But she was too late. Damiano had already carried him inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE next twenty-four hours were a living hell for Sofia.
From her parents’ castle she phoned the Palazzo Verde countless times requesting to be put through either to her son or his nanny. But each time she met the same implacable response. The Duke had given orders that she was not to be put through, but she could rest assured that her son was well and happy. And when she tried to speak to Damiano it was a similar story. He did not wish to speak to her. If she wished, she could leave a message. Suddenly she had become an outcast. She felt broken in two.
Her mother, to whom she had confided more or less the whole story, was sympathetic but sensibly told her, ‘You made a very foolish mistake to believe that Damiano would ever allow you take his son away.’ And she frowned at Sofia. ‘I thought you knew your husband better than that.’
‘But I was desperate!’ Sofia knew that what her mother said was true, but why couldn’t she understand what had driven her to do it? ‘I couldn’t bear to go on with the ghastly charade he was forcing on me and I was terrified he’d stop me seeming Alessandro if I refused.’
Though, of course, by what she’d done she’d only made that fear come true and her mother was right: Damiano would never have let her take Alessandro. Even if she’d made it to her parents’ home with him, Damiano would only have come after her. Nothing in the world was surer than that.
Her mother was watching her now with kindly, wise blue eyes. ‘You know you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you want, and it’s probably a good idea to stay at least until you calm down—and until Damiano has a chance to calm down too. Then you can go back to him and just get on with doing your duty, even if that does involve what you call a charade.’
At Sofia’s defiant look, she laid a loving hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘It is your duty, you know. You’re the wife of the Duke. It’s part of your job to put on a show.’ She sighed a sympathetic sigh. ‘And maybe things will get better. I pray that they will. I just want you to be happy.’
Sofia did not argue. Maybe her mother was right and she ought to stay put until she’d calmed down a bit. Certainly she sensed that her mother had definitely been right to talk her out of her original plan to drive straight back to the Palazzo Verde and force some kind of showdown with Damiano. All that would have done was make the situation even worse. And maybe during her absence, as her mother had predicted, Damiano would actually calm down too.
- yes, her mother was a wise woman, full of good and sound advice, but there were some things that Sofia understood better than .she did.
Things would never get better, she would never be happy and her mother was just wasting her breath with her prayers.
‘Tell the Duke I have to speak with him. Tell him it’s urgent. Tell him I’ll wait in my office until I hear from him.’
Sofia was back at the Palazzo Verde just twenty-four hours after she’d left it. For that was all the time she’d needed to get her head straight and figure out precisely what it was she had to do.
It was really very simple. She had to get back to Alessandro, for she simply could not bear the way she’d been cut off from her son. And if the price for that was the resumption of her charade with Damiano, then she would accept that and play her part as best she could. She would apologise for what she’d done, beg his forgiveness, and she would promise on her honour never to do such a thing again.
As she waited now in her office for him to come to her, she was feeling perfectly composed and emotionally distanced. Damiano could no longer reach her. She was quite sure of that now. He had driven out her love for him in that confrontation in the courtyard.
Sofia waited for more than an hour before he finally appeared. And though her heart jolted at the sight of him, just as it always had, she felt no pleasure at all as she looked into his face, just a steadily bubbling brew of anger and dislike.
Just inside the doorway he stopped. ‘I’m told you wish to speak to me?’
No ‘hello’. No ‘how are you?’ Not even a smile of greeting. It was clear that he hated her every bit as much as she hated him.
Sofia, who had been standing by the window, gazing down into the garden in the hope of maybe catching a glimpse of Alessandro, tilted her chin at him as she turned round fully to face him. That’s fine by me, she was thinking. At least there’ll be no more false gestures of affection.
In a clear voice she told him, ‘I’ve come to apologise for what happened. What I did was wrong. It’ll never happen again.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I already know it’ll never happen again.’ Damiano’s tone was hard enough to split concrete. ‘You’ll never have the opportunity to do anything like that again. You can take my word on that absolutely.’
And what was that supposed to mean? Sofia’s grey-blue eyes flashed at him as something close to panic flickered inside her. ‘I hope you’re not trying to tell me you have any intention of keeping up this ban? You have no right to do that, you know—to keep me from my son. And I won’t allow you to get away with it. Don’t think that I will.’
Damiano straightened slightly and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, his dark eyes unhurriedly scouring her face. ‘Did you invite me here in order to tell me what you plan or do not plan to allow?’ He smiled a contemptuous smile, expressing his opinion on that folly. ‘If so, I’ll go now. We’d both be wasting our time.’
He was so damned superior. She felt an angry bitterness fill her. Instead of standing here apologising to him, she felt like wringing his arrogant neck! And she opened her mouth to tell him so, but as he made a move to leave the room she quickly snapped herself to heel. Did she really want to risk not seeing Alessandro even for another hour?
‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘I didn’t ask you here for that. I asked you here to tell you that, for the sake of my relationship with my son, I’m prepared to fall in with your demands about us appearing together in public. I accept that it’s my duty and I’ll never complain again.’ She bit her lip. ‘Now please say that I can see Alessandro.’ And she waited, heart beating, to hear his answer.
Damiano said nothing for a moment, just continued to watch her. Then he told her, ‘I’m glad you came to your senses so quickly. Was that your own decision or did your parents talk you into it?’
‘It was my own decision. ’ Her eyes flashed with annoyance. ‘I am capable, you know, of making decisions for myself. I don’t need to be told what to do by my parents.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He regarded her steadily. ‘Even though, I have to say, your decisions are occasionally a little rash.’
Sofia could scarcely deny that. ‘We all make mistakes.’ She flashed him another look and added cuttingly, ‘I’m sure even you manage to make the occasional one.’
‘You reckon, do you?’
As he said it, he smiled, taking Sofia totally by surprise. He was watching her with a strangely soft expression, the dark eyes gently humorous, uncensorious, even warm. It was almost as though he had reached out and touched her.
Sofia could not help it. As she looked into his face, she felt a wave of emotion rise up inside her that was frighteningly close to yearning and a very long way from hate. And for a moment it was as though her closed heart had suddenly opened, exposing all the fragile, hurt emotions that she had so carefully locked away. She felt like turning her face away and weeping slow tears.
Instantly horrified, she struggled to pull herself together. How could she allow herself to be so easily seduced after the unspeakable way he had treated her?
In a cool tone, carefully distancing herself again, she remarked, ‘Well, you didn’t make any mistakes yesterday, did you? You knew exactly where and when to pounce.’ She narrowed her eyes at him and asked him a question she’d asked herself. ‘How did you know I was planning to take Alessandro?’ For she was quite sure he hadn’t intercepted her by chance. ‘Do you have someone watching me? One of
your paid spies?’ And she looked at him with all the contempt she could muster.
‘Perhaps I do.’ The warmth in his eyes had gone now. ‘And perhaps it’s just as well, since you seem to have so much trouble behaving in an acceptable and appropriate manner. So you’d do well to bear that in mind in future.’
He started to turn away and it looked for a moment as though he was about to leave without giving her the answer she was really waiting for. But then he paused.
‘I’ve decided that you may see Alessandro. But not alone. Only in the company of a third party such as Alice. It’ll be some time, I fear, before I can trust you to be with him on your own again.’
Then, with a final black look, he turned and left the room.
‘Let’s take it again from just before the Fairy Godmother appears!’
From her seat in the front stalls, with a rap of her silver-topped cane Madame Ulana brought the ballet troupe instantly to order. ‘Positions!’ she called. ‘Vite! Vite, mes enfants!’ Then, ‘Music!’ she commanded with another rap of her cane, and at once the little theatre was filled to the gods with the sweet, piercing strains of Prokofiev’s Cinderella.
It was a dress rehearsal and Sofia was feeling a tiny bit nervous, though mainly she was just thrilled at the excitement of it all. And for once she wasn’t even thinking of all her personal problems as she stood in the wings waiting to go on. All she was thinking of was delivering the very best performance she was capable of.
It was two weeks now since Sofia had moved back into the palace and during that time things had returned more or less to normal. She was back into the swing of work and spending as much time as she could with Alessandro, in spite of that hateful restriction Damiano had imposed.
That stuck in her throat, but she would accept it for the moment, for in a way she could see why he had imposed it. But once she’d proved she could be trusted and that she really meant what she’d promised she would start working on him to persuade him to allow her to see her son on her own again.
In the meantime she was just grateful that she saw very little of Damiano, for luckily there had been no joint functions to attend and their paths rarely crossed within the palace. They had become strangers once again, as though London had never happened.
On a happier note, she’d been busy with rehearsals for the ballet, though she had warned Madam Ulana without going into details that there was a possibility she might be obliged to pull out at short notice so it was essential that her stand-in be well up to scratch. For Damiano, she well realised, might force her to withdraw at any moment. She was even a little surprised that he hadn’t already done so and had decided it could only be because he had temporarily forgotten.
And that didn’t surprise her either. She was probably the last thing on his mind.
But in thinking that Sofia could not have been more mistaken. And she was also wrong to believe he had forgotten about the ballet. In recent days, as it happened, both she and the ballet had been occupying a large chunk of Damiano’s mind. And at this precise moment they were occupying all of it.
For if Sofia had been a little less bound up in what she was doing she might have noticed the figure who had just slipped into the darkened auditorium and seated himself inconspicuously in one of the rows at the back. A figure in a black coat with the collar turned up and a wide-brimmed borsalino which shadowed his features. But she hadn’t noticed, of course—something about which Damiano was immensely glad.
This wasn’t the first time Damiano had dropped in on a rehearsal. The other time, a few days ago, having learned quite by chance that a rehearsal was currently in progress, he had made the decision on the spur of the moment as he was being driven past the theatre on the way to an appointment. Having a few minutes to spare, he’d instructed his chauffeur, ‘Drop me off here and wait across the street.’ Then he had slipped into the darkened theatre without a soul noticing that he was there.
And what he had seen had had the most powerful and unexpected effect on him.
He sat back in his seat now, waiting for Sofia to step on stage. It was hard to know why he had come that first time. Curiosity, perhaps. Though he hadn’t just been checking up on her. He could easily have got someone else to do that. No, she had taken him aback a little that time in London when they had argued about her involvement in the ballet and she had accused him, with such composure, of treating her like an irresponsible child and told him he ought to try giving her the benefit of the doubt. And he’d wanted to see for himself if she’d been justified in that.
On stage, Cinderella was sinking despondently into a corner as her wicked stepmother and the ugly sisters went off to the ball. And Damiano was aware of sitting forward in his seat. This was the point at which Sofia appeared.
She stepped on stage with all the grace of a true professional, dressed in a long white dress, a sparkling wand in her hand, her glorious red-gold hair tied in a knot on top of her head. And she made the most beautiful, most dignified Fairy Godmother ever.
Yes, she had been right. He had judged her unfairly. There was no tutu. No leaping about. Nothing he could even remotely object to. For her part did not actually require her to dance, only to move about the stage with perfect poise and grace, and that she did looking every inch a royal duchess.
Damiano watched her now, entranced, feeling a piercing sense of loss. He had thought he could just shrug her off after that angry débâcle over the Geneva trip. He had thought he could turn back the clock to the way things had been before London. But something had happened to him. Something had changed. He missed her dreadfully, in a way he had never missed any woman. And to be honest he was still trying to work out what to do about it.
He had to do something. That was becoming increasingly clear to him. Why, he had really only come here this afternoon because he was so desperate to see her and there seemed no other civilised way of doing it. If he met her face to face they would only end up quarrelling, and he had had enough of quarrelling. He didn’t want any more.
But he did want her, with a constant, throbbing ache.
The Fairy Godmother scene over, Sofia began to move off stage and was surprised to hear a burst of applause from the back of the auditorium. Curious, she frowned and peered into the darkness. But she was too late to see anything, for the tall figure in the borsalino was already disappearing through the exit.
Sofia’s secretary had a message for her when she stepped into her office just after eight-thirty the following morning.
‘His Grace the Duke phoned. He wishes you to accompany him to a formal drinks reception at the French embassy tomorrow evening, followed by an informal dinner in town.’
Oh, no. Sofia felt her heart sink into her boots. Her brief reprieve was over. The finger of duty beckoned and there was absolutely nothing she could do but comply.
But she kept her dismay to herself. ‘Thank you, Nina,’ she nodded. Then, suddenly curious, she added, ‘Did you say the Duke phoned personally? He didn’t make this request through his secretary?’
‘No, Your Grace. He called himself and asked to speak to you. When I told him you weren’t here he instructed me to give you the message. And he said that if there was any problem you should let him know.’
Sofia raised a surprised inner eyebrow. What was the meaning of all this courtesy? If he was planning on getting intimate again, it wouldn’t work this time. She had been taken in once, but she’d learned her lesson. There was no way he would trick her a second time.
At the appointed hour the following evening Sofia was dressed—in a stunning vivid green silk gown—and mentally ready to do her royal duty. This was a cross she had agreed to bear and she would bear it as best she could.
She stepped into the Lily Room where it had been arranged that they meet and found him waiting for her, facing the door, smiling at her in welcome, as though he was genuinely pleased to see her. And for a moment her treacherous heart was filled with a sense of sheer joy at the sight of him. But she did not smi
le back. She forced herself not to. She would smile in public, if that was her duty, but they were not in public now.
‘You’re looking beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’
She found it hard to meet his eyes. They were filled with an intense look that was making her nervous. She had the very clear impression that he had something on his mind. And he seemed to confirm that a few minutes later as he was climbing into the car behind her.
‘After the reception,’ he confided, ‘I have a surprise for you.’
Sofia did not ask him to elaborate. She did not even wonder what the surprise might be, though she assumed it was bound to be something unwelcome. But she wanted to know nothing, for she had already decided that the only way for her to get through this evening was to take it one minute at a time. She would deal with his surprise when the time came for her to deal with it. Until then, she would simply concentrate on putting on a show.
As usual, she played her part marvellously. Though perhaps she was a little out of practice, it occurred to her at one point as she stood chatting with a group of diplomats while flashing the occasional warm smile at her husband, and had to acknowledge that, unlike on previous occasions, she was finding it all a bit of a strain. She kept wishing she could sit down. She felt strangely light-headed. And it definitely wasn’t the drink. She’d only had one glass of champagne.
But the feeling soon passed and at last it was time to leave. With Damiano at her elbow, she was bidding farewell to hosts and fellow guests and climbing back into the waiting car.
‘And now that surprise I told you about.’ Damiano turned to smile at her as they set off. And then, to her dismay, he reached out and took her hand.
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