Francesca tensed, her whole being concentrated on him, on what he was saying.
He looked up at last, and she saw pain in his eyes. ‘When I came upon you…holding hands with Gabriel…quite simply I wanted to kill him. And afterwards take you to bed and leave my mark on you in the most primitive way…’ He glanced down again. ‘I should never have allowed myself near you while I was feeling like that. I horrified myself that day, treating you the way I did.’
Fran swallowed, unable to speak. This was a revelation of hope that she was afraid to grasp at too greedily, too quickly. She could scarcely take in what he was saying—what she thought he was saying.
‘You don’t want to listen to my confessions. My apologies for asking you to,’ Rolfe said roughly. ‘I should have stayed away. I suppose this is in the worst of taste. After what I did to you, I guess you probably never wanted to see me again.’
‘Rolfe…’ she whispered, her voice refusing to work properly.
Looking up, he gave her a smile that wrenched at her heart. ‘I have no right to do this to you. It’s not your problem. You…go on with your life, Francesca,’ he said. ‘This is too complicated. I’ll get out of here, never bother you again. Forget I said anything. It was stupid of me.’
He moved as though ready to leave, to walk away from her, and she reached out and placed both her hands over his. ‘Rolfe,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He sucked in a breath, closing his eyes. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said, ‘Fran…Francesca. Don’t.’
Her name sounded so sweet on his lips. ‘You do know I’m Fran,’ she said quietly, so quietly. ‘You know that.’
‘Of course I know it!’ He looked at her then, eyes blazing. ‘I know…you’re not your sister.’ He dragged another harsh breath inward. ‘Somewhere deep inside I think I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on you.’
‘You said it was like the first time you met her.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed heavily. ‘And yet it was always different. You were always different. The face was hers, but…the person behind the face…you were serene and very grown-up and so…giving. Although you were nervous of making love, and I didn’t understand why until…well, you know. I was both intrigued and exasperated by your caution and—what I know now was inexperience, the natural fear of the unknown. And I was intensely frustrated, of course. But that night when you let me make love to you at last, there was something about knowing that you didn’t remember any other time…any other man. I wanted to cherish you, love you, waken you to what lovemaking between a man and woman could be when they really love each other as I loved you. And I’d give anything…to change the way it ended. I wish to God I’d realised earlier…’
She flushed, but refused to look away. And after a moment he did, his gaze fixing on their hands. ‘Capri was always volatile, unpredictable. Part of her charm—she had an abundance of that—but…wearing. I did love her in the beginning—even, in a way, to the end. But not in the way I love you. After the first few months I had to work at it, remind myself that I’d taken her for better or worse. There were times when I remembered why I’d fallen in love with her, when it was almost like those early, dizzying weeks after we first met. We might have made it. I’d hoped we would, that something was still salvageable. After the accident I began to be certain that I’d love her for ever, that we did after all have something deep and enduring and nothing could erase it from my heart, my life. Only that wasn’t Capri. It was you. Francesca.’
He lifted his head and looked at her, and she gazed back at him with clear green eyes and said simply, ‘I’m in love with you, Rolfe. I think I have been since the first moment I opened my eyes and saw you. And I’ve been so afraid that…that you never really wanted me at all.’
His hands turned on the table and gripped hers. ‘I don’t think I dare believe this,’ he muttered.
‘It’s true. I love you and I didn’t know how I was going to live the rest of my life without you.’ She sucked her lower lip briefly. ‘Please, can we go someplace where you can hold me?’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘TO HAVE and to hold,’ the minister intoned. ‘From this day forward…’
Francesca repeated the words, her voice steady and clear. Minutes later Rolfe slid a gleaming new gold ring on her finger and soon afterwards bent to kiss her.
She kissed him back, a kiss full of sweetness and promise. He’d waited for three months after asking her to marry him—determined, he said, to do the thing properly, to give her the courtship she’d missed out on when they’d got things so muddled the first time. And also, she suspected, to reassure her anxious parents that she was in no way a substitute for the wife he had lost.
Fran’s natural mother was there too, wiping tears away. Although they shared a unique bond and Fran had grown fond of her and made friends with her husband and other children, this woman who had once been a troubled, frightened, pregnant teenager from a strict Italian background would never replace the mother who had loved her all her life.
Her adoptive family had opened its collective heart to Rolfe, and although he was taking her home with him she knew there would be plenty of visiting back and forth across the Tasman. Shayne had already booked his next school holiday with them.
In a luxury Sydney hotel that night, Rolfe ordered champagne and sandwiches, and while she showered he flipped off all the lights but one, and was waiting for her when she returned wearing a sliver of white satin that skimmed her breasts and her hips.
‘This time,’ he promised, ‘I’ll be far more careful. I swear I’ll give you nothing but pleasure. And you must tell me if there’s anything you don’t like.’ He touched her hair, her shoulder, laid his fingers against her breast, and palmed the beat of her heart. Then he kissed her gently, lingeringly and reluctantly withdrew. ‘My turn in the bathroom. I won’t be long.’
She slipped under the bedcovers and listened to him in the shower, then got out of the bed and padded across the room. He was stepping out of the shower cubicle when she surprised him.
Water dripped down his body—a magnificent body, she thought, inspecting it. Growing more so by the minute.
‘Fran?’ He grabbed a towel. ‘Something wrong?’
Slowly she shook her head. ‘No. Not that I can see.’ She took the towel from him and without hurry ran it over his chest.
Rolfe’s eyes glittered and he snatched the towel from her, giving himself a cursory wipe over. ‘If you don’t want to be ravished right here,’ he suggested, ‘you’d better go back to bed.’
‘Only if you promise to ravish me there,’ she answered, her cheeks flushed, her eyes smiling.
He made a choked sound and picked her up in his strong arms, shouldering his way out from the steamy room to the bedroom with its king-size bed. ‘I thought you’d be scared,’ he said, ‘after the last time.’
‘Why should I be scared of you?’
He lay down on the bed with her, his naked, still damp body hot through the cool satin that covered hers. ‘I hurt you so much…have you forgotten?’
‘I haven’t forgotten. And I haven’t forgotten how you made love to me before that…as though it was my first time…even while you thought it wasn’t. I haven’t forgotten your patience, and your gentleness, and your passion…I never wanted to forget it, not in all those months when I thought it was all I was ever going to have of you. I want it all over again, Rolfe. I want you, to have and to hold, from this day forward…’
‘As I want you,’ he answered. ‘But I’m going to make this slow and gentle and wonderful for you, my darling. Something so good you’ll remember it for ever.’
He kept the promise—his mouth, his fingers, his body working tender magic that weaved a spell of delight, spiralling higher and higher, a gradual seduction of the senses, until she sighed into his mouth, ‘Now.’
This time there was no pain, only the most exquisite of pleasures, and a feeling of utter completeness, a mysterious fusion of two into one. And then the
dazzling, erotic, all-consuming dark whirlwind shot with stars, the ultimate expression of love between man and woman that took them both beyond reality into a world of utter sensation.
She drifted down from the heights they’d shared, her head against his shoulder, his hand stroking her back.
‘You’re right,’ she whispered, turning her head to touch his salty skin with her lips. ‘This is a memory that I’ll cherish as long as I live.’
‘And so will I,’ he told her soberly, stroking her hair away from her forehead with gentle fingers. ‘I should tell you I fully intend to spend the rest of my life making memories just like it. Memories that neither of us will ever lose.’
Francesca smiled dreamily into the darkness. ‘I know,’ she said with utter certainty, ‘I never will.’
eISBN 978-14592-5228-8
WIFE TO A STRANGER
First North American Publication 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Daphne de Jong.
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