And though she’d considered herself to be a citizen of the world for a long time, having spent so long abroad she no longer felt purely ‘American’, there was an odd, biological imperative wrapping around her.
She looked out at Athens, and something like pride fired through her. This baby, in her stomach, would be Greek, just like his or her father. This ancient culture, the birthplace of democracy, poetry, the Olympics, would belong to this land, its people and traditions humming through its blood and soul.
Did that make her a part of this culture, too?
Her eyes glanced across the ancient buildings and yes, she felt something spark in her chest. Pride. Belonging. Love. Affection.
The knock on the door came at that moment, and she approached it with a smile on her face.
It fell, ever so slightly, when she found her newly-minted stepfather standing on the other side. “Lorenzo?” She frowned; his arrival made no sense.
If Bella was confused, he was even more so. “Arabella?” He stepped backwards, scanning the house, reading the number, then looking at her, his handsome face – and he was very handsome, Bella accepted – showing his lack of comprehension. “What are you doing here?” And then, with a scowl. “I suppose you are with your mother.”
“Mom? No.” She shook her head. “Mom’s … I thought she was in Rome, with you?”
“No. She flew to Greece a week ago.” His expression was taut, his manner showing barely-concealed impatience. “I must speak to her.”
“Mom’s not here,” Bella repeated. “I haven’t seen her since a couple of weeks after the wedding. Why? Is she okay? Is there a problem?”
“Si. Certamente. Is he here?”
It made no sense, but she was too flummoxed by her stepfather’s sudden appearance, and trying to work out what she could say to explain her own presence in Vitalo’s house. “Do you mean Vitalo?” She asked breathily.
“Of course I mean Vitalo.” Lorenzo pronounced her husband’s name with clear contempt. “So? I can come in?”
“Oh, right, yes, I mean, of course,” she frowned, stepping backwards and waving her hand down the hallway, towards the lounge room. She flicked a glance at her watch. It was just after eight. “He said he was working late tonight, but he won’t be…”
“He is married. You know this?”
Bella’s heartbeat began to crash against her chest. She stared at him, searching for something – anything – she could say to explain, but her words were tangled inside of her.
“I thought once we were married, it would be an end to it, but it wasn’t.” He strode across the room, pulling the lid off one of Vitalo’s decanters and pouring a generous measure of whisky into a glass. “You want some? No. Of course. You have the baby.” His scowl was one of pure rage. “It wasn’t though,” he continued, angrily. “Not even days after they were together again. She came to him here and spent the night, you know.”
Something like ice ran down Bella’s spine. “What are you talking about, Lorenzo? You’re making no sense.”
“Your mother,” he spat. “And il bastardo Vitalo Katrakis. And now he’s married, and his poor wife is just like me – always second choice to the other. Who is she? A friend of yours?”
“I don’t understand,” she spoke slowly, calmly, her eyes flitting to the clock above the mantelpiece. She had no idea when Vitalo would be home but she needed him, in that moment. She needed his strength and support, his common sense. She needed him.
“Your mother and that – that –,”
“Vitalo,” she supplied, when he apparently couldn’t locate a suitable curse.
“Si,” he snapped, throwing the scotch back and refilling the glass angrily. “Have been sleeping together for a decade.”
The ice on her spine turned into an ice shelf. She stared at him, then frowned, because how could that be the case? “My mother is at least ten years his senior,” she said. “And I think I’d know if they’d ever…”
“Why would you?” He prompted, dragging a hand through his hair. “Why would she tell you? Why would he?”
“I…” her hand lifted to her stomach, curving over it protectively, and his eyes followed the betraying gesture. And, as if the penny was only just now dropping, he stalked across the room and lifted her left hand.
“Cristo,” he groaned. “You married him. The baby is his.”
Her face blanched of all colour. She nodded.
“They are sicker than I had realized. To use me is bad enough, but to use you? Her own daughter?”
“She’s not using me,” she promised. “Mom has no idea about this…”
“How do you know?”
“Because we haven’t told anyone,” she insisted.
“Perhaps you have not, but I would put money on your mother having known all along.”
“You’re wrong,” she said with a certainty that was only slightly eroded. “There’s absolutely no way Vitalo and my mother have ever been anything other than friends.”
I never thought she’d cheat. And with someone I love, like a brother.
Her father’s words swirled through her, and she shivered, reaching for the wall behind her and bracing her back against it.
“They were together tonight,” he said, and the spite was gone from his voice, leaving only dejection. “I followed her to the bar, watched her go in. Watched him hug her. Her kiss him. It was enough. I’ve known since I first met her that there was someone else. I knew she’d spent the night here, but I thought, in time, she would get over it. I thought I could be enough for her…”
“I don’t believe any of this,” she whispered, her expression stiff. “Vitalo is the last man on earth who would ever hurt my father, and there’s no way he’d sleep with me if he’d had any kind of relationship with…”
Only the night they were together was clear in her memory, and she recalled in total, perfect detail the fact that they hadn’t swapped names until after the fact. She recalled too his shock when he’d learned who she was. His panic. How quickly he’d left. How he’d refused to so much as speak to her in his office.
God.
The wall wasn’t enough. “I need to sit down.”
“You didn’t know,” Lorenzo surmised, holding an arm out to offer support.
“Of course not. I…” She gripped him tightly, her expression showing utter desperation. “I feel sick.”
He swore in his native Italian. “Where is the bathroom, cara?”
She pointed down the hallway and moved in that direction, Lorenzo supporting her. She just made it, bending over the toilet and retching until her stomach contents were clear and her head was hot and clammy. She straightened to find Lorenzo had wet a face washer and was holding it out to her. “Thank you.”
She flushed the toilet and closed the lid, sitting down on it and holding the washer over her face. It felt like heaven, cool and refreshing.
“Why do you think they’ve been together so long?” she prompted, trying to cling to the facts in the hope something would shake loose to dispel his certainty.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, cagily, and it was enough to breathe hope into her heart.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“I know they were in love,” he said. “I know they spoke often, and talked about how they could ever be together. I know your mother told your father, and told him she wanted a divorce, that she wanted to be with Vitalo. I know your father was devastated.”
“How do you know?” She asked, standing and clinging to his arm. “Tell me.”
“I made it my business to know,” he snapped, but there was hurt and fear and upset in his face.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
His eyes sparkled, blue and green, when they met hers. “Because, cara, I had no way of protecting my interests, with your mother. She held all the cards and she loved to lord that over me. You don’t know how often she’s threatened to leave me, broke and alone like I was when we met.”
Na
usea was back, cresting through her. “So what? You wanted to blackmail her, or something?”
He had the decency to look ashamed. “I did. At first. When I thought she would tire of me and move on. But instead, we fell in love… Or I thought we did.”
She wanted to say she didn’t believe him. She wanted to defend her mother and Vitalo, she wanted to defend them with all the breath in her body, but she was no fool, and there were facts in play that demanded some examination.
“I can’t understand why she would marry you,” she said, finally, thoughtfully.
His smile was a grimace. “To make him jealous,” he said, shaking his head. “She hoped he would interfere. That he would hate the idea of her marrying again so much he’d finally commit to her.”
Bella swept her eyes shut, remembering the darkness of Vitalo’s mood on the night of the wedding. It made sense. All of it.
“And then I got pregnant,” she whispered, holding her stomach. “But he didn’t have to marry me…” She dipped her head into her hands. “Why would he do that?”
“I can think of any number of reasons, cara,” Lorenzo spoke with true sympathy. “The least generous of which is to pain your mother. To pay her back for marrying me.”
“No way. He’s not capable of that.”
“Or perhaps it was to ensure he would be close to her. How convenient to be in the same family as your married lover…”
Disgust rolled through her gut and bile rose into her mouth. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “I can’t believe that.”
“I am sorry, with all my heart, to be the bearer of this news, but it is as I say. She slept here about a month ago.”
Bella counted back the dates, and she knew when that would have been – right before he came and proposed to her. The night he’d found out about the baby. “How do you know?”
“I had an investigator,” he said without apology.
Her eyes swept shut. It could have been harmless. And yet…
She spun away from him, vomiting once more, her body wracked with sickness, her head spinning. And suddenly, she was adrift, nothing and no one anchoring her to anything she could recognize. All of the markers in her life were awash; she couldn’t make head nor tail of any of them.
“How did you get here?”
He frowned. “I flew.”
“Not to Athens. Here. To Vitalo’s.”
“A cab.”
She nodded. “I need… I want to…” What? To run away?
She shook her head, and when she closed her eyes she saw Vitalo and her heart panged and tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – do that to him. She wouldn’t flee without giving him a chance to explain. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s not, but I’m sorry if my mother has used you, as you say. I truly hoped you would make each other happy…”
His expression shifted and he shook his head. “I fell in love with her,” he said, shrugging, “Knowing what kind of woman she was.”
The words were like arrows in Bella’s side, because she knew what kind of woman Kat was, too. She’d tried to deny it, all her life, loyalty keeping her silent, leading her to try to see the best in her mother.
But there was a vanity and insecurity in Katerina Howard that required constant adoration. Why else would she have pushed both of her daughters away when they became teenagers, and beautiful in their own rights? Bella was sent to Spain and Sophia to Abu Faya and all the while she what? Slept with Vitalo?
The nausea wasn’t going to abate.
“Can I get you something? Food? A drink?”
She bit down on her lower lip. “Some water,” she answered gratefully, moving back to the lounge and sitting down, running her hand over her stomach anxiously.
Lorenzo disappeared from the room and then the front door of the house opened and everything seemed to stand perfectly still; time ceased to move.
Bella was aware of everything – the ticking of the clock above the mantle, the humming of the lights overhead, the coolness of the room and the futility of her Christmas decorations. She felt it all and she saw two men enter the room at once, from opposite sides, and she was powerless to do anything but watch. It was like a solar eclipse, but so much more dramatic.
Vitalo was wearing a suit, dark blue, the same one he’d had on that morning when she’d knelt before him and taken him in her mouth. Her stomach twisted. It couldn’t be true.
He looked at her, and his eyes appraised her, trying to read her, but she kept her face expressionless, her haunted eyes averted from him.
“Lorenzo,” Vitalo moved deeper into the room, placing himself between Bella and the other man, as though she was in some kind of danger from the Italian. “What are you doing here?”
Lorenzo was, however, in no mood for even the veneer of civility. “How dare you?” He spat. “It is bad enough that you jerk Kat around for all these years, but to bring her daughter into it? What kind of a sick bastard are you?”
Bella sat there, strangely devoid of response, almost like an outsider looking in. She realized, later, that it was her body’s natural coping mechanism – her body’s way of holding her together for as long as possible.
“That’s enough,” Vitalo spoke quietly, with a firmly controlled voice.
“Oh, it is not enough,” Lorenzo was the opposite, all passion and flame. “How can you sleep with Kat and then get her daughter pregnant? How can you do that to either of them? She loves you,” Lorenzo shouted, and he was mad, in that moment, mad and hurt and suffering badly. He stormed across the room and lifted his fist, pummeling it against Vitalo’s cheek.
Bella gasped.
Vitalo didn’t defend himself, at first. He took the punch, his head ricocheting at the violence of it, and Bella gasped, roused to the present, to the room, no longer able to hide herself away.
“She loves you!” Lorenzo shouted again. “My wife is in love with you and this is what you do to her!”
Vitalo lifted a hand then, catching Lorenzo’s palm before he could issue another punch, and Bella felt a sob bubbling hysterically in her chest.
“She loves you, too,” Vitalo said, thickly, the words dragged from deep inside of him, and each one was like a bullet inside Bella’s gut.
“I hate you!” Lorenzo swore, lifting his other hand and aiming it at Vitalo’s cheek. It connected, but it wasn’t a good punch, landing softly on his jaw.
“Yes,” he said, nodding curtly. “Of course you do.”
Vitalo’s calmness enraged Lorenzo all the more, so he launched at Vitalo and pushed him backwards, towards the sofa. Bella stood up, moving out of the way just in time, before both men fell onto it, a tangle of arms and legs and tanned flesh. She stared at them, and the world tilted completely to the wrong side.
“Stop.” She said, quietly at first, and then over again, with increasing urgency. “Stop. Stop. Stop. Both of you, stop it.” And she stomped her foot and finally they did, they listened to her, parting, their breath torn from their bodies, and she stared at them with rage and disgust.
These two men, fighting over her mother.
There was hurt inside of her, but mostly, there was just immediate, urgent acceptance.
She’d fallen in love with Vitalo, but it had all been too good to be true. She’d fallen in love with him, but hadn’t it been another lie? Just like with Xavier?
For the second time in her life, she’d married a man based on a lie, and she’d let herself hope… she’d let herself believe…
“I’m going to go away for a while,” she spoke to Vitalo, but didn’t look at him. “I think I need to … think. And … be alone.”
He swore, and shoved at Lorenzo once more, and the Italian didn’t offer a fight. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, and Vitalo pushed up, crossing to Bella, grabbing her arms in his strong powerful hands. But she jerked free, and when she looked at him and saw the shining black mark on his cheek that would surely develop into a nasty bruise, she ref
used to feel sympathy.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned, the words quietly spoken but ringing with cold anger.
“Don’t go away,” he said thickly. “Please. Let me explain. I can explain.”
Bella wanted that. How she wanted that! “Were you with her tonight? Is that where you were?”
Vitalo wasn’t expecting that. His expression shifted and his jaw tightened and even before he’d answered, she knew that he had been. If he denied it, she would know it to be a lie.
“Yes,” he bit out. “She wanted to see me.”
Bella nodded, but mentally, she sagged. Too much of it made sense. “She was going to leave my father for you.”
Again, she’d surprised him. She saw the brutal flash of agreement on his features before he could contain it. “I didn’t know that until you told me, the day we did the tree.”
Lorenzo made a snorting noise. “All lies,” he snapped, drawing Bella’s attention. She hadn’t remembered they weren’t alone.
She stared at him – his face as broken as Vitalo’s now, and she shook her head. Two stupid men, fighting over a woman who didn’t deserve either of them. She began to shiver, all over. Her hands were numb and her brain heavy.
“I’m going to go,” she said, nodding, as though committing the plan to herself. “I need to go.”
“Don’t,” Vitalo begged, wrapping his hand around her wrist. “You need to stay.”
“No,” she shook her head, but didn’t pull away. She looked down at their skin, their connection and felt nausea again. It was all a lie. It had all been a lie. She sobbed, then, giving into her grief for a moment, because it hadn’t been a lie for her. She’d fallen completely in love with him.
Her fingers slid the wedding band from her hand and she pushed it into his palm. “Bella,” the word was thick with desperation. “Just wait. Just give me tonight. If you want to go tomorrow, I won’t say a word to stop you, but please, just stay…”
“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head, moving away from him, away from Lorenzo. “Is your driver outside?”
The Evermore Series II: Books 4, 5 and 6 Page 11
