He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he walked over to one of the windows and stood gazing outside for a while. He looked sombre suddenly, as though he was considering uttering something he wasn’t sure was the right thing to say. Accordingly Joanna felt the muscles encasing her spine contract with tension.
‘Molly told me that you used to live on a farm once,’ he revealed. ‘Until your grandfather died and your mother decided she did not want to take over his tenancy, and so she moved you all up to London to live.’
Molly had told Sandro that? Joanna was shocked. She hadn’t been aware that Sandro and her sister had ever been close enough to talk about things like that!
‘She said you used to love it there,’ he continued, turning to watch the different expressions as they flickered across her face. ‘She said you loved the clean air and wide-open spaces and the sense of freedom to come and go as you please. Apparently you had a horse of your own and used to ride him everywhere. She told me how much you missed it all once you were stuck in London...’
Silence. Joanna stood there in a dusty sunbeam while she came to terms with the disturbing fact that Sandro knew a lot more about her than she’d ever suspected he knew.
‘Say something,’ he prompted.
‘Molly said an awful lot to you, by the sound of it,’ was the only remark she could come up with.
He grimaced, hands doing their usual thing by sliding into his trouser pockets in a way that was supposed to be relaxed but which Joanna suspected meant he was the complete opposite.
‘We used to meet,’ he confessed. ‘For lunch—perhaps once a month after you left me. I needed to know how you were coping and she was more than willing to talk about you...’
Tears washed across her eyes and stayed there, blurring out the dusty brown floor at her feet; a pain she couldn’t quite interpret was tugging at her heartstrings. Grief for a much-missed Molly? Probably. Hurt for all those secret meetings she hadn’t known had been going on between her sister and Sandro? Definitely. But, most of all, she felt dreadfully exposed again, as though nothing about her was sacred where Sandro and his obsession with her were concerned.
‘Then...’ he went on, and his voice sounded constrained now, enough to set Joanna moving restlessly, her arms wrapping themselves around her body so her fingers could pick tensely at the soft sleeves of her creamy top. ‘A couple of days before I was due to fly out here to spend some time with my mother, because she had been ill and she seemed to need me more at that moment than you seemed ever likely to need me...’
He paused, she presumed it was to grimace at his own honesty, but she couldn’t look at him to check that out, and, anyway, the tears were still blurring her vision.
‘Molly called me up and asked me to meet her. She sounded—distressed,’ he said. ‘We met for lunch, and it was then that she told me what you had apparently only just told her, about what had happened to you and why you couldn’t live with me. She asked me if it made a difference to how I felt about you,’ he said, and then went on gruffly, ‘I said, Of course it made a damned difference, but, for once, you were going to have to wait until I had given my mother the few weeks I had put aside for her to oversee her convalescence!’
Defiance, Joanna recognised. Oh, there had been a lot of angry defiance in those words just then.
‘When I got back to London—’ He had to stop a moment because his voice had broken, and Joanna squeezed her eyes tight shut because she knew what he was going to say next. ‘You had both left the flat,’ he continued. ‘I could not bring myself to believe it at first, then I assumed that Molly must have told you what she had told me, and you had, predictably, made a run for it, because you couldn’t stand the idea of my pursuing you again. In fact,’ he concluded, ‘I was so sure that was the case that I did not even bother checking any further than your flat, which is why I never got to hear about what happened to Molly.’
In other words he’d presumed the worst about her, Joanna noted hollowly. Just as she had presumed the worst about him.
‘Now I want to make reparation for the last year, which must have been hell for you. And this,’ he explained with a slow wave of one beautifully sculptured hand, ‘is my way of making that reparation. I give you wide-open spaces, Joanna, and the freedom to enjoy it as you wish...’
The reparation was his reparation not her reparation? ‘Y-you mean...?’ she stammered out incredulously. ‘You mean you’ve bought this beautiful place for me because you feel you owe me something?’
‘Do I not?’ he countered.
‘No!’ she cried ‘You do not!’
‘I will have to move main control of the bank back to Rome, of course,’ he said, speaking right over her protest as if she hadn’t voiced it. ‘But I will install a full communications system here, for convenience, which will mean less commuting for me, so we can work at this place together...’
Joanna stared at him and couldn’t even breathe through the pressure building in her breast. He believed she would be happy living in the country, so he had bought them a country estate to live on! And he was going to move his head operation back to Rome—again!
In other words, he was prepared to move heaven and earth to make this work for them—again.
‘And what do you want, Sandro?’ she asked him huskily. ‘What is it you personally want from all of this for yourself?’
He shrugged, then smiled a wry kind of smile that thoroughly mocked whatever it was he had been going to say before he’d even bothered saying it. ‘A wife who will be a wife to me would be nice.’
And that was all? A minor want like that? A perfectly justifiable want for any man, never mind a man like Sandro!
But, oh, good grief, it was like a mountainous obstacle to her!
‘Oh, Sandro,’ she sighed in shaken response, knowing she could never give him what he wanted. She had proved beyond all doubt this morning that she was incapable of being a proper wife to him! Which meant, therefore, that she could not accept anything else from him. ‘Stop doing this!’ she cried out in pained compulsion. ‘Don’t you see I’m not worth it? I don’t even want it!’
‘Then what do you want?’ he demanded.
You, she thought hopelessly, and turned away from him so he wouldn’t see that answer written in her eyes.
‘No!’ he objected, angry now, very angry, because once again she was letting him down with her inability to give him back what he needed from her. Striding towards her, he grabbed her arm and spun her back to face him. ‘You will stop hiding from me whenever we begin to get close to the real truth!’ he grated at her.
‘I can’t keep taking from you and giving nothing back!’ she cried in pained distress.
‘Then give yourself to me,’ he answered simply.
‘I can’t!’ she choked. Good grief, did he never listen to a word she said to him? ‘I can’t, damn it. I can’t!’
He sighed, straightened his body as though he was containing something very intense deep down inside him, then unclipped his hands from her shoulders and moved off towards the sunny front doorway.
‘Come on,’ he said to her over his shoulder. ‘There is a lot more to see yet outside. I think you will like the stables...’
Joanna couldn’t believe it! She stood there, exactly where he had left her, and marvelled incredulously at the stubborn way he was still completely ignoring anything she said to him that he didn’t like!
In the end she followed him outside and let him show her the gardens and the stable block, for which, he informed her, she was to choose her own stable of horses once they’d made the house fit to move in to permanently. In a daze she let him guide her from one thing to another, said nothing—thought nothing! Her mind had shut down completely, as though someone—namely Sandro—had turned it off for her because her thoughts didn’t suit him.
An hour after that they were back at the car, and for one last time she tried to get through to him. ‘Sandro—please!’ she begged, ‘Will you listen to me?’
‘Not unless you are going to say something positive,’ he replied coolly.
‘I positively know I am never going to be able to let you make love to me,’ she answered bluntly.
‘Why not?’ he challenged.
She didn’t answer, her eyes lowering from his, her lips pressed grimly shut.
‘Still more ghosts to uncover, Joanna?’ he prodded.
You are my ghost, she answered silently. You haunt my every breathing moment. ‘I’ve faced the ghosts,’ was what she said out loud. ‘Without it changing anything.’
‘No, Joanna,’ Sandro responded. There are still some ghosts lingering here that I have not managed to uncover yet. But I will,’ he vowed. ‘I will find that person I once fell in love with. The person who once loved me in the same exquisite way, no matter what it takes to do it. And that,’ he concluded, ‘is what is called positive thinking, cara. Not that negative stuff you keep on throwing at me.’
‘You’re mad,’ she sighed, her red-gold hair glinting in the sunlight as she sent him a look of weary frustration. ‘You have to be—if you are this pig-headed!’
‘You think me mad?’ He laughed. ‘No—no.’ He denied the charge. ‘For I can remember that what we had was so damned special only a madman would let it slip through his fingers—which I am not about to do!’
‘You let it go once before,’ she reminded him.
‘But I did not know why you drove me to do so,’ he countered. ‘You let me believe it was my fault, something you could not stand about me! I could not overcome your physical aversion then, Joanna, but I can now, and I will,’ he stated grimly. ‘I’ll overcome your sad determination to punish us both for something neither of us had any control over!’
With that, he turned and climbed into the car, leaving her to follow or stay as she felt fit. She followed, because she was heavily aware that she had no real choice about it.
No choice.
She almost laughed, except the situation warranted tears, not laughter.
He already had the engine running by the time she got in beside him, his dark expression set in stone and the atmosphere so bad now that neither of them made any attempt to ease it. They drove back down the cypress-lined driveway without another word passing between them.
She felt angry and guilty and cruel and petty. Maimed, that was what she was, she told herself bitterly. Maimed to the very roots of her persona if she could treat him as badly as this.
It was not a very pleasant thing to know about oneself.
That was why this relationship could never work for them. She would always be letting him down like this. Just as she had always let him down before.
So the gulf between them seemed to get even wider, and the antagonism to get so biting that Sandro curtly excused himself the moment they arrived back at the apartment late that afternoon, and disappeared behind a slammed door to his private study.
Joanna winced, recognising the sound from three years ago. This is it, she likened dejectedly; the slippery, sliding slope back into emotional carnage.
And it wasn’t over yet. She was just coming out of her bedroom, after showering and changing into a cool cotton sundress, when she heard voices in the drawing room. With a sinking heart she recognised the voice of their visitor, and she gritted her teeth and made herself walk into the room.
Sandro and his mother were standing sharing soft-voiced, angry words, by their tones. They were speaking in Italian, so Joanna had no idea what they were actually saying, but the moment they both noticed her standing there they clammed up so tightly that she knew they must have been discussing her.
‘Mamma has just discovered we are here in Rome,’ Sandro informed her coolly, ‘and decided to pay us a visit.’
His mother winced, and Joanna understood her desire to do it. Sandro’s voice had been sliced through with grating sarcasm.
‘Buona sera, Joanna,’ his mother greeted her, rather ruefully. She was a short, slender, very elegant creature, with dyed dark hair and her son’s velvet brown eyes. Eyes that were fixed coolly on Joanna at the moment ‘It is good to see you again, my dear...’
Was it? Joanna didn’t think so, going by the look in those eyes right at this moment. ‘Thank you,’ was all she said, stepping forward to allow their cheeks to brush in the expected Latin way of greeting. ‘I w-was about to make some coffee,’ she murmured, looking desperately for a way of escaping this awkward situation. ‘Perhaps you would like to s-sit down while I go—’
She was already turning for the door when a telephone began ringing in Sandro’s study. ‘I need to answer that,’ Sandro said grimly. ‘You stay and talk to Mamma.’
Joanna stared at him in horror as he went striding by her. Don’t you dare do this to me! her eyes pleaded furiously. He ignored her, still so angry with her that she supposed this was his way of getting his own back.
‘Please, Joanna, come and sit by me and tell me what you have been doing with yourself since we last met.’
Oh, damn. Joanna’s shoulders dropped, her bank of energy along with them. Turning with an air of dull fatalism, she made herself walk over to the sofa and sit down beside Sandro’s mother.
‘You are looking well,’ his mother remarked politely.
‘Thank you,’ she replied again. ‘And s-so are you,’ she felt compelled to add. ‘Sandro has been telling me that you’ve been ill recently.’
The older woman nodded. ‘Last year it was necessary I underwent some open heart surgery,’ she explained, with a small grimace that revealed a reluctant acceptance of her illness. ‘Alessandro took me to Orvieto to convalesce afterwards. It is such a peaceful place to be, away from Rome’s constant rush and noise, when one is feeling under the weather...’
‘Yes.’ Joanna nodded, her eyes glazing with a wistful understanding of what her mother-in-law meant.
‘Of course,’ his mother acknowledged. ‘For you have just arrived back from visiting the old Campione estate. Alessandro was explaining why I could not reach him by telephone today. I discovered by pure accident, you see, that you were here with my son.’
And here it comes, Joanna noted, her spine straightening slightly, because she had a fairly good idea what was going to come next, like—What the hell do you think you’re up to, disrupting my son’s life a second time?
Yet it didn’t come. ‘You liked the estate?’ Sandro’s mother asked instead.
‘Very much—who wouldn’t?’ Joanna found a stiff little smile from somewhere. ‘It’s such a beautiful place.’
The older woman nodded. ‘Alessandro and I visited it several times while we were there. He was so very drawn by this idea, you see, that a country home could well be the lure he was searching for to coax you back to him.’
Joanna blinked. Sandro had been considering that beautiful place as far back as twelve months ago? She had believed it was a recent impulsive decision on his part.
‘But of course,’ his mother continued levelly, ‘the best made plans can to go awry, even for a man like Alessandro. I was sorry to hear about the tragic death of your sister, Joanna,’ she added gently. ‘It must have come as a terrible blow to you.’
She knew about that too? Joanna’s spine went a little straighter. ‘It was at the time,’ she agreed. ‘But I am over it now.’
‘Still...’ Obviously not put off by Joanna’s stiff tone, the older woman continued, ‘It seems dreadfully fated that while my son was planning his campaign to reinstate you as his wife, you were enduring such a terrible loss... Do you believe in fate, Joanna?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered warily. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘Do you believe in love, then?’ the older woman persisted. ‘Do you believe that a good, honest and true love can conquer all, or do you think that even the best love may always be fated to fall by the wayside, no matter what the lovers try to do to hold onto it?’
‘I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say,’ Joanna replied carefully, while h
er eyes darted across the room in the dubious hope that Sandro would reappear and put a stop to this before it got out of hand.
But he didn’t appear and, like her son, the mother was obviously someone on a mission at the moment, because she touched Joanna’s hand to regain her attention. ‘What I am trying to ascertain, cara,’ she said gently, ‘is whether you believe that your marriage has a better chance at succeeding this time, or whether this is just a sad case of Alessandro refusing to accept defeat.’
‘We are working on it,’ Joanna said tightly.
‘The physical side?’
Joanna shot to her feet. So did Sandro’s mother, her hand closing around Joanna’s wrist with a surprising strength for such a slight person. ‘I am not trying to make trouble,’ she asserted anxiously, making trouble with every word she spoke. ‘But—please, Joanna, you have no mamma to talk to about these things! God knows,’ she murmured unsteadily, ‘it cannot be easy for you after what you have been through. But I do not want to see Alessandro hurt as badly this time as he was the last, because you could not—’
She stopped and swallowed. Joanna began to tremble because it was beginning to hit her, really hit her, what his mother was actually saying here.
‘I would like to help, if I can.’
‘No one can help.’ Abruptly Joanna pulled her captured wrist free, her face turned to ice, her body cast in it ‘This is not your problem.’
‘What’s going on here?’
Joanna spun on her heel to stare at Sandro through eyes made of glass. ‘You told her,’ she accused him. ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
With that she went to stalk past him, but he stopped her by gripping her by the shoulders.
‘Let me go,’ she bit out in revulsion—the first true revulsion she had shown him since his return into her life.
‘Mamma does not know it all,’ he avowed. ‘Only what Molly told me. I am only human, cara,’ he added on a short sigh, when her icy expression did not alter. ‘I needed to talk to someone I could trust about what had happened to us!’
It didn’t matter. To Joanna, still too much had been said. ‘It didn’t happen to us, Sandro, it happened to me!’
The Marriage Surrender Page 15
