let me go,” she repeated wretchedly.
The mattress gave under his weight. He leant over her. “These are teething problems. You are over-sensitive. All you can think about is running away. I do not run away from trouble. I face it,” he said hardily. “And you will face it with me.”
“We’re poison for each other.”
“Dio, such melodrama!” he growled. “And stop lying there as if I am about to attack you!”
Helplessly, she turned her head away. It was a mistake. His fingers laced into her hair and his mouth covered hers in hungry retribution. He found no answer in her. She was as inanimate and as empty as a waxen doll. He flung his dark head back, his ruptured breathing pattern breaking the stillness. “You can never be there for me when I need you,” he condemned raggedly. “Why should I curse myself with a wife who has no love for me? Forgive me for forgetting that you are only here on sufferance. I will not disturb you again.”
She knew then that the same process was working within him. Alienation. It would only be a matter of time before Alex let her go. He was too proud to hang on to a wife who could not respond to him in bed. It was the ultimate offence, and what a pity it was that she had not contrived the miracle sooner. Since she was seeing the hope of freedom again, she could not understand why tears should wet her cheek and why she should ache at Alex’s roughened belief that she turned her back on him when he most needed her. He had never talked about needing her before. Why did he have to talk about it now?
* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, she was uncompromisingly sick the instant she got out of bed. One of the maids heard her retching in the bathroom and fetched Sofia. Sofia arrived to beam meaningfully at her while she clung to the sink, trying to subdue a second debilitating bout of nausea. Her pinched face had a greenish pallor and her eyes were haunted. She had woken up feeling sick, the last two mornings. She hadn’t wanted to think about the fact. She had suppressed the awareness that there had been no comforting physical proof as yet that she was not pregnant.
Oh, God, please, no, was all she could think now. They were leaving for Rome this morning. Alex had been distant and civil for the past forty-eight hours. All the portents were that he was withdrawing from her, slowly but surely, with the rigid control of a reformed addict staving off the need for another fix. Steeling herself to kill Sofia’s hopeful smile, she said, “Is there something wrong?”
The housekeeper frowned. “Is the Kyrie ill?”
“I don’t think last night’s fish agreed with me. I’ve been feeling unwell all night.” Kerry tilted her chin.
Sofia retreated. Kerry splashed her face with unsteady hands. It couldn’t happen, it just couldn’t happen now. Her system could be upset by travel, the change in climate, the alteration in diet…by sheer nerves. But that night in London was all she could think about. One reckless night at the wrong time. The nausea, the dizziness and the lassitude were all horribly familiar. Alex had impregnated her and she wanted to scream blue murder. It wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair when she was already practically at her last gasp.
“Are you feeling well?” Carina enquired over breakfast. “You seem very pale.”
“I had a restless night.” She studied the table. She felt like a plague carrier. She felt as if someone had painted a cross on her forehead. She was too self-conscious, too petrified to look anywhere near Alex. But in another sense she wanted to rage at him for his rotten potency. All she could think about was the horrendous misery of her months carrying Nicky, memories inextricably interwoven with what had been going on in her life simultaneously. The mere threat of repetition bereft her of all rationality, and if he found out he would never let her go.
How she got through the helicopter trip she never knew afterwards. It was mind over matter. She had suffered dreadfully from travel sickness, even in a car, when she was pregnant with Nicky. But air travel was the worst of all. On the flight to Rome, mind over matter was no longer sufficient to subdue the churning in her stomach. She spent most of the flight in the washroom, or so it seemed. Concealment had become impossible.
Carina hovered, muttering worriedly about food poisoning. Alex was pale and suspiciously silent after the receipt of one single glance of burning reproach from Kerry. The whole event might have been masterminded by fate to reveal her secret. The only time Alex had ever seen her airsick she had been pregnant. It did not take a lightning bolt of amazing perception for him to suspect the cause.
He insisted on carrying her off the plane. He had recovered his colour, but he looked guilty as hell. It gave her a malicious pleasure that he should understand exactly how she felt. A doctor was waiting for her at the townhouse. Carina helped her into bed. By then, the penny had dropped with her, too.
“I was never like this. No wonder you are miserable,” she soothed sympathetically. “It is very hard to be pleased when you feel so ill.”
“One swallow does not make a summer,” said the doctor glibly. “No pregnancy is a blueprint of another. There may well be small similarities, but with rest and calm you could enjoy excellent health this time.”
Kerry saw nothing but misery ahead. As soon as he had gone and Alex’s sisters and Athene had given up offering advice, she turned over in bed and wept inconsolably. The axe had fallen. Her body wasn’t her own any more. How easy it was for the uninitiated to talk about the redeeming joys of motherhood when they did not have eight months of purgatory stretching in front of them, and a marriage that had already stopped being a marriage beforehand.
CHAPTER NINE
“THE DOCTOR wants you to stay in bed for a few days.”
Kerry emerged from beneath her hair. “I hate you!” she screamed.
Alex’s black hair was ruffled, his tie was loose and his strain was palpable. She went back under her hair again, racked by the cruel injustice of it all. He didn’t love her, she was going to be dumped in Florence again and left to suffer well out of Alex’s radius. That doctor didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her that things would be different this time around.
“You realise—you must realise that I cannot agree to an abortion,” Alex delivered, knotting the rope, did he but know it, round his own throat. “I…I couldn’t live with that. I wish I could, but I couldn’t. Perhaps it will be a false alarm.” He sounded very much as if he hoped it was.
What sort of man was he to even think of such a solution? Horror darted through her in wrathful rejection. But desperate straits demanded desperate measures, she decided. When Alex was adapting to a strategic retreat from the battlefield of their marriage, fate had sprung a rear attack on him. Once again he was being condemned to fatherhood with a woman he didn’t love, couldn’t respect and couldn’t live with.
“I’ll never forgive you for even mentioning the possibility,” she mumbled feverishly. “How could you even think about it for a moment? How could you even say that?”
“I?” Alex unleashed, suddenly springing free of his unusually quiet manner and doing so loudly enough to make her look up in dismay. “I…” He pointed to himself in raw, flaring Latinate emphasis. “Not want my own child? Dio, I am jubilant!” He slung the assurance at her, stressing each syllable so that the words rolled off his tongue in fluid provocation. “And I’m not about to apologise for it, either. This time I will be able to watc
h my child grow. This time I will not be on the outside!”
It was eleven that evening before Alex reappeared. Having run the gamut of her emotions and vaguely appreciated that, no matter what stance Alex took, she would still be unreasonable, she was very quiet.
“I am taking time off to see that you look after yourself,” he announced aggressively in the darkness. “If I could suffer for you I would, but I can’t. I just don’t want you to think that I am leaving you alone.”
He gathered her resistant body close with determined hands. His fingers spread protectively over her flat stomach in a movement which was uniquely revealing. “How soon will we know?” he prompted impatiently.
He was holding her, at last he was simply holding her. But the baby had inspired the warm attitude of concern. He really was pleased, she realised. He had switched his possessiveness from her to the life inside her womb. So might he have patted an incubator. All of a sudden, everything else took second place. She sniffed. The numbness had faded again. Of course it had. Loving Alex was a life sentence. It really didn’t matter what he did. It would always be the same.
Over the next three days he drove her scatty. She was deluged with fancy nightwear and the latest books, and adjured not to move a muscle. He seemed to be stocking her up to spend the next twenty years flat on her back. One of his sisters did him the cruel disservice of presenting him with a book on pregnancy. By the time Alex emerged, much stricken from its overly informative depths, a headache would have had him rushing her to the nearest hospital.
“Are you dying?” Nicky whispered from under her arm one afternoon. “I heard Nonna say Daddy thought you were dying?”
He rocked her with laughter. He made her see the funny aspect to Alex’s over-zealous attitude. When the doctor called, she asked him to speak to Alex. Otherwise Alex was never going to believe that she was fit to travel to Florence.
It was an hour before Alex appeared. “You don’t look healthy to me. Have I been making a fuss?” he prompted tautly.
