Chapter Two
DULCIE STARED AT Ettore in shaken silence, sharply aware of the cool paving stones beneath her feet and the breath bottling in her throat. She knew her face was showing her shock and confusion, and she felt horribly exposed.
Because it wasn’t just shock and confusion she was feeling. A part of her, a tiny, shaming, ridiculous part, felt something like hope or relief that he wanted her still.
‘Not for ever, you understand. Just for the immediate future.’
She blinked, flinched inside.
Stupid Dulcie. Of course, he hadn’t meant for ever.
Her shame engulfed her and maybe she made some kind of sound because his eyes narrowed on her face, and she felt her cheeks start to burn.
She was such an idiot. Of course, Ettore didn’t want her.
She had been a summer fling. Was meant to stay a summer fling.
That was how it had been every other year before Ettore.
Most years, by the time summer ended, there had been many such flings. None had overstepped the mark.
All had been easy to give up.
Except him. Ettore Marchesi, the man standing in front of her, telling her in a cool, matter-of-fact voice that he wanted to stay married for the ‘immediate future’ because apparently it was in both their best interests to do so.
A stiletto blade slid between her ribs, the pain so sharp that she almost lost her balance. Two years ago, she’d thought their lives would be entwined for ever. She was his, and he was hers. Unconditionally.
Until he’d forced her to choose between him and Oscar, the brother she had failed to choose all those years ago.
Actually, make that just failed.
Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed in a vice as she remembered a two-year-old Oscar, with his huge, worried blue eyes and his small, sticky hand reaching for hers, climbing into her bed to the distant but audible soundtrack of their parents screaming at each other downstairs.
The marriage had limped on for far too long. Secretly, a part of her had longed for it to end so that the shouting would stop. So that their house, her home, didn’t feel as if it were sitting on top of a fault line.
When her mother had called her into the kitchen and told her that she and her father were splitting up, her first feeling had been relief.
And then her father had asked her to choose who she wanted to live with.
It was an impossible, inappropriate question for a child to answer and she had been tongue-tied with panic because, even as a seven-year-old, she’d known that if her father left without her, none of them would see him again. If she was being generous, she told herself that was why she’d chosen him.
But if she was being truthful, she had chosen her father because her mother was an alcoholic and she hadn’t wanted to be responsible for her.
Pushing the thought away, she took an unsteady step backwards.
‘And that’s why you came to find me.’ Her voice was starting to spiral and, over Ettore’s shoulder, she could see people glancing over curiously.
It reminded her of when her mother had been drunk and she’d fallen over in the supermarket and everyone had stood frozen, watching her flail about on the floor.
Dulcie’s heart thudded jerkily inside her chest. She had that feeling of a wave building, rising behind her to block out the light. She’d had that feeling so many times in her life. Of things getting impossibly big and beyond her ability to manage.
But not today.
‘Let me think.’ She pressed her finger against her forehead. ‘You know what? I don’t need to think. Obviously, I’m not interested in playing some weird marital charade with you. I don’t know why you would even ask that question.’
‘Then let me tell you.’ He spoke quietly but there was an authority to his voice.
‘No.’ At the margins of her vision, she saw a man turn to stare at her. But she didn’t care. Nor did she want to hear Ettore’s reasons. Didn’t he understand how cruel it was to ask her to do that? ‘Our marriage is over. I thought I’d made that clear the last time we met.’
She made as if to step past him, but he moved neatly to block her escape and she felt a sudden suffocating panic.
Not because she thought he would hurt her.
Ettore had been passionate in bed, and he was physically strong, but even when provoked by Oscar, he hadn’t hurt her brother, just restrained him.
But he was too close. So close that she could see the faint trace of stubble on his strong jaw.
So close that she could feel the sheer, unfiltered maleness of his lean, muscular body.
Close enough that she could remember the way he would roll her over to straddle him, his hands moving with devastating precision over her skin until she was just a pulsating, helpless extension of his body.
She blanked her mind, irritated at her brain’s disloyal and baffling ability to focus on the good when there was so much more of the bad.
‘Obviously, I’m not expecting you to make up your mind now. I understand it’s a big decision to take so I’m happy to give you twenty-four hours to think it over. I’m staying at the Conisbrough in London—’
‘I don’t care where you’re staying. And I don’t need twenty-four hours. You could give me twenty-four years, and my answer would be the same. Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not interested in buying it.’ Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. She had bought into love with Ettore and been burned.
‘I’m not selling you anything, Dulcie. I’m offering you the chance to get your life back on track. And not just your life. Oscar’s too. I know he’s struggling and that you’re supporting him. But can you give him the help he needs? Because I can. I can make that a reality.’
‘You leave my brother out of this.’ She was instantly, fiercely protective, shaken too that he knew so much about their lives. Though still not afraid of him.
His face was hard then, the bones like granite beneath the skin. ‘As I remember, it was you that put him front and centre and above all others.’
Not always, she hadn’t, and she would regret that for the rest of her life.
‘You don’t know anything about my brother or me—’
‘I know that he’s still drinking. Still violent. That he lost you your job—’
‘He’s not violent!’ Oscar got loud and incoherent when he was scared and he threw things and smashed them, but he had never hit anybody, never hurt her.
Not intentionally, and only that one time when he and Ettore first met.
Her pulse slowed as Ettore’s words replayed inside her head and then she frowned. ‘How do you know that? About my job?’ Her eyes narrowed on his face. ‘Have you been spying on me?’
His jaw tightened. It was something that she had never quite managed to understand, that way he had of suddenly putting distance between himself and other people.
It was as if a barrier had risen up like that privacy screen in the limo her friend Dina had hired for her hen night.
In the past, it had happened sometimes when they were out in a restaurant or in the street when someone got too messy or too loud.
But never with her. Never when they were alone.
It made her feel slightly sick, knowing that she was now someone he wanted to keep at arm’s length.
‘Not spying, no. I was trying to find you. So that we could have this conversation. You’d changed your number and your address, so I went to where you were working. Where you used to work, as it turned out.’
Staring down at Dulcie’s taut face, Ettore managed to hold onto his temper. In part, that was only possible because he was still reeling from his abrupt, inexplicable volte-face.
He had come to Cambridge fully intending to tell Dulcie that he wanted a divorce.
He had the paperwork in his pocket, more for effect than any legal requirement.
But then he had seen her outside the lecture theatre, and everything he had planned to say had been overridden.
In fact, he had gone a step further and, instead of demanding a divorce, he had suggested the opposite.
And now he couldn’t backtrack without looking either stupid or unhinged.
Which quite frankly felt like a fair assessment of his current behaviour. He couldn’t recall when he’d ever acted so impulsively.
Not true, he thought, remembering his humbling scamper across Charles de Gaulle airport, a coffee cup in his outstretched hand.
Meeting Dulcie Turner in a rare moment of freedom had felt like serendipity and salvation all rolled into one. Marrying her two months later had been a spur-of-the-moment impulse, a random act of recklessness in a considered, constricted life.
With her sparkling smiles and her love of the natural world, Dulcie was the complete antithesis of the cool, metropolitan women he’d dated in the past. Women like him, who had a role to play. She tasted like freedom and possibility. She was sunshine and sherbet on his tongue.
The intensity of his attraction had overruled common sense and the whole unassailable inappropriateness of his response to her.
And now it had happened again. She had turned him into a creature of impulse.
He swore silently. How the hell was he going to explain this turn of events to his family? To Carlo?
But explaining away the unexplainable, the unreasonable, the irrational was his superpower.
‘They had no right to tell you why I left.’
‘People like to gossip,’ he said obliquely. ‘And no doubt your brother’s antics helped break up an otherwise boring day.’ No need to mention that people particularly liked to gossip when there was a financial incentive to do so.
He watched a flush of colour seep across her cheeks. She was angry and hurt, but what of it?
She had no idea what it had been like walking out of her flat into the darkness. He had found sleep impossible. Eating, a chore.
The accident had added despair and shame to his misery. He had missed her so badly and had stopped taking the pain medication because he had been paranoid that he might mention her name, call out for her.