Chapter Fourteen
The old mare whinnied softly and nuzzled her head against Eleanora’s shoulder.
‘The sugar is all gone,’ she said, speaking Spanish as best she could. She leant against the mare’s flank on the straw-covered floor of the loosebox. It was strong and warm and comforting. Eleanora stroked the velvet muzzle.
Her mother had been right. Horses could comfort when humans let you down. When sisters stabbed you to the quick, and laughed and mocked you as they did.
When husbands betrayed you…
No, she could not claim that. Sanzio had never betrayed her, because their marriage had never been intended to last, and he was about to be free of her.
She had made herself face that, and so all that Sanzio had done that nightmare day when Tonia had descended to claim him from her as she’d taunted that she could, any time she wanted, had only served to pre-empt the formal ending of their marriage.
That he had hurt and humiliated her she just had to let go of.
Just as she was now letting go of Sanzio. By now he would have heard from her lawyer, setting in motion their divorce.
He’ll be glad—relieved. He can carry on openly with Tonia now.
Tears welled up in her. She could set Sanzio free of her, as he had shown he wanted to be, but she—pain twisted inside her—she could never be free…
* * *
The estancia was as Sanzio remembered it.
The colonial-era house gracious, the stables and outbuildings extensive, horses in the well-fenced paddocks.
His arrival was noted by one of the ranch-hands and as he got out of the SUV hire car, Eleanora’s jodhpur-clad mother emerged from a stable block. She came right up to him.
‘Why are you here?’ she demanded. Her tone was not friendly.
‘I would like to speak to Eleanora,’ he said carefully, speaking English as she had.
Eleanora’s mother eyed him in the same unfriendly fashion.
‘I will ask her if she wants to,’ she answered.
‘But before I do, I will tell you to your face that I consider your behaviour despicable. I had thought better of you, but clearly you are both a fool and a knave when it comes to my daughter’s unspeakable half-sister. ’
Not waiting for a reply, she headed for the ranch house. Time stretched. Then she was on the veranda, beckoning him. Moments later, he was indoors and she was opening the door to the drawing room.
‘If you upset her,’ Eleanora’s mother told him grimly, ‘I will have you thrown to the stallions and they can trample you to death with my blessing!’
He walked in. Eleanora was there.
White as a sheet.
* * *
The door closed behind her mother with a snap. Eleanora sank down on the sofa, legs weak.
‘Why have you come? What for?’
She made herself look at him. Emotion knifed through her. The last time she had set eyes on him, Tonia had been all over him. And he was letting her. Pain twisted at the memory. He was standing there, inside the doorway, so dear, so familiar.
So forever out of reach…
‘To talk to you. Explain to you.’ Sanzio’s voice was staccato, and it dawned on her that he was standing with tension radiating from him. She wondered why.
‘Explain?’ Her voice was hollow. ‘What needs explaining?’ Her face contorted suddenly, twisting her features.
‘That you’re back with Tonia? She’s told me so herself, crowing over it in every spiteful text she’s sent me, that you can’t get enough of her.
It’s happened just as she told me it would—that all you’ve wanted all along, all through our marriage, is to get her interested in you again, and that she could get you back any time she wanted, she just had to snap her fingers.
Well, she came to the Palazzo and she snapped her fingers!
I saw it with my own eyes—and so did her poor, hapless husband. ’
She broke off. She must not collapse like that. She took a ragged breath.
‘You could have saved yourself the journey here, Sanzio. I know I’ve got no business objecting. How could I? Have your affair with Tonia. I’m sorry for Edouard, but he might as well realise my sister always gets what she wants. She wanted you back, and she’s got you back.’
Weariness pressed her down. To see Sanzio again—to know he was gone from her for ever…
Sanzio was speaking. Carefully and clearly.
‘I am not,’ he said, ‘having an affair with Tonia. If she’s told you I am, she’s lying. Tonia likes lying, as I thought you understood by now.’
Anger stabbed her. ‘My eyes didn’t lie that hideous lunch when she came on to you and you welcomed it! Or that vile scene I saw in the Palazzo—which poor, wretched Edouard saw as well. And heard!’ She took a ragged, razored breath. ‘I know you didn’t want either of us to witness it, but—’
He cut across her, his voice like a knife. ‘That was exactly what I wanted.’
She stared, and then, closing her eyes, her face crumpled. That Sanzio could have been so cruel as to want her—and the wretched Edouard—to see what they had.
‘You wanted us to see it?’
‘Yes, just as I wanted you to see me letting Tonia come on to me, not repulsing her, not sending her packing.’
‘But why?’ Incomprehension was clear in her voice.
She’d assumed, that nightmare day, he was simply indulging himself, not caring about the effect his and Tonia’s behaviour was having on her and the hapless Edouard.
After all, as she’d told herself, what right had she to care when their marriage was nearly over?
She’d even told him, right before Tonia arrived, that their divorce would be coming soon.
‘Why?’ Sanzio was speaking again. There was something different in his voice now, but she didn’t know what it was. There was an edge to it, as if he was forcing himself to say it. He took a breath, sharp and incising.
‘To make you jealous,’ he said.
* * *
‘Jealous?’ She was staring at him, her face still blank with incomprehension. He wanted to laugh, but there would be no humour in it.
‘Yes, jealous.’ His voice was heavy. He paused. ‘It was all I could think of doing.’
He frowned. ‘I had to do something…anything. You’d just, totally out of the blue, started spouting stuff about separate kitchens, and going our separate ways, and divorcing—and you were so casual about it, so damn matter-of-fact, as if—’
He stopped.
She was still staring at him. Her face still blank. He took another breath.
‘As if what we had meant nothing to you.’
Something flickered in her eyes. He saw her hands in her lap tighten on each other.
‘What did we have, Sanzio?’ Her voice was low. ‘We had a marriage that was made for a set purpose. A purpose that would be fulfilled when the Palazzo’s restoration was finished. A purpose that included you settling a score with Tonia. That…that was it really.’
He could see her face working, her hands in her lap start to twist as she went on.
‘A purpose that never included—’ she drew a ragged breath ‘—becoming lovers. And…and just because we did become lovers didn’t mean anything else had changed.’
His eyes were on her. Fixed on her.
‘It changed everything,’ he said.
* * *
She heard him speak. But she felt a faintnessfill her.
‘It changed everything,’ Sanzio said again.
He frowned. ‘At first, I didn’t realise it.
At first, I simply wanted to indulge myself with you.
I knew I shouldn’t, because you hadn’t married me for that, but I gave in to my own longing for you, told myself—’ his voice twisted ‘—that it would be a way for you to finally be free of your sister’s lifelong lies.
You were so scarred by what she’d done to you, that I wanted you to trust me—trust that I found you beautiful and desirable.
That you inflamed my senses! And that was true.
All true. But there was more, oh, so much, much more!
Just being with you, in bed and out, was bringing me what I had never known existed. ’
He stopped. His eyes had never left hers, and she could feel the faintness increasing now.
‘Happiness,’ Sanzio said. He drew a breath, a ragged one.
‘We were so good together! It just worked—everything about us worked! Whether we were in Rome or the Palazzo, or anywhere at all! I just thought it would go on, just being like that. Because why shouldn’t it? When it was so, so good between us.’
His voice changed. ‘But when…that morning by the pool, you started to talk the way you did, it hurt. Hurt to hear you say so calmly that we would soon be divorced. That’s why I behaved as I did with Tonia.
To try and get you to—’ he took a heaving breath ‘—to feel possessive of me, not dismissive, as if I meant nothing to you. When you—’ she saw his jaw clench suddenly ‘—were all the world to me.’
* * *
He had said it. Said what he had crossed the ocean to say. And now it hung there in the space between them—the space that gaped like an abyss. He could barely feel his heartbeat, yet he knew it was pounding within him. Every muscle was stretched as if on a rack.
‘All the world to me,’ he heard himself say again.
His eyes were on her, fastened on her, and her face was still white, her hands still clutched in her lap. But no longer twisting. They lay still, so very still.
And she was not speaking.
No word, no answer, no reply,
Nothing at all.
He made to turn, to go, to leave. He had crossed the ocean in vain.
Then, before his racked body could obey, his eyes still fastened on her, he saw something change in her face.
Tears welling in her eyes…
* * *
She could not stop them. They spilled, pouring down her cheeks. Silently and unstoppably.
He was there in an instant. Coming down beside her, taking her hands in his. His strong, warm hands, so dear to her, so very, very dear to her. She clung to them as if it were the only way she could exist.
He said her name and she turned her face to him, tears still pouring unstoppably down her cheeks. He was speaking now, his voice jerky, faltering.
‘Oh, God, Eleanora, don’t cry—don’t cry!’ She saw his face work. ‘If you want me to leave…’