A Clash With Cannavaro (12 page)

Claudette and he must have a lot of catching up to do, she realised, aware that he hadn’t seen his stepmother in happy circumstances for some months; knowing that they hadn’t always got on.

Still, it was good of her to take the time to come and see her stepson on his wedding day, she mused, even if Claudette had clearly not taken to his new wife, any more than she had taken to Vikki when she had married his brother.

Slipping on a green silk robe, her body pulsing with excited anticipation, she went through into the dressing room to brush her hair.

A prominent red star hung parallel with the centre of the open window. She wondered what it was, and in a flight of fancy wondered what her mother would have made of it—called it. The North Star? No. Wrong hemisphere, surely? Or perhaps it was part of the Taurus constellation, in which case her mother would probably have said it was the vivid red eye of the angry bull.

In front of one of the long mirrors she started brushing her hair, and then, in a deliciously abandoned moment, swept it up above her head. Her own eyes were bright with anticipation, she noticed, and the upper curves of her breasts were clearly visible beneath the gaping ‘V’ of her green robe. Exactly the same emerald-green that she had been wearing the night she had met Emilano, she realised, her heart giving an excited little leap when she heard the bedroom door handle suddenly being turned.

He was closing the door behind him. She could see his reflection clearly in the mirror, where she was still standing with her hair pushed up in that provocative way and an unintentionally provocative smile playing around her mouth. But then she wanted him to see her just as she saw herself at that moment. Wanton and alluring. Naked beneath her robe. A woman eager to please the man she was madly in love with and had promised to cherish for eternity.

Or a woman...
cruelly, she heard her sister’s voice mentally mocking her, even though she tried to blank it out...
a woman who’s just landed the catch of the centur
y
!

‘I thought you’d changed your mind about joining me,’ she purred softly at his reflection, bringing her tongue unconsciously across her top lip. ‘I was getting ready to send out a search party,’ she teased. ‘Or to check to see if you’d forgotten which room I was in.’

She spoke with all the love and warmth and tenderness oozing from her towards this man who, even with his back to her, still managed to look as though he’d been put on this earth purely to please womankind. And yet he was hers—and only hers, she thought blissfully, until the end of time.

But then he turned round, and even in the mirror she could see the cold, hard angles of his unsmiling features.

‘What is it?’ she whispered, whipping round, her spirits tumbling like the flaming red hair about her shoulders as she came out of the dressing room. ‘What’s wrong?’

CHAPTER NINE

‘W
HY
DID
YOU
not tell me that Daniele is not my brother’s child?’

His question hit Lauren like a thunderbolt through solid steel.

‘What are you talking about?’ she queried, with her throat contracting.

‘The fact that your sister was pregnant with another man’s child when she married my brother, and that you knew about it!’

The colour leeched out of Lauren’s face, and for those few moments when she couldn’t speak she saw hard grooves deepening around Emiliano’s mouth.

‘So you did know.’ His voice was barely a whisper.

‘No.’ She was shaking her head, her answer little more than a croak.

‘Are you saying she didn’t tell you?’ Harsh scepticism ran through every word.

‘No!’ It was an adamantly voiced denial. ‘I mean...’

‘Yes?’ he prompted, like a cold, remorseless interrogator and not the man who had made those vows to her so sincerely and apparently lovingly just a few hours ago.

‘I mean that when Vikki left Angelo she...she told me she had said some awful things to him. She said he’d been threatening to hang on to Danny to stop her leaving so, in order to get away from him,
and
keep her baby, she told him she’d had an affair the last time they’d broken up and that Danny wasn’t his.’

Lauren remembered how shocked she had been on hearing that; remembered the relief she had felt when her sister had shown distinct remorse for saying it.

‘She apologised to him afterwards.’ During one of their mutually antagonising telephone conversations, Lauren suspected. ‘Made it clear to him that she’d only said it because he was being so difficult.’

‘And because she realised she stood to lose a nice fat maintenance settlement if she didn’t.’

‘That’s not true!’ Her sister had done a lot of questionable things in her time, but she would never have lied about her baby’s paternity for the sake of her own ends, would she? ‘Has your stepmother just told you all this?’ she demanded, hating the doubts that were seeping through her with regard to Vikki’s motives, yet unable to forget her sister’s parting words that last day when she had left Danny in Lauren’s temporary—or, as it turned out—permanent care.

I’m going to screw him for every penny I can get!

‘Why?’ she queried with her eyes narrowing when Emiliano didn’t respond. ‘To try and ruin your wedding day? Doesn’t she want you to be happy?’

He made a hard, deprecating sound down his nostrils. ‘Claudette and I might not always have got along, but my stepmother is not deliberately vindictive,’ he informed her coldly. ‘She had the facts directly from Angelo himself just a couple of weeks before he died.’

‘So why didn’t she tell you then? Why didn’t he?’ she persisted, desperate for some answers.

‘We weren’t in contact.’ He wasn’t spelling it out in so many words, but Lauren guessed he was referring to both Claudette and his brother. ‘Aside from which, I was the last person in whom my brother would have confided,’ he stated grimly. ‘More to the point, Lauren, why didn’t
you
?’

* * *

‘Because it didn’t even cross my mind! And if it had, I really wouldn’t have thought it was worth mentioning,’ she uttered, flabbergasted. ‘Vikki and Angelo...’ She couldn’t even say:
have gone. ‘
It was just something Vikki said so she wouldn’t lose custody of Danny, but she regretted saying it.’

‘And you want to make me think you were really naïve enough to believe that?’

His remark hurt. Not least because in questioning her sister’s scruples he was also questioning hers, just as he had done in the past. Only this time it was a thousand times worse because she loved him; because she was wearing his wedding ring on her finger.

‘How can you say that?’ It was hard containing the emotion in her voice when his accusations and suspicions were making a mockery of everything in a room designed for a night of loving. ‘Let alone even imagine that I would have let you think...’ She shook her head to try and clear it. ‘Of course Danny’s Angelo’s! A
Cannavaro
,’ she stressed, refusing to harbour any doubts in her mind. ‘OK. He looks more like my side of the family than yours, but he does have some Cannavaro characteristics. You even commented on it once or twice yourself!’

‘A man can convince himself of anything if he wants to,’ he assured her dismissively.

‘And you obviously want to!’ she snapped back, wondering why he was refusing to budge or even give an inch. ‘So what are you trying to say? That I lied to you to get you to marry me?’

‘Only you know the answer to that, Lauren.’

She gazed up into his harsh, judgemental features, her own face lined with pain and incredulity as she whispered, ‘What are you saying?’

She could feel herself trembling as he took a folded piece of paper from his trouser pocket and opened it out.

‘Perhaps you’d care to explain this.’

He didn’t show it to her, just began quoting from the text of what Lauren realised, in shocked amazement, was a letter she had written to Vikki shortly after her sister had walked out on his brother.

‘“You can’t go on living with Matthew like you did when you and Angelo broke up before. It’s not being fair to him now you’re married, and you’re never going to make Angelo believe Daniele’s his if he finds out.”’

‘Where did you get that?’

As she tried to snatch it from him
,
Emiliano continued remorselessly.
‘“If he does, you’ll lose everything.
Daniele
will lose everything...”’

‘I meant his
family
!’ Lauren riposted emphatically. She had written that letter to try to get Vikki to stop making things difficult for herself, as well as to apologise to Angelo, when her sister had seemed too proud and reluctant at first to contact him. ‘Where did you get it?’ she demanded, with her nostrils flaring as she watched Emiliano toss the letter down on the bridal bed in a disgusted gesture that sent darts of pain and anguish spearing through her.

‘My brother found it among your sister’s things, which the police had taken to their marital home at the time of the accident, and which he discovered when he was well enough to go through them afterwards.’

Things that Lauren hadn’t been allowed to take as Angelo had still been legally Vikki’s next of kin.

‘You told me you hadn’t seen her for years until shortly before their wedding.’

‘I hadn’t!’

‘So how did you know she had been shacking up with this Matthew before?’

‘She told me!’ Wings of angry colour were spreading across her cheeks. ‘And she wasn’t shacking up with him! Matthew was just a friend.’

‘A very good one, apparently!’

Good enough to put Vikki up in his London flat whenever she’d burnt her bridges. To love her as he had since they’d been teenagers in Cumbria, when her sister didn’t even fancy him and only ever wanted to use him as a stopgap. Someone to shoulder her troubles—as someone always had, Lauren remembered unhappily—when her sister couldn’t cope with the problems she’d often made for herself.

It was clear, though, that telling Emiliano that would scarcely help to exonerate her in her supposed conspiracy with her sister. And who was to say that Vikki hadn’t, in one of her capricious moments, been persuaded into letting Matthew take her to bed at some stage just for the hell of it? Or even some other man, for that matter?

If your brother didn’t think Daniele was his, and that I knew about it, why didn’t he confront me with it?
she nearly asked through her mounting doubts about her sister, but then decided it was totally unnecessary. Hadn’t Angelo Cannavaro’s actions said it all in the way he had simply abandoned his son after Vikki died? And yet why had he taken so long to show that letter to his stepmother? Hadn’t he wanted to accept that he might just have driven his wife into the arms of another man?

Now, though, looking up into his brother’s satanically dark features, she noticed for the first time how strained he looked.
Devastated
was the word that sprang to Lauren’s mind.

Yet he couldn’t feel half as devastated as she did right at that moment, knowing what he thought about her. It didn’t help in any way to realise how incriminating that letter sounded, how guilty it made her seem.

‘You can’t really believe all this. Unless you’ve got so little trust in me that you think I could be guilty of all the things you’re accusing me of. In which case, why did you marry me? Unless...’

‘Unless what?’ he enquired coldly.

‘Unless you had some ulterior motive.’ After all, he had never once said that he loved her.

His eyes narrowed into slits as he tilted his head to look at her. ‘Like what?’

‘Daniele.’

He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Is that what you think?’

‘Why not? You can hardly think very much of me if you can accuse me of trying to trick you even before we’ve had our honeymoon.’

‘I haven’t accused you of trying to trick me.’

‘Haven’t you?’

This time he didn’t answer, and it was obvious why. He still thought she had been party to a gross deception by Vikki and had carried on that deception.

‘If you loved me you wouldn’t have questioned my honesty,’ she said, tortured by the fact that he had. ‘But you’ve never really stopped believing I wanted you for what you could give me, have you? You’ve always judged me on something you believe I’ve said or written, without even bothering to look beyond it. You just put two and two together and come up with sixteen! But if you think as little of me as that, then it has to be true what I said. That you married me for the simple reason I mentioned just now: Danny. You wanted him back where he belongs. Belonged,’ she corrected, hurting, unable to believe that all this was happening—that it was being said. ‘And you took the best possible route you could think of to make sure you got him. After all, in marrying me you weren’t only getting custody of your nephew... Correction. What you
thought
was your nephew,’ she inserted pointedly, ‘but a ready-made mother to look after him as well!’

Not to mention a guaranteed willing bed partner, she thought wretchedly, although she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that.

‘If you imagine that, then we should both be examining our motives,’ he said heavily.

‘Perhaps we should!’ she retorted, wishing she wasn’t being driven to saying things like this, unable to believe they were having their first row with their marriage ceremony barely over.

But it was more than a row, wasn’t it? she thought achingly. He was questioning her honesty. Her integrity. Her morals. Everything. Everything, in fact, that made her who she was.

His lashes came down as though he was tired suddenly. Tired of arguing. Tired of what, for him, at least, must have been a long, pointless charade.

‘What are you thinking?’ Lauren asked quietly, not wanting to be affected by those incredibly charismatic features, the proud sweep of his forehead, that bump in his nose, that shadowed jaw and that cruelly sensuous mouth that had imparadised her on so many occasions, but she was.

‘I am not thinking anything right now.’ Hands in his pockets, he moved past her to stand looking out of one of the bedroom windows. The music had ceased. The band was packing up. Even the last of the buffet was being cleared away. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said.

‘Well, I do.’ She lifted her shoulder in a hopeless little gesture, trying to stem the tears she was determined to contain. She couldn’t believe how calm she sounded, how very much in control of herself, as she told him, ‘I don’t think I want to be sharing a bed with you tonight.’

He swung round and looked at her for a long moment.

His eyes were resting on the soft heart of her face with its velvety red brows, green eyes and that slightly turned up nose with its dusting of freckles as though he wanted to consign it to his memory. Then, with a slide of his gaze to her provocatively parted robe, that even now made her pulses throb traitorously in response, he gave the briefest nod of acknowledgement before walking away, out of the room.

* * *

Lauren hadn’t slept a wink.

The sofa in the dressing room hadn’t been designed for sleeping on, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to use the bed that had been prepared for a first night of conjugal bliss. Neither had she wanted to risk setting tongues wagging amongst the staff by creeping back to her old room, where she had dressed so happily for her wedding less than twenty-four hours before.

Now, with the first light of dawn peeping through the blind, she eased herself up and found that she was aching mentally and physically from that dreadful scene with him the night before as she brought herself gingerly into the bedroom.

He hadn’t come back. Not that she had really expected him to. The room was as they had left it and the big bed hadn’t been slept in. The hibiscus flowers woven through the brass spindles had dropped, designed only to last a day.

Like her marriage, she thought excruciatingly, and wondered, as she had been doing throughout the long night, where on earth they could go from here.

He had said that relationships were built on trust, but he had never actually stopped doubting her. He had never trusted her, had he? she realised, agonised. How could he have, she reasoned, if just one thoughtlessly worded letter—and it had been thoughtless, she accepted, stupidly so—could resurrect his past opinion of her and nullify everything they had between them? Or what she had imagined they had had, she thought, torturously. But she couldn’t begin life with a man who clearly despised her. Nor did she want to, she realised, choking back tears, as she had been doing for most of the night. Any more than he wanted to be with her. And even if Vikki hadn’t cheated on Angelo and Daniele
was
his son, Emiliano would never believe now that the toddler was a Cannavaro, which gave him no claim to her little nephew, or left him even wanting one. But it was his lack of trust in her that was hardest to bear. So where did that leave her and Emiliano?