‘Would you like some coffee before you go?’
More in an attempt to dissolve the brittle atmosphere than because he really wanted a cup, he nodded in agreement. ‘Please.’
She busied herself in the kitchen. Best cups. Best coffee. Some outrageously expensive chocolate biscuits she had once been given and which there had never been a right time to open. Before now.
She spooned coffee into the cafetiére and stared sightlessly out of the window. Would she ever have agreed to this arrangement if she had known that the inevitable parting would prove so painful?
When she carried the tray back into the sitting room he was half sitting, half lying on the sofa watching her, and her heart leapt as it always did at the sight of him.
‘Smells good,’ he remarked.
‘Mmm.’ She wished he would say something, other than make those bland comments which could have come from a stranger, and not the man who had shared her life for the past fortnight. She handed him a cup and then took her own over to the opposite side of the room and placed it on a small table beside her.
The distance between them seemed to be the size of a tennis court.
‘Kate,’ he said suddenly. ‘Come and sit next to me.’
Her eyes narrowed and she felt the lurch of disappointment. Physical closeness meant only one thing where they were concerned. ‘There isn’t time, Giovanni,’ she told him dully, unprepared for the tightening of his mouth in response.
‘You think that the only reason I want you beside me is so that I can make love to you one more time before I go!’ he accused hotly. ‘Is that it?’
‘There’s no need to sound so outraged! That’s what it always does mean where you’re concerned!’ she told him. ‘And we’ve hardly been behaving like saints for the last couple of weeks, have we?’
‘No.’ He put his coffee down untouched, and got up to look out of the window, his hands thrust deep inside his pockets as he stared out at the river which was made silvery-grey by the rain today.
Kate watched the tense set of his shoulders and then he turned round, his face looking as though he was fighting some kind of inner war with himself.
‘It doesn’t have to be over you know, Kate.’
It was her wildest dream become glorious reality. ‘What do you mean?’ she questioned slowly, and her heart seemed to deafen her with its pounding.
‘You know that I come back to England from time to time?’ Kate stilled as his words began to make immediate sense.
‘Go on,’ she said in a strangled kind of voice. ‘Explain exactly what it is I think you’re suggesting.’
He was trying to think logically about what would work best. For both of them. He gave a slow smile, captivating her with that mocking blue stare. ‘I can make sure that business brings me here on Friday—maybe I could stay over until Sunday. Here, with you.’ The smile grew lazier. ‘How does that sound, cara?’
She thought of snatched weekends of bliss with him. Perfect, but never enough. It never could be enough. She would be transformed into one of those bloodless women who lived their whole lives from phone call to phone call. The odd visit would dominate her life, until the rest of it grew indistinct and she would become one of those ‘nearly’ women. Nearly living, but not quite.
She shook her head. ‘Thanks, but no, thanks.’
He felt a flicker of irritation only marginally greater than the one of surprise. He had been confident enough in his power over her to expect her to accept. ‘Not even a moment to consider it, Kate?’ he questioned sardonically.
‘I don’t need to consider it.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘It’s not what I want from a relationship, Giovanni.’
‘What exactly do you object to?’ he drawled.
It hurt that he couldn’t see. ‘All the highs of infrequent passion aren’t enough.’ She shrugged. ‘It isn’t real, don’t you see?’
A muscle began to pulse in his cheek. ‘I haven’t heard you doing any complaining!’
She withered him a look. ‘That was different. That was never planned to be anything other than short-term, was it? The terms were laid out very carefully at the beginning. Surely you can’t have forgotten?’
But he had been certain that he would want to let go by now, and he had been wrong. For a man who was rarely wrong it had been a salutary experience. His anger had been spent, but not so his passion for her—that raged like the fierce storm it had always been. He drew a deep breath, knowing that this was as close to conciliation as he would get.
‘Look, just what do you want, Kate?’ he said evenly. ‘We still haven’t known each other very long. Surely you’re not holding out for living together—’
Her sharp, outraged intake of breath halted him.
‘I am not,’ she said icily, ‘holding out for anything! My life is not a game show, Giovanni—even though sometimes it’s felt weird enough to be one during the last couple of weeks—’
‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’ Now it was his turn to sound icy.
How could she tell him that whatever he gave her, it was never enough? That she wanted more, and more still. She needed to go deeper with him than the great sex and the lunches and dinners and trips around London. She wanted more than a surface relationship, and she could not have it, she realised. Not with him.
‘Nothing, Giovanni.’ She gave a weary sigh as she raked her fingers to pull the fall of hair back from her face, and looked at him sadly. ‘I knew it had to end, and so did you. I just don’t want it to end on a bad note.’ She hesitated. ‘But neither do I want to try to sustain something we both know isn’t sustainable.’
‘So that’s it?’
‘It doesn’t have to be this way. We can say goodbye, and enjoy the memories of what we had.’
His face grew even more shuttered. ‘As you wish.’ He walked across the room and picked up his bags. ‘But you’ll forgive me if I don’t hang around.’
‘Of course,’ she said stiffly, but she followed him out to the front door all the same, opening it for him and praying that he would kiss her. One last kiss to remember him by.
And, looking down at her, he knew what she wanted. Oh, yes. They had kept areas of their lives out of bounds for necessary reasons of survival. They had not discussed Anna, or the man she herself had been briefly engaged to. Those topics would have caused pain and jealousy and recriminations.
But her physical needs he knew inside out. He knew her body and her desires almost better than he knew his own. Not to kiss her would be to punish her, and a cruel and ruthless streak badly wanted to punish her for her rejection of him. Except that he needed that kiss just as badly as she did.
Something to remember her by.
He dropped the bags and drew her into his arms, and her eyes closed as though she could not bear to read what was in his face.
He kissed her. Softly at first, and then with a growing ardour which he knew he must quell, and when he pulled away from her, almost violently, they both gave ragged little sighs of regret.
As her eyelids fluttered open she was unsurprised by the hard and uncompromising set of his features, knowing that he could offer her nothing more than the very bare essentials.
She heard her lips framing a question she had not intended to ask. ‘And will you see…Anna?’
She wanted a reassurance that he was unwilling or unable to give her. What the hell did she expect him to do? Renounce all others out of some inappropriate loyalty to a woman who had just said she didn’t want to see him again?
‘Of course,’ he said, quietly and truthfully, and saw how she tried not to let her pain show. ‘Sicily is a small island. We share many friends—it is inevitable that I shall see her.’
She wanted to ask him whether he would rekindle his engagement, whether absence had changed his feelings about Anna, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid of what the answer might be. She nodded instead. ‘Goodbye, Giovanni,’ she whispered.
‘Ciao
, bella,’ he gritted and swung out of the door before he could change his mind.
He fumed all the way to the airport, and thought how ironic it was that he remained angry, when he had sought her out precisely to rid himself of that emotion. And for two weeks he had existed in a state which had pushed that anger to the recesses of his mind, but now it was back, and with a brand-new focus.
So why was he angry now? Because she had told him that she had no wish to continue the affair? Wasn’t his Sicilian pride wounded more than his heart?
Very probably.
It was purely physical, he told himself grimly as he returned his car to the hire company and picked up his bags. All it ever was and all it ever could be.
He followed the signs to the departure lounge, telling himself that he would fly home and forget all about her.
‘Can I get you anything, sir?’
‘Mmm?’ He looked up absently.
‘Some coffee perhaps? Or something else?’
The stewardess flashed him the kind of smile which told him that there was more than coffee on offer, should he so desire.
Enjoy your freedom, he told himself. Enjoy it!
‘Coffee would be perfect,’ he drawled in Italian, and allowed the corners of his mouth to lift in a smile which made the woman’s eyes dilate with undisguised pleasure.
And he sank down into the comfort of the First Class lounge, while the stewardess fussed round him like a hen.
After he had gone, Kate behaved like a woman bereaved—not wailing or crying, but going from room to room to try to hang on to what she had left of him before it disappeared forever.
The scent of him on her pillow, and on the towel which she fished out of the laundry basket. Even his half-drunk cup of coffee she foolishly felt like preserving. But soon the pillowcase and the towel would go into the washing machine, and the cup in the dishwasher and then there would be no trace at all left of him—save the red roses he had bought her last week, and which were already beginning to wilt.
She buried her face in the flowers. Their bloom was fast-fading but the petals were still velvety-soft, and there remained the last sweet, lingering trace of scent. She breathed in deeply, as though that could bring new life to her, but the pleasure she gained was only fleeting, and she wondered how long the dull ache in her heart would last.
She sat staring at the bouquet for a long, long time, and only when she thought that the threat of wayward tears was safely at bay did she pick up the telephone to speak to her sister.
‘Hello?’
‘Kate?’ Her sister’s voice immediately filled with concern. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said, in an odd, flat voice which didn’t sound like her voice at all. ‘He’s gone.’
‘I’m on my way up!’ said her sister grimly.
Determinedly Kate stripped the bed while she waited for her sister, and assigned all the temptations of the dirty linen to the laundry basket—because what good would it do her to mope around after him and keep reminding herself of him? That would have only served a purpose if he was coming back.
And he wasn’t.
When Lucy arrived, she frowned. ‘Are you OK?’ The frown deepened. ‘Stupid question. Of course you’re not OK.’
Kate bit her teeth into her bottom lip. ‘Is it too early for wine, do you think?’ she asked huskily.
‘Nope! In fact you look as though you could use a drink,’ said Lucy and followed her out into the kitchen. ‘So tell,’ she said, still in that same grim voice, ‘just what your Sicilian stud had to say for himself before he left!’
‘Please don’t call him that,’ said Kate crossly as she took a bottle of white wine from the fridge and pulled the cork out.
Lucy glared. ‘Still protecting him, are you, Kate—even though he’s treated you like a concubine for the past fortnight?’
Kate shook her head. ‘He has treated me beautifully over the past fortnight,’ she defended, her voice softening with memory. ‘And I walked into it with my eyes wide open. I wanted it just as much as he did.’
‘Well, I hope it was worth it,’ said Lucy, accepting the proffered glass.
Kate sipped and thought about it. Had it been? ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘All I know is that I couldn’t resist it—him—at the time, and yet it wasn’t enough to carry on with.’
‘But you weren’t given that option, were you?’
Kate gave a small, rather bitter laugh. ‘Actually, I was. Giovanni offered to carry on the affair—with him taking the occasional trip to England and us making a weekend of it.’
‘The bastard!’
Kate shrugged. ‘Not really; you can’t blame him for trying—’
‘Kate, will you stop being so damned understanding?’
Kate put her glass down with a shaking hand and turned to look at her sister with tears threatening to spill out of her eyes. ‘What alternative do I have?’ she whispered. ‘At least this way I can remember it with fondness. If I call him every name under the sun—won’t that just make everything that we shared seem worthless?’
Lucy shot her a look of understanding. ‘You seem to really like him.’
Kate shook her head. ‘I don’t know if like is a word you would use in connection with Giovanni—he isn’t a man it’s easy to get close to. I don’t know if there’s a word in the dictionary to describe the way I feel about him.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, why didn’t you plump for what he was offering you?’
Kate bit her lip. It wouldn’t make sense if she told her sister he would lose all respect for her if she opted for the continuation of the affair—because Lucy probably thought that Giovanni had zero respect for her anyway. And she couldn’t blame her. Viewed from the outside, she must look like the world’s biggest fool—letting a man like that into her home and her life and her heart on a purely temporary basis.
Because something had happened during that brief, blissful stay. He had been reluctant to leave, and had shown it this morning, and she wanted to treasure his reluctance for the rest of her life. Surely she must have touched a tiny part of him, for him to have behaved like that?
But she knew that a long-term affair with a man like Giovanni would eventually end, and end bitterly, too—of that she was certain. And she would have her heart broken completely—whilst at the moment it felt only slightly wounded.
Her emerald eyes were brimming with fresh tears as she looked at her sister. ‘The affair just wouldn’t have been enough,’ she told her simply, and Lucy nodded in comprehension.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said slowly. ‘Now I do see.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘But you were wrong, you know, Kate.’
Kate stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘There is a word in the dictionary to describe the way you’re feeling about him.’
Kate’s look remained blank.
‘It’s called love, my darling,’ she said gently.
CHAPTER TEN
THE envelope was waiting for her when she arrived home from work, the writing on it unfamiliar, but with a lurch of her heart Kate guessed exactly who it was from. The elegant, lazy script could only have been penned by one person. She stared at it as if it were an unexploded bomb.
Open it, a voice inside her said. Or would a more self-protective woman simply have hurled it into the bin?
She picked it up and slit it open with trembling fingers, and saw that she had been right. Inside was an airline ticket to Barcelona, and a brief, almost insultingly curt note.
—Have three months been enough to change your mind, cara? Why not join me in Spain—and we can take up where we left off?
It was signed, ‘G’.
She slammed the note down on the table, resisting the stupid urge to read and reread it, to run her eyes hungrily over the two stark sentences again and again.
“Take up where we left off, indeed!” And where was that? In bed? Swallowing down her anger and her temptation, she told herself that
she would telephone him and tell him exactly what he could do with his ticket.
No. She would ignore it completely—that would be far more effective a refusal. His honour would be outraged! And she wouldn’t be susceptible to the honeyed persuasion of his voice.
She kicked her shoes across the sitting room as the telephone started ringing and her heart began to pound uncomfortably. Don’t be crazy, she told herself. It could be absolutely anyone.
But it wasn’t.
She seemed to sense that it was him even before he spoke. There was an infinitesimal, irresistible pause, before she heard him murmur, ‘Cara?’
Sweat broke out in icy pinpricks on her brow. ‘I am not your darling!’ she snapped.
‘No. Not my anything. Not any more,’ he agreed mockingly. ‘When you will not see me.’
The hardest decision she had ever had to make, but she had stuck by it. ‘I meant what I said, Giovanni.’
He sighed. ‘I know you did.’
‘So why send me a ticket to join you?’
‘You know exactly why.’ A pause. ‘I want to see you.’
‘And you’re a man who is used to getting what he wants,’ she observed.
He didn’t answer that. ‘Have you missed me?’
‘Like a hole in the head!’
There came the sound of soft laughter. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s your prerogative,’ she said, but her casual air did not quite come off.
‘So you have!’
Yes, she had missed him. Of course she had. She wondered what had ever occupied her mind before she had met Giovanni, because now he seemed to haunt her thoughts constantly. Three months of being away from him, when the minutes and the hours had ticked away with excruciating slowness.
‘I’m not coming—’
‘Mmm?’ he interrupted, on a teasing little note of provocation. ‘That cannot be much fun for you, Kate, but I can soon change that, I assure you!’
Her cheeks flamed. ‘Giovanni, will you stop it!’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ he protested.
‘Yes, you are!’
‘What am I doing, cara?’ he questioned softly.
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