Читать книгу The Italian Count's Defiant Bride - CATHERINE GEORGE, Catherine George - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

TO HIS credit it had not, Alicia conceded now as she reached the hotel chosen as the venue for the party. She handed her raincoat in, then hurried off to the flower-banked function room overlooking Cardiff Bay. She checked with the catering manager, to be told the waitresses were ready to serve the canapés, and the waiters were lined up at the bar, champagne bottles at the ready. At her signal the pianist began to play, and she returned to the entrance to smile in welcome as the first batch of guests arrived.

‘Looking good, Alicia,’ said the managing director jovially. ‘Excellent job.’

‘Thank you.’ She smiled, pleased.

For the next hour Alicia’s entire attention was focussed on making sure that everything ran to plan, and that the press had access not only to the sponsor’s management but to all the celebrities, rugby and otherwise, who were present. Satisfied that drinks were circulating fast enough, she checked that dinner would be served on time—welcome news, since her only meal that day had been a sketchy breakfast. As she rejoined the party the marketing director, who had once played at centre for Cardiff, caught her by the arm.

‘Come with me, my fair Alicia,’ said David Rees-Jones. ‘A guy’s just arrived who says he knows you. I played against him once in a game against Italy.’

She stiffened, alarm bells ringing as David relentlessly towed her through the crowd to join the man at one of the great windows looking down on the water. ‘You remember Francesco da Luca? How come you two know each other?’

Alicia’s eyes narrowed in fierce warning at Francesco.

‘We met years ago in Florence,’ he said smoothly, and took her hand to kiss it. ‘Com’esta, Alicia? You look very beautiful tonight.’

‘She looks beautiful every night, friend,’ said David cheerfully, and with a wink atAlicia excused himself to greet some late arrivals.

‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed, pinning on a bright, social smile.

Francesco’s triumphant answering smile set her teeth on edge. ‘I was invited.’

‘By David?’

‘No.’ He manoeuvred her nearer the window, neatly isolating her from the rest of the room. ‘Last night I dined with some old rugby friends who introduced me to John Griffiths. He was most kind to invite me here tonight.’

Alicia stared, seething, through the window. If his invitation had come from the managing director, she had to grin and bear it. Even if it choked her. ‘Are you here long?’ she asked politely, as though they were strangers.

‘For as long as necessary,’ said Francesco with emphasis, and moved closer. ‘I insist that we talk tonight, Alicia.’

She turned narrowed, hostile eyes on him. ‘Insist?’

He laid a hand on his heart. ‘Mi dispiace. Request is better?’

‘No. As far as I’m concerned, we have nothing to talk about.’

‘But we do, Alicia.’ He took her hand. ‘I will take you home when the party is over.’

She shook her head. ‘The party was over for us a long time ago, Francesco.’

His grasp tightened. ‘Ah no, contessa, you are mistaken.’

‘Neither mistaken nor interested, Francesco. And don’t call me that! Now, let me go, please. Dinner is about to be served.’ Not that she felt hungry any more.

‘Wait,’ he commanded. ‘Why did your mother move from Blake Street?’

Conscious of curious eyes turned in their direction, Alicia kept her smile pinned in place as though they were just indulging in party chat. ‘She got married.’

His eyes softened as he released her. ‘And do you like her husband?’

‘Yes, very much. Now, I’ve got to go—’

‘Not until you tell me where you live.’

Oh well. He had to know sometime. ‘I rent a flat right here in the Bay.’

‘You live alone there?’

She nodded curtly, and hurried off through the crowd.

It seemed like hours before the meal and the speeches were finally over. At last Alicia collected her raincoat and went down to the foyer, where most of the management and their wives and partners were waiting for taxis. And, with them, Francesco da Luca.

‘Well done, Alicia. A triumph for Wales and for the party tonight,’ said John Griffiths with satisfaction. ‘Can we drop you on our way?’

‘I have a taxi waiting,’ said Francesco swiftly.

‘Ah. We leave her in good hands, then.’

Goodnights were exchanged, and before Alicia could argue that she lived near enough to walk home she was giving a taxi driver her address, which Francesco noted down in something he took from his wallet. He needed the information anyway, thought Alicia, resigned. Ever since Bron’s surprise marriage and her move to her husband’s home in Cowbridge, there had been no way for Francesco to demand news of his missing bride. And presumably he wanted to marry again and provide an heir for Montedaluca. In which case he could just send her the necessary papers to sign and that would be that. Mission accomplished.

The ridiculously short journey was accomplished in fraught silence, which lasted after Francesco paid the driver and continued as he followed Alicia into the lift in the foyer of her waterside building. By the time the doors opened at her floor, every nerve in her body was tied in knots.

When she ushered him into her sitting room, Francesco made straight for the glass doors which opened onto a minuscule balcony overlooking the Bay. He turned to her with a smile. ‘You also have a room with a view, Alicia.’

‘It’s why I couldn’t resist the flat,’ she admitted, ignoring the memory his words brought to life. ‘Though the basement swimming-pool and parking facilities make it worth the steep rent.’ She gave him a bright smile. ‘Would you like some coffee, or a drink? I can give you some passable wine.’

‘Grazie, nothing.’ He looked round the room, at the small sofa and the one chair that could be remotely described as comfortable. ‘Let us sit down.’

Alicia took off her raincoat, and conscious, now that she was alone with Francesco, that her caramel silk shift stopped short of her knees and left one shoulder bare, excused herself to put her raincoat away. Feeling defenceless without it, she snatched up an elderly black cardigan and wrapped herself in it to rejoin her uninvited guest.

She took the chair and waved him to the sofa. ‘All right, Francesco. But I warn you, I’m tired. So I hope this won’t take long.’

He sat down, eyeing the cardigan in amusement. ‘If that garment is meant to hide you from me, Alicia, it does not succeed.’ His eyes moved over her in slow, nerve-jangling scrutiny. ‘You have changed much from the shy young girl I first met.’

He had changed too. His face was harder, older, but no less striking than the first time she’d seen it, caught on camera in grinning triumph. ‘I grew up, Francesco. It took me longer than most girls, but the treatment you and the contessa dished out fast-forwarded me into adulthood pretty rapidly in the end.’

Francesco’s jaw clenched. ‘My mother is dead,’ he reminded her.

‘And, as I said in my letter, I’m truly sorry for your loss.’

‘Are you?’

‘Of course. She was the most important person in your life. You must miss her very much.’

‘I do. But I do not pretend that, now she is dead, she was a saint.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I regret that she did not welcome you to our home with warmth.’

That was an understatement for the permafrost which had chilled Alicia to the bone. She shrugged. ‘But she was right when she told me I was an unsuitable bride for her son.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Mamma said this to you?’

‘I’m sure she said it to you, too.’

‘Davverro, but I made it plain to her that you were the only bride I wanted.’

She raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘A pity you didn’t make it plainer to me. Once I arrived in Montedaluca, I began to doubt it more with every passing day. Most people in the castello took their cue from the contessa and made me feel like an outsider. Which I was, of course. Apart from your great-aunt Luisa, and the lady you hired to teach me Italian, hardly anyone spoke to me for the six weeks I lived there—including you. You were so busy during the run-up to the wedding you had no time for me. You turned into a stranger.’ Alicia smiled coldly. ‘Which you were, of course. Until then, I didn’t even know you had a title.’

He shrugged dismissively. ‘Such things mean little now.’

‘It meant a great deal to your mother. The only time she deigned to spend with me was filled with instructions on how a future Contessa da Luca must behave.’ Alicia smiled sardonically. ‘She must have been utterly delighted when I bolted.’

He shook his head. ‘You are wrong. She was ravaged with worry.’

‘You surprise me. I thought she would have been over the moon because you were free again.’

‘But I am not free.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Having married you in the cattedrale in Montedaluca, I am bound to you for life.’

Alicia’s eyes flashed. ‘Cut the drama, Francesco. You can get a divorce easily enough. Or easier still you could just get the marriage annulled after what happened—or didn’t happen—between us.’

‘No one knows this,’ he said, his tone so harsh it startled her. ‘Unless you told your mother, or Megan?’

Alicia shivered and drew the cardigan closer. ‘How could I bear to talk about—about that to anyone?’

‘So what reason did you give your mother for leaving me?’

‘I said I’d made a huge mistake; that it was better to make a clean break right away.’ She smiled. ‘Bron, not surprisingly, wished I’d decided before the ceremony rather than after, but she sympathised totally with my refusal to return to Montedaluca. The contessa was no warmer to her than she was to me, even though Bron did her the courtesy of agreeing to hold the wedding in Montedaluca instead of Cardiff.’

‘But Signora Cross soon had her revenge,’ he said grimly.

Alicia frowned. ‘How, exactly?’

‘When my mother accompanied me to Cardiff to see her—’

‘She did what?’

Francesco’s eyes narrowed. ‘You did not know this?’

‘I most certainly did not!’

‘It was very soon after you left me, Alicia.’

She stared at him in blank astonishment.

‘You do not believe me?’ He shrugged. ‘It is the truth. Your mother swore to me that you had gone away.’

Alicia regrouped hurriedly. ‘I had. When I got back from Paris I was so—so miserable I was sent off with Megan to stay with her grandmother in Hay-on-Wye for a while to recover. Or try to.’

Francesco’s jaw tightened. ‘I was told nothing of this during the visit. Megan’s parents were there to support your mother. Also the large brother.’ He smiled grimly. ‘They were unmoved by my anguish. Your mother insisted that you never wanted to see me again.’

Alicia stared at him, shaken, feeling the warmth drain from her face.

‘You are very pale. Do you have brandy, Alicia?’ asked Francesco gently. He got up to take her by the hand and led her to the sofa.

‘No.’ She tried to smile, but her lips were stiff. ‘I’ll make some tea in a minute.’

‘Tell me what to do and I will make it,’ he commanded.

‘No. First I just need to sit and get my head round this.’

Francesco sat beside her, keeping tight hold of her hand. ‘I swear it is the truth, Alicia.’

‘I’m sure it is. It would be easy enough to disprove. But it’s a shock, just the same,’ she said huskily, her throat thickening. ‘I just wish I’d known.’

‘Piangi!’ he ordered, and held her close.

Alicia obeyed, but not for long. She blew her nose in the handkerchief Francesco produced, but when she tried to move away he held her tightly, one hand sliding under the ancient cardigan to smooth over the silk covering her shoulders.

‘No, piccola. Stay. It is easier to talk like this, no?’

Oh, yes. Half seduced by his touch, the mixed pain and pleasure of his endearment made it all too dangerously easy. But, a voice in her brain quickly reminded her, although his mother had been partly to blame for her headlong escape from matrimony it had been Francesco’s words that had actually sent his bride on the run. Words that had remained, engraved in her mind, ever since. Alicia pushed at his restraining arms until he released her, then went back to the chair. Sniffing inelegantly, she mopped away the last of her tears and smiled at him in bleak apology as she drew the cardigan closer.

‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined your handkerchief.’

‘Gran Dio, what does that matter?’ His eyes glittered like blue flames. ‘When you ran from me you ruined my life!’

Alicia met the look head on. ‘I thought I was giving it back to you, Signor Conte. I was sure you’d go back to your mamma and Montedaluca, glad to be free of your unsatisfactory bride. I’m sure the contessa was thrilled.’

‘As I have told you,’ he said harshly, ‘she was not.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Nevertheless, it is the truth. When she saw my despair, my mother confessed to much regret that she had not behaved well towards you.’

‘To a “freckled schoolgirl with red hair and a figure like a boy”,’ quoted Alicia with deadly accuracy.

Faint colour rose along Francesco’s patrician cheekbones. ‘You overheard?’

‘Except for the Italian for freckles, which I already knew, your mother took good care to speak English.’

‘So that the servants would not understand,’ he said stiffly.

‘But that I would.’ Alicia shrugged. ‘Not that it matters any more, Francesco. That schoolgirl grew up fast.’

‘And no longer has a figure like a boy.’

‘Nor was my hair ever red!’ That was something which had annoyed her almost as much as the rest of the contessa’s comments had hurt.

His eyes moved over her with a look as tactile as a caress. ‘You have matured into an alluring woman, and I was not the only man who thought so tonight.’

‘I see a lot of men in my work,’ she said indifferently.

The eyes slitted. ‘Is there one you see more than others?’

‘Several I look on as friends to share a meal with.’

‘And a bed?’ he demanded.

‘You have no right to ask me that!’

‘I have every right,’ he said through his teeth. ‘I am your husband.’

‘You gave up any right to call yourself that on our wedding night,’ she shot back.

He took in a deep, unsteady breath. ‘Alicia, in my frustration and disilluzione, I uttered words I have regretted bitterly through all the years since. If you could have witnessed my anguish when I found you gone, you would have had your revenge.’

She shrugged impatiently. ‘I wanted escape, not revenge.’

‘And threw your rings on the floor!’

‘Better than having theft added to my sins,’ she retorted. ‘I scrubbed myself, pulled on my old clothes and ran off via the service lift with my back pack, desperate to get away before you came back.’

‘You had no thought that I would be demented, thinking of you alone in Paris?’ Francesco’s jaw tightened. ‘I was such an ogre, Alicia?’

She shrugged. ‘If not an ogre, you were nothing like the man I fell in love with. Though the change had started long before then. When I arrived to stay in Montedaluca before the wedding, you were different, so preoccupied with your business affairs, that you had very little time for me. Almost from the start I began to wonder if I was making a big mistake. But I just didn’t have the courage to put a stop to all the preparations your mother had made. Afterwards I wished to God I had. You said such terrible things; I was heartbroken. But not for long,’ she added quickly. ‘My heart soon healed once I cut you out of it.’

They stared at each other in tense silence.

‘So. Tell me what happened next,’ said Francesco at last.

‘Not much. I spent a long time with Meg, pulling myself together, then I had another holiday alone with Bron in Cornwall. And then I went to college. Only not here in Cardiff, as originally planned.’

‘Because you thought I might trace you there?’

She gave a flippant little laugh. ‘Heavens no, that never occurred to me. I knew you’d rung Bron a few times to ask about me, but because you never came after me—or so I thought—I assumed you were glad to get shot of me. I transferred to the university where Megan was reading law, and I changed to economics because by then an art-history degree with a year’s study in Florence was the last thing I wanted.’ She smiled at him sardonically. ‘You wouldn’t have recognised the convent schoolgirl, Francesco. I was the archetypal student—with body piercing, bare midriff even in the dead of winter, and skirts so short they terrified my mother. I dyed multi-coloured streaks in my hair, drank beer in the union with the rugby team, and partied like mad.’

He sat very still, his eyes locked with hers. ‘You held me responsible for this?’

Alicia nodded vehemently. ‘Of course I did. But after a while Bron read the riot act, and told me I was worrying Megan so much her work was suffering, which meant her parents were worried too. So I put you out of my mind, cut the partying and got down to work myself.’

‘And in time my pride would no longer allow me to continue pleading with Signora Cross for news of you,’ Francesco said bitterly. ‘She is a very strong lady.’

‘Life has shaped her that way.’

‘She has never told you more about your father?’

‘No.’ Suddenly Alicia could take no more. ‘Enough of this, Francesco. Would you please go now?’

He got up at once. ‘Va bene. But I will take you to lunch tomorrow.’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I’m having lunch with Megan.’

‘Then I shall come here in the evening.’ His eyes locked on hers. ‘Make very sure you are here, Alicia. I will not return to Montedaluca until the problem is resolved.’

‘Oh, very well,’ she said wearily. ‘But come after dinner, please.’ No way was she going to prepare a meal for him. ‘Do you want to ring for a taxi?’

‘No.’ His jaw tightened. ‘I will relieve you of my unwanted company immediately. A domani.’

‘Goodnight.’ Well aware that she’d offended him, Alicia saw him to the door. She locked up and turned out the lights, and with a grateful sigh made for her bedroom, suddenly so tired it was a struggle to go through her usual routine before she crawled into bed.

An hour later she gave up all idea of sleeping and got up again, cursing Francesco for spoiling what should have been a wonderful day. Wales had beaten Italy—which for her was a particularly personal triumph—and the party she’d organised had been a success, except for the presence of Francesco da Luca. She should have been on cloud nine. Alicia sighed irritably, made some tea, propped up the pillows on her bed and sat upright against them, unable to get the da Lucas’ visit to her mother out of her mind. In the morning she would ring Bron to get her side of the story before Francesco returned tomorrow night. Bronwen Cross had obviously not wanted her daughter to go back to her bridegroom.

But Alicia felt no animosity towards her mother, who early on in life had learned to make her own way. Bronwen Cross’s father had died when she was twelve, and her mother a relatively short time later during Bron’s first year at Cardiff University. At the time the newly-orphaned Bronwen was lodging in the home of Huw and Eira Davies in a room in the attic flat they let out to students to help pay the mortgage on their Victorian town house.

Huw Davies was a solicitor, and in spite of the long hours he worked in his aim to achieve partnership in his firm he was a godsend to his grieving young lodger in sorting out the legalities after the death of her mother. In exchange Bron looked after his young son, Gareth, during Eira’s trips to the ante-natal clinic at nearby Glossop Terrace, the hospital where the second Davies baby would soon be born.