What she didn’t say, but which he knew to be true, was that she wanted to escape his mother, who doted on her new grandson, but made no secret of her aversion to Maeve. “She’s a spineless nobody who entrapped our son, and not the daughter-in-law I hoped for,” he’d overheard Celeste remark to his father, during one of her periodic visits to corporate headquarters.
“You weren’t the daughter-in-law my mother envisaged, either,” his father had replied, “but she finally accepted you, and I suggest you learn from her example. Dario’s his own man, just as I was. He’s made his choice, and from everything I see, done not too badly for himself.”
But in May and the onset of hotter weather, the entire Costanzo clan moved to their summer homes on Pantelleria. Like him, his father and brother-in-law spent the week in Milan and joined their families on the weekend, leaving the women to keep each other company the rest of the time. And that’s when the rot really set in. Giuliana and Maeve had connected from the first and grown close as sisters. But his mother and Maeve were a whole other story, as Dario learned on his return from Australia.
Celeste wasted no time airing her grievances and cornered him in the garden his first day back. “She’s inexperienced and should be grateful for my help,” she complained, referring to a confrontation that had taken place a few days earlier to do with what she perceived to be Maeve’s inept mothering skills. “I know what’s best for my grandson.”
“You need to take a step back and stop interfering,” Dario informed her flatly. “And stop trying to undermine Maeve’s self-confidence, as well, while you’re at it.”
“I’d have thought you’d appreciate my keeping an eye on her when you’re not here,” she retaliated. “All things considered.”
He wasn’t about to give her satisfaction by asking what all things considered amounted to. “She doesn’t need anyone keeping an eye on her in my absence. I trust her judgment implicitly.”
“A little too much, if you ask me,” his mother said ambiguously, and when he responded by starting to walk away, stopped him short by bringing up the subject of Yves Gauthier, a man new to the island of whom Dario had previously been only vaguely aware.
“He’s Canadian, just like her,” Celeste continued scornfully, “and calls himself an artist, although not one any of us has ever heard of. He’s leased the Belvisi place for the summer, but it’s no secret that while you were away, he was seen more often at your home than his own. From all appearances, he and your wife have become, shall we say for want of a better description, very close friends.”
Still refusing to rise to the intended bait, Dario said, “Not surprising. They share a common background.”
His mother sniffed disparagingly. “‘Common’ being the operative word.”
“I’d have thought that by now you’d learned your lesson and knew better than to go around stirring up trouble where none exists,” he told her sharply. “It didn’t work when you tried it with Giuliana and Lorenzo, and it won’t work now. Maeve is my wife and the mother of my son, and that’s never going to change.”
She lifted her shoulders in her signature elegant shrug. “If that’s really what you want, then at least let me say this. It’s just as well you’re planning to take a break from the office and spend a week or two here because, whether or not you believe me, Yves Gauthier needs to be reminded of his proper place, and it is not making himself at home on your territory.”
Dario had laughed, and accused her of letting her imagination run away with her, but the seed of doubt had been planted. He began to notice how frequently Maeve brought up Gauthier’s name in conversation, and how the Canadian had insinuated himself into their tight social circle.
Dario had never been jealous of another man in his life. The women he’d dated in the past had never given him cause to be. That, as a husband, he found himself at the mercy of such demeaning weakness now both shamed and infuriated him.
Determined not to let it gain the upper hand, he did his best to stamp it out, but it got the better of him just three days into his supposed vacation time, when he and his parents were recalled to the head office for an emergency meeting of the board of directors. Giuliana and Lorenzo, the other two involved, were visiting friends in Paris and flew directly from there to Milan.
“But you only just got home,” Maeve complained, when she heard. “Can’t they manage without you, for once?”
“Not this time,” he said. “We’ve run into a major snag with an overseas operation that could cost us millions.”
“But we never get any alone time anymore.”
He forbore to point out that was as much by her choice as his, and said reasonably, “Come with me for a change. Show Sebastiano the city of his birth. Go shopping and visit the museums. It’d do you good.”
“Tag along like an extra piece of luggage?” she scoffed. “No, thanks! I’ve had enough of being made to feel small and insignificant. I’d rather stay here.”
He knew her run-in with his mother lay behind her response, and if he was half the man he liked to think he was, he’d have shown more understanding. But he had bigger issues to resolve. The company his great-grandfather had created was hemorrhaging money and it had to be stopped. So instead of giving her the reassurance he knew she needed, to his horror and later regret, he heard himself roar, “Well, at least you can always call on the obliging Monsieur Gauthier to keep you company if the nights prove too long and lonely.”
She blanched. “What?” she gasped.
“You heard me.”
“Yes,” she said after a pause, her eyes welling with tears. “I imagine half the island probably did.”
Doing his best to moderate his tone, he said, “You’re not the only one who’s tired of our being apart more than we’re together, Maeve. If I wanted to live like a bachelor, I wouldn’t have married you in the first place.”
“Perhaps that was your big mistake,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “But since you did, and since you have so little trust in me, perhaps the best thing you can do is put an end to what was never a love match in the first place.”
And leave the door open for some half-assed wannabe artist to move onto his turf? Like hell! “Regardless of the reason for our marriage, the fact remains that it happened, and I have done my best to make it work. You have unlimited freedom and the wherewithal to enjoy it pretty much however you please. So forget any ideas you have of walking out on it. That is not, nor will it ever be an option.”
“Watch me!” she spat. “I don’t care how rich and famous you are, I will not sink back into that pathetic, browbeaten creature I once was, just for the privilege of being the great Dario Gabriele Costanzo’s charity bride.”
“I didn’t marry you because I felt sorry for you, Maeve.”
She swiped at the tears running down her face. “Oh, we all know very well why you married me,” she said bitterly. “You had to do the right thing.”
“Yes. Doing the right thing has always been important to me.”
“Then how do you explain this?” Seizing a tabloid magazine lying on the coffee table, she thrust it at him. It fell open at a photograph showing him leaving a restaurant apparently in the company of blond, tanned beauty wearing a white dress so minuscule, it was barely decent.
“I can’t,” he said, tossing the magazine aside. “I won’t lie to you. When I’m away, I’m frequently entertained by business men and their wives, many of whom are extremely attractive, but this woman is not one of them. I have no idea who she is nor, to my certain knowledge, have I ever so much as spoken a word to her.”
“You didn’t spend much time speaking to me, either, the night we met,” she sobbed, “but that didn’t stop you from—”
“I’m well aware how that night ended, Maeve. I made a mistake and I’m doing my best to live with it. But if you’re determined to point fingers, let me remind you that at least some of the blame lay with you. All you ever had to say was stop.”
Livid
with himself and with her, he left her then, stopped just long enough to grab his briefcase from his desk, and strode out to the car. Within the hour he was onboard the company jet, headed for Milan.
The next afternoon the police contacted him. There’d been an accident. A car had spun out of control and gone over the edge of a cliff, some five or six kilometers from the villa on Pantelleria. Sebastiano had suffered minor injuries, Maeve was clinging to life, and the driver, Yves Gauthier, was dead.
CHAPTER TEN
GLOOMILY, Maeve watched as the aircraft gained height and headed due east over the Mediterranean. Too soon the Tunisian coastline sank into the hazy sunset distance and the black dot that was Pantelleria assumed more distinctive shape and color.
The day had flown by. She’d woken first and spent a minute or two inspecting the man she’d married. His face was more vulnerable in sleep, making him appear less the powerful business magnate. She loved the lean, firm line of his jaw, even dusted as it was with new-beard growth, and the way his black hair, normally so well behaved, spilled riotously over his forehead. She loved his strong neck, his dark, dense lashes that were enough to make a woman weep with envy, the sweeping arc of his eyebrows. She loved his mouth, its shape, its texture and its amazing talent as an instrument of seduction.
More than all that, she loved the inherent strength of him, the kind that had to do with something other than muscle and sinew. She might not remember their past relationship, but she knew instinctively that she could count on him. He was not a man to shirk his duty, renege on a promise or betray a friend. Although undoubtedly handsome as a god and sexier than was good for him or her, his real beauty came from within, and that was what she loved most about him.
Love…a word so often spoken without thought for what it should mean, yet sometimes the only word that would do, even if she couldn’t recall it ever having crossed Dario’s lips since their reunion. Yet perhaps that wasn’t so strange, given that although they’d been married for over a year, because of her illness she’d really only known him for the last few weeks. Was it possible to fall in love with him all over again in so short a time, or was the up-swell of emotion he aroused in her something her heart remembered, even if her brain did not?
He stirred, stretched and raised his eyelids to half-mast, as if the weight of their lashes was more than they could be expected to cope with so early in the day. “Buon giorno,” he muttered, his voice so raspy and sensual that she tingled all over. “You have the look of a woman with much on her mind.”
“I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“What I’d like for breakfast.”
“Come up with any ideas?”
“Yes,” she said, drawing the sheet down past his waist and very precisely placing the tip of her forefinger exactly where she wanted it to go on his very male anatomy. “I’d like you.”
His gray eyes darkened. “Help yourself, amore mio. I’m all yours.”
After such a start to the morning, the famed mosaics in the Bardo Museum, which they visited later, weren’t nearly as impressive as they might otherwise have been.
“I don’t want to go back there,” she said now, the words falling into a silence broken only by the hum of the airplane’s engines.
Dario looked up from the newspaper he was reading. “That’s not what you told me yesterday. Yesterday you were captivated by Tunis.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “What I mean is, I don’t want to go back to Pantelleria. Please, Dario, can’t we go straight to Milan instead? I want to see my other home, and I can’t believe you’d rather be trying to run your end of the business from the villa when it would be so much more efficient and convenient to be at the heart of things at corporate headquarters.”
“Are you sure you’re ready for such a radical step?” he asked her doubtfully. “Milan’s a big city, and there was a time that you preferred the slower pace of life on Pantelleria.”
“Not anymore,” she said, with an inward shudder. “Antonia and the rest of the household staff have been most kind, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I want to be around people who don’t look at me as if I’m some sort of walking freak, or treat me as if I might break if I don’t follow the exact same routine every day. Plus, we’re almost into the second week of October now, and you said yourself there’s not much to do on the island once summer’s over.”
“True. And with the fall fashion season getting underway in Milan, you’d enjoy seeing what’s on the runway, I’m sure.”
The chance to witness creative design at its most innovative transfused her with a well-remembered excitement. “Oh, I would!”
He rolled up the paper and regarded her thoughtfully.
“What?” she said, wishing she could read his mind.
“I’m wondering if there’s something else you might be interested in, as well. Next Saturday is our company’s annual benefit to raise awareness of Parchi Per Bambini, my great-grandfather’s children’s charity, which is as important today as it was when he first introduced it. There are now more than a hundred playgrounds in the poorer areas of various cities around the country, but not as many as we’d like to see, especially in the south. It’ll be quite the gala occasion. How do you feel about attending it with me?”
“I’d love to.”
“Think twice it before you say that. The whole family will be there, which you might find overwhelming since it’ll be like meeting them all for the first time.”
She grimaced. “Except for your mother. She and I, if you recall, already renewed our acquaintance with a singular lack of success, I might add.”
“Sì. Except for my mother.”
“Well, I have to face her again sooner or later, and the same goes for the others.”
“You didn’t feel that way a couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple of weeks ago I hadn’t rediscovered my marriage.” Or fallen in love with her husband all over again. But perhaps it was too soon to tell him that, so she said instead, “I’m not the same woman I was back then.”
“No, I don’t believe you are. You’re emerging from a chrysalis into a butterfly more than ready to spread her wings.” He slapped the newspaper against his knee. “D’accordo! It’s a date. I’ll send for the company jet and we’ll fly to Milan in the morning.”
At last, no more marking time! Elation and relief fizzed through her blood like champagne. She was a step away from rediscovering the other half of her lost life; hopefully one free of covert glances from anxious domestics, and secrets hidden behind locked doors.
“Well, this is it.” Stepping out of the elevator, which they’d entered from a sunny private courtyard, Dario flung open the double doors to the penthouse.
Maeve stepped into a small marble foyer and paused, more than a little dazzled by what lay beyond. If the island villa was luxurious, this residence was palatial. Gleaming hardwood floors and paneled white walls graced an entrance hall grand enough to host a sixteenth-century masked ball. At one end, a spiral staircase rose to a gallery, above which a beveled glass dome flooded the entire area with natural light.
Apparently unnerved by her silence, Dario touched her arm tentatively. “If you’re concerned at being left alone, I’ll cancel my meeting,” he offered, referring to the in-flight phone call he’d received after they’d left Pantelleria.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “What do I have to be nervous about? The place isn’t haunted, is it?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then go with an easy mind.”
“The meeting shouldn’t last more than an hour or two, but call if you need anything. My assistant will put you through right away. Meanwhile, pour yourself a glass of wine and make yourself at home while I’m gone. I called ahead and had the maid service stock up the refrigerator. Better yet, take a nap. We left Pantelleria pretty early and you’re probably tired.”
Tired? She’d never felt more energized in her life, at lea
st that she could recall. “Really, Dario, stop worrying. I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“All right, then.” He hugged her and dropped a kiss on her mouth. “We’ll go somewhere nice for lunch when I get back,” he promised, the look in his eyes suggesting lunch wasn’t the only thing he had in mind.
“I look forward to it.” She shooed him away, eager to re-acquaint herself with her sort-of-new home. “Now go!”
She waited until the elevator doors whispered closed behind him before passing through the entrance hall and an arched opening flanked by marble pillars to the living room—except so mundane a term scarcely did justice to the gracious expanse confronting her.
Elaborate white moldings stood in stark contrast to walls covered with burgundy-colored silk damask. Oil paintings, some portraits, some landscapes, hung in heavy carved frames. Thick ivory carpets cushioned the floors. An ebony grand piano stood in one corner, its highly polished lid reflecting the graceful fronds of a tall areca palm in a Chinese jardiniere. The remaining furniture was antique, Italian provincial mostly, with the sofas and armchairs upholstered in cream silk brocade. In the center of one wall was an elegant marble fireplace. The remaining walls boasted French doors that opened onto a wrap-around terrace with breathtaking views of the Duomo.
Pillared archways on either side of the fireplace gave access to a formal dining room large enough to seat a dinner party of twelve. A magnificent chandelier hung above the long table, its crystal prisms shooting fiery sparks in the bright sunlight. A butler’s pantry connected this room to a superbly outfitted kitchen with a small but charming breakfast room set off to one side. There, another door opened directly into the big entrance hall.
Upstairs were three bedrooms each with its own marble bathroom. A four-poster occupied pride of place in the master suite, which also had a recessed sitting area set up with two armchairs. More ornate white molding showcased deep-ocher walls, with matching watered-silk drapes at the tall casement windows.
The Costanzo Baby Secret Page 11
