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Maybe the hurt had gone deeper than she’d expected. He’d had more than twelve months to get over it, but his jabbing little remarks weren’t accidental.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect you’d understand.’
‘Was there another man?’ he asked abruptly. And looked around again, as if searching for evidence. ‘Have you left him too?’
Roxane’s temper snapped. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ He couldn’t conceive that she’d just wanted to be alone, that she could manage on her own? ‘Another man, after living with you for nearly three years?’
At her scorching tone he looked arrested, almost confused. She added, ‘And how dare you suggest I was unfaithful?’
Her anger seemed to give him pause. He shot a look at her from under his brows. ‘For months I tortured myself with the thought…’
It hadn’t even occurred to Roxane that he would think that. How could he have…? This was further proof that he’d never really known her, never bothered to comprehend her deepest needs. A small ache shifted from somewhere near her heart and lodged in her throat, stifling her voice. ‘You were wrong.’
A lifting of his shoulder, a tilt of his head, seemed to indicate it was not important. But of course it was. His pride would have suffered, and he had a surfeit of that. If the truth were known, pride was probably the real reason he had refrained from sending someone looking for her, rather than respect for her stated wishes.
‘You broke your other marriage vows,’ he said. ‘Why not that one?’
‘It’s different!’
‘How?’
The question was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, you were wrong,’ she reiterated.
He gave her a piercing stare, and nodded as if accepting that. ‘And now?’ he inquired softly.
‘Now?’ About to snap a hot rejoinder, Roxane paused, her chin lifting. ‘Now my private life is my own.’
His eyes narrowed, and she had to resist an instinct to let hers skitter away.
A shrill burring made her jump, and she said foolishly, ‘That’s my phone.’
Careful not to rise too hurriedly this time, she went to the hallway to lift the receiver. ‘Yes?’
Zito stood regarding her through the open door while she tried to give her attention to the caller. ‘Yes, Leon.’
Wrenching her gaze from Zito’s inimical stare, at the corner of her eye she saw him swing round and disappear from her line of sight.
‘Saturday?’ Roxane forced herself to concentrate. ‘Yes, it is short notice. Wait while I get my diary.’
She dug it from the bag she’d left by the phone. ‘You do mean Saturday next week? What kind of party? If it’s black tie formal…’
Leon assured her it wasn’t. An impromptu welcome home, he said, for a son returning from overseas with his new fiancée. ‘A family affair. About a hundred guests.’
‘Just an intimate little gathering?’ Roxane felt sorry for the unknown young woman. ‘So the relatives get to cast their eyes over the bride-to-be?’
‘It could lead to more introductions. These people are some of Auckland’s best-known socialites. I hope you’re free to supervise as well as make the arrangements?’
Roxane’s own social life was low-key and intermittent. ‘I’ll be there on the night,’ she promised.
‘I know I can rely on you.’
Silly to feel a glow of satisfaction at the banal words, but when she returned to the little sitting room after hanging up, her lips were curved in pleasure.
Zito was standing at the long old-fashioned window. He faced her as she paused inside the door, and his eyes didn’t match his casual tone when he spoke. ‘Boyfriend?’
She didn’t have a boyfriend, but the suggestion made her hesitate before answering. ‘Business.’
‘Business?’ he repeated sceptically. ‘At this time of night?’
‘It’s not that late.’ She checked her watch. Just after nine.
Zito brushed that aside. ‘Saturday night—a party? An intimate party. Did you really need to consult your diary, or was that just to keep him on his toes?’
‘You’re being absurd.’
He came away from the window. His eyes were obsidian, glowing with a dark fire, his high cheekbones outlined with dusky colour under his natural tan. ‘Absurd, am I?’
‘Yes!’
Maybe it was the fierce contempt in her tone that stopped him, just a few feet from her. Certainly it was the first time she’d ever stood up to him like this.
‘So who is this bride-to-be?’ he shot at her. ‘You? Because if so, you’ve forgotten a small detail, haven’t you?’
Roxane was so astonished she laughed.
And saw again, with a surge of strange triumph, that she’d unsettled him. She had never seen Zito wrongfooted so many times in the space of—what? Half an hour?
It was a peculiarly heady sensation.
Tempted to let him retain his hasty assumptions, she decided that would be unnecessarily childish. Crisply, she informed him, ‘That was my boss. We organise and cater events, mostly for corporates and big business, but he was asking me to make the arrangements for a private welcome home and engagement party for a client’s son.’
Zito stared at her as if trying to decide whether she was telling the truth, then he sank abruptly onto the nearby couch and bowed his head, his fingers combing through the black strands, and muttered something she couldn’t catch.
After a small hesitation Roxane sat in one of the armchairs facing him. Knees and ankles pressed together, she folded her hands in her lap. Capable hands, the nails allowed to grow just over the tips, and glossed with clear satin polish. Ringless hands. Hastily she covered the left one with her right.
When she looked up Zito was leaning against the couch cushions, looking disgruntled, his long legs sprawled in front of him. ‘I’ve been stupid tonight,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Clumsy and stupid.’
Startled by the admission, Roxane didn’t argue, regarding him warily.
His eyelids drooped as his gaze lowered to her mouth, and then without haste traversed her body, making her skin prickle pleasurably in reluctant response. ‘I should have caught up and stopped you after you got off that bus,’ he said.
‘Instead of scaring me witless?’
‘When did you know it was me?’
When he’d called her ‘darling’ in his unforgettable, dark-melted-chocolate-and-brandy voice, that she’d always imagined held a trace of his Italian ancestry, although he was a second-generation Australian.
‘Just before I hit you,’ she told him.
He laughed. She remembered that he’d laughed then too, although the slap must have hurt.
Old emotions stirred, treacherously. Against the quickening in her blood she curled her hands, gripping one inside the other.
To quell the memories she said, ‘What were you doing in Ponsonby Road, anyway? For that matter, what are you doing in Auckland?’
‘We’re thinking of opening a New Zealand branch of Deloras. I was dining at GPK.’
‘Checking out the possible competition?’ Zito’s grandfather had arrived in Australia as a penniless assisted immigrant, and worked as a dishwasher and kitchen hand until he opened his own small restaurant, and then another, and another. Over the years the family business had become a multi-million dollar Australian institution.
And now they were planning to expand across the Tasman Sea and conquer the New Zealand market?
‘Combining business with…pleasure,’ Zito said.
Her skin tightened. ‘You were with a woman.’
Of course he hadn’t been eating alone. And of course his companion had been female.
‘A woman I won’t be seeing again.’
‘I’m not surprised, if you left her flat in the middle of a meal.’ The waspishness of her voice was simply on account of his unusual lapse of manners, Roxane assured herself. She had no right to be jealous. And of course she wasn’t. ‘What on earth did you say to her?’
‘I apologised, gave her some money for the meal and a taxi, and said I’d phone her in the morning.’
Poor woman. Roxane very nearly laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky if she accepts the call.’
‘I’ll send her some flowers,’ he said dismissively.
‘Oh, that’s sure to bring her round.’ That and his notoriously irresistible charm. ‘You’ll have her eating out of your hand in no time.’
She’d irritated him. ‘As a gesture of apology,’ he said. ‘I told you I won’t be seeing her again. She’s a casual acquaintance—nothing more.’
Who had probably hoped to be much more. The woman would never know what a lucky escape she’d had.
Roxane knew she was being unfair. An older, more sophisticated woman, more sure of herself than Roxane had been when she married Zito might have been perfectly happy—and made him happy too. She took a deep breath, blinked fiercely and stared at a blank spot on the wall.
‘What’s wrong, Roxane?’
Strangely, he sounded as if he really cared about the answer. Roxane blinked again and made herself look at him, saying the first thing that came into her head. ‘I haven’t eaten since lunch. I’m hungry.’
The remark must have spilled out of her subconscious, perhaps triggered by his talk of an abandoned dinner.
And for some reason it seemed to make him angry again. ‘Will you never learn to look after yourself?’ he asked.
‘I have,’ she replied icily. ‘If you hadn’t attacked me and dragged me in here and poured brandy down my throat, I’d have had something to eat by now.’
That was probably half the reason for her sluggish light-headedness—shock followed by alcohol on an empty stomach.
‘I can fix that.’ He got up. ‘Where’s your kitchen?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’ He was already leaving the room. ‘I’ll find it.’
‘Zito…’ She stood up too, following after him while he strode along the short passageway and unerringly found the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Zito,’ she repeated as he switched on the light, ‘I don’t need you to fix anything for me.’
He turned and gave her his most dazzling smile. Generations of charismatic Italian genes had produced that smile.
Taking her arm, he drew her to the small round table in the window corner, pulled out one of the aqua blue spray-painted wooden chairs and planted her on the cheerful patterned seat cushion. ‘I’m still hungry too. And there’s no reason you should have to cook for me. Just sit there and tell me where everything is.’
He slipped his coat and tie off to hang them over the other chair, and rolled his sleeves up muscular olive-skinned forearms as he went to the sink to wash his hands.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She’d been tired after working late, she’d probably gone to sleep at the desk in her inner city office, and this was all a bad dream. Zito wasn’t really here in her kitchen, opening cupboards to haul out pans, finding a jar of pasta on a shelf, demanding to know if she had red onions and tomatoes, was the garlic bulb he’d discovered with the onions all she had, and were there any cloves?
‘In the cupboard next to the fridge,’ she answered automatically, as she’d answered all the other questions. She watched him shake cloves into his hand and sniff at them, eyes closed, his long lashes a black crescent against golden-brown skin as he inhaled the sweet-pungent scent.
He’d always done that, checking for freshness and potency the way his grandfather had taught him.
Every time the staff who had run their big white house in Melbourne had their days off, Zito had taken Roxane down to the huge, spectacularly well-equipped kitchen and they’d make a meal together.
‘Smell that,’ he’d say, after doing so himself, and she’d bend over his cupped palm, breathing in the scent of newly ground pepper, an exotic spice or a freshly chopped herb before he tipped it into whatever dish he was preparing.
He’d pause in the middle of slicing an apple or a crisp, barely ripe cucumber, taste a piece and then turn and hold out another bit for her to take in her mouth.
Sometimes she’d playfully nip his fingers, inviting retribution in kind. He’d scold her for distracting him from the serious business of cooking and promise her an erotic punishment, deferred until the evening.
But not always deferred after all, so that much later they would rise from a tumbled bed and after showering together return to the kitchen, perhaps wearing only a robe apiece, and resume the interrupted preparations. The food tasted even better for the delay in one kind of gratification to the satisfaction of another.
Making a meal had been foreplay, a seductive art that Zito practised with the same unselfconscious, epicurean enjoyment that he brought to their lovemaking.
An art that had not diminished in the last year. Despite the inadequate work counter and the inconvenient placing of fridge and cooker, he demonstrated the same competence and controlled flamboyance that he had in his perfectly planned workspace with its acres of tiles and stainless steel. He even managed, apparently by instinct, to avoid hitting his head on the low-hung cupboards.
A bad dream? No, rather a blissfully sweet one, but unbearably nostalgic.
Roxane had told him once that his cooking style was like Russian ballet—so much honed masculine muscle disciplined to graceful and occasionally extravagant use within a defined space reminded her of the male dancers.
Zito laughed and said, ‘Aren’t they all gay?’
‘Not all of them,’ she’d protested, and he’d demanded to know how she knew, playing the jealous Latin lover, and finally swept her off to bed to prove that he was definitely, unmistakably heterosexual.
CHAPTER THREE
UNCONSCIOUSLY Roxane’s lips curved in a wistful, reminiscent smile.
He’d had no need to prove his sexual orientation to her. It had been blatantly obvious from the first time she’d looked into his eyes. Despite her inexperience Roxane had recognised with a small starburst of excitement the quickly controlled but unmistakable flame of sexual desire. A flame that had ultimately consumed her, leaving behind the ashes of a marriage and a troublesome, glowing ember of reciprocal hunger.
An ember, she admitted with inward dismay, that removing herself from his dangerously flammable orbit, settling in another country, rebuilding her life without him, had failed to destroy. The sound of his voice, his breath warming her temple, the touch of his lips on the vulnerable skin of her wrist, had been enough to bring it flaring back to instant life.
‘You had a bottle of Te Awa Farm Boundary in that cabinet in the other room,’ Zito said, lowering a handful of spaghetti into a pot.
Roxane mentally shook herself, irrationally glad that she needn’t be ashamed of her choice of that increasingly less rare commodity, a good New Zealand red. Zito had taught her to recognise decent wines. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘No, stay there.’ His hand pressed her back into the chair as he passed her on his way to the door.
But she got up all the same, needing to do something to banish the bittersweet memories. By the time Zito came back carrying an already opened bottle and two glasses, she had spread a cotton cloth on the table and set two places. And was standing staring at them, thinking, Why am I doing this? If I had any guts I’d have shown him the door and told him not to come back.
He poured wine into glasses, handing one to Roxane. ‘Sit.’
She sat.
Habit, she told herself, watching a knife flash through an onion. During their marriage she’d become accustomed to letting him tell her what to do, and it had taken her less than sixty minutes to slip back into the mould he’d shaped for her.
Zito picked up a tomato and cut easily through the shiny red skin. Always buy good knives. That was something else he’d taught her. On moving into the cottage she’d treated herself to the best German stainless steel, although she could ill afford it.
Subconsciously she had still been under the spell he’d woven about her.
This mood of stunned acquiescence was due to shock. When they’d eaten she would assert herself, thank him politely and then tell him to go.
She shifted her gaze from his lean, strong fingers pinching tips of fragrant thyme from the collection of herbs on the window ledge, and reached for the luminous ruby wine, letting it slide down her throat like liquid satin.
Zito poured wine from the bottle into the concoction he was stirring on the cooker, intensifying the tantalising aroma that was making Roxane’s taste buds come alive.
Soon he set before her a plate of spaghetti coils dressed with butter and herbs, topped by a mouth-watering garlic-scented sauce and garnished with fresh basil.
Then he sat opposite her, lifting his wineglass in a silent toast before picking up a fork and expertly winding spaghetti around the tines.
Instead of eating it he offered it to her, leaning across the small table, and automatically Roxane opened her lips and accepted the delicious mouthful.
Nobody cooked spaghetti sauce like Zito. Involuntarily she closed her eyes to better appreciate the taste. This too was a remembered ritual, and behind her tightly shut lids tears pricked.
She swallowed, licked a residue of sauce from her lower lip, then dared to open her eyes, hoping Zito would be concentrating on his meal.
He was smiling at her, his gaze alert and quizzical and a deliberate sexual challenge as it moved from her mouth to her eyes.
‘It’s…’ Roxane cleared her throat. ‘It’s great, as always.’
He never made exactly the same sauce twice, varying the ingredients and the amounts according to his mood and what was available—or according to his assessment of her mood of the moment. But each variation was a masterpiece, and tonight’s was no exception.
‘Good.’ As if he’d needed her seal of approval, he applied himself to his plate. ‘It would have been better if I’d made the spaghetti myself, but this is not bad.’
‘It’s made on the premises I buy it from.’ He’d spoiled her for the ordinary supermarket kind.
Roxane had never mastered the tricky business of twirling spaghetti round a fork without some strands trailing all the way back to the plate, or having the whole lot perversely slide off just as she lifted it to her mouth.
Zito let his fork rest several times as he watched her efforts, a quirk of amusement on his mouth.
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said finally, exasperated. ‘You know I’m no good at this.’
He did laugh then, openly. ‘Look—like this.’ His hand came over hers, his fingers manipulating the fork, lifting it to her mouth with every strand neatly rolled.
She pulled her hand from his as she swallowed the proffered morsel. Dozens of times he’d tried to teach her, yet she’d failed to learn, maintaining it was in his genes, that he’d been born with a silver spaghetti fork in his mouth.
‘I’m out of practice.’ And with him critically studying her technique, she was clumsier than usual. ‘I hardly ever eat pasta now.’ What they were having was left over from a recent dinner she’d made for a couple of friends.
‘No wonder you’ve got thinner.’ His penetrating glance at her figure disapproved.
‘I’m not thin!’
‘Thinner, I said,’ he corrected. ‘You’re as lovely as ever—’
‘Thank you.’ Her voice was brittle.
‘—but you’ve lost weight.’
‘I’m getting more exercise than I used to. It’s healthy.’ She’d begun walking to work to save the bus fare when she’d been living in rental accommodation and her casual job wasn’t paying much. But she’d enjoyed the early morning exercise, except when Auckland’s fickle weather turned nasty. Her present job being largely desk-bound, walking to the office was a good way of keeping fit. ‘Do you still play squash?’
‘Yes.’
At one time he’d been a state champion; trophies lined the bookcase in his study where he sometimes worked at home. But after he turned twenty-five the business had gradually absorbed more of his energies. His grandfather had retired and his father had been anxious to groom the heir to take his place in the family firm.
‘How is your family?’ Roxane inquired.
‘Do you care?’
There it was again, that flash of acrimony like a searing flame darting through the steely armour of politeness.
‘Yes, I do,’ she said steadily. ‘I like your parents, and I miss your sisters, they were fun and very good to me. And your grandfather is a darling.’
‘But not his grandson.’
Roxane stopped trying to persuade a stubborn strand of spaghetti onto her fork and looked up. ‘I told you, Zito, it wasn’t—’
His closed fist thumped on the table, making the glasses jump, the wine shiver and sparkle in the light from overhead. ‘You told me nothing! Nothing that made any sense!’
Roxane had jumped too, and she felt her face go taut and wary.
He said immediately, wearily, ‘I didn’t intend to scare you again. This can wait.’
Zito had never believed in mixing food and argument, maintaining it spoiled both of them, that each deserved to be enjoyed in its own way. Nine times out of ten, he said, after a good meal an argument didn’t seem worth the effort.
Nine times out of ten he’d been right. And the tenth time, his way of resolving any issue between the two of them had been to make love to her until she could no longer think, until nothing seemed to matter but her need for him, and his for her, and every problem dissolved in the aftermath of passion. They had never, she thought with surprise, had a real quarrel.
‘Eat,’ he said, and she realised she’d been caught in a net of insidious remembrance while her food cooled.
A childish spurt of rebellion urged her to put down her fork and tell him she didn’t want any more. Instead she twirled more spaghetti and lifted it carefully to her mouth.
‘Do you feed yourself properly?’ he asked her.
‘I have perfectly adequate meals. Salads, lean meat, fish…soup in winter, and vegetables.’
He made a sound deep in his throat as though he didn’t think much of that. ‘Do you entertain?’
‘My personal entertaining tends to be impromptu and informal.’ The cottage couldn’t comfortably be used for large gatherings. Even the dining room that previous owners had carved from the original big old-fashioned kitchen didn’t have space for more than a table for six and a sideboard.
‘Tell me about this job of yours,’ Zito invited.
‘I started work with Leon’s catering firm soon after I arrived in Auckland, as casual labour. At first I was just serving food and laying tables, working lots of overtime…’ She’d needed the money. ‘After a couple of months he asked me to join the permanent staff.’
Leon had been impressed by her quickness, her reliability and her initiative. She remembered the inordinate thrill his praise had given her. ‘I could see,’ she went on, ‘that some clients would have liked more than food. Someone to organise invitations, publicity, venues—take care of the details of running a successful affair.’
‘You could see?’ Zito tilted his head.
That wasn’t disbelief, Roxane told herself. It’s just interest. Don’t be touchy.
‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘So I ran the idea past Leon and he said, “Let’s try it,” and put me in charge.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Just like that,’ she confirmed, and tried not to look smug. ‘I’m very good at what I do, and now I have the salary to prove it.’ Soon she would be able to afford new furniture and a few luxury items.
‘Congratulations.’
‘It’s small beer compared to the Riccioni empire, but so far we’re a roaring success.’
‘Deloras isn’t an empire, it’s a family business,’ Zito argued testily.
‘A family business worth millions.’ Maybe billions. She had never been privy to financial details.
‘That isn’t a crime. We all work very hard.’
‘I know you do.’ It was true of the men in the family anyway. The women weren’t expected to take part directly, as had been made very clear to her.
She was to keep house, which in practice meant ‘ordering’ a staff of three experienced people for a household of two, preside at parties and formal dinners for which the catering was performed by Deloras chefs and waiters, and attend functions that often seemed to have no other purpose than to allow the Deloras men to parade their success in the form of the clothes, jewels, beauty and breeding of their womenfolk.