‘Which part, Alannah?’ he repeated.
She held out the palms of her hands in a gesture of appeal. ‘I thought—’
‘What did you think?’ he interrupted savagely. ‘That you could treat me like your tame puppet? Playing happy couples around the Christmas tree and indulging in some happy-ever-after fantasy, just because we’ve had sex and I asked to spend the holidays with you, since we were both at a loose end?’
‘Actually,’ she said, walking over to the blaze of the fire and turning back to stare at him, ‘I thought about how soulless it might be—having a corporate Christmas in some horrible anonymous hotel. I thought that with the kind of life you lead, you might like some home cooking for a change.’
‘But I don’t do home. Don’t you get that?’ he questioned savagely. He saw a small, rectangular present lying on the table and realised he hadn’t even bought her a gift. It wasn’t supposed to be that kind of Christmas. He shook his head. ‘I can’t stay here, Alannah. I’m sorry if you’ve gone to a lot of trouble but it’s going to be wasted. So pack everything up while I put out the fire. We’re going back to town.’
‘No,’ she said quietly.
His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean…no?’
‘You go if you want to, but I’m staying here.’
There was a pause. ‘On your own?’
Alannah felt a sudden kick of rebellion as she met the incredulity in his eyes. ‘You find that so surprising?’ she demanded. ‘You think I’m scared? Well, think again, Niccolò. I live on my own. I’ve spent pretty much the last seven years on my own. I don’t need a man to protect me and look after me—and I certainly don’t want to drive back to London with someone who can misinterpret a simple gesture with your kind of cynicism. So go to your anonymous hotel and spend the next few days splashing your cash and telling yourself how much you hate Christmas. I’ll be perfectly happy here with my chocolate and mulled wine.’
His black eyes glittered. ‘I’m telling you now that if you’re calling my bluff, it won’t work. I’m not staying here, but I’m not leaving without you, either.’
‘I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,’ she said, walking across to the cocktail cabinet and pouring herself a glass of wine with a trembling hand. ‘Like I said, I’m not going anywhere—and I don’t imagine that even you are macho enough to drag me out by my hair. So leave. Go on. Just leave!’
Silently, they faced each other off before he pulled open the door and a fierce gust of wind brought a great flurry of snowflakes whirling into the room, before it slammed shut behind him.
Alannah didn’t move as she heard the sound of his car starting up and then slowly pulling away on the snowy path. Her fingers tightened around her wine glass as she wondered how she could have judged him so badly. Had she thought that, because he’d murmured soft words in Sicilian when he’d been deep inside her, he’d lost the elements of ruthlessness and control which defined him?
Or was he right? Had she been naïve enough to imagine that a homespun meal might make him crave an intimacy which extended beyond the bedroom?
Her heart pounded.
Yes, she had.
Walking over to the sink, she threw away the wine, washing out the glass and putting it on the side to dry. She drew the curtains on the snowy darkness of the night and switched on the radio, just in time to hear the traditional Christmas service being broadcast from King’s College, Cambridge. And as soon as the sound of carols filled the room she felt tears spring to her eyes, because it was so heartbreakingly beautiful.
She thought about the nativity scene—the helpless little child in a manger, and briefly she closed her eyes. She’d got it so wrong, hadn’t she? She had taken him as her lover and ignored all the warning bells which had sounded so loudly in her ears. She had conveniently forgotten that everything was supposed to be on his terms and she’d tried to turn it into something it wasn’t. Something it could never be. What had she been thinking of? She’d even bought herself a new and more revealing dress to send out the silent message that he had liberated her from some of her inhibitions. And she was almost as grateful to him for that as she was about the job he’d given her.
But he had thrown the offer back in her face.
She was cold now and ran upstairs to find a sweater, her heart contracting painfully as she looked around the bedroom. She had thought he would be charmed by the antique iron bedstead and the broderie-anglais linen. She’d imagined him picking up that old-fashioned jug and studying it—or telling her that he liked the view out into the snow-covered woods at the back of the house. She had planned to run him a bath when he arrived, and to light some of the scented candles she’d had delivered from London. She had pictured washing his back. Maybe even joining him, if he could persuade her to do so. She’d never shared a bath with anyone before.
What a fool she was, she thought viciously, dragging a mismatched blue sweater over the golden dress, and shaking her hair free. It wasn’t as if she’d had no experience of life and the cruel lessons it could teach you. Hadn’t she learnt that you had to just accept what you were given—warts and all? She should have taken what was already on the table and been satisfied with that. But she had been greedy, hadn’t she? Niccolò had offered her something, but it hadn’t been enough. She had wanted more. And still more.
The sound of the front door clicking open and closing again made her heart race with a sudden fear which made a mockery of her defiant words to Niccolò. Why the hell hadn’t she locked it after he’d left—or was she hoping to extend an open invitation to any passing burglar? Except that no self-respecting burglar would be out on a snowy Christmas Eve like this. Even burglars probably had someone to share the holiday with.
‘Who is it?’ she called.
‘Who do you think it is? Father Christmas?’
The sardonic Sicilian voice echoed round the small cottage and Alannah went to the top of the stairs to see Niccolò standing in the sitting room, snow clinging like frozen sugar to his black hair and cashmere coat. He looked up.
‘It’s me,’ he said.
‘I can see that. What happened?’ she questioned sarcastically as she began to walk downstairs. ‘Did you change your mind about the mince pies?’
He was pulling off his coat and snow was falling in little white showers to the ground. She reached the bottom stair just as the poignant strains of ‘Silent Night’ poured from the radio. Quickly, she turned it off, so that all she could hear was the crackling of the fire and the sound of her own heartbeat as she stared at him. ‘Why did you come back?’
There was a pause. His black eyes became suddenly hooded. ‘It’s a filthy night. I couldn’t face leaving you here on your own.’
‘And I told you that I would be fine. I’m not scared of the dark.’ I’m much more scared of the way you make me feel when you kiss me.
‘I’m not about to change my mind,’ he said. ‘I’m staying, and I need a drink.’
‘Help yourself.’
He walked over to the bottle she’d opened earlier. ‘You?’
A drink would choke me. ‘No, thanks.’
She went and sat by the fire, wondering how she was going to get through the next few hours. How the hell did you pass the time when you were stuck somewhere with someone who didn’t want to be there? After a couple of moments Niccolò walked over and handed her a glass of wine, but she shook her head.
‘I said I didn’t want one.’
‘Take it, Alannah. Your face is pale.’
‘My face is always pale.’ But she took it anyway and drank a mouthful as he sat down in the other chair. ‘And you still haven’t really told me why you came back.’
Niccolò drank some of his wine and for a moment he said nothing. His natural instinct would be to tell her that he didn’t have to justify his actions to her. To anyone. But something strange had happened as he’d driven his car down the snowy lane. Instead of the freedom he’d been expecting, he had felt nothing but a heavy weight sett
ling somewhere deep in his chest. It had occurred to him that he could go and stay in a hotel. That if the truth were known, he could easily get a flight and join his friends and their skiing party. He could pretty much get a plane to anywhere, because the hosts of the many parties he’d declined would have been delighted if he’d turned up unexpectedly.
But then he’d thought of Alannah. Curled up alone by the fire with her raven hair aglow, while beside her that corny Christmas tree glittered. All that trouble she’d taken to create some sort of occasion and he’d just callously thrown it back in her face. What kind of a man did that? He thought of how much he’d anticipated making love to her again. How he’d spent the day aching to possess her and wanting to feel her arms wrapped tightly around him. What was wrong with him?
He put down his glass and his face was sombre as he turned to look at her.
‘I came back because I realised I was behaving like an idiot,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it out on you and I’m sorry.’
Alannah sensed that sorry wasn’t a word which usually featured highly in his vocabulary, but she wasn’t letting him off that lightly. Did he think that a single word could wash away all the hurt he’d inflicted? ‘But you did.’
‘Yes. I did.’
‘Because you always have to be in charge don’t you, Niccolò?’ she demanded, her anger starting to bubble up. ‘You decided how you wanted Christmas to play out and that was it as far as you were concerned. What you want is paramount, and everyone else’s wishes can just go hang. This is exactly what happened at Michela’s wedding, isn’t it? Niccolò wants it this way—so this is the way it must be.’
‘That was different.’
‘How?’ she demanded. ‘How was it different? How did you ever get to be so damned…controlling?’
The flames were flickering over his brooding features and illuminating his ebony hair, so that it glowed like fire-touched coal.
‘How?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘You don’t have any ideas?’
‘Because you’re Sicilian?’
‘But I’m not,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I’m only half Sicilian. My blood is not “pure”. I am half Corsican.’ He frowned. ‘You didn’t know that?’
She shook her head and suddenly his almost swashbuckling appearance made sense. ‘No. I had no idea. Michela never really talked about that kind of thing. Boarding school is about reinvention—and escape. About painting yourself in the best possible light so that nobody feels sorry for you. All we knew was that you were unbelievably strict.’ She put her glass down. ‘Although you did used to take her to the Bahamas for Christmas every year, and we used to get pretty jealous about that.’
‘She never told you why?’
‘I knew that your parents were dead.’ She hesitated. ‘But nobody wants to talk about that kind of stuff, do they?’
Niccolò felt his mouth dry. No, they didn’t. They definitely didn’t. And when death was connected with shame, it made you want to turn your back on it even more. To keep it hidden. To create some kind of distance and move as far away from it as you could. He’d done that for Michela, but he’d done it for himself, too. Because some things were easier to forget than to remember.
Yet even though she was doing her best to disguise it, Alannah was looking at him with such hurt and confusion on her face that he felt it stab at his conscience. All she’d done was to try to make his Christmas good and he had thrown it back in her face in a way she didn’t deserve. He’d given her a lot of stuff she didn’t deserve, he realised—and didn’t he owe her some kind of explanation?
‘Mine was a very…unusual upbringing,’ he said, at last. ‘My mother came from a powerful Sicilian family who disowned her when she married my father.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Wasn’t that a little…dramatic?’
He shrugged. ‘Depends which point of view you take. Her family was one of the wealthiest on the island—and my father was an itinerant Corsican with a dodgy background, who worked in the kitchens of one of her family hotels. It was never going to be thought of as an ideal match—not by any stretch of the imagination.’ His gaze fixed on the flames which danced around one of the logs. ‘My father was completely uneducated but he possessed a tremendous charisma.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Along with a massive gambling addiction and a love of the finer things in life. My mother told me that her parents did everything in their power to prevent the marriage and when they couldn’t—they told her she would only ever be welcome if she parted from him. Which for a strictly traditional Sicilian family was a pretty big deal.’
Alannah stared at him. ‘So what did she do?’
‘She defied them and married him anyway. She loved him. And she let that love—’ His voice took the word and distorted it—so that when it left his lips it sounded like something dark and savage. ‘She let it blind her to everything. His infidelity. His habitual absences. The fact that he was probably more in love with her inheritance, than with her. They took the boat to Italy when my mother was pregnant with me and we lived in some style in Rome—while my father flew to casinos all over the world and spent her money. My mother used to talk to me all the time about Sicily and I guess I became a typical immigrant child. I knew far more about the place of my birth than I did about my adopted homeland.’
Alannah leaned forward to throw another log on the fire as his words tailed off. ‘Go on,’ she said.
He watched the flames leap into life. ‘When I was old enough, she used to leave me in charge of Michela so she could go travelling with him. She used to sit in casinos, just watching him—though I suspect it was mainly to keep the other women at bay. But he liked the attention—the idea that this rich and wealthy woman had given up everything to be with him. He used to tell her that she was his lucky charm. And I guess for a while that was okay—I mean, the situation certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was bearable. Just that beneath the surface everything was crumbling and there was nothing I could do to stop it.’
She heard the sudden darkness in his voice. ‘How?’
Leaning his head back against the chair, he half closed his eyes. ‘My mother’s inheritance was almost gone. The rent on our fancy apartment in Parioli was due and the creditors were circling like vultures. I remember her mounting sense of panic when she confided the bitter truth to me. I was eighteen and working towards going to college, though something told me that was never going to happen. My father found out about a big tournament in Monaco and they drove to France so that he could take part in it.’ There was a pause. ‘It was supposed to be the solution to all their problems.’
She heard the sudden break in his voice. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, he won,’ he said. ‘In fact, he cleaned up big time. Enough to clear all his debts and guarantee them the kind of future my mother had prayed for.’
‘But?’ She sensed there was a but coming. It hung in the air like a heavy weight about to topple. He lowered his head to look at her and Alannah almost recoiled from the sudden bleakness in his eyes.
‘That night they celebrated with too much champagne and decided to set off for Rome, instead of waiting until the morning. They were driving through the Italian alps when they took a bend too fast. They hit the side of the mountain and the car was destroyed.’ He didn’t speak for a moment and when he did, his words sounded as if they had been carved from stone. ‘Neither of them would have known anything about it. At least, that’s what the doctors told me.’
‘Oh, Niccolò,’ she breathed. ‘I’m so sorry. Michela told me they’d died in a car crash, but I didn’t know the background to the story.’
‘Because I kept as much from her as I could. The post-mortem was inconclusive.’ His voice hardened. ‘Determining the level of alcohol in a…cadaver is always difficult. And no child should have the shame of knowing her father killed her mother because he was on a drunken high after winning at cards.’
She thought how cold he sounded—and how ruthless. But that was his default position,
wasn’t it—and wasn’t it somehow understandable in the circumstances? Wasn’t much of his behaviour explained by his dreadful legacy? ‘You still must have been devastated?’ she ventured.
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Do you want the truth? The real and shocking truth? My overriding emotion was one of relief that my father had won so big and that somehow the money got to me intact. It meant that I could pay the rent and clear the debts. It meant that I could send Michela away to school—at thirteen she was getting too much for me to handle. And it meant that I could live my own life. That I could capitalise on his win and make it even bigger. And that’s what I did. I bought my first property with that money and by the end of that first year, I had acquired three.’
Alannah nodded. It was funny how when you joined up the dots the bigger picture emerged. Suddenly, she realised why he’d always been so strict with his sister. She saw now that his own controlling nature must have developed as an antidote to his father’s recklessness. Financial insecurity had led him to go on and make himself a colossal fortune which nobody could ever bleed away. His wealth was protected, but in protecting it he had set himself in a world apart from other men.
‘And did this all happen at Christmas?’ she questioned suddenly. ‘Is that why you hate the holidays so much?’
‘No. That would have been neat, wouldn’t it?’ He gave a wry smile. ‘It’s just that Christmas came to symbolise the bleak epicentre of our family life. For me, it was always such an empty festival. My mother would spend vast amounts of money decking out the rooms of our apartment, but she was never there. Even on Christmas Eve she would be sitting like some passive fool on the sidelines while my father played cards. Supposedly bringing him luck, but in reality—checking out that some buxom hostess wasn’t coming onto him.’
She winced at the phrase, but suddenly she could understand some of his prejudice towards her, too. For him, buxom women in skimpy clothes were the ones who threatened his parents’ relationship. Yet in the end, his puritanical disapproval of her chosen career had done nothing to destroy his powerful lust for her, which must have confused him. And Niccolò didn’t do confusion. She’d always known that. Black and white, with nothing in between.
Christmas in Da Conti's Bed Page 11
