Читать книгу Angry Desire - CHARLOTTE LAMB - Страница 7

GABRIELLA woke next morning to the sound of a church bell chiming seven. An echo came from across the lake—or was that another church telling the hour? For a moment she lay there, dazedly remembering the incoherent dreams she had been haunted by all night—Stephen’s hard, dark face, his mouth, the heat of his body moving against hers, his hands…

Perspiration broke out on her forehead. With a low groan she sat up in bed and looked around the room. The walls were whitewashed. Last night they had looked rather stark, but this morning they were coloured pinky gold by the sun. She had not closed her shutters last night and had left the window slightly ajar; a gentle breeze was now ruffling the floor-length white gauze curtains.

Gabriella slid out of bed in her thin silky nightdress and walked over to the window, pushed it right open and went out on to her balcony, to be struck dumb by the beauty of the view.

She stood there, staring, blue eyes wide; she hadn’t expected anything like this. Her gaze moved over the ring of mountains, their indented line blue-hazed, majestic, stretching away out of sight, the morning light moving on their peaks where here and there snow still covered the upper slopes, a cloudless sky floating above them and below, on the surface of the lake, their shimmering reflections, white, gold and soft rose.

Como was not a huge lake; it had a domestic intimacy, and she could see the other side of it clearly enough to make out houses, red-roofed and white-walled, gardens with cypress and fir trees, and, on the winding roads along the lakeside, cars moving.

The hotel gardens ran right down to the lake to where she saw a wooden jetty, with a few people waiting on it—men reading newspapers, schoolchildren, women with shopping baskets chatting to one another. On the lake a small ferry boat was chugging towards them at a sedate speed. She watched it dock, nudging the old tyres tied along the jetty. A sailor tied up and the passengers boarded, greeting the jerseyed sailors on board like old friends—which they probably were.

The boat cast off again, crossing the lake again. Gabriella watched it leave. She could see why people who lived here would use the ferry if they wanted to cross the lake. Driving around those narrow, twisting little roads would be hair-raising even in daylight. That’s what I’ll do, she thought; I’ll leave my car at the hotel and explore the lake on the ferry.

She heard cheerful, murmuring voices outside in the corridor, then the whirr of the lift descending—other people going to breakfast, obviously—which reminded her that she had ordered a breakfasttray in her room for eight o’clock. Taking a last look at the view, she turned reluctantly away into her bedroom.

She showered, slid into a towelling robe hanging on the door and sat on the bed to blow-dry her long, silky hair; it took quite a time, so in the end she left it loose, to finish drying naturally, and dressed in a dark blue linen shift dress, leaving her slender legs bare but sliding her feet into white sandals with a tiny heel, a few fine straps of leather criss-crossing the foot, buckled at the ankle.

A few moments later the room-service waiter tapped on her door. He was a young boy in a spotless white uniform, as slender as a girl and doeeyed. He gave her an appreciative look, young though he was—he was, after all, an Italian and enjoyed the sight of a pretty woman. ‘Your breakfast, signorina,’ he said smiling as she admitted him.

‘Grazie,’ she said, leading the way out on to the balcony. In Italian she told him to put the tray down on the small white table.

‘A lovely morning for you,’ he said, as if he had produced that too. His dark eyes admiringly flicked over her from her black hair to her long legs. Clearly he was in no hurry to leave. ‘Is this your first visit to Como?’

‘Yes, and I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Where does the ferry go?’ she asked, pointing to the jetty where a new string of passengers was boarding a different boat.

‘That one?’ He gave it an indifferent glance. ‘That sails between Menaggio, Bellagio and Varenna.’

‘Do all the ferries have the same route?’

‘Oh, no—some go right the way to Como itself, at the far end of one arm of the lake…’

‘One arm?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘The lake is a Y-shape, signorina.’ He pulled a pencil from his pocket and drew a rough outline on a notepad he also carried. ‘Like that. Como is at the end of this upper arm and Lecco is almost at the end of the other arm. The lake divides at Bellagio, then you come down here to Novate.’

‘What a strange shape for a lake! So which town is this?’

He gave her a startled look, his great dark eyes incredulous. ‘This is Menaggio, signorina! You didn’t know that?’

She grinned at him. ‘I drove in here on impulse last night; I was so tired that I didn’t even notice the name of the hotel, let alone the place.’

The boy was in no hurry to leave. ‘Where do you come from? I don’t recognise your accent. You sound southern—are you from Naples?’

She laughed. ‘Close—I was brought up in Brindisi.’

Another waiter appeared below, on the terrace steps, and whistled piercingly. The boy looked down, startled, was given a peremptory gesture and an angry glare, and hurriedly turned away.

‘I must go…Excuse me, signorina.’

He vanished and, smiling wryly to herself, Gabriella sat down and considered her breakfasttray—a glass of orange juice embedded in a bowl of crushed ice, a silver coffee-pot, rolls, a couple of little cakes, butter, a pot of jam, a bowl of fresh black cherries and some frosted green grapes.

She didn’t touch the cakes, but she ate a roll and some of the cherries, drank all the juice and a couple of cups of coffee while she gazed down at the lake, watching the changing reflections until a passing boat sent wide ripples to break them up. People on the jetty were talking to each other cheerfully, their voices drifting to her on the warm air. She thought that it must be nice to live in a small place where you knew everyone; big cities like London could be lonely places.

The telephone made her jump. She turned her head to stare at it in terror.

Who could be ringing her? Nobody knew she was there. Her heart began to beat agonisingly; her skin tightened and turned icy cold. She was trembling as she got up, knocking over the chair she had been sitting on.

The phone still went on ringing; maybe it was the hotel reception desk asking if she was staying another night. Slowly, reluctantly, she crossed the room and stretched out a shaky hand.

‘Hello?’ Her voice was low, husky.

‘Signorina Brooks?’ an Italian voice asked.

‘Yes.’ She was waiting on tenterhooks.

‘A Signor Giovio to see you, signorina.’

She let out a quivering breath, closing her eyes in sick relief. It was only Paolo; he had got her card already and understood its message. She had known he would—he was much too quick not to have got it at first glance. ‘Oh…my cousin, yes; tell him I’ll be down in a moment.’

She brought her tray into her bedroom, then closed the balcony doors and almost flew downstairs. Paolo was waiting for her in the lounge which led out on to the garden terrace.

The room was enormous, with high ceilings from which glittered chandeliers and marble floors across which deep white sofas were scattered. One end was entirely made up of windows, stretching from ceiling to floor, draped in the same white gauze curtains as those which hung in her room; through them you could see the hotel gardens leading down to the lake and they allowed the sun to flood the great room with light.

Paolo stood by them, gazing out. She stopped to stare at him while he was unaware of her. He hadn’t changed much since they’d last met although he was clearly a few years older. He was still a slight figure, his face in profile bony and memorable—not handsome but striking, his sallow skin deeply tanned and his hair jet-black, softly waving down to his shoulders. He was wearing a lightweight pale blue suit; elegantly casual, it looked expensive. Did he buy designer clothes now?

As if becoming aware of her presence he turned, their eyes met and a smile lit his thin face. ‘So, there you are!’ he said in Italian, holding out both hands, and she ran to take them.

‘I knew you’d understand the card.’

‘Of course,’ he dismissed, shrugging. His slanting eyes skimmed her face. ‘You don’t look as terrible as you sounded last night. Sleep well?’

She nodded but perhaps the memory of her bad dreams showed in her face, because Paolo frowned.

Some other guests wandered into the room, giving them curious looks. Gabriella opened the tall glass door into the garden.

‘Let’s walk by the lake. I’m dying to get a closer look at it. Isn’t it breathtaking? How long have you been here?’

‘A couple of weeks.’ Paolo fell into step beside her as she began to descend the stone steps towards the lakeside. ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’

She stopped on the jetty and leaned on the wooden rail, staring out towards another town on the far side of the lake. ‘Where’s that?’ she asked, pointing.

‘Varenna,’ Paolo said in a dry tone, knowing that she was delaying any more intimate talk.

‘Is it worth visiting?’

‘It’s small but pretty; there are some nice gardens to see. Are we going to talk about the scenery or are you going to tell me why you ran away?’

She went on staring across the lake and didn’t answer.

Paolo drew a folded newspaper from under his arm and offered it to her. Frowning, Gabriella took it, looked at the front page and with a leap of the nerves saw that it was an English paper.

‘Page five,’ he said.

Hands trembling she turned the pages and saw her own face, grey and blurred, in a photo which she didn’t remember being taken—she and Stephen arriving at a theatre for a very starry first night. Feverishly she skimmed the story; it was short on facts but those it had were mostly about Stephen and it pretended sympathy for him at being left at the altar.

Somehow the reporter made her sound like a bimbo—a gold-digger who had probably run off with an even richer man, although none was actually suggested. The story did, however, claim that she had not sent back her engagement ring, which was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and added that she had got other valuable jewellery out of Stephen, all of which she had also kept.

She crushed the paper in her hands and looked at Paolo, stricken. ‘You bought this here?’

He nodded. ‘There’s a good newsagent who sells a few foreign newspapers. This was the only popular English paper on sale this morning but he said he’d had half a dozen copies of this one. If you look at the date you’ll see that it was out in England yesterday.’

Pale, she said, ‘So others may have read the story.’

Paolo nodded grimly and took the screwed-up paper, smoothing it out again to study Stephen’s face in the grey photo. ‘Is it a good likeness?’

She glanced at the hard face, the fleshless cheekbones, the cool grey eyes, that insistent jawline. A little shiver ran through her.

‘Yes.’

Paolo screwed the newspaper up again and tossed it into a nearby refuse bin.

‘What did he do to you?’

She gave a choky little sigh. ‘Nothing—nothing at all. Poor man, he must be utterly bewildered—that’s why I couldn’t tell him face to face.’

‘That would have been an idea,’ Paolo said without inflexion.

She flinched as if from an accusation, guilt in her eyes, and shot him a distraught look. ‘I know—I know I should have, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t talk to him. He would never have understood unless I told him…and I couldn’t talk about it, Paolo; I still can’t talk about it.’

‘Ah,’ he said on an indrawn breath. ‘So. That is what it is all about.’

She turned to look at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. ‘Oh, you’re so quick; you always know what I’m talking about. That’s why I came here to find you—at least you’ll understand. I can talk to you without having to dot every I and cross every T.’

He touched her cheek with one fingertip. ‘I had a suspicion that this might be behind it, but it’s years ago—you should have had therapy, you know, talked it out with a professional.’

‘I couldn’t.’ Her pink mouth was stubborn, unhappy. The breeze blew her black hair across her cheek and she brushed it away angrily.

‘That’s just why you ought to try!’

‘Anyway, nothing really happened. I’m not the victim of some horrible crime.’

‘Crimes of the heart can be as disastrous.’

Another sigh shook her. ‘Yes. Don’t let’s talk about it.’

He grimaced. ‘OK. Tell me how you met this guy Stephen Durrant, then—tell me about him. He didn’t make a great impression on me on the phone.’

She turned and walked further along the lake, under a line of magnolia trees in bloom, their flowers perched like great white birds on the glossy green leaves.

‘Stephen heads a big property company…DLKC Properties. I don’t expect you’ll have heard of them.’

‘I have,’ Paolo said, shooting a narrowed glance at her. ‘So he’s behind them, is he? I thought they were an international consortium.’

‘They are, but Stephen is the main shareholder.’

‘He must be very rich, then. They weathered the storm when property took a nosedive a few years back. A lot of other companies were wiped out but DLKC survived intact.

‘A friend of mine bought a flat in a block they built in Tenerife—it was brilliantly designed, and a nice place to live, I thought. The landscaping was excellent—well laid out gardens, a nice-sized pool…’ He stopped and grinned down at her. ‘Sorry; you know how obsessed I am with design.’

‘I remember,’ she said, smiling back. ‘And you know I love my work too. I’m always sorry for people who don’t enjoy their job.’

‘Does Stephen Durrant enjoy his?’

She couldn’t put Paolo off the scent. She looked at him wryly.

‘Stephen lives for his work; he rarely has time for anything else.’

‘Including you?’

She looked away, across the lake. ‘He made time for me. When he remembered.’

‘Ah,’ Paolo said again. ‘Did that make you angry?’

‘Angry?’ She was taken aback by the question. ‘Why should it?’

But hadn’t she resented the fact that Stephen had so little time and saw her so rarely? At the same time, though, she had been relieved, because she was afraid of him getting too close, becoming too important to her. Afraid of him, of herself.

Why are you such a coward? she thought wildly. Why are you so scared of everything?

‘He has a reputation as a bit of a hard man, doesn’t he?’ murmured Paolo, watching her troubled face.

She turned away, picked a leaf from a bush and crumpled it in her cold hands, inhaling the aromatic scent of the oils released.

‘Well, he’s very successful. I suppose most successful people are pretty tough.’

Paolo nodded thoughtfully. ‘Is he a self-made man? He sounds like one.’

‘He built his business up himself, but he inherited a small building firm from an uncle when he was twenty.’

‘How old is he now?’

‘Thirty-six.’

‘Did the age-gap bother you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been interested in anyone my own age; I prefer older men.’ She stopped dead, catching Paolo’s eyes, and flushed scarlet, then went dead white. Hurriedly she walked on and he caught up with her.

After a moment or two he said, ‘But you’re scared of Stephen, aren’t you?’

‘If you knew him, you’d be scared of him.’

‘Then why in God’s name did you agree to marry him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she wailed, her face working in anguish.

‘Surely to God you knew how you felt about him, Gabriella?’ Paolo sounded impatient, angry with her, and that made her feel worse. She was terrified of angry scenes, of someone looking at her accusingly, blaming her. Tears stung her eyes.

‘I felt…safe…with him…’ she whispered, and Paolo was silent for a moment.

‘What changed?’

She didn’t answer, looking away.

Paolo said, ‘I take it that he is in love with you?’

Her long black hair blew across her face again, in blinding strands, and she didn’t push it away this time. Her eyes hidden, she whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

Paolo’s voice hardened. ‘Oh, come on, mia cara, you must know how he feels about you!’

She knew Stephen wanted her physically—that fact had been blazingly obvious when he had lost control and started making love to her with that terrifying heat. She shivered. He had never been like that before. Why that night?

But she knew why; she had known at the time although in her sheer blind panic she hadn’t allowed herself to think about her own guilt. Now she did, and Paolo frowned as he watched her changing, disturbed face.

‘Don’t look like that. It can’t be that bad!’

Can’t it? she thought, staring across at the sunlit, white-capped mountains and remembering her mood that last evening. She had been edgy, shy, uneasy, but she had tried to hide it because she and Stephen had been the guests of honour at a pre-wedding party given for them by Stephen’s elder sister, Beatrice, in her beautiful Regent’s Park home. In her late forties, she was the wife of a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office. Gabriella had only met her half a dozen times but she liked her, in spite of her formidable manner, which Beatrice had in common with her brother.

Beatrice didn’t resemble Stephen physically—she was small and fair and blue-eyed. Stephen said that she took after their mother. His younger sister, Anne, had married a Spaniard and lived in Barcelona—she had been at the party too, but Gabriella hadn’t seen much of her. There had been so many people there and she had known only a handful of them—mostly friends of Stephen’s whom she had met before.

She had never met his nephew Hugo before; she wished to God that she hadn’t met him that night.

‘Talk to me,’ Paolo said and she started, looking round at him, her face chalky white and her eyes lost and childlike. He drew a sharp breath. ‘For heaven’s sake! What on earth happened to put that look in your eyes?’

She swayed and he put an arm round her, glancing behind them. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, leading her towards a wooden bench at the edge of the hotel gardens. Her legs were trembling so much that she was glad to sit down. She leaned back, closing her eyes.

After a minute she said huskily, ‘I realise it sounds stupid, but then I have been stupid with Stephen. I don’t really know him. I should never have got engaged, and honestly, Paolo, I don’t know how he really feels about me; I can’t remember him ever saying he was in love with me.’

Paolo looked incredulously at her. ‘Not even when he proposed?’

She shook her head.

From the beginning she had been very ambivalent about Stephen, about their relationship—not sure where it was going or if she should be seeing him at all. When she was with him she was never bored, though; time flashed past, although she could never remember afterwards anything that he had said or anything much that had happened. Looking back on all those evenings with him, she could only remember his face, his grey eyes, his deep voice murmuring.

If he went abroad, and she didn’t see him for a week or so, she thought about him all the time. She didn’t understand him, yet she couldn’t forget him, and although she kept telling herself that she would stop seeing him she never did. When he rang to invite her out she always accepted if she was free, and Stephen knew which nights she worked so he usually made sure to ask her out on her free evenings.

On his thirty-sixth birthday he had taken her to dinner at a very exclusive Mayfair restaurant, whose chef was something of a hero of hers. The food had been marvellous, and she had drunk more wine than usual and felt as if she was floating. Stephen had watched her across the table, his eyes half veiled by heavy lids, and she had been hypnotised by that deep stare, gazing back in sleepy languor while they sipped superb coffee.

‘You look lovely in that dress; you should wear white more often,’ he’d said.

The compliment had made her flush, and she’d lowered her eyes.

Stephen had stretched a commanding hand across the table and taken her hand, moving his thumb softly up and down against her wrist.

‘Gabriella, turning thirty-six has made me stop and think about the way my life is going. I’ve been too busy building up my business to have time to think of marriage, but since I met you I’ve realised how much has been missing from my life for years. Living alone isn’t natural for human beings—we need each other too much—but I was always so busy that I never had time to see just how lonely I was.’

She had stared, struck dumb. What was he saying? Was he going to ask her to live with him, share his bed, to move into that huge penthouse apartment of his? He couldn’t be asking her to marry him!

She had never quite known why he kept seeing her, or what he wanted—and she had been so shy with him that she hadn’t dared ask. She had hoped, stupidly, that their relationship would go on in that undemanding, tranquil way.

The moment that he had proposed had been the end of her illusions, although it hadn’t dawned on her at once that everything had changed that night. She had been too bewildered.

‘I’ll be forty in a few years, and the clock is ticking faster. I want a family while I’m young enough to enjoy them,’ he had gone on quietly. ‘How do you feel about having children? I’ve noticed you with your cousin’s baby; you seem to love looking after him—do you want some of your own?’

Her eyes had glowed. She adored Tommy, her cousin Lara’s baby, and she had given Stephen an instinctive, unthinking reply. ‘I love children, especially when they’re babies; I love to hold them, all milky and smelling of talcum. I envy Lara having Tommy. She says she doesn’t want any more—it’s too much like work—but I’d like at least four. I was an only child and I was always lonely. I told myself then that I’d make sure that I had more than one child.’

Now she thought, Why did I say all that? I knew what he might be going to say—why didn’t I lie, tell him that I didn’t want children and he should ask someone else? Why did I babble on like that, misleading him, giving him the wrong impression?

Did I secretly want to marry him? Or was it the same old weakness that has always haunted my life—the inability to recognise danger, to avert catastrophe?

He had picked up her hands and held them loosely, watching the way that her face lit up as she talked about babies, and, when she had finally run out of words and stopped breathlessly, he said, ‘Then will you marry me, Gabriella?’

She looked now at Paolo and gave a long sigh. ‘I thought he was marrying me because he wanted a family.’ That was the truth, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

Paolo’s brows shot up. ‘Then you realised that you would be sleeping with him?’

She blushed. ‘Yes, but…’ Knowing something with your conscious mind was one thing; realising it at the very deepest level was another. It all depended on how you perceived a situation. Stephen had asked her if she wanted children and she did; she loved the idea of having a baby of her own, and finally belonging to a real family again. That had been one aspect of his proposal and their engagement—she had closed her eyes to another aspect of it.

That was why when Stephen had lost control and all that passion had flared out of him she had gone into blinding panic.

If he had acted that way on the night that he had proposed she would have run like hell. But he had been so different then; he had told her softly, ‘I’ll make you happy, Gabriella!’ and she had been lulled into false optimism by that gentleness, the apparent lack of passion. She had drifted into engagement without realising what dangerous waters lay ahead, had let him put his ring on her finger, had let him arrange the wedding, had sat and nodded when he’d made suggestions, had allowed his personal assistant to organise it all, even the invitations to her few friends and family.

The closest of her family were all dead, of course. She only had distant relatives, and her bridesmaids were to have been one of Stephen’s nieces and two of her old college friends—and Lara, who was to have been matron of honour in warm peach silk. The rest on the enormous wedding guest list were Stephen’s friends and colleagues—some of them wealthy and influential. What would they all be thinking? What would Stephen have told them? Perhaps they would jump to the conclusion that she had run off with another man.

‘He suspects you’ve run off with another man,’ Paolo said, as if picking up on her thoughts—as he’d sometimes done in the past, she remembered. They had some sort of mental link; it had always been there, even when they were children. Thoughts flashed from one to the other like electric sparks.

She looked up at him anxiously. ‘Did he say so?’

‘I picked it up from his voice. Mia cara, that is a very jealous man, jealous as hell—I could smell the fire and brimstone down the telephone line!’

She flinched. Yes, Stephen probably did suspect that she had run off with someone. When someone fled from marriage to one man, it was usually to go to another. But jealous? Stephen? Was he? That would be yet another shock discovery, if it was true. I hardly know him at all, she thought; he’s as much a mystery to me as he was the day I met him.

‘He’ll want explanations, answers,’ Paolo warned her. ‘And you had better have them ready. I have a shrewd idea that he will keep looking for you no matter how long it takes, Gabriella.’

She got up and began to hurry back towards the hotel as if running away again—and that might have been the best plan. Now that Stephen had found Paolo he might hire a private detective to check to see if she was in Como. But there were other places she might go, and he had no idea how close she and Paolo were. Surely he would hunt elsewhere first?