by Alison Kent
Oh, my…Nina thought, and had to turn away again so that her mother wouldn’t see what was happening to her face.
Another thick silence crawled around them while her mother brooded over what she’d said and Nina stared at the view. The little sailboat had gone, she saw, disappearing round the headland to her right, where the ancient city of Syracuse clustered around the tiny island of Ortigia.
When her gaze drifted to the left she could just make out Mount Etna in the distance, shrouded in one of her hazy mists. The volcano had been very active lately, spewing out the most spectacular paratactic displays throughout the long hot summer. Now winter was here, and although the days were quite warm for December, the gentle plume of smoke she could see rising from Etna’s peak said the volcano had cooled her ardour to suit the cooler temperature—for now, at least.
‘How does she look?’ she asked after a minute.
‘The same,’ came the flat reply. ‘As beautiful as ever, if not—’ More so, was the observation left hanging in the air. ‘She reminded me of her mother,’ Louisa added huskily.
Nina smiled a bleak little smile. The beautiful dark-haired Lucia had produced a beautiful dark-haired daughter and oh, how Louisa had always envied her twin for doing that.
‘What are you going to do?’ her mother asked after another of those heavy silences.
Do—? Nina turned to face the room again, wearing a smile that was so paper-dry it actually hurt her lips as they stretched. ‘Rafael paid a high price for my loyalty and he’ll have it, whatever he decides to do. I’ve already told you that you’re talking to the wrong person about this.’
‘Oh Nina…’ The pained sigh matched her mother’s expression as she watched Nina cross back to the table. ‘How did you and Rafael ever get yourselves into this state?’
‘Money, darling,’ Nina drawled in her very best boarding school English as she sat down again. ‘Our appalling lack of it and his abominable excess.’
‘Rubbish,’ Louisa dismissed. ‘You adored each other. Rafael was besotted with you from the first moment he looked at you, and you were so in love with him that even that—that prissy manner your father insisted on breeding into you used to melt for him.’
A game, Nina cynically named that little deception. It had all been just a very clever game they’d played out for the sake of anyone who happened to be interested. Rafael had set the rules by which their marriage would run and Nina had agreed to keep to them—for a price. They were to show a loving front to the world, and in return he would keep the great Guardino name clear of bankruptcy.
Some price for him to pay for what had only been a face-saving exercise, Nina conceded, recalling just how much it had cost him to bail her grandfather out. But then saving face had always been of paramount importance to Rafael. The monumental size of his pride demanded it.
That and some deeply hidden hang-ups he never spoke about but which ruled his life far more than he realised.
‘It was the sole reason why she went away in the first place,’ Louisa insisted. ‘Once she realised what was happening between the two of you she really had no other option but to step back and leave the field clear.’
And there, Nina thought, was the deception. ‘Yes,’ she agreed.
Rafael had been hovering on the brink of asking her beautiful cousin to marry him when Marisia had discovered something about him she couldn’t accept and walked out. She’d walked out on his love, his fabulous wealth and, most important of all, she’d walked all over his precious pride as she went.
‘You used to be so happy together.’
‘Delirious.’
‘Rafael used to eat you with his eyes and he did not care who saw him doing it.’
Nina found a wry smile for that observation—wry because in an odd way her mother was right. Rafael had eaten her with his eyes.
With his eyes, his lips, his tongue, his…
But that had only been for the first few wild months of their marriage, when they’d set out to fool the world and had done it so successfully that they’d actually managed to fool themselves at the same time.
And the special ingredient to aid and abet this deception?
Sex. She named it grimly. They’d been so bowled over by the discovery of a wildly passionate and very mutual sexual attraction to each other that it had shocked them stupid for a time. Blinded them to the reality of what they really felt for each other.
Blinded her anyway, Nina amended as something worryingly close to despair began to swell up inside her. Blinded her enough to let her believe that they were actually in love.
Love. She could scoff at the very word now. As far as Rafael was concerned he had simply played the game, as any man would play the game, and taken what was on offer because it had been there to take, whereas she…
Well, blinded as she had been, she had committed the ultimate sin in his eyes, by taking their relationship one step further—unwittingly crossing into forbidden territory—and in doing so had forced Rafael to open her eyes to the size of her mistake.
Since then—nothing.
Nothing, she repeated, feeling the desolation of that nothing echoing in the deep, dark void of her now empty heart.
Louisa must have seen it, because she reached across the table to cover one of Nina’s hands. ‘I know you have been through a bad time recently, darling,’ she murmured very gently. ‘God knows, we all suffered the loss with you, believe me…’
Nina stared at their two hands, resting against pristine white linen, and wished her mother would just shut up.
‘Your grandfather still blames himself.’
‘It was no one’s fault.’ Her reply was quiet and stilted, her thoughts even more so—cold and bleak.
‘Have you told him that?’
‘Of course I have. Countless times.’
‘Have you told Rafael the same thing…?’
Suddenly she wanted to run from the room again. ‘What is this?’ She sighed. ‘An inquisition?’
‘He worries me—you worry me—No, don’t get angry…’ Louisa begged as Nina reclaimed her hand and shot back to her feet. Louisa stood too, her tone suddenly anxious. ‘It’s been six months since you lost the baby…’
Six months, two weeks and eight hours, to be precise, Nina thought.
‘Before that the two of you were never seen apart and now you are never seen together! You just shut everyone out, Nina—Rafael more than anyone! And—OK,’ Louisa said, ‘I understand that you needed time to recover, but after what I’ve just told you, surely you must see that it is time for you to put that tragic loss aside if you don’t want your marriage to end in tragedy too!’
For an answer Nina spun on her heels and walked away, hating everything—everyone—and despising herself. She didn’t want to think about her poor lost baby; she didn’t want to think about Rafael!
Her heart ached, her bones ached. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the mirror hanging on the wall and was shocked into stillness by what she saw. Her skin was pale by nature, but it had now taken on the consistency of paste. Her eyes looked bruised, her mouth small and tight. Tension was gnawing at the fine layer of flesh covering her cheekbones, making her look gaunt and wretched—and she was not going to cry! she told herself furiously. She just was not going—
‘He is not a man to neglect like this, cara,’ her mother persisted. ‘She wants him back. And you have just got to face it!’
I won’t faint if you say her name, you know,’ she drawled.
It was like a red rag to a bull. Her mother’s response was incensed. ‘Sometimes I find it difficult to believe that you’re my child at all! Do you have any of my Sicilian blood? Marisia—yes—that is her name, and you did not faint! Your cousin Marisia was in love with your husband long before you came on the scene, and by the way she is behaving I would say that she is still in love with him—yet you stand here looking as if you could not care less that they are conducting a very public affair!’
‘So
you want me to do—what?’ Nina swung round, blue eyes offering up their first flash of real emotion since this whole horrible scene began. ‘Am I supposed to jump on the next flight to London and face them with what you’ve told me? Then what?’ she challenged, moving back to the table to glare at her mother across it. ‘You tell me, Mamma, how my half-Sicilian blood is supposed to respond once I’ve dragged it all out in the open—do I draw out my dagger and plunge it into both their chests with true Sicilian vendetta passion?’
‘Now you are being fanciful just to annoy me,’ Louisa said crossly. ‘But, having asked me the question—si!’ she retorted. ‘Some drama from you would be a lot healthier than looking as if you don’t give a damn!’
CHAPTER TWO
MAYBE I don’t give a damn, Nina thought later, when she was alone in her bedroom. She didn’t know if she cared one way or another what Rafael was doing.
And that was her problem—not knowing how she felt about anything.
A sigh slipped from her. Her mother’s final volley before she’d left in a huff was still ringing in her ears.
‘I suppose you will manage to drag yourself down from the hilltop to be present at your grandfather’s birthday party tonight?’
Her weary, ‘Of course I’ll be there,’ had made Louisa’s lovely mouth pinch.
‘There is no of course about it. You are in danger of becoming a hermit, Nina. For goodness’ sake, snap out of it!’
‘I had lunch three days ago in Syracuse with Fredo,’ she’d retaliated. ‘Hermits don’t do that!’
‘Hmph.’ Louisa hadn’t been impressed. ‘That man is about as much use to you as the plethora of kind words and sympathy he will have dished out. You need to be pulled out of it, not encouraged to sink further in your wretched misery!’
Stopping what she was doing, Nina stood for a moment, blue eyes lost in a bleak little world of their own. Inside she could feel her heart beating normally. She breathed when she needed to and blinked her eyes. Her brain was functioning, feeding in information, and she was able to get information out, but when it came to her emotions, everything was just blank—nothing there, nothing happening. It was like living in a vacuum, with a defence space around her as big as a field.
‘Oh, what’s happened to me?’ she breathed, looking around at the bedroom she’d used to share but now had to herself. Even in here the only sign that life was still going on was the black dress hanging up, which she was going to wear tonight.
Snap out of it, her mother had said, and Nina truly agreed with her. But—into what?
The sound of a car coming up the driveway stopped her thoughts and sent her over to the bedroom window. The prospect of yet another unexpected visitor dragged a groan from her throat that was cut short when she recognised the sleek, dark limousine.
It was Rafael.
Her heart gave a sudden tight little flutter—not with pleasure, but with a sinking sense of dismay. He wasn’t due back from London for days, so what had brought him back here sooner than he’d intended?
Had someone told him about her mother’s visit? Could he know what that visit had been about?
No, don’t be stupid, she told the second sharp flutter that now had her freezing to the spot. He might be equipped to throw power around like thunderbolts, but even Rafael couldn’t get from London to Sicily in the space of two short hours.
The car slowed to take a sweep around the circular courtyard, then came to a stop at the bottom of the shallow steps that led up to the house. Rafael didn’t wait for Gino, his personal bodyguard and chauffeur, to climb out and open his door for him. With a brisk impatience that was his nature he pushed open the door and uncoiled his long frame from the back of the car. The top of his dark head caught the light from a golden sunset, then slid down to enrich the warm olive skin of his face as he paused to look at the house.
He was tall, he was dark, he was arrestingly handsome—a perfect example of a man in his prime. Black hair, golden skin, hard, chiselled features, straight, thin nose, and a firm and unsmiling and yet deeply, deeply sensual mouth.
Nina traced each detail as she stood there, despising herself for doing it yet unable to stop. Everything about him was so physically striking—the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he frowned with a restless impatience that was inherent in him. His dark silk suit was a statement in design architecture, tailored to a body built to carry clothes well—the wide shoulders, long arms and legs made up of steely muscle, wide chest and tight torso behind a white shirt.
But the really important things about Rafael had nothing to do with his physical appearance. He was frighteningly intelligent, razor-sharp, and ruthless to the core. The kind of man who had come from nothing and made himself into something in spite of all the odds stacked against him, amassing his wealth with a gritty determination that came from his fear of having nothing—again.
He was, Nina thought as she watched him turn to speak to Gino, a very suave, very sophisticated—mongrel. And she used the word quite deliberately. Rafael did not know where he had come from, so he’d spent most of his adult life hiding what he feared he might be by surrounding himself with status symbols of the kind of person he wanted to be.
Rejected by his mother before she had even bothered to register his birth, he had lived his childhood in a Sicilian state orphanage. The only thing that faceless creature had given him to cling to when she’d dumped his helpless newly born body on some unsuspecting stranger’s doorstep had been a note pinned to the blanket he had been wrapped in.
‘His name is Rafael,’ the note had said, and he had gone through the latter stages of his childhood fighting to hell and back for the right to use that name.
The orphanage had called him Marco Smith, or Jones, or some Sicilian equivalent. For the first ten years of his life he had truly believed it to be his name, until the day something—an inbuilt instinct to be someone, probably—had sent him sneaking into the principal’s office to steal a look at his personal file.
From that day on he had answered only to Rafael. Sheer guts and determination had brought him fighting and clawing to the age of sixteen, with his name legally changed to Rafael Monteleone—the Monteleone stolen from the man on whose doorstep he had been dumped.
But tenacity should be Rafael’s middle name—or the one Nina would add in if she could. From the minute he’d left state care he had set out like a man with a single mission in life—which was to trace the mother who had abandoned him.
To finance his search he’d worked hard and long at anything, and for anyone who had paid a fair wage, until he had accumulated enough money to risk some of it on a little speculation—thereby discovering his true mission in life: to make money—pots of it—bank vaults of it—Etna-sized mountains of it in fact.
Strangely, though, as the money mountain had grown so his need to know his roots had diminished. Rafael had succeeded in becoming his own man. If you did not count some deeply buried fears that lurked beneath the surface of his iron-hard shell, which forced him to struggle with the most incredible inferiority complex.
‘The mongrel syndrome’. Rafael’s term, not Nina’s. ‘I could come from the loins of anything.’
Rafael lived with the awful fear that the blood running in his veins might be rotten. It didn’t seem to help that the man he had built himself to be was so morally upright, honest and true that any suspicion of him being rotten inside was actually laughable. He could never know that for sure, so he dared not let his guard on himself drop for a moment—just in case something dreadful crept out.
How did Nina know all of this? The man himself had told her, during one of those long rare nights when they lay still closely entwined after the kind of loving that had always seemed to blend them into one. They’d swapped secret hopes and fears in the darkness because it had seemed so right, sharing—sharing everything. Bed to bodies, souls to minds.
That was the same night that she’d foolishly let herself believe he loved her, Nina recalled. To h
ear that soft, deep, slightly rasping voice reveal all its darkest secrets had, to her at least, been confirmation of something very special growing between them. She had discovered later that it was just another aspect of his complicated make-up that Rafael could bare his soul to her whilst keeping his heart well and truly shut.
It wasn’t long after that night when she’d discovered they were going to have a baby. She’d been ecstatic; to her way of thinking a child of their very own would only bond them closer together. What it had actually done was drive them wide apart. And she would never forgive him for the brutality he had used in forming that gulf.
They had barely communicated since. From that moment on their lives had reverted to the original plan—she being the beautiful well-bred trophy wife Rafael had bought to shore up his bruised ego, and he the man she had sold herself to so he could keep her family in the luxury they were used to.
The only blot on this otherwise squeaky-clean landscape Rafael had made for himself was Marisia—his first-choice bride. The Guardino granddaughter with the pure Sicilian pedigree who’d walked out on him the moment she’d discovered his mongrel beginnings, leaving his pride in tatters at his feet.
‘I will not marry a man who can’t say who his mother is, never mind his father!’ Marisia’s harsh words to Nina echoed through the years. ‘If you are so concerned about his feelings then you marry him. Trust me, cara, he will take you—just to leech onto your half-Guardino blood.’
He had done too—taken her—and it was pretty lowering to remember how eagerly she’d jumped at the chance. But then, she’d already been in love with him, though thankfully no one else knew that—including Rafael. He’d put his case in practical business terms, pointing out the financial advantages in marrying him and, because he was ruthless enough to use any persuasion, he had made her aware of other advantages by more physical means.
