The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress

by Penny Jordan

‘No. Never that.’ Raphael swung round as he uttered the tormented denial, the sunlight revealing the new thinness of his face, his expression that of a man emotionally tortured beyond his own bearing.

  ‘Tell me what it is, then,’ Charley insisted. ‘Tell me.’

  She could see his chest expanding as he took a deep, ragged breath.

  ‘Very well, then. You saw for yourself how I reacted last night—how my anger overwhelmed me, how I took hold of you in anger and violence.’

  ‘Because you were afraid that the car would hit me.’

  ‘I wish I could believe it was only that that motivated me, but I cannot let myself accept that. Last night I broke every vow I have ever made to myself. It must never happen again. I am not saying that things must end between us because I do not want you to have my child, but because I will not put you in a position where I might hurt you. Just as I will not pass on to any child the poisoned inheritance that is in my own genes.’

  Whilst Charley looked at him in shocked bewilderment, Raphael loosened the tension out of his shoulders with a tired movement.

  ‘You will want to know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Charley agreed.

  ‘It is a long story—as long as the history of my mother’s family. She was descended from the blood-line of one of the most bloodthirsty of all the Beccelli family. During the fifteenth century his cruelty and sadism was such that it was expunged from all family documents. His greed knew no bounds. In order to empower himself he waged war on his neighbours, amongst them my mother’s family, giving orders that the sons of the family should be killed along with their parents, whilst taking for himself their daughter to be married to one of his own sons—but not before he had raped her and impregnated her.’

  Raphael heard Charley’s indrawn gasp.

  ‘His cruelty was unimaginable—the product of a twisted and sadistic mind. Finally he was brought to rough justice when he was murdered by his own sons, who then fell out amongst themselves, killing one another and leaving behind them the young raped bride who was carrying the child of her abuser. From that time down through my mother’s family there have been those who have manifested sadism—men and women who have carried out acts of unspeakable cruelty. My mother’s own great-grandfather was one of those people, as was a male cousin—who ended up being murdered in a brothel. There were other members of her family—less openly affected but possessed of terrible tempers, given to uncontrollable rages. Because of her dread of passing on the curse of that inheritance my mother had sworn never to marry or have a child, so that no future generations would be contaminated by her inheritance. But then she met my father. They were passionately in love with one another, and he persuaded her to marry him. She told me over and over again during my childhood how she had promised herself that she would not burden future generations with the burden she herself had had to carry, how madness brought on by guilt as well as sadism destroyed the lives of so many who shared her blood.’

  Charley had to swallow hard before she could speak. Raphael’s revelations had filled her with pity for him, and a fiercely protective love.

  ‘But you are neither of those things,’ was all she felt able to say. ‘You are no sadist, Raphael, and you are not mad.’

  ‘Not yet—although that is not to say that I will never be, nor that my child will not be.’

  It took several seconds for the full horror of what he was saying to sink into Charley’s mind.

  ‘But you can’t know that it will happen,’ she managed.

  ‘No. But, far more importantly I cannot know that it will not—and because of that I cannot take the risk, not for you and not for a child. Even if it is free of the taint of our shared blood, he or she in turn will have to carry the burden that will be born with them, and they will have to make the decision that I was not strong enough to make for them. It is my belief that in speaking to me as she did my mother was asking me to do what she had not been able to do.’

  ‘But you are a duke, and without an heir…’

  ‘I have an heir—the son of a cousin who is my closest male relative on my father’s side, and so untainted.’ Raphael dismissed Charley’s statement. ‘The reason I am telling you this is not because I want your pity but because I want you to understand why we cannot be together. Already you have witnessed my anger—how are we to know how that darkness within me might grow?’

  ‘That was a completely natural reaction, and my fault.’

  ‘No, last night is not the first time such a rage has possessed me. After my mother’s death I went into her sitting room—the room she always loved best. I could almost see her sitting there in her favourite chair, but she wasn’t there, and because of that I destroyed that chair by smashing it against the fireplace.’

  ‘You were just a boy,’ Charley protested. ‘A boy who had lost both his parents and who was alone and frightened.’

  Raphael turned to her, giving her a tormented look of mingled desire and denial.

  ‘Do you not think I would like to tell myself that? That I would like to believe it? But I cannot. I must not. Because it may not be the truth, and because there is no way of knowing whether or not I possess my mother’s family’s curse.’

  ‘I love you, Raphael, and I am willing to take the risk.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I am not.’

  ‘Because you don’t love me?’ Charley challenged him. Surely if she could get him to say that he loved her then she would be able to find a way to persuade him to let her share his life?

  ‘No, I don’t love you.’

  The pain that seized her was crucifying, unbearable. Without knowing it she made a small sound, agonised and heartrending. Raphael closed his eyes. He must not weaken. It was for her sake that he was denying her—for her future.

  ‘Don’t you think if I did love you that I would still say there could be nothing between us? Don’t you think that if I loved you my concern would be for you, for your ultimate happiness, your right to love a man you will never need to fear—a man who can give you the child or children that you will also love.’ His voice became harsher as he told her, ‘I cannot and will not imprison you in a relationship which ultimately you will come to resent. I can’t. I have told you that, and if there were by some mischance to be a child…’ He paused and then told her heavily, ‘It is my belief that my mother took her own life after my father’s death, because she was afraid of being alone with the responsibility of what she might have passed on to me and through me to generations as yet unborn.’

  Charley’s heart ached with compassion and love.

  ‘I refuse to believe that you are affected by your family’s affliction, Raphael, and as for children—for a woman who loves you, who truly loves you as I do, you yourself would be enough,’ she told him fiercely, unable to keep her emotions out of her voice.

  Now, at last, he turned fully to look at her. The morning sunlight was cruel, revealing the toll his openness with her had taken on his haunted features.

  ‘You cannot know that I will not be affected. Neither of us can. Do you think I want to see you recoil from me in horror and fear? To see the love shining in your eyes now turn to horror?’

  Charley desperately wanted to go to him and hold him, almost as a mother might hold her child. He was the man she loved and he always would be. What he had revealed to her had only made her love him more, not less, just as it had made her want to share with him his exile from what other people took for granted.

  ‘Raphael, please let me share this with you,’ she begged him.

  ‘No,’ Raphael answered. ‘To love someone and not yearn to create with them the miracle of a new life from that love is an act of denial beyond the limits of my own control. I may not have known that before, but I know it now. I learned that when I held you in my arms. I will not allow what I feel for you to chain you to me. Love—true, real love—has to be stronger than that. It must put what is right for the person loved above its own needs and desires.’

 
Raphael was saying that he loved her?

  Joy lifted her heart—only for it to crash down again as she took in the full meaning of what Raphael had said.

  ‘You cannot make that decision for me,’ she told him. ‘If you love me then—’

  ‘Then nothing.’ Raphael stopped her, his voice harsh. ‘I cannot offer you my love and still think of myself as a man of honour. You must see that?’

  ‘What I see,’ Charley told him spiritedly, ‘is that you are making us both suffer when we don’t have to over an issue that may not even exist. I love you, Raphael. Of course I would love to have your child—but I will gladly and willingly sacrifice doing so to be with you and share your life.’

  ‘I cannot allow you to do that.’ His mouth twisted—the mouth she had kissed so passionately last night—and the lips that had touched her body so intimately, bringing her such pleasure, now held a cynical twist, causing her intense pain.

  ‘Your own choice of words reveals the truth—you describe not having a child as a sacrifice,’ Raphael told her. ‘You cannot deny it. You used that description of your own volition.’

  Charley could see that it was pointless for her to wish the word unsaid. She raged inwardly, blaming herself for her thoughtlessness, thinking how bitterly unfair it was that the whole of her future happiness should hang on one simple word.

  ‘You may love me now, Charlotte,’ Raphael told her, ‘but there will come a time when the ache inside you for a child will be stronger than the ache inside you for me. I cannot let that happen. Not for my sake, but for yours. I am already guilty of allowing my own selfish need to overcome my principles, and in doing so I am hurting you. I shall not do so any more. When I return to Rome I will speak to my lawyer and to your employer, to arrange for someone else to take your place here, working on the project.’

  Raphael ignored Charlotte’s stifled protest.

  ‘I shall, of course, compensate you financially…’ he continued.

  ‘Pay me off, you mean? Like a discarded toy you don’t want any more? Is that how you always treat the women you sleep with, Raphael—by paying them off once you have had what you wanted from them?’

  White-faced with grief, Charley flung the words at him, retreating to the top of the bed when he strode towards her, to grasp her shoulders and almost shake her.

  ‘You will not say that,’ he told her. ‘You will not demean what we shared together and yourself by speaking in such a way. The money has nothing to do with our personal relationship. It is to compensate you because you will be losing your job.’

  It was because his emotions were so raw that he was angry with her, Charley knew. The thought crossed her mind that if she increased that anger, if she really, really pushed him, then that emotion might spill over into a passion that would result in them making love, giving her a chance to prove to him that what they felt for one another was too strong to be ignored. Shame flooded through her. She must not taint what they had shared last night by attempting to manipulate him. She did not want her memories soured by her own shame.

  Raphael released her, stepping back from her, removing the temptation to ignore her better self.

  ‘It will take some time for everything to be sorted out—a couple of weeks at least, I imagine—and during that time it will be necessary for you to remain here at the palazzo.’

  ‘And where will you be?’ Charley had to ask him.

  ‘I shall be in Rome. I cannot be here,’ Raphael told her bleakly. ‘Not now. It would be too much—for both of us. Do not look at me like that,’ he warned her. ‘I am doing this for your sake, and one day you will thank me for it.’

  Charley shook her head, her vision of him blurred by the tears filling her eyes.

  ‘No,’ she told him brokenly. ‘I will never do that, and I will never stop loving you.’

  He was walking towards the door. She couldn’t let him go.

  ‘Raphael, please,’ she begged him, running towards him, the sunlight splashing her naked body with golden light.

  He had reached the door.

  She put her hands on his arms and pleaded, ‘We could be together. I understand now why the garden and its restoration is so important to you. It’s because it is what you will give to posterity, isn’t it? Instead of your children—your son. We could do it together, Raphael; together we could restore and create something of great beauty to give to your people.’

  Charley felt the shudder that ripped through his body.

  ‘Trust a woman to find some ridiculous and fictitious emotional fairytale and insist on substituting it for reason,’ said Raphael, dismissing her statement, but he knew that she had touched a nerve. Her words were like the careful, gentle touch of an archaeologist, brushing away a protective covering to reveal something unbearably fragile beneath it. Only in his case what she had revealed was not some priceless piece of antiquity but instead his pitiful attempt to find a substitute in his life for all that he could not have—to find a purpose and a meaning that would compensate him for what he had to deny himself.

  Charley’s naked body was pressed close to his own, her face turned up to his, her gaze brimming with love and hope. All he had to do was open his arms to her and she would be his for ever. There would be no turning back. He would have her love to sustain him through the darkest of dark nights.

  ‘A garden lives and breathes, Raphael, it gives love and joy to those who come into it. We could share that. It could be ours…’

  The pain was almost too much for him. It reached out to every single part of him, along with the awareness of all that would be lost to him. He had to resist temptation. He had to endure the pain—for Charley. Desperately, Raphael formed a mental image of Charley—not as she was now, but as she would be holding her child in her arms, her whole body alight with the love she felt for it. Her child, but never, ever his.

  ‘No!’ he told her harshly, reaching for the door handle, forcing her to release him and step back from him.

  It was over. There could be no going back.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SHE would be leaving Florence in ten days’ time. Everything was arranged. She had her ticket; she would be picked up and driven to the airport—all she had to do was ensure that her paperwork was left in order and her appointments cancelled.

  Charley started to pull open the drawer in the desk, to remove the desk diary she kept as an extra backup reminder of the appointments stored electronically, determined to make sure that professionally nothing was overlooked. Her misery overflowed into irritation when the drawer wouldn’t open properly. Kneeling down in front of the desk, she felt inside the drawer, quickly realising that the diary had become wedged against the underside of the desk. Picking up her ruler, she used it to try and prise the diary free, exhaling in impatient relief when she finally succeeded. The force of her probing, though, had sent the diary skidding right to the back of the drawer, with a definite thud of sound, obliging her to pull the drawer further out. Only when she did so, to her dismay, there was no sign of the diary and the back of the drawer itself was missing.

  She had damaged Raphael’s mother’s desk. Horrified, Charley pulled the drawer out completely, and then frowned as she realised how much shorter it was than the full depth of the desk. Very carefully she slid her hand and her arm into the empty space where the drawer had been, feeling her way to the back of the space. It was more or less the same depth as the drawer, and indeed a good ten inches short of the depth of the desk. Curious now, Charley re-examined the space, pressing against the back wall and then exhaling in triumph when it suddenly gave way. It must be a hidden compartment, operated by a spring, and she must have inadvertently touched it when she had pushed her diary free. It was too deep for her to reach inside it, so she had to use her ruler again to edge out her diary and bring it within her reach. Only it wasn’t just the diary she had edged out. There was something else as well: several thick sheets of expensive notepaper, poking out of an envelope that had obviously never been s
ealed.

  Uncertainly Charley turned the envelope over, her heartbeat accelerating as she stared at what was written on it.

  To my beloved son, Raphael…

  Charley sank down onto the floor, still holding the envelope, her diary forgotten.

  This was a letter to Raphael from his mother. It had to be. And she had no right to read it, but her hand was trembling so much that somehow the letter had begun to slip free of the envelope, the thick sheets sliding into her lap.

  Putting down the envelope, Charley quickly picked the paper up.

  Impossible now not to be aware of the elegant handwriting, of the date written at the top of the first sheet in dark ink.

  The letter was nearly twenty years old, written quite obviously when Raphael had only been a boy. An aching longing filled her, a tender smile for the boy that Raphael must have been curving her mouth.

  She looked down at the letter, the words written on it springing up as though demanding that she read them.

  My dearest and dearly loved son—and you are that, Raphael, MY son, the son of my heart and my love. I am writing this letter to you in English because it is the language that my English governess taught me, as your father and I have taught it to you, so that we could all speak it together—our special ‘secret’ shared language. Your father is gone now, and my life without him is so empty. One day, when you yourself know true love, you will understand all that this means.

  I write this letter now, knowing that it is what your father would want me to do. It is to be given to you when you come of age. We had planned to tell you together, and I fear I shall not have the strength to tell you on my own.

  I beg you not to judge me too harshly, Raphael, for being too cowardly, too afraid of losing your love, to tell you the truth myself. The truth, though, must be told—for your own dear sake.