Hot Nights with...the Italian

‘Doing what?’ Julia demanded derisively. ‘Apart from this part-time course in fine arts you’re following at the moment, you’re trained for nothing except the career that’s already mapped out for you—as the wife of a multimillionaire and the mother of his children. It’s payback time, and you’re the only currency they’ll accept.’

‘I don’t believe it. I won’t.’ Marisa’s voice was urgent. ‘Renzo can’t have agreed to this. He—he doesn’t want me either. I—I know that.’

Julia’s laugh was cynical. ‘He’s a man, my dear, and you’re an attractive, nubile girl. He won’t find his role as bridegroom too arduous, believe me. He’ll fulfil his obligations to his family, and enjoy them too.’

Marisa said slowly, ‘That’s—obscene.’

‘It’s the way of the world, my child.’ Julia shrugged. ‘And life with the future Marchese Santangeli will have other compensations, you know. Once you’ve given Lorenzo his heir and a spare, I don’t imagine you’ll see too much of him. He’ll continue to amuse himself as he does now, but with rather more discretion, and you’ll be left to your own devices.’

Marisa stared at her. She said huskily, ‘You mean he’s involved with someone? He—has a girlfriend?’

‘Oh, she’s rather more than that,’ Julia said negligently. ‘A beautiful Venetian, I understand, called Lucia Gallo, who works in television. They’ve been quite inseparable for several months.’

‘I see.’ Instinct told Marisa that her cousin was enjoying this, so she did her best to sound casual. ‘Well, if that’s the case, why doesn’t he marry her instead?’

‘Because she’s a divorcee, and unsuitable in all kinds of ways.’ She paused. ‘I thought I’d already indicated that Santangeli brides are expected to come to their marriages as virgins.’

Marisa said coolly, ‘But presumably the same rule doesn’t apply to the men?’

Julia laughed. ‘Hardly. And you’ll be glad of that when the time comes, believe me.’ Her tone changed, becoming a touch more conciliatory. ‘Think about it, Marisa. This marriage won’t be all bad news. You’ve always said you wanted to travel. Well, you’ll be able to—and first-class all the way. Or, with Florence on your doorstep, you could always plunge back into the art world. Create your own life.’

‘And that is supposed to make it all worthwhile?’ Marisa queried incredulously. ‘I allow myself to be—used—in return for a couple of visits to the Accademia? I won’t do it.’

‘I think you will,’ her cousin said with grim emphasis. ‘We’re Santangeli pensioners, my pet, all of us. Yourself included. We owe our lifestyle to their goodwill. And once you’re married to Lorenzo, that happy state of affairs will continue for Harry and myself. Because they’ve agreed that we can move out of London to a bungalow, specially adapted for a wheelchair, and employ full-time care when the need arises.’ For a moment her voice wavered. ‘Something we could never afford to do under normal circumstances.’

She rallied, her tone harsh again. ‘But if you try and back out now, the whole thing will crash and burn. We’ll lose this house—everything. And I won’t see Harry’s precarious future in jeopardy because a spoiled little brat who’s spent the past few years grabbing everything going with both hands, has suddenly decided the price is too high for her delicate sensibilities. Well, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, sweetie, so make the best of it.

‘And remember, a lot of girls would kill to be in your shoes. So, if nothing else, learn to be civil to him in the daytime, cooperate at night, and don’t ask awkward questions when he’s away. Even you should be able to manage that.’

Except I didn’t, Marisa thought wearily, shivering as she remembered the note of pure vitriol in her cousin’s voice. I failed on every single count.

She sighed. She’d fought—of course she had—using every conceivable argument against the unwanted marriage. She’d also spent the next few days trying to contact Alan, who had been strangely unavailable.

And when at last she had managed to speak to him on the phone, over a week later, she’d learned that he’d been offered a transfer, with promotion, to Hong Kong, and would be leaving almost at once.

‘It’s a great opportunity,’ he told her, his voice uncomfortable. ‘And totally unexpected. I could have waited years for something like this.’

‘I see.’ Her mind was whirling, but she kept her tone light. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t consider taking me with you?’

There was a silence, then he said jerkily, ‘Marisa—you know that isn’t going to happen. Neither of us are free agents in this. I know that strings were pulled to get me this job because you’re soon moving to a different league.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think I’m really meant to be talking to you now.’

‘No,’ she said, past the shocked tightness in her throat. ‘Probably not. And I—I quite understand. Well—good luck.’

After that it had been difficult to go on fighting, once her stunned mind had registered that she had no one to turn to, nowhere to go, and, as Julia had reminded her, barely enough academic qualifications to earn her a living wage.

But in the end she’d wearily capitulated because of Harry, the quiet, kind man who’d made Julia’s reluctant guardianship of her so much more bearable, and who was going to need the Santangeli generosity so badly, and so soon.

But if Renzo Santangeli believed she was going to fall gratefully at his feet, he could think again, she had told herself with icy bitterness.

It was a stance she’d maintained throughout what she supposed had passed for his courtship of her. Admittedly, with the result a foregone conclusion, he hadn’t had to try too hard, and she’d been glad of it, reflecting defiantly that the less she saw of him the better. But the fact remained that her avowed resolve had not actually been tested.

The only time she’d really been alone with him before the wedding, she thought, staring at the screensaver on her computer, was when he’d made that strange, almost diffident proposal of marriage, explaining that he wanted to make their difficult situation as easy as possible for her, and that he would force no physical intimacies on her until she’d become accustomed to her new circumstances and was ready to be his wife in every sense of the word.

And as far as their engagement went, he’d kept his word. She hadn’t been subjected to any unwelcome advances from him.

No doubt he’d secretly believed he wouldn’t have to wait too long, she decided, her mouth tightening. He’d been sure curiosity alone would undermine her determination to keep him at arm’s length, or further.

Well, he’d learned better during the misery of their honeymoon, and their parting at the end of it had come as a relief to them both. And, although he’d made various dutiful attempts to maintain minimal contact with her once she’d moved back to London, he clearly hadn’t seen any necessity to try and heal the rift between them in person. Not that she’d have allowed that, anyway, she assured herself hastily.

So, now he seemed to have tacitly accepted that, apart from the inevitable legal formalities, their brief, ill-starred marriage was permanently over. Soon he’d be free to seek a more willing lady to share the marital bed with him when he felt inclined—probably some doe-eyed Italian beauty with a talent for maternity.

Which would certainly please his old witch of a grandmother, who’d made no secret of her disapproval of his chosen match from the moment Marisa had arrived back in Italy under Julia’s eagle-eyed escort. Harry had not accompanied them, having opted to spend the time quietly at his sister’s home in Kent, but he’d announced his determination to fly out for the wedding in order to give the bride away.

But Renzo’s next wooing would almost certainly be conducted in a very different manner.

She’d wondered sometimes if it had been obvious to everyone that he’d rarely touched her, apart from taking her hand when making introductions. And that he’d never kissed her in any way.

Except once …

It had been during the dinner his father had given at the house in Tuscany for her nineteenth birthday, with a large ebullient crowd of family and friends gathered round the long table in the sumptuous frescoed dining room. She’d been seated next to him in her pale cream dress, with its long sleeves and discreetly square neckline, the epitome of the demure fidanzata, with the lustrous pearls that had been his birthday gift to her clasped round her throat for everyone to see and admire.

‘Pearls for purity,’ had been Julia’s acid comment when she saw them. ‘And costing a fortune too. Clearly he’ll be expecting his money’s worth on his wedding night.’

Was that the message he was intending to convey to the world at large? Marisa had wondered, wincing. She’d been sorely tempted to put the gleaming string back in its velvet box, but eventually she’d steeled herself to wear it, along with the ring he’d given her to mark their engagement—a large and exquisite ruby surrounded by diamonds.

She could not, she’d thought, fault his generosity in material matters. In fact she’d been astonished when she’d discovered the allowance he proposed to make her when they were married, and could not imagine how she’d spend even a quarter of it.

But then, as she had reminded herself, he was buying her goodwill and, as Julia had so crudely indicated, her body.

It was a thought that had still had the ability to dry her mouth in panic, especially with the wedding drawing closer each day.

Because, in spite of his promised forbearance, there would come a night when she would have to undergo the ordeal of submission to him. ‘Payback time’, as Julia had called it, and it scared her.

He scared her …

She had turned her head, studying him covertly from under her lashes. He’d been talking to the people across the table, his hands moving incisively to underline a point, his dark face vivid with laughter, and it had occurred to her, as swiftly and shockingly as a thunderbolt crashing through the ceiling, that if she’d met him that night for the first time she might well have found him deeply and disturbingly attractive.

His lean good looks had been emphasised by the severe formality of dinner jacket and black tie. But then, she’d been forced to admit, he always dressed well, and his clothes were beautiful.

But fast on the heels of that reluctant admission had come another thought that she’d found even more unwelcome.

That, only too soon, she would know what Renzo looked like without any clothes at all.

The breath had caught in her throat, and she’d felt an odd wave of heat sweep up over her body and turn her face to flame.

And as if he’d picked up her sudden confusion on some secret male radar, Renzo had turned and looked at her, his brows lifting in enquiry as he observed her hectically flushed cheeks and startled eyes.

And for one brief moment they had seemed caught together within a cone of silence, totally cut off from the chatter and laughter around them, his gaze meshing with hers, only to sharpen into surprise and—oh, God—amused awareness.

Making her realise with utter mortification that he’d read her thoughts as easily as if she’d had I wonder what he looks like naked? tattooed across her forehead.

He had inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement, the golden eyes dancing, his mouth twisting in mocking appreciation, and reached for the hand that wore his ring, raising her fingers for the brush of his lips, then turning them so he could plant a more deliberate kiss in the softness of her palm.

Her colour had deepened helplessly as she’d heard the ripple of delighted approbation from round the table, and she had known his gesture had been noted.

And she had no one to blame for that but herself, she’d thought, her heart hammering within the prim confines of the cream bodice as she had removed her hand from his clasp with whatever dignity she could salvage. She had known, as she did so, that the guests would be approving of that too, respecting what they saw as her modesty and shyness, when in reality she wanted to grab the nearest wine bottle and break it over his head.

When the dinner had finally ended, an eternity later, she’d been thankful that courtesy kept Renzo with the departing guests, enabling her to escape upstairs without speaking to him.

Julia, however, had not been so easily evaded.

‘So,’ she said, following Marisa into her bedroom and draping herself over the arm of the little brocaded sofa by the window. ‘You seem to be warming at last to your future husband.’

Marisa put the pearls carefully in their case. ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

‘Then you’re a fool,’ her cousin said bluntly. ‘He may be charming, but underneath there’s one tough individual, and you can’t afford to play games with him—blushing and sighing one minute, and becoming an ice maiden the next.’

‘Thank you,’ Marisa returned politely. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

She’d momentarily lost ground tonight, and she knew it, but it was only a temporary aberration. She’d find a way to make up for it—somehow.

And so I did, she thought now, only to find myself reaping a bitter harvest as a consequence.

Her reverie was interrupted by the return of Corin, looking woebegone.

‘She wants her half-share in the gallery,’ he announced without preamble. ‘She says that I’m far too conventional, and she’s planning to take an active part in the place—imposing some ideas of her own to widen the customer base. Which means she’ll be working next to me every day as if nothing’s happened. Well, it’s impossible. I couldn’t bear it.’

He sat down heavily at his desk. ‘Besides, I know her ideas of old, and they just wouldn’t work—not somewhere like this. But I can’t afford to buy her out,’ he added, sighing, ‘so I’ll just have to sell up and start again—perhaps in some country area where property isn’t so expensive.’

Marisa brought him some strong black coffee. She said, ‘Couldn’t you find a white knight—someone who’d invest in the Estrello so you could pay your wife off?’

He pulled a face. ‘If only. But times are bad, and getting harder, and luxury items like these are usually the first to be sacrificed, so I could struggle to find someone willing to take the risk. Anyway, investors generally want more of an instant return than I can offer.’

He savoured a mouthful of his coffee. ‘I may close up early tonight,’ he went on, giving her a hopeful look. ‘Maybe we could have dinner together?’

I’m sorry, Corin, she thought. But I’m not in the mood to provide a shoulder for you to cry on this evening—or whatever else you might have in mind. You’re a nice guy, but it stops at lunch. And it stops now. Because I have issues of my own that I should deal with.

Aloud, she said gently, ‘I’m sorry, but I already have a date.’

She hadn’t intended to meet Alan either, of course, but it had suddenly come to seem a better idea than sitting alone in her flat, brooding about the past.

That’s a loser’s game, she told herself with determination, and I need to look to the future—and freedom.

CHAPTER THREE

EVEN as she was getting dressed for her dinner date with Alan, Marisa was still unsure if she was doing the right thing.

It occurred to her, wryly, that even though it was barely a year since she’d actually contemplated running away with him her heart was not exactly beating faster as she contemplated the evening ahead.

And she hadn’t promised to meet him, so ducking out would be an easy option.

On the other hand, going out to a restaurant appeared marginally more tempting than spending another solitary night in front of the television.

Yet solitary, she thought with a faint sigh, is what I seem to do best.

Up to now, having her own place for the first time in her life had felt a complete bonus. Admittedly, with only one bedroom, it wasn’t the biggest flat in the world—in fact, it could have been slipped inside the Santangeli house in Tuscany and lost—but it was light, bright, well furnished, with a well-fitted kitchen and shower room, and was sited in a smart, modern block of similar apartments in an upmarket area of London.

Best of all, living there, as she often reminded herself, she answered to no one.

There was, naturally, a downside. She had to accept that her independence had its limits, because she didn’t actually pay the rent. That was taken care of by a firm of lawyers, acting as agents for her husband.

After the divorce was finalised, she realised, she would no longer be able to afford anything like it.

Her life would also be subject to all kinds of other changes, not many of them negative. In spite of Julia’s dismissive words, her academic results had been perfectly respectable, and she hadn’t understood at the time why she’d received no encouragement to seek qualifications in some form of higher education, like her classmates.

How naive was it possible to get? she wondered, shaking her head in self-derision.

However, there was nothing to prevent her doing so in the future, with the help of a student loan. She could even look on the time she’d spent as Renzo’s wife as a kind of ‘gap year’, she told herself, her mouth twisting.

And now she had the immediate future to deal with, in the shape of this evening, which might also have its tricky moments unless she was vigilant. After all, the last thing she wanted was for Alan to think she was a lonely wife in need of consolation.

Because nothing could be further from the truth.

She picked out her clothes with care—a pale blue denim wrap-around skirt topped by a white silk shirt—hoping her choice wouldn’t look as if she was trying too hard. Then, proceeding along the same lines, she applied a simple dusting of powder to her face, and the lightest touch of colour on her mouth.

Lastly, and with reluctance, she retrieved her wedding ring from the box hidden in her dressing table and slid it on to her finger. She hadn’t planned to wear it again, but its presence on her hand would be a tacit reminder to her companion that the evening was a one-off and she was certainly not available—by any stretch of the imagination.

Two hours later, she was ruefully aware that Alan’s thinking had not grown any more elastic during his absence, and that, in spite of the romantic ambience that Chez Dominique had always cultivated, she was having a pretty dull evening.

A faintly baffling one, too, because he seemed to be in a nostalgic mood, talking about their past relationship as if it had been altogether deeper and more meaningful than she remembered.

Get a grip, she thought, irritated. You may have been a few years older than I was, but we were still hardly more than boy and girl. I was certainly a virgin, and I suspect you probably were too, although that’s almost certainly no longer true for either of us.

He had far more confidence these days, smartly dressed in a light suit, with a blue shirt that matched his eyes. And he seemed to have had his slightly crooked front teeth fixed too.

All in all, she decided, he was a nice guy. But that was definitely as far as it went.

However, the food at Chez Dominique was still excellent, and when she managed to steer him away from personal issues and on to his life in Hong Kong she became rather more interested in what he had to say, and was able to feel glad that he was doing well.

But even so, the fact that he had not gone there through choice clearly still rankled with him, and although he’d probably bypassed a rung or two on the corporate ladder as a result of his transfer, she detected that there was a note of resentment never far from the surface.

As the waiter brought his cheese and her crème brûlée, Alan said, ‘Are you staying with your cousin while you’re in London?’

‘Oh, no,’ Marisa returned, without thinking. ‘Julia lives near Tonbridge Wells these days.’

‘You mean you’ve actually been allowed off the leash without a minder?’ His tone was barbed. ‘Amazing.’

‘Not particularly.’ She ate some of her dessert. ‘Perhaps—Lorenzo—’ she stumbled slightly over the name ‘—trusts me.’ Or he simply doesn’t care what I do …

‘So I suppose you must have a suite at the Ritz, or some other five-star palace?’ He gave a small bitter laugh. ‘How the other half live.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ Marisa said tersely. ‘I’m actually using someone’s flat.’ Which was, she thought, an approximation of the truth, and also a reminder of how very much she wanted to get back there and avoid answering any more of the questions that he was obviously formulating over his Port Salut.

She glanced at her watch and gave a controlled start. ‘Heavens, is that really the time? I should be going.’

‘Expecting a phone call from the absent husband?’ There was a faintly petulant note in his voice.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have an early appointment tomorrow.’ At my desk in the Estrello, at nine o’clock sharp.

At the same time she was aware that his remark had made her freeze inwardly. Because there’d been a time, she thought, when Renzo had called her nearly every day, coming up each time against the deliberate barrier of her answering machine, and leaving increasingly brief and stilted messages, which she had deleted as quickly as she’d torn up his unread letters.

Until the night when he’d said abruptly, an odd almost raw note in his voice, ‘Tomorrow, Marisa, when I call you, please pick up the phone. There are things that need to be said.’ He’d paused, then added, ‘I beg you to do this.’

And when the phone had rung the following night she’d been shocked to find that she’d almost had to sit on her hands to prevent herself from lifting the receiver. That she’d had to repeat silently to herself over and over again, There is nothing he can say that I could possibly want to hear.

Then, in the silence of all the evenings that followed, she had come to realise that he was not going to call again, and that her intransigence had finally achieved the victory she wanted. And she had found she was wondering why her triumph suddenly seemed so sterile.

Something, she thought, she had still not managed to work out to her own satisfaction.

She had a polite tussle with Alan over her share of the bill, which he won, and walked out into the street with a feeling of release. She turned to say goodnight and found him at the kerb, hailing a taxi, which was thoughtful.

But she hadn’t bargained for him clambering in after her.

She said coolly, ‘Oh—may I drop you somewhere?’

He smiled at her. ‘I was hoping you might offer me some coffee—or a nightcap.’

Her heart sank like a stone. ‘It is getting late …’

‘Not too late, surely—for old times’ sake?’

He was over-fond of that phrase, Marisa decided irritably. And his ‘old times’ agenda clearly differed substantially from hers.

She said, not bothering to hide her reluctance, ‘Well—a quick coffee, perhaps, and then you must go,’ and watched with foreboding as his smile deepened into satisfaction.

She didn’t doubt her ability to keep him at bay. She had, after all, done it before, with someone else, even though it had rebounded on her later in a way that still had the power to turn her cold all over at the memory.

But she told herself grimly, Alan was a totally different proposition. She’d make sure that when he’d drunk his coffee he would go away and stay away. There’d be no more meetings during this leave or any other.

As they went up in the lift to the second floor of the apartment block she was aware he’d moved marginally closer. She stepped back, deliberately distancing herself and hoping he’d take the hint.

But as she turned the key in the lock he was standing so close behind her that his breath was stirring her hair, and she flung the door open, almost jumping across the narrow hallway into the living room.