The Sin of Cynara (16 page)

  'I do as I please.' In a couple of long strides he was across the room and darkly overpowering as he stood over Carol. 'The opinions of other people mean nothing to me, and I should hope I am not such a boor that I would expect you to humble yourself in any way at all. You will be the padroncina, way above the other women. My wife.'

  The two words daggered through Carol. His wife because the solemn words made it so, along with the witnesses and the ring, and the fact that she took his name.

  His wife ... the stranger at the altar beside him.

  'A woman expects romance, eh?' His voice was deeply ironic. 'Was there not enough of that with my brother?'

  'More than enough,' she admitted. 'But when some-one says they love you, then somehow it's easier to be married to them. It establishes a bond, but you and I -we grasp at nothing, because there is nothing between us. Don't you see?'

  'Yes, I see.' He gazed down at her, and his eyes followed the silky flow of her hair. 'There is no sense of security without love, and I can only give you the material things. They will have to be enough, mia, for the sake of Vincenzo's son. Marriage to me will make him secure, at least.'

  'Yes,' she murmured, and felt a dreadful aching at her heart. Had she foolishly hoped that Rudolph might speak of love instead of underlining the fact that he had only the comfort of his home to offer and never the consolation of his heart?

  'I could never deny that I want Teri to be safe,' she said. 'You must think me horribly ungrateful—'

  'I merely think of you as a woman.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'You wouldn't be the first to give your heart to a knave, and to bury it in his grave. But you are young, and perhaps a life that is a little easier will help you to forget in time. It will be good here for the child, among his own sort of people, especially as you said that he was not made welcome in the house of your aunts.'

  'They're a little old-fashioned, signore.' Carol looked at him with troubled eyes; he believed that she was smitten by an undying love for his brother, and she couldn't tell him that whatever she had felt for Vincenzo had been struck dead in her heart on the very day he had falsely married her. At the time she had hated him, but now she felt only a residue of regret and pity.

  Here with Rudolph, in the solitude and quietness of this Italian bedroom, she felt strangely breathless and unlike herself. She looked at his seared face and wanted to offer him something ... he was a man after all, and he had kissed her with a kind of banked-down hunger for passion.

  'Won't you feel cheated' - the words stumbled from her lips - 'married to someone just for the sake of - of her child?'

  'Cheated?' His eyes fixed hers with a dark brilliance. 'Are you saying that you want to give yourself to me, signora?'

  'When we - marry.' The words almost fainted in her throat. 'If you want me—'

  'Oh, I can want.' Swift as a striking snake his hand flicked out and took a fistful of her hair, pale and gleaming against his dark skin. 'I assure you, madam, that it would give me the intensest pleasure to throw you to that bed and take your body. But pleasure is a passing thing and it bears no relation to the real joy -the joy that is love.'

  His eyes held hers a moment longer, then with a brief inclination of his raven-dark head he turned on his heel and strode to the door. It opened and closed behind him, leaving a blank space where his dark shape had been. Carol stared at the emptiness and felt as if she had been slapped around the face.

  She lifted a hand to her face and felt the coldness of her skin. He couldn't have said it more explicitly, that she was just a body that might please him for an hour. Beyond that she had nothing to offer him that he wanted ... this shaken feeling was horrible, for it told her that her proffered heart had been flung back at her.

  'Oh - go to hell,' she muttered, and tossing her long hair she made for her bed, climbed the half-moon of steps and crept in under the covers like a lost cat seeking a little warmth.

  There in the darkness she thought over their conversation until her cheeks burned. The man was abominably arrogant and so withdrawn from all sympathy that trying to please him was like getting entangled in barbed wire. All right, if that was the way he wanted it then she'd be happy to oblige him by accepting the material advantages of being his wife. No one before had ever treated her as anything more than the dutiful standby who took on an abandoned baby and slaved for a pair of selfish aunts in order to keep a roof over that baby's head. She had earned a little respite from drudgery, and it would certainly make a change to be the padroncino who gave the orders instead of taking them.

  Carol fell asleep on that thought and when she awoke in the morning that feeling of defiance was still with her. She met the bold eyes of the aristocratic officer in his carved picture frame and dropped him a curtsey. 'Yes, signore, you may look down your proud nose, but that doesn't alter the fact that I'm going to marry into your high and mighty family.'

  Without delay or hindrance the baróne carried out his wedding plans, and there were certain papers which Carol had to sign in the presence of a rather starchy lawyer from Rome. When she asked Rudolph about the papers he replied that they related to Teri and legal preparations were being made for the boy to take his name and to become heir to Falconetti.

  Carol's heart came into her throat as she realized that she was committing another woman's child into the keeping of the baróne, and that in some awful way she might be breaking the law. But now there seemed no way to stop the momentum of the arrangements; she actively feared Rudolph's anger if he should discover that she had tricked him into accepting her as Teri's mother.

  Gena carried her off to Rome for a shopping spree, and there in one of the biggest and smartest dress houses her clothes for the wedding and the honeymoon were fitted and purchased. Lovely things in real Eastern silks, and in dreamy colours that suited Carol and brought out a rather enchanting quality in her blonde looks.

  'Now I know why Rudi is marrying you,' said Gena, walking around Carol after a sumptuous velvet dress had been tried on her slim figure, with slashed medieval sleeves and a low neckline which revealed her creamy neck and shoulders. 'My dear, you pay for dressing, as the saying goes, and have a certain look of class in good clothes. That hair of yours helps, of course, and now I can see why you never had it chopped off. Were you hoping to marry a rich guy one of these days?'

  Gena smiled, but there was a certain glint of shrewdness in her eyes. Carol met that smile with a faintly mysterious look, of which she was totally unaware, for she wasn't looking at herself in the long mirror.

  'I think you know I'm not a gold-digger,' she said. 'Chance plays strange tricks with our lives, that's all.'

  'Perhaps.' Gena stood and studied the effect of Carol in the velvet dress the colour of sapphires. 'All the same, you've been damned lucky, haven't you, honey? Do you love my brother? He deserves it, but women are put off by his cool air of pride in the face of his deformity. He won't be pitied, if that's what you feel for him.'

  'I know how much he hates sympathy,' Carol said. 'Anyway, I'm not the important feature of this marriage, and these clothes are only a little icing on the cake. Rudolph is marrying me for the sake of Teri.'

  'And vice versa, eh?' Gena frowned, and then turned to consult with the fitter over some of the other fine items for Carol's wardrobe. The violet and fawn riding outfit, the gown embroidered with a filigree of garnets and gold thread, the textured suits and glove-leather shoes.

  Carol played the obliging, shy bride and refused to allow the secret fears and feelings to overwhelm her. She lunched with Gena and Saul in smart restaurants, and was taken on a tour of the city. It all passed in a dreamlike fashion and she wasn't really sorry when it was time to return to the isola, where Teri had been left in the charge of the baróne's kindly and efficient housekeeper.

  All the time away from him Carol had been anxious in case Bedelia should harm him in any way . . . when he rushed into her arms in the hall and she hugged him breathless, her anxiety gave way to a glowing smile, which the baróne caught and held as he emerged from one of the archways. His eyes flashed over, taking in her clover-coloured suit, her legs long and slim in transparent silk stockings, the kind worn with a wispy suspender-belt. Carol was unbearably aware of him looking at her, clad like this in the expensive garments his money had bought, and which Gena had insisted that she wear now she was the bespoken of a wealthy Italian. She was aware that they heightened her fair looks and gave her an ultra-feminine appearance, somehow taking from her that air of independence she had felt in her inexpensive trouser suits bought in at chain store.

  'Welcome home,' he said, coming across to her. 'Are you making sure that your bambino is still in one piece and has come to no harm during your absence?'

  There was a curious note of indulgence in his deep foreign voice, and it disarmed Carol and made her legs tremble as she straightened up.

  'Hullo, signore. I'm glad you've taken good care of Teri.'

  'Quite naturally I have kept my eye upon him.' A lean hand reached out and briefly stroked across the boy's head. 'Teri and I are now friends, are we not, mio?'

  'Tio Rudi has taken me fishing in his boat, Cally.' The boy smiled up eagerly at her, and she gave a little gasp of dismay as she saw that he had lost a front tooth.

  'Buster, how did that happen?'

  'On a walnut,' he said. 'We found some in the orchard, but Tio said it was only a baby tooth and that from now on I would start to grow my real teeth.'

  She glanced at Rudolph and he broke into a slight smile, showing his own faultless white teeth. Teri would have teeth like that, she thought, thankfully. Strong, hard and white. Teri would be safe now, to grow up in this man's protection.

  Her smile was shaky. 'I - I brought you back a present, Buster. Shall we go upstairs and unpack it?'

  'Oh, yes, come on !' He tugged at her hand, and all the way up the stairs she could feel the baróne's eyes upon them. She felt again that tremor in her legs; a hasty glance revealed that the baróne was still at the foot of the staircase and his eyes were upon her legs as she mounted to the gallery. The pulse gave a skip at the base of her throat and she recalled in all its detail that night in her bedroom and the almost ruthless way he had said that it would give him intense pleasure to 'take' her,

  She swayed slightly and caught at the wrought-iron handrail of the stairs ... It was crazily foolish and wanton, but she wanted the reality of that threat, with or without any love in it. Pity? She felt not a scrap of it for such a man, her female instincts far more aware of his strength and lean hard grace in the cream-coloured jacket and silk-striped brown shirt that set off his intense darkness. His smile curled against his acid-hurt, ironic lips that had left their lingering impression upon hers.

  'Why are you shivering like that, Cally?'

  Teri's young voice fluted the words up and down the stairs, and instantly she saw the smile wiped from the scarred face, the pupils narrowing in those tawny eyes. He turned and walked away in the direction of his den, taking with him the belief that she was repulsed by the look of him.

  Her fingers so gripped the iron that her bones ached. She wanted to dash down the stairs to Rudolph, with such an overwhelming urgency that she barely controlled the impulse. What was the use? If she touched him, if she met his eyes, she would only be struck dumb by shyness and it would only look as if she were trying to say sorry to him.

  'I can't wait to see what you've bought me ' Teri was tugging at her other hand, and that moment of urgency was safely disposed of. Getting emotionally involved with the baróne could only lead to further complications, and she had enough of those to handle without losing her head over a man because he had something about him that appealed to the primitive side of her nature ... the side she hadn't been aware of until meeting him, living in a kind of innocence that now made her understand Cynara a little better.

  Desire could blind you to everything else, and now she was aware of its danger Carol resolved to be on her guard with the man who aroused it. It had nothing to do with love ... love was a tender emotion, not a savage urge to give and take.

  Only a matter of days now separated Carol from her marriage to the baróne, and she filled them with as much activity as possible, seeking in every way not to be alone with the man who was to be her husband.

  The morning of the wedding dawned with brilliant sunlight, and the first thing Carol heard when she awoke was the sound of the bells in the Falconetti chapel, pealing among the trees with that very special sound that even a bride of expediency couldn't help but respond to. She ran out on to her balcony and stood here barefooted in her pyjamas, her hair in its long thick plait making her look very young and vulnerable.

  'Buon giorno !' The words floated up to her from the courtyard, and when she glanced downwards there was the baróne on horseback, saluting her with a flick of his whip. He held it as if reminding her of what she had said, that he had power over people without the use of a whip.

  'Good morning, signore,' she called down to him, and a potent shyness clutched at her throat as her fingers clutched at the lapels of her pyjama jacket, pulling them together over her bare neck. A black sweater was high against his throat, and his boots and breeches gave him a tough look. His black hair was ruffled as if he had been riding hard, and this was verified by the way his horse tossed its head and stamped the cobbles.

  'I - I don't think I'm supposed to see you before the - ceremony,' Carol said, and she was about to back into her room when he commanded her to stay where she was.

  'I thought only we Latins were superstitious,' he said. 'You look rather pale and nervous, as if this were the first time you had gone through with this kind of thing. I should be the nervous one, eh?'