Roccanti's Marriage Revenge

by Lynne Graham

  ‘How could you embarrass me?’ Zara asked in bewilderment. ‘Why wouldn’t I acknowledge you?’

  Paola sighed. ‘You’re married to my son. You must know how badly I let him down as a child. Many people despise me for the life I have led and I understand how they feel. I’ve taken drugs, lived on the streets, I’ve been in prison for stealing to feed my addiction—’

  ‘If Vitale wants to see you that is enough for me,’ Zara broke in quietly, feeling that such revelations were none of her business.

  ‘Since I came out of rehabilitation my son and I have been trying to get to know each other. It is not easy for either of us,’ his mother confessed with a regret that she couldn’t hide. ‘It is hard for Vitale not to judge me and sometimes I remember things that make it almost impossible for me to face him.’

  ‘I think it’s good that both of you are trying, though,’ Zara responded with tact as Giuseppina entered with a tray of tea.

  Paola compressed her lips. ‘Coming to terms with my past and facing up to the mistakes I made is part of my recovery process. I attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings regularly,’ she explained. ‘I have a good sponsor and Vitale has been very supportive as well.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Still feeling awkward, Zara watched her companion pour the tea with a slightly trembling hand, her tension obvious.

  ‘On Fridays we usually go for a meal and we talk, sometimes about difficult things … like my daughter, Loredana,’ Paola continued quietly. ‘I have no memory of her beyond the age of six or seven when I left my first husband, Carlo. She visited twice when she was grown up but I was in no condition to speak to her and I can’t remember her—’

  ‘Vitale told me …’

  ‘You must know some of the bad things at least.’ Paola’s eyes were moist, her mouth tight with anxiety. ‘He could have died when he was a child. I think he often wished he had when he was younger. I deprived him of his true father and his inheritance and yet he puts me in a house like this and takes me out to dine in fancy restaurants as if I was still the respectable young woman who married his father … the woman I was before I became an addict. He says I can be whoever I want to be now.’

  ‘He’s right. You can be,’ Zara said gently, soothingly. It was impossible not to recognise how fragile Paola was and how weighed down she was with shame for her past mistakes. She found herself praying that the older woman did make it successfully through the recovery process and managed to stay off drugs.

  Paola asked her about the garden and then offered to show it to her. Zara began to relax as they discussed the design and Vitale’s mother asked for advice on what to plant in the empty borders behind the villa. Paola had already visited a garden centre nearby. Zara was quick to suggest that they should go back there together the following week and she agreed a date and time while hoping that Vitale would approve and not think her guilty of interference.

  It was late afternoon the next day before Vitale returned to the palazzo. Dressed in a simple white sundress, Zara was arranging an armful of lavender in a fat crystal vase in the hall. He strode through the door and came to a halt, brilliant dark eyes locking to her tiny figure, picking up straight away on the troubled look she shot at him. Her pregnancy was becoming obvious now, a firm swell that made her dress sit out like a bell above her slender shapely legs.

  ‘You can shout if you want,’ Zara told him ruefully.

  An ebony brow rose. ‘Why would I shout?’

  ‘I went to see your mother. I assumed you’d already know.’

  ‘I did. Paola rang me as soon as you left the villa,’ Vitale confided with a wry smile. ‘She likes you very much and thinks I did very well for myself, which I already knew—’

  ‘But I went behind your back quite deliberately,’ Zara pointed out guiltily, keen to ensure that he had grasped exactly what she had done. ‘I just had to know where you went on Friday nights and who you were spending time with—’

  ‘It was hell not telling you but I didn’t want to spook Paola by forcing the issue. It took a lot of persuasion to get her to move into the villa. She’s afraid of encroaching on our lives and of embarrassing us—’

  ‘Are we that easily embarrassed?’

  ‘I’m not, if you’re not.’ His sardonic mouth hardened. ‘She lost thirty years of her life to drug abuse and she’s made a huge effort to overcome her problems. I think she deserves a fresh start.’

  ‘But you’ve found seeing her … difficult,’ she selected the word uneasily.

  ‘I didn’t like the secrecy and it does feel strange being with her. I never knew her when I was a child and from the age of eleven until this year I had no contact with her, nor did I want any. We have a lot of ground to catch up but I’ve learned stuff from her that I’m grateful to have found out,’ he admitted levelly, accompanying her up the marble staircase. ‘Do you mind if I go for a shower? I feel like I’ve been travelling all day.’

  ‘Not at all. What did you learn from Paola?’ she probed curiously as he thrust wide the door of their bedroom.

  ‘That my father kept a mistress throughout the whole of their marriage.’ Vitale raised a brow with expressive scorn. ‘He only married my mother to have children and he didn’t treat her well. It’s not surprising that the marriage broke down or that she was suffering from such low self-esteem that she went off the rails.’

  ‘But it was a tragedy for both you and her … and your sister as well,’ Zara completed. ‘How did your mother come back into your life again?’

  ‘I was first approached on her behalf by a social worker several years ago but at the time I refused to have anything to do with her,’ Vitale confided as he shrugged free of his jacket. ‘Then I met you and I began to realise that human beings are more complicated than I used to appreciate.’

  ‘What have I got to do with it?’ Zara prompted with a frown.

  ‘I used to be very black and white about situations. People, though, are rarely all good or all evil but often a mixture of both and we all make mistakes. After all, I made a big mistake targeting you to get at your father,’ Vitale volunteered grimly. ‘That was wrong.’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear you admit that.’ Zara curled up on the bed and looked at him expectantly. ‘When did you reach that conclusion?’

  Vitale dealt her a sardonically amused appraisal. ‘There were quite a lot of helpful pointers after I met you, angelina mia. How about my discovery that you could get under my skin in the space of one weekend when I had already wrecked my chances with you? How about when you learned that you were pregnant and told me at the same time that you hated and distrusted me? Or even how about your need to impose a ridiculous three-month trial on our marriage so that you could get out of the commitment again if you had to? Do you think I’m so slow that I couldn’t learn from those experiences?’

  ‘It has never once crossed my mind that you might be slow—’

  ‘But I was when it came to recognising and understanding my emotions,’ Vitale interrupted, trailing his tie loose and tossing it aside. ‘When I was a kid, it was safer to squash my feelings and get by without them because anything I felt only made me more vulnerable.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Zara conceded, picking up the tie he had dropped on the floor and frowning at him.

  ‘So I’m untidy,’ he conceded with a flourish of one dismissive hand, well into his stride now with his explanation. ‘As an adult I didn’t recognise emotions for what they were, the same way as I didn’t recognise what I felt for my mother until it was almost too late for me to get the chance to know her. By the time a priest who worked with Paola in rehab came to see me this year you were in my life and I was more willing to credit that I might not know everything there was to know and to listen to what he had to tell me.’

  ‘I don’t get my connection,’ she admitted freely, draping the tie over the back of a chair in a manner that she hoped he would learn to copy.

  ‘Well, once I fell in love with you it opened the flood
gates to the whole shebang!’ he pointed out mockingly. ‘I mean, I’ve even learned to be reasonably fond of Fluffy now. Going from loving you to trying to understand my mother’s need to make amends and be forgiven wasn’t that difficult …’

  Zara blinked and stared at him in disbelief, lavender eyes huge. ‘You fell in love with me … when?’

  A wicked grin flashed across his beautifully shaped mouth as he realised he had taken her by surprise. ‘Oh, I think it probably happened that first weekend when I was playing at being the evil seducer and setting you up with the paparazzi. In fact, as I later appreciated, I was setting myself up for a fall. I didn’t know I was in love back then, I just felt like you had taken over my brain because I couldn’t get you out of my head, nor could I stay away from you.’

  ‘So when did you decide it was love?’

  ‘Slowly, painfully …’ Vitale stressed ruefully, his face serious. ‘When I’m with you I’m happy and secure. When I’ve been away from you and I’m coming home I’m downright ecstatic. Everything has more meaning when you’re with me. Loving you has taught me how to relax, except when I’m worrying about you.’

  ‘What have you got to worry about me for?’

  ‘It’s that naturally negative bent my thoughts suffer from,’ Vitale confided ruefully, shedding his shirt. ‘The more you mean to me, the more scared I am of losing you, and sometimes when I look at you I am terrified of what I feel—like when I came through the front door and saw you standing there with those purple things—’

  ‘The lavender,’ she slotted in.

  ‘Whatever, angelina mia.’ With a fluid shift of one hand he dismissed an irrelevant detail. ‘You were standing there looking so beautiful and pleased to see me and yet worried and I had this moment of panic that something had happened, that something was wrong—’

  ‘I was just worried that you would be annoyed at my having gone behind your back to see who was living in the villa.’

  ‘No, I was touched by your compassion. You spent time with Paola. You didn’t make her feel bad. You even invited her out—’

  ‘She needs company,’ Zara pointed out. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘It would be a very big deal to some women. There will be gossip, even scandal if Paola becomes a part of our lives. Some people will approve, others will not.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to me. Let’s see how things go,’ Zara suggested, knowing that the older woman still had a long way to go as part of her recovery process and that the continuing success of her rehabilitation could not be taken for granted.

  ‘She needs us to have faith in her—she’s got nobody else.’ Naked but for his boxer shorts, Vitale ran a knuckle gently down the side of Zara’s face. ‘But I’ve been hell to live with while this was going on, haven’t I?’

  ‘You were a little moody after seeing her.’ ‘And you don’t like moody guys,’ he reminded her with a grimace. ‘It was tough at first. But although seeing Paola roused bad memories it also made me view my past in a more even light.’

  ‘I really like the fact that you’re making that effort for your mother,’ Zara confided softly, her tender heart touched. ‘It would have been easier for you to turn your back on her.’

  ‘I think it’s actually harder to hang onto the prejudices, as I did over Loredana.’ Vitale compressed his handsome mouth. ‘I will never like your father—he is not a pleasant man and he hurt you. But speaking to him about the night my sister drowned did show me that I was still thinking of that incident with the vengeful attitude of a teenager distraught over his sister’s death.’

  ‘Yes,’ Zara agreed feelingly.

  ‘Someone else isn’t always to blame for the bad things that happen,’ he acknowledged heavily. ‘Although your father, in fact both your parents are very much to blame for your unhappy childhood. To have stood by and allowed you to be branded a liar at the age of ten to conceal your father’s violence towards your mother and you was unforgivable. That was a huge betrayal of your trust.’

  ‘I got over it.’

  ‘And I don’t think I will ever understand why you were still willing to marry Sergios Demonides just to cement a business deal and win your parents’ approval.’

  ‘It was very foolish but I had spent so many years craving their approval without ever getting it. I didn’t have enough self-respect,’ she admitted wryly. ‘I had to come to Tuscany to realise that to marry a man I didn’t love or care about was a very bad idea.’

  ‘I had an identical moment of truth when I met you. You changed my outlook, gioia mia,’ Vitale confided in a tone of immense appreciation. ‘I didn’t like emotions, didn’t trust them, preferred not to get involved with anything or anybody that made me feel too much. But you taught me how much of a difference love could make to my life and then you taught me to want your love …’

  Heaving a delighted sigh at that assurance, Zara rested a small hand on his shoulder. ‘You know that three-month trial marriage I mentioned?’

  ‘Don’t I just?’

  ‘I won’t keep you in suspense,’ Zara told him teasingly. ‘I’ve decided to keep you for the long haul.’

  The beginnings of a smile started to tug at the corners of Vitale’s mouth. ‘Finally she lets me off the hook.’

  ‘I’m not convinced it did you any harm to be on that hook in the first place.’ Zara mock-punched his shoulder. ‘Sometimes you’re far too sure of yourself. But I do love you,’ she whispered, suddenly full of heartfelt emotion. ‘I love you very much indeed.’

  Vitale did not make it into the shower until much later that evening. In fact he didn’t even make it out of the bedroom, for Edmondo was instructed to bring dinner to his employers upstairs. Having declared their love and revelled in the wonder of sharing the same feelings and opinions, Vitale and Zara made passionate love. Afterwards they lay on in bed for ages talking about the why and the how and the when of those first seeds of love until even Zara was satisfied that they had talked the topic to death.

  It was definitely not hard for her to listen, however, to how enraged Vitale had felt on her behalf when he appreciated how little her parents valued her in comparison to the twin brother whom they assumed would have been perfect had he lived beyond his twentieth year. In turn, Vitale was hugely amused by the news that his kindness to Fluffy had alerted Zara to the idea that he might have a softer centre than his initial behaviour towards her might have suggested.

  ‘So, I’m not on probation any longer,’ Vitale commented with a hint of complacency.

  ‘And how do you work that out?’ Zara enquired, surveying him questioningly.

  ‘You said you wanted me for the long haul.’

  ‘Depends on your definition of long haul,’ she teased.

  ‘For ever and ever just like the fairy tales,’ Vitale hastened to declare, spreading a large hand across the swell of her stomach and laughing in satisfaction as he felt the faint kick of the baby she carried. ‘You and the baby both, angelina mia.’

  ‘That’s an ambition I’m happy to encourage,’ Zara told him happily.

  EPILOGUE

  THREE years later, Zara watched her daughter, Donata, play in the bath in their London town house before scooping her out into a fleecy towel and dressing her little squirming body in her pjs. Her dark eyes were so like Vitale’s that the little girl was very talented at wheedling things out of her mother.

  ‘Daddy?’ Donata demanded, first in Italian and then in English, demonstrating her bilingual language skill with aplomb.

  ‘Later,’ Zara promised, tucking the lively toddler into bed and reflecting that it would be the next morning before Donata saw the father she adored.

  Vitale had spent the whole week in New York and, although Zara and occasionally their daughter sometimes travelled with him, she had taken advantage of his absence to catch up with plans needed for Blooming Perfect clients in both London and Tuscany. Business was booming in both countries to the extent that Zara had been forced to turn down work. Media in
terest and an award won for a garden she had designed for the Chelsea Flower Show had given her an even higher profile and resulted in a steady influx of clients. Rob had become a permanent employee and Zara had hired a junior designer to work under her in London.

  Vitale’s mother, Paola, had made it safely through her rehabilitation and as time went on had gained in confidence. Having undertaken training as a counsellor, Paola had recently found her feet in her new life by volunteering to work with other addicts. Vitale had also agreed to sponsor a charity for former addicts and their families. The older woman was now very much a part of Vitale and Zara’s life and was a very fond grandparent—a fact that Zara was grateful for when her own parents had little to do with their lives.

  While Vitale had managed to come to terms with his mother’s malign influence on his childhood and had since established a more relaxed adult relationship with the older woman, little had occurred to improve Zara’s relations with her parents in a similar way. Her father could not accept the fact that Vitale knew about the domestic violence that had cast such a shadow over Zara and her mother’s life. In turn, Zara’s mother, Ingrid, was too loyal to her husband to challenge his hostile attitude to their daughter and son-in-law.

  Although Zara occasionally accompanied Vitale to social events in London that her parents also attended, and the two couples were always careful to speak for the sake of appearances, there was no true relationship beneath the social banter. Sometimes that hurt Zara a great deal more than she was willing to admit to Vitale. At the same time she did have reason to cherish some hope of a future improvement in relations because her mother made a point of phoning and asking her daughter when she would next be in London so that she could see Donata. Ingrid would then visit her daughter’s home and play with her grandchild, but it was tacitly understood that those visits took place without Monty Blake’s knowledge.