Chapter Four #2
A knot was tightening around her sternum like a rope around a cleat and she felt a sudden urge to tap on one of the tinted windows of the two black SUVs that were parked on the other side of the car park and ask them how much they would charge to take her to Fiana.
Or, better still, tell Ettore that she’d changed her mind. But the paperwork was signed. Oscar was at the Dymphna. She was just going to have to find a way to make this work.
She glanced at his car. ‘Shall we get going, then?’ Any fears she’d had about having to make polite conversation or, worse, rake over the past again were swiftly forgotten.
Firstly, it took all of Ettore’s focus to edge the dark blue car through the mid-morning crush of mopeds and cars and buses and when he pulled off the motorway and the roads got narrower and the buildings further apart, she forgot about speaking. She was too busy staring at the Italian countryside.
She had been to Rome on a school trip and skiing in the Alps with her father, but this was a different Italy.
It was breathtakingly lovely. Low, undulating hills in every shade of green, patched with olive groves and vineyards and dotted with tiled-rooved houses. And above it all, a sky as flawlessly blue as a sapphire. After the narrow, stone-walled streets of Cambridge, it all felt so open and light.
‘We’re taking the scenic route. I hope you don’t mind.’
Ettore’s voice yanked her out of her trance, and she turned towards him, her ribs tightening infinitesimally as his gaze shifted from the road to her face. ‘It’s a slightly longer journey but we’re in no rush and it will give you a chance to see the country.’
His country. The unspoken end to the sentence made her pulse punch erratically because, of course, they were on his turf now. Here in Italy, she knew no one. She couldn’t even speak the language.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true, she thought, her face suddenly burning. Ettore had taught her a few very specific words.
Her breath snagged and maybe it was audible because his jaw flexed and she felt a shiver scrabble over her skin and then, to hide her reaction, she said quickly, ‘How far is it to your house?’
He hesitated a moment, and she had the feeling that he was debating something. ‘Just over an hour,’ he said finally.
‘And when are we going to see your father?’
‘He’ll be there when we arrive. He lives with me.’
He did? How was that going to work?
The panic she had been largely keeping at bay since she’d boarded her flight in London surged up inside her as the private time she would need to survive this arrangement they’d made seemed to evaporate before her eyes.
‘You don’t need to worry. He has his own rooms. But he rarely gets up before lunch, and he usually retires early.’
‘How did he react when you told him about the marriage?’
‘He was surprised, obviously. But he’s looking forward to meeting you.’
Dulcie tried to imagine her own father’s reaction. Colin Turner had been a controlling husband and a controlling father. That choice he had forced her to make as a child had been the first of many. She’d learned which path to follow to earn his approval, and he’d had her whole life mapped out.
Obedience had been rewarded but any deviation from the path he’d chosen had resulted in coldness and distance. After she’d changed her degree course from law to environmental sciences, he had stopped paying her tuition fees and her living expenses.
When, finally, she had learned the extent of his control and cruelty, she had chosen to walk away, and he had punished her by cutting her out of his life.
‘Do you want to start or shall I?’
She glanced over at Ettore. ‘Start what?’
‘We need to fill in the gaps. In our lives. It’s what we’d do if this reconciliation were real.’
‘You know what I do. I work at the lab as a technician and then I do shifts as a cleaner at the university.’
She knew she sounded like some truculent teenager, but when she’d met Ettore, she’d still been riding high from being offered her dream job at Genesis Agri-Tech. It was humbling to have to relive her bumpy descent down the ladder.
‘I’m not talking about the broad brushstrokes. We need to dig deeper. Get into the finer details. Like what you do outside work.’
There was nothing outside work. Her school and university friends kept in touch, but it was hard to do more than text them and meet for an occasional quick catch-up. And since Oscar had moved in with her, he was her focus.
‘I see friends. We go out to dinner. We go dancing. We go to parties,’ she lied. ‘What about you? What have you been up to?’
‘I oversee the family business. We own a vineyard. A couple of years ago, we expanded into olive oil.’
How had she not known that? But they had talked about their lives only in terms of the here and now. Everything else had been extraneous. An unwarranted intrusion into something that had felt distant and unconnected to who they were when they were together.
‘And outside of growing vines and olives?’
His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘I see friends. We go out to dinner, go dancing.’
There was a hard pause.
So much for filling in the gaps. Was this why their marriage had failed? But why would this version work any better?
Her fingers clenched and unclenched in her lap. She was starting to feel panicky again.
Back in Cambridge, the reality of what she had agreed to do had felt distant and unreal.
It had been something happening in a far-off place called the future.
It had been easier to focus on her motivation for agreeing.
But now that she was here the inherent, unchangeable flaws of the deal they’d made were getting more pertinent by the mile.
‘What are they?’ Her eyes snagged on a honey-coloured building with crumbling, crenellated walls. Through the gaps she could see some chickens pecking furiously. ‘I must have seen five or six already. They look like little fortresses.’
‘It’s a masseria. They’re not fortresses so much as fortified houses. They’re very common in this region.’
‘Sounds welcoming.’
His mouth curved up minutely at the corners and she knew that he knew that she was referring to that remark he had made in Cambridge, and she had to fight back a betraying sort of flush at the idea that they should be in any way on the same wavelength.
‘Six hundred years ago there used to be pirates along the coast, and I suppose the residents got fed up with being raided and robbed so the landowners built these fortified houses.’
‘Why didn’t they just build castles?’
‘Some of them did.’ He lifted his hand from the wheel and gestured to his left and her gaze followed his gesture.
She sat up sharply, her eyes widening.
Even at a distance she could see the turrets of what was unmistakably a castle, half hidden by woodland.
And then it disappeared from view.
Turning in her seat, she peered past the headrest trying to see it again. And then she froze.
Ettore glanced at her. ‘What is it?’
‘Those SUVs were at the airport. I think we’re being followed.’
‘Yes, we are,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s their job, and, unfortunately, they’re something you’ll have to come to terms with.’
‘What do you mean?’ She frowned, and now it was her turn to look over at him.
‘It comes with the territory,’ he said as he accelerated through a pair of huge wrought-iron gates that opened silently to let them pass. ‘Or rather it comes with the estate.’
‘What are you talking about? What estate?’
A shiver ran down her spine, a child again playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, feeling something creeping up behind her, something she didn’t want to turn and face. But this time Ettore was giving her no choices.
He shifted back in his seat, his dark gold gaze tearing into her.
‘This is Castiglione Fiana, and it is my family’s home. Which means, as of now, it is your home too.’
Her breath, her heartbeat, everything fell still. This was his family home?
But what kind of family lived in a castle? In England, they would have to be ultra wealthy or, more likely, aristocratic.
She thought back to the beautiful, serious-eyed man she had met in Paris, remembering how formal he could sometimes be with strangers and that slight aloofness of manner that seemed to magically conjure up a seat in a crowded restaurant.
And then her hands started to tremble and there was a ringing in her ears, and she understood it all in that instant and it was as crushing as it was overwhelming.
Because the clues had always been there but she’d been too busy hiding herself to see what was hiding in plain sight.
‘Who are your family?’
He hesitated infinitesimally as if the question was something he’d fielded many times already in his life.
‘My father is the Duke of Marchesi. I am his heir, the Marquis of Corti.’
For a moment, the interior of the car seemed to flex in on itself as if all the air had been sucked out if it.
They had stopped moving but Dulcie barely noticed.
Nor did she register the moment when Ettore got out of the car.
It was only when he opened her door and held out his hand and then, moments later, attempted to take hers, that her body reacted and she pulled her hand back.
For a moment, his smile looked as if it were stamped onto his face, and she suddenly noticed that they were no longer alone.
There were two people, a man and a woman, standing in front of the largest door she had ever seen.
His family? No, they must be staff, she realised a moment later as the woman stepped forward, inclining her head, her knees dipping into what looked suspiciously like a curtsey.
‘Buongiorno, Signore, Signora.’
‘Buongiorno, Valentina. Cara, this is Valentina, our housekeeper. And that is Alberto.’ The man bowed stiffly.
‘Hi, nice to meet you both.’ Dulcie forced herself to smile, and this time when Ettore took her hand, she managed not to jerk away.
Ignoring the sparks shooting up her arm, she let him lead her into the castle.