On the other end of the line, Kate felt her nerve nearly fail her, but some dogged determination drove her on. ‘Do you…do you speak English?’ she enquired falteringly.
‘But of course!’ There was a slight pause. ‘Who do you wish to speak to?’
Kate drew a deep breath, and the name came out in a gush. ‘Giovanni Calverri! Is he there, please?’
‘Who is calling?’
Kate thought how frosty the voice had become. Should she leave her name? ‘Is he there, please?’ she asked again.
There was a loud, undisguised sigh, as if the person at the other end of the line had scant patience with unknown women who refused to say who they were.
‘No, he is not here!’
‘And are you expecting him back?’
‘Not today.’ There was a pause. ‘Signor Calverri has been in England.’
I know! Kate bit the words back.
‘And has only just arrived back.’ Another pause. ‘So obviously, the very first thing on his mind was to go and see his fiancée.’
His fiancée? ‘Oh, I see,’ said Kate faintly, as, with a slow, sinking pain in her heart, she put the receiver down without another word.
CHAPTER FIVE
GIOVANNI watched the woman who walked alongside the pool towards him.
She was the epitome of elegance—her pure silk dress in a buttery-cream colour setting off the raven-dark hair and the huge, black-fringed brown eyes. Her face was serene, on her lips a smile of calm acceptance—an easy pleasure at seeing once more the man she had known for all her adult life.
He felt the deep, sharp pain of regret.
‘Giovanni!’
‘Hello, Anna.’
She moved straight into his arms, but he could not bring himself to hold her other than awkwardly, as if she were composed of some brittle substance, and his touch might contaminate her. She pulled away, her brow criss-crossing in a frown.
‘What is it, caro?’ she demanded.
What way to tell her? Though the notion of not telling her was even more unthinkable.
He knew that most men of his acquaintance would put the whole experience down to a fleeting temptation of the flesh, not worth confessing to because of the consequences of such a confession. But Anna was the woman he knew. The woman he had always intended to marry.
‘Giovanni!’ She was looking at him now in alarm. ‘What has happened to make you look this way? Is someone sick? Has something happened to the business?’
He met her stare without flinching, and it was perhaps because she knew him so well, and had known him for so long, that a horrified look of comprehension began to dawn in her dark eyes.
Her voice grew faint. ‘Tell me!’
He had no desire to hurt her, but hurt was an irrevocable repercussion of his actions. His mouth hardened. ‘I met someone—’
He heard her pained intake of breath, and he flinched as he saw the hurt that clouded her eyes.
‘And…’ He hesitated, trying to pick out the least wounding words of all.
‘And what? The truth, Giovanni!’ she demanded, in as furious a tone as he had ever heard.
‘I slept with her!’
There was a short, shocked silence before she spoke.
‘How many times?’
Her question astonished him. ‘What?’
‘You heard me! How many times did you sleep with her?’
‘Once,’ he answered heavily. ‘Just the once.’
‘Only once?’ She frowned at him in disbelief.
‘Once!’ he emphasised bitterly, his blood heating his veins with shameful pleasure.
She shook her head and let her eyelids flutter down to conceal her eyes. ‘Oh, why did you have to tell me?’ she whispered.
His heart beat strong with the burden of guilt. ‘You needed to know the truth.’
But she shook her head once more. ‘No, Giovanni,’ she said acidly. ‘You needed someone to share the burden with, didn’t you? To ease your conscience! Most men would have filed it away under an experience never to be repeated—especially if, as you say, it was just the once.’
But her words leapt out at him like tiny barbs. If, as you say… She would never trust him again. He knew that. The rest of her life would be spent watching him. Waiting for him to slip. Always wondering…
‘Anna, I’m sorry—’
‘No!’ she retorted furiously. ‘You have offloaded your guilt—please spare me your need for forgiveness!’ She sank down on one of the wrought-iron benches that stood in the shade of a cypress tree. Then looked up at him with hurt, bewildered eyes.
‘Who is she?’
‘No one!’
‘Yes! Somebody!’
‘A girl. Just a girl I met in England and—’
She cut across him icily, ‘Was she the first?’
He stared at her incredulously and then his eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘Of course she was the first!’
‘There’s no “of course!” about it!’ She studied the engagement ring on her finger, then looked up at him, her gaze very steady. ‘The first? And only?’
Giovanni could see the hurt in her eyes, but there was, he realised, no surprise whatsoever. Almost as if she had been expecting him to stray. His mouth hardened as he thought of all the women he had turned down over the years. One misdemeanour, and you were scarred by it forever. And he had only himself to blame.
And Kate, of course, he thought with a kick of something akin to both hatred and desire. Kate with those smooth, pink nails which had curled around his arm so possessively, enchaining him with the sweet seduction of her touch.
‘The first,’ he agreed quietly. ‘And the only.’
‘Oh, why did you have to tell me, Giovanni?’ she whispered sadly and again he felt the sharp pang of remorse as she saw the white glitter of the diamond which sparkled on her finger. ‘Most men would have tried to get away with it.’
‘Because I could not bear to live a lie with you, Anna,’ he told her softly, and a muscle worked in his cheek as he silently cursed the day his path had crossed with that of Kate Connors.
Back in London, Kate sat staring at the telephone as if it were an alien just landed from Mars.
Engaged, she thought in a frozen kind of disbelief, starting as the doorbell began to ring, and she remembered the last time it had rung like that.
Like a zombie, she walked out to answer it, some stupid hope making her wish that history could repeat itself and that Giovanni would be standing there, telling her that there was no fiancée. That she had made a terrible mistake.
But it was Lucy, her copper hair pulled back into a pony-tail, and not a scrap of make-up on her face—but that didn’t matter, thought Kate. Not when your eyes were like emeralds sparkling in such a pale, clear face.
‘Hello, Lucy,’ she said, and then her voice began to tremble.
Lucy swept her a swift, assessing look and her face took on a mixture of concern and anger. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Giovanni Calverri!’ Lucy spat the name out.
‘Seen him?’ Kate very nearly laughed, but tears were much too close to the surface to allow her the luxury of laughter. ‘Yes, you could say that I’ve seen him.’
Lucy came into the flat and shut the door behind her. ‘And?’
Kate bit her lip. Who else could she tell? Who else could she bear to tell? Someone who loved her enough never to judge her. And Lucy did.
She tried to recount the whole sorry story matter-of-factly. ‘He turned up yesterday after I’d been to see you.’
Lucy nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘He… I… We…’ Kate shook her head and tried again. There was no pretty way to phrase it. ‘We went to bed,’ she said simply.
‘You what?’ breathed Lucy.
‘You sound shocked,’ commented Kate drily.
‘That’s because I am! Oh, no,’ she amended suddenly as Kate’s lips began to tremble again, ‘not because of what you did—but because it�
�s just not like you!’
‘I know it isn’t.’
‘You’re the kind of woman who plays safe, Kate. Gosh, I remember when you were going out with Pete—he used to say that you’d virtually interviewed him on at least the first four dates before you would even let him kiss you!’
Kate nodded. ‘Yep. That’s me. Safe, sensible Kate.’
Lucy knotted her fingers together. ‘So what happened? What was so different?’
‘He was,’ said Kate quietly. She walked over to the window and stared unseeingly at the river before she turned round to face the soft consternation in her sister’s eyes and tried to explain the inexplicable. ‘It was an attraction like no other I’d ever felt. Ever.’
‘And he must have felt the same way too, presumably?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ agreed Kate tonelessly, and realised that she couldn’t give Lucy only half the story. Didn’t want to, either. And who would she be protecting if she kept the horrible, hurtful truth to herself? Only a man who didn’t deserve one vestige of protection. ‘But he disappeared in the middle of the night.’
Lucy’s face fell. ‘He did a runner?’
‘He certainly did.’
Lucy thought for a moment, then she shrugged awkwardly. ‘Maybe he had a good reason—’
‘Oh, a very good reason!’ Kate gave a hollow laugh. ‘Like the fact that he’s engaged to be married—that’s reason enough!’
Lucy winced. ‘You are joking?’
Their eyes met.
‘I’m sorry, Kate, I didn’t mean to be flippant. As if you’d joke about something like that. But how do you know? I mean, you surely didn’t—’
‘You think I went to bed with him knowing that he was going to be married to someone else?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘Of course I didn’t!’
‘He should have told me,’ whispered Kate. ‘He should have told me that he was promised to someone else!’
‘How on earth did you find out?’
This was the humiliating part. Kate swallowed. ‘I was angry—angry with him for having left without even so much as a goodbye, and angry with myself for having behaved so outrageously. I decided that he needed to be told he just couldn’t do something like that—if not for my sake, then maybe he might just think about it with the next poor girl he bowls over with his charm!’
‘So you rang him?’
Kate nodded. ‘In Sicily. I got some snotty secretary who told me smugly that he had gone off to see his fiancée—’
‘Maybe she was lying,’ said Lucy hopefully.
Kate put her head to one side as she looked at her sister. ‘Oh, sure! Why would she do a thing like that?’
‘Because some secretaries are madly in love with their bosses themselves, and so they take it on themselves to be as beastly as possible to other women!’
‘Nice try, Lucy, but I don’t believe she was lying.’ There had been other clues, too. She should have given them more thought. The way that the attraction he had undoubtedly felt towards her had held the unmistakable trace of antipathy. His reluctance to stay once he had dropped off her Filofax. His offensive arrogance in assuming that she had left it behind deliberately. Believing that she wanted to lure him. And her behaviour towards him had probably seemed as though she had wanted to lure him here.
What man would pass up on an offer like that?
‘So what will you do?’ Lucy’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, God— Kate, you couldn’t be…pregnant, could you?’
Kate shook her head, because even that hurt to tell. ‘Oh, no,’ she said bitterly. ‘No chance of that. Signor Calverri conveniently had a packet of condoms on him! No doubt always prepared for the unexpected!’
‘It’s a rather good thing, under the circumstances,’ observed Lucy drily. ‘The last thing you need in a situation like this is an unwanted pregnancy.’
Kate’s mouth crumpled. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she admitted, thinking that for a man who was little more than a stranger the pain he had caused seemed to be disproportionately intense.
‘Nothing you can do,’ said Lucy in a determinedly bright voice. ‘Except carry on working and waiting for Mr Right and put it all down to experience.’
‘There’s no such thing,’ said Kate bitterly.
‘What, as experience?’
She swallowed, trying to smile and to lighten up. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. But just now her sense of shame and humiliation was too strong for her to be able to resist cynicism. ‘As Mr Right,’ she said tightly. ‘Now, are we going out tonight?’
‘You want to?’
Kate shrugged. ‘We always do at the end of a job, don’t we? I can’t sit around here moping for the rest of my life!’
Once Lucy had gone, she made a determined effort to dress up, even though her heart wasn’t in it. She nearly wore black, but that seemed like a psychological admission of defeat. So she put on white linen trousers instead—with a glittery little top in silver-spangled white, because the summer night was warm and sultry.
At just past eight she and Lucy set off for the Italian restaurant, stopping off at the pub on the way as they always did.
It was a typical London pub—packed and noisy—so they sat outside on a wall next to a big pot of daisies and drank their lager and enjoyed the river view.
‘I’ve never seen you look so fed-up, Kate,’ said Lucy, watching her sister stare miserably into the foamy top of her drink.
‘I guess I’ve been very lucky in the heartbreak stakes,’ said Kate lightly. ‘Up until now.’ Her infrequent love affairs had tended to become friendships more than the mad kind of passionate romances which broke your heart. She had never been the type to sob into her pillow over a man.
So how come one brief and beautiful encounter had left her feeling as though a part of her had been torn out and thrown into the gutter? Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears, and she forced herself to take another sip of beer.
‘Come on, Kate,’ said Lucy gently. ‘Let’s go and eat.’
CHAPTER SIX
AT LEAST Kate had her career. That was what she kept telling herself over and over again, in an attempt to convince herself that in work lay some kind of refuge from her problems. The only difficulty being that her particular career was that it was such a solitary occupation.
When she decorated a house she liaised with the owners to discover exactly what it was they wanted her to create. She then went about finding paints and fabrics and objets d’art from various suppliers.
But there was no regular daily interaction with workmates. No one to sit and drink coffee with and talk.
Though maybe that was a blessing in the circumstances. Workmates might ask her why her eyes were ringed with great black shadows. Why eating seemed to be an intolerable effort. And why it took all her energy just to summon up a fraction of her usual enthusiasm.
She was now refurbishing a dining room in north London—a sprawling great Edwardian house belonging to a television actor and his presenter wife. Money was no object, and they had seen some of her work at friends’ houses and given her a free rein. The dream scenario, really. But this time the smile she pinned to her face each morning felt like an effort, and she hoped that her mood wasn’t transmitting itself to her employers.
On Friday, when the walls had been painted in a rich, dark green, she returned to her flat in Chiswick and thought unenthusiastically about the weekend ahead. She needed to keep active. To fill her time, so that the memory of Giovanni and his bright blue eyes and delicious body would fade far away into the distance.
She thought about going to visit her parents. No. That was a crazy idea. Her mother would take one look at her gaunt face and demand to know exactly what was wrong—and how could you tell your mother something like that?
The phone began to ring and aimlessly she reached out her hand and picked up the receiver, trying to inject enthusiasm into her voice. ‘Hello?’
There was a click as the line was disconnected and she
stared at it for a moment, then replaced it uninterestedly, secretly pleased that no one had spoken. The last thing she had felt like doing was having a conversation, having to pretend that everything was all right, when everything in her heart felt all wrong.
The heat of the summer day was still intense, and so she drew herself a bath and soaked in it for ages, until the water was merely lukewarm and the tips of her fingers had shrivelled into pale little starfish. Then she put on a long satin robe and padded barefoot into the sitting room.
She would order in some pizza. She winced. No, definitely not pizza. The Italian connection would be much too great to contemplate. A curry, then. And a glass of wine. With maybe a sad old movie afterwards, which would allow her to shed tears legitimately.
She painted her toenails and had just let them dry, when the doorbell rang, and she hoped it might be Lucy. She didn’t want to hassle her sister with her problems, and so she hadn’t suggested getting together with her. But maybe Lucy fancied a little company as well.
But it wasn’t Lucy who stood on the doorstep, it was Giovanni, and Kate stared at him, her mouth drying, her heart beginning to thunder as she met a hard blue gaze.
‘You!’ she breathed.
‘Me,’ he agreed sardonically.
Her mouth had difficulty forming the words. ‘Wh-what are you doing here?’
His mouth thinned. What did she think he was doing here? His gaze moved slowly from her face to her body, and the lush swell of her breasts straining against silver-grey satin drove the dull ache of suppressed desire into a heated beat against his temple. He chose his words carefully. ‘I had business to see to in England.’ His eyes mocked her. ‘And I thought I might drop by, as I was passing.’
She knew exactly what he was implying. Oh, the arrogance! The unmistakable predatory assumption of the man! Kate leaned on the door and composed her face into a calm, unperturbed mask made false by the sustained thundering of her heart. ‘So here you are,’ she observed coolly.
Her haughty demeanour stirred his senses more than it had any right to. Had he expected that she would simply fall into his arms? ‘Here I am,’ he agreed levelly. He paused deliberately, and his voice deepened into a silky question. ‘Are you not going to invite me in, cara?’
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