by Lynne Graham
Cristo had fallen in love with little fairy-like Betsy, who was so tiny and exquisite that Belle was convinced that she herself would look like a comic-book character standing beside her. Belle was taller, curvier, and physically larger in every way, her hair raucous red to Betsy’s pale, subtle blonde. No two women could have been more diametrically opposed in the looks department. Did he try to fantasise that she was Betsy in bed? That cruel suspicion pierced Belle like a knife in her chest, shock still winging through her in blinding waves while her mind leapt on to make even more offensive connections. Cristo had actually dared to marry her when he was in love with another woman! Appalled at this knowledge that sucked out every atom of her former happiness and contentment in her role, Belle slid out of bed and swept up her wrap. She folded herself into it in a jerky motion because her limbs still felt oddly detached from her body.
‘Why on earth did you marry me?’ Anger was roaring through Belle in a giant floodtide that drowned every rational thought and controlled every response. ‘I mean, you were in love with another woman, so why the heck would you ask me to marry you?’
Taken aback by her behaviour, his incomprehension growing at her overreaction to what he now saw as a comparatively insignificant mistake on his own part that had caused no one any harm, Cristo frowned in bewilderment. ‘Why should it bother you?’
‘It doesn’t bother me. I’m not one bit bothered!’ Belle proclaimed in furious vehement denial, her pride answering for her. ‘But obviously I don’t like what it says about you. What sort of man gets involved with his brother’s wife?’
Understanding crossed Cristo’s sleek dark face, swiftly followed by an unmistakeable expression of distaste. ‘I wasn’t sexually involved with Betsy. I didn’t make a single move that crossed the boundaries of friendship with her.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that you haven’t had an affair with her?’ Belle demanded incredulously. ‘Do I look that stupid?’
Honesty, it suddenly struck Cristo for the first time, could be a poisoned chalice. His gift of honesty, offered with the best of intentions, had simply stirred up more serious suspicions. He sprang out of bed and reached for his jeans, pulling them on commando style in a fluid motion. Stunning dark eyes met unflinchingly with Belle’s accusing stare.
‘There was never any question of an affair. For a start, I never told Betsy how I felt, and naturally there was no physical intimacy. Dio mio, she’s my brother’s wife. I couldn’t possibly cross that line.’
‘But they’re getting a divorce!’ Belle cut in furiously.
‘Nik will always be my brother. I could still never go there and from the outset I accepted that there was no future in my feelings for her.’
‘Yet you married me even though you loved her!’ Belle reminded him painfully, scarcely able to frame the words through her chattering teeth. She felt cold and clammy and nauseous. She had never felt so hurt and rejected in her entire life and it was as though a great well of anguish deep inside her was threatening to drag her down and swallow her alive. Suddenly the world looked dark, her future empty and full of threat.
‘Why shouldn’t I have married you? How I believed I felt about Betsy is pretty much irrelevant now. There was no way I was ever going to have anything but a friendship with her, and let’s not forget that you and I agreed to a marriage purely based on practicality.’
That reminder was brutally unwelcome. Belle’s nails bit painfully into the flesh of her hands as she knotted them together. A practical marriage. When had she contrived to forget that revealing description of his expectations and her own agreement on that basis? When had she developed expectations of something a great deal more emotionally satisfying than a detached marriage of convenience? And whatever the answer to those questions was it didn’t really matter at a moment when she was in so much pain that she could barely bring herself to look at him. Just then she was too worked up to argue with Cristo and she was desperate to make an escape lest she embarrass herself by saying something she shouldn’t.
‘Excuse me,’ Belle breathed curtly, sidestepping Cristo to stalk into the bathroom.
The door closed, the lock turning with a fast and audible click.
In frustration, Cristo swore under his breath. Why was she so angry? Why the hell was she so angry with him? Blasted relationships, he reflected with brooding resentment. He was no good at them, and never had been. He had always settled for sex and got out before anything more complex was required. But he couldn’t walk away from Belle and their marriage any more easily than he could escape the fallout from what appeared to be a disastrous error of judgement on his part. He pictured Belle’s face when he had truthfully answered her question. She had turned pale as snow, her eyes blank while immediate constraint tightened her features. One minute she had been in his arms, smiling and happy and affectionate, the next angry and distant and…hurt. His wide sensual mouth compressed grimly at that awareness. Every natural instinct told him he should have lied in his teeth and made up an excuse for still having that photo in his wallet. But although he had told her about Betsy, it had decidedly not been the moment to tell her the rest of that story because she would never have believed him in the mood she was in, he reasoned bitterly.
Trembling with reaction, Belle splashed her face with cold water. Tears were running from her eyes and she washed them away with punitive splashes of more cold water, finally burying her chilled face with a shudder in a soft warm towel. Cristo was in love with Betsy and nothing had ever hurt Belle so much as that discovery. Why was that? she asked herself wretchedly; why was she taking the news so badly, so…personally?
They had married for convenience and her main motivation before the wedding had been the welfare of her brothers and sisters. That goal had been achieved most successfully for Cristo was already accepting that her siblings were also his and therefore family to them both. He wasn’t going to turn round and suddenly desert the children, he was too honourable for that, she reflected heavily. To date he had also kept his promises to her. To say the very least, he treated her with warmth and respect.
Had she hoped he felt more than that where she was concerned? Belle nibbled at her lower lip, afraid to meet her own eyes in the mirror because, on her terms, their relationship had very quickly become intensely personal both in and out of bed. The limits of practicality had been bypassed and forgotten by her within days of the wedding. She had learned to care for Cristo, to enjoy his company, his sense of humour, his kindness to Franco, his thoughtfulness whenever it came to a question of what made her happy. In short she had travelled all the way from initial admiration and appreciation to falling madly in love with her husband, which was why hearing that he loved someone else had caused her such pain. Stupid, stupid man—why on earth had he told her? And, even worse, why had he looked at her as though she was insane when she reacted with furious condemnation? Didn’t he understand anything about women? About her? Maybe she should have framed the experience in terms he would have understood…
‘Cristo!’ Belle bawled across the bedroom on her noisy return, the bathroom door still shuddering behind her from her aggressive exit.
Cristo emerged from the dressing room in the act of buttoning a shirt and fixed enquiring dark eyes on her with exaggerated politeness. ‘You called, bella mia?’
Belle reddened fiercely. ‘All right, I shouted. I’m sorry. It’s just you don’t seem to understand how I feel, so I thought I should give you an example.’
A winged ebony brow elevated. ‘An example?’
‘Try to imagine how you would feel if I was to tell you right now that I was in love with Mark Petrie,’ she urged.
Before her very eyes, Cristo froze into an icy bronzed statue. ‘Are you?’
‘You see, the boot’s very much on the other foot now, isn’t it?’ she fired back. ‘No, of course I’m not in love with Mark, but you don’t like the idea, do you?’
‘Of course, I don’t—you’re my wife.’ Dawning comprehension sliv
ered through Cristo and his shrewd gaze veiled but he remained stubbornly silent, wary as he was of setting her temper off again.
‘No wife would want to hear that her husband ever loved another woman,’ Belle pointed out with dignity. ‘It’s not personal, it’s simply a matter of what’s…what’s…acceptable. You’re my husband. I’m possessive about you. I can’t help that.’
‘We’re both possessive by nature, bella mia,’ Cristo husked, relieved that the storm had been weathered and she appeared to be calming down.
But Belle was simply putting on an act to save face. She had her pride. She didn’t want him to know how she felt about him. Determined to act normally, she shone a light smile of acceptance in his direction before returning to her own room where her clothes were still kept. While she dressed for lunch, she concentrated her rushing thoughts on the knowledge that her family were arriving within hours. Family, that was what really mattered. There was absolutely no point in tearing herself apart over what went on in Cristo’s dark, complex head because she couldn’t change that.
No doubt, though, he had Betsy on a pedestal. Betsy would always be the unattainable perfect woman in his eyes while Belle would have to settle for being the much more convenient, accessible and real-world wife, who would dutifully help him raise their orphaned brothers and sisters. Well, she could live with that unromantic reality, couldn’t she? Of course she could, she told herself urgently, while in the back of her mind furious objections flared. It wasn’t a matter of being second-best, she told herself. That was a degrading label and she would go insane if she started picturing herself as some kind of martyr.
Keep it simple, she urged herself sternly. She loved her husband. How had that happened? She had once been so afraid of falling in love and getting hurt, yet miraculously those concerns had been overwhelmed by the powerful emotions Cristo drummed up inside her. He was very generous, very attentive and absolutely breathtaking in bed. What’s not to like, she asked herself accusingly. To want or expect more than she was already getting was downright greedy. He couldn’t help what he felt. She should respect his privacy, she reasoned in an even more frantic loop of planning; she shouldn’t concern herself with his emotions. And telling him that he was never to see or even speak to Betsy again would not be a winning move…would it?
Cristo watched Belle across the lunch table, utterly distrusting her demure expression as she fed Franco from her own plate, breaking her own rules and using the child as a distraction every time Cristo spoke. Franco, of course, lapped up the extra attention and would throw a merry tantrum the next time he was refused a selection from someone else’s plate. Cristo was torn between a strong desire to shake Belle and an even stronger desire to drag her back to bed and stamp her as his again. Suspecting that he might strike out in that field, he decided to throw in the towel. Belle was in a mood and she would get over it but he was exasperated by the way she was behaving and the wedge she was driving between them. His chair scraped across the terrace tiles as he pushed it back and plunged upright.
‘I have a couple of calls to make. I’ll see you later,’ he said drily.
Targeted by shrewd dark-as-night eyes, Belle went pink and then parted her lips. ‘I was planning to sleep in my own room tonight. If the article is to be published tomorrow, I want to be really rested so that I can be with my family,’ she muttered uncomfortably.
Cristo gritted his perfect white teeth. It wasn’t as if he kept her up all night every night! Was he a little too demanding in the bedroom? Wouldn’t she have complained before now? Belle was no human sacrifice and indeed had a whole repertoire of delightful approaches calculated to wake him up hot and hard at dawn. It was an unfortunate recollection when every basic instinct he possessed craved a renewal of the very physical connection they shared. Handsome mouth set in a steely stubborn line, Cristo strode away.
‘Now Cristo’s annoyed with me,’ Belle mumbled into Franco’s tousled hair as he sat on her lap. ‘He never says anything. He just gives me this sardonic look and it makes me cross and it makes me sad and for some peculiar reason it makes me want to run after him and say sorry.’
‘Kiss-do,’ Franco slotted with emphasis into that confused flood of confidence and the little boy began wriggling off her lap, suddenly keen to be free.
Belle watched her brother race after Cristo and her mouth down-curved; it promised to be a long and lonely afternoon.
*
In the echoing hall of the palazzo, Tag leapt straight out of his travel box and flung himself in a passionate welcome at Belle, pink tongue lolling, ragged tail wagging like mad, his little white and black body wriggling frantically. No sooner had he achieved that reunion and more than a few hugs of reciprocal affection, he glanced at Cristo and growled long and low in his throat.
‘No, Tag!’ Bruno stepped forward to say forcefully, casting his older sister a look of reproach as he scooped up the little dog and walked to the door with him to let him out to run off his over-excitement. Pietro and Lucia, the eight-year-olds too wound up to stay still after hours of travelling confinement, hurtled back outside in the dog’s wake. ‘You have to be very firm with him, Belle. He doesn’t understand anything else.’
‘She’s the same with Franco,’ Cristo remarked wryly. ‘Lets him get away with murder.’
‘Well, thank you both for that vote of confidence,’ Belle countered as her grandmother laughed and folded her into a warm hug. ‘How have you been, Gran?’
‘I missed you,’ Isa confided, her shrewd gaze searching her granddaughter’s pale face and shadowed eyes with a frown. ‘Missed that little scamp, Franco, as well. We all did.’
‘Bruno says there’s no shops near here.’ Donetta sighed, her pretty face troubled and self-pitying. ‘And I’ve got nothing to wear in this heat.’
‘We’ll go shopping,’ Cristo promised.
‘Well, don’t expect me to come, especially not if Lucia is going as well.’ Bruno winced and shot Cristo a rueful look. ‘Lucia only likes the colour pink and won’t wear anything else. Getting her into a school uniform will be a nightmare.’
‘It’s only a phase. She’ll get over it,’ Belle told him soothingly.
‘Mum never did,’ Bruno reminded her wryly, his mobile face shadowing with a sudden stark grief that he couldn’t hide and which made him hurriedly study the floor with fixed attention.
Belle tensed and tried and failed to think of something comforting to say. Isa grabbed her hand to draw her attention back to her. ‘You can start the official tour by showing me to my room,’ she suggested. ‘And a cup of tea would be even more welcome.’
Isa was tireless in the questions she asked about the Palazzo Maddalena and astonished to be told that Cristo’s aristocratic mother didn’t care for her former family home.
‘The princess grew up here and much prefers life in the city,’ Belle explained. ‘Cristo only comes here for the occasional holiday so the place does need updating, but I don’t like to wade in and start talking about changes when we’re only just married.’
‘You sounded so happy when you phoned me ,’ Isa remarked thoughtfully as she sank with an appreciative sigh into a comfortable wicker armchair on the terrace and reached for the tea Umberto had brought. ‘What’s happened since then?’
Belle forced a smile. ‘Nothing,’ she swore with determination. ‘I am very happy with Cristo.’
‘A man and a woman can find it a challenge to live together at first,’ Isa commented gently. ‘Being part of a couple entails compromise.’
‘Cristo is really, really good to me,’ Belle muttered in a rush, keen to settle any concerns her grandmother might be cherishing. ‘I really do have nothing to complain about.’
‘Then why aren’t you happy?’ Isa prompted bluntly. ‘I can see something’s not right.’
‘But it’s not something I can discuss… It’s something I need to talk about with Cristo,’ Belle declared, recognising in that moment that she had actually spoken the truth. Much as
she would like to, she could not avoid the subject of Betsy. That had to be discussed and she had to come to terms with it, she registered unhappily. The worst possible stance she could take would be to hold Cristo’s feelings against him and poison every other part of their relationship with her bitterness. But it was so very hard to suppress the resentment, jealousy and hurt bubbling up inside her every time she looked at him.
‘That sounds sensible,’ her grandmother commented with approval and deftly changed the subject to bring Belle up to date on what had been happening in her family since her wedding.
Dinner was served out on the terrace at a big table Umberto had retrieved from a storeroom. The meal was an uproarious affair with all the children talking together, exchanging insults, pulling faces at Franco’s table manners, and Belle could see that Cristo was disconcerted by the sheer liveliness of their over-excited siblings. Pietro and Lucia could barely spare the time to eat before they, with Tag in hot pursuit, chased off to explore the gardens again, with Franco trying desperately to keep up with them and breaking down into floods of tears when he was left behind. Cristo went to retrieve the toddler left sobbing at the top of the steps.
‘Time for bed, I think,’ he murmured quietly. ‘I’ll call Teresa.’
‘No, I’ll take him up,’ Belle interposed, holding out her arms to take her little brother. ‘A bath will soothe him.’
‘I’ll carry him,’ Cristo countered flatly, stunning dark eyes hard and challenging as he studied her set face. ‘I’ll be back down in—’
