Chapter Three
STARING UP AT the Conisbrough Hotel in Belgravia, Dulcie felt her heart relocate to her throat.
It was just over nineteen hours since Ettore had made his proposal.
Or issued his ultimatum, depending on how you looked at it. Aside from when they were both asleep, most of those intervening hours had been spent trying to convince Oscar that she wasn’t leaving him and that he hadn’t wrecked everything and that she would be coming back.
And she understood why he needed that certainty.
Knew that the root cause of his anxiety and insecurity was her fault.
Which was why she had spent a long time reassuring him, giving him the certainty he needed.
Now though, as she walked across the polished black and white marble floor, she wished she had someone who could make her feel certain that she was doing the right thing.
For Oscar.
For herself.
It didn’t help that there were so many parallels to the last time she had stepped out of her day-to-day life. And then, as now, she was travelling to meet Ettore.
The difference was that two years ago she hadn’t known she would be meeting him.
The memory of that first time she saw him snapped into focus. As a scientist, she had always thought that being swept off your feet was hyperbole. But that was before the dark-haired man with the eyes of a lion had cut a swathe through the crowds milling beneath the departure board.
She had wanted to laugh.
Later, after he’d walked out of her flat without a backward glance, she’d wanted to cry. But she hadn’t gone after him.
Her legs had overruled her heart, refusing to let her make the same mistake as she had at aged seven.
It didn’t matter that watching him leave felt like open heart surgery without an anaesthetic.
Choosing to put your life in the hands of someone who demanded you sacrifice some part of yourself to earn their love was a slower, equally painful death of sorts.
And yet, here she was in London, to take up his offer and go to Puglia with him as his wife.
The idea made her feel like a biplane in a tailspin.
Everything was moving so fast. Too fast for her to keep her thoughts from blurring.
But one thing stayed still and clear-edged.
Oscar needed help. Professional help. And all she needed to do to make that happen was something she had already done, willingly, eagerly—
So eagerly that the memory of it felt almost alien.
As if it had happened to someone else. Or as if she’d been someone else entirely.
Someone she neither recognised nor understood.
As much of a stranger as those two random people they had tugged into the Marylebone register office to witness their wedding.
It had been the simplest of ceremonies. The perfect postscript to a fairy-tale romance. And her love for Ettore had been utterly unprecedented in its purity. Before, with her family, her love for her parents had been coloured by fear and anxiety. With Oscar, it was threaded through with guilt.
But this was her chance to atone properly. Maybe guilt was not enough of an offering to the gods. Maybe she had to suffer too.
Smiling at the doorman, she stepped in the foyer and pulled out her mobile phone.
On the train, during one of the frequent occasions when she’d lost her nerve, she had dithered about simply calling the hotel and asking to speak to Ettore.
She had even got her phone out and found the number.
But if she was agreeing to stay as his wife, she was going to have to face him sooner or later.
And this way she would catch him off guard.
Payback for how he’d ambushed her in the street.
Now, she pulled up the hotel’s website. She had seen someone do this in a film once and it had all looked very easy but she felt all fingers and thumbs.
Holding her breath, she pressed the phone icon. There was a ringtone and then a male voice answered. ‘Conisbrough Hotel, good morning, how may I help you?’
‘Hi there.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Could you put me through to one of your guests? It’s Mr Marchesi.’
‘Of course. Just putting you through.’
Without waiting to hear the phone connect, she slipped it into her pocket, breathing out unsteadily. Now for the hard part.
She walked purposefully over to the reception desk, smiling as the young blonde receptionist looked up from her screen.
‘Good morning, how may I help you?’
‘Good morning. Mr Marchesi is expecting me. Could you put a call through to his room and tell him I’m here?’
‘Of course.’ The receptionist smiled and tapped her headset.
There was a bowl of roses on the countertop and, holding her breath, Dulcie leaned forward casually as if to inhale their scent.
As she did so, her eyes darted to the screen on the desk.
She had seen someone enact this whole scene in a film once.
This was where the room number magically appeared on the screen, but she had no idea if it would work—
She blinked. It had.
Not a number, a name. The Royal Suite.
It had worked.
A rush of adrenaline burned through her like a tequila slammer so that it took her a moment to realise the receptionist was speaking to her.
‘I’m sorry, the line was engaged.’ The receptionist smiled apologetically.
‘That’s fine.’ She rolled her eyes, doing blonde. ‘I just realised, I have his mobile number, so I’ll call him on that. But thank you.’
She melted backwards into a group of guests who had fortuitously appeared and then turned and walked over to the lifts as casually as she could manage.
Her heartbeat sounded like horses’ hooves thundering against her ribs.
And as the lift doors closed behind her, she slumped back against the wall, relief momentarily swamping her panic.
Dulcie hadn’t called.
Ettore flicked his cuff back to check his watch, again, and then stopped himself.
He didn’t need to look at the time to know that it was running out.
Should he have followed her? Probably. Would it have changed anything? Almost certainly not. He had offered the biggest, juiciest bait—the chance to give Oscar real, long-term care. But Dulcie hadn’t bitten.
On the contrary, instead of snatching his offer from his hand, she had fled from him. As for staying married, it appeared he had crystallised her determination to seek a divorce.
Good job, Ettore, he thought, dropping down into the leather armchair that offered unparalleled views of the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye.
For a moment, he stared at the huge wheel.
At this distance it was hard to believe it was moving.
Almost as hard as it was to believe that it was two years since he had last seen it.
It had been a conscious choice to avoid visiting London. The idea of being in the same city as Dulcie and not being with her would have rubbed salt in an imperfectly healed wound.
But somehow, he doubted it would hurt more than seeing her in Cambridge had.
His shoulders stiffened as he pictured her hair streaming behind her like the tail of a kite as she cycled away from him.
As for that ‘Ciao’ she had tossed in his face as you might toss a crust of bread to a pigeon.
It was the first word he had spoken to her, and she had been amused by the fact that it could mean both hello and goodbye.
Her use of it yesterday was deliberate, he was sure. Pointed even.
There was a knock at the door. In the next-door suite, he heard his bodyguards get to their feet. But it was probably just housekeeping, and frankly he needed a distraction.
‘It’s fine,’ he called out. ‘I’ll get it.’
He strode across the room and yanked open the door.
His jaw felt slack, and he knew that he must look surprised, but it wasn’t just surprise he was feeling.
Seeing Dulcie outside his room was giving him flashbacks to a different room in a different hotel in a different city when Dulcie had knocked on his door at three in the morning.
Opening it, he had stared down at her face, his chest churning with hope and longing and then she had leaned in and kissed him and he had fallen into a parallel world.
A world where for the first, the only time in his life he had been able to relax, to be who he wanted, to do what he wanted without needing to consider anyone but himself.
Was she remembering it too? Was she seeing the two of them in that half-empty hotel? Orphans of the storm. Strangers in the night.
Except they hadn’t been strangers when morning came. Or that was what it had felt like. But then three months later it had turned out that he hadn’t known her at all.
‘Do you want to do this here?’
Perhaps Dulcie was remembering that night. There was a rough catch to her voice, and he was so distracted by it that his brain kept replaying her question like a needle hitting a scratch on a record. Do this? Do what?
‘Or shall I come in?’ Her second question, accompanied by a tilt of her head towards his suite, brought him back to his senses and, nodding, he took a step backwards.
‘I think that would be best.’
As she stepped past him, he waited a few seconds to get his breathing back under control and then he followed her, closing the door softly and pulling out his phone to text his bodyguards that he didn’t want to be disturbed.
‘This is nice.’
Dulcie was walking slowly around the suite, her fingers grazing the smooth leather upholstery.
She was dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, and her hair was tied back in a kind of half-up half-down arrangement that all women seemed to be able to do in their sleep.
But there was a tension to her straight back, and he wondered if she was already regretting her decision to find him.
‘Your family’s business must be doing well.’
His shoulders stiffened, her words jarring. He was not a practised liar, but he was sometimes a pragmatic one.