Marrying the Enemy (16 page)

‘You visited your dad? That’s great,’ she said, his nervous rambling endearing him as much as his disclosures.

‘I did it for us,’ he blurted, releasing her hand to start pacing. ‘You were right about me needing to see him to face the past, deal with it and move on. I needed to get things straight in my head before I saw you, because I didn’t want to mess up like I did with the promise ring.’

She winced. ‘Sorry, I didn’t expect it and it came out of the blue.’

He stopped in front of her, tilted up her chin. ‘Oh, you expected a ring, just not an imitation of the real thing.’

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a navy box. A Seaborn’s box, and her heart stalled.

‘That promise ring was exactly that. A promise I’d wait for you. I didn’t want to rush you, didn’t want to scare you with my feelings, so I gave you an interim ring, giving you space ’til you made up your mind if you wanted this marriage to work for real.’

He inched open the lid with his thumb and her heart kick-started again, racing a million beats a minute.

‘Besides, this one wasn’t finished and I wanted to give you something—’

She squealed as she caught sight of the ring.

Her
ring.

A perfect three-carat fantasy-cut pink diamond set in white gold.

‘How—when—why—?’

He slipped the ring from the box and slid it onto the ring finger of her left hand. ‘You once told me how much an engagement ring means to you, how you didn’t want one unless it meant the real thing.’

As the ring slid into place he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it.

‘I’m hoping this ring says what I feel in my heart a lot more eloquently. I love you, Ruby Seaborn. Probably fell a little bit in love with you the first moment we met. I didn’t want to love you—’

‘Quit while you’re ahead.’ She kissed him, wrapping her arms so tightly around him she never wanted to let him go.

The timing of the ring proved his love. He’d commissioned it before their weekend away, before the promise ring, before she’d lost the plot.

When they eased apart, she clung to his shirt and gave him a little shake.

‘You should’ve told me about the engagement ring earlier.’

‘You should’ve trusted me, trusted what’s in here.’

He placed his hand over her heart and it turned over and leapt straight into his palm.

‘So I’m guessing a marriage proposal is kind of redundant, huh?’

She laughed and locked her hands around his neck. ‘I don’t know, a girl can never have too many bits of jewellery. Seeing as I’ve got the wedding band and engagement ring and promise ring, maybe an eternity ring wouldn’t go astray?’

‘You don’t need a ring for me to show you I’ll love you for eternity.’

‘A
www...tough guy
’s really a big softie underneath.’

He growled and nuzzled her neck. ‘That’ll be our little secret.’

‘For ever,’ she murmured, a moment before his lips touched hers.

She couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate their marriage, having her husband’s undying love.

Though she did have her eye on some flawless canary diamonds that would make a perfect eternity ring...

* * * * *

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CHAPTER
ONE

‘Y
OU
say it was your grandparents’ wish
that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa
Maria?’

The dispassionate male voice gave
away as little as the shadowed face. Its bone structure was delineated with
strokes of sunlight that might have come from Leonardo’s masterly hand,
revealing as they did the exact nature of the man’s cultural inheritance.
Those high cheekbones, that slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of
olive-toned flesh, the proud aquiline shape of his nose—all of them spoke of
the mixing of genes from the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to
possess it. His ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of
what they wanted. And now his attention was focused on
her
.

Instinctively she wanted to
distance herself from him, to conceal herself from him, she recognized, and
she couldn’t stop herself from stepping back from him, her ankle threatening
to give way as the back of her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen
edge of the gravestone behind her.

‘Take care.’

He moved so fast that she froze,
like a rabbit pinned down by the swift, deathly descent of the falcon from
which his family took its name. Long, lean tanned fingers closed round her
wrist as he jerked her forward, the mint-scented warmth of his breath
burning against her face as he leaned nearer to deliver an
admonishment.

It was impossible for her to
move. Impossible, too, for her to speak or even think. All she could do was
feel
—suffer
beneath the lava-hot flow of emotions that had erupted inside her to spill
into every sensitive nerve-ending she possessed. This was indeed torture.
Torture…or torment? Her body convulsed on a violent surge of self-contempt.
Torture. There was no torment in this man’s hold on her, no temptation.
Nothing but self-loathing and…and indifference.

But her whispered, ‘Let go of
me,’ sounded far more like the broken cry of a helpless victim than the
cool, calm command of a modern and independent woman.

* * *

She smelled of English
roses and lavender; she looked like an archetypical Englishwoman. She had
even sounded like one until he had touched her, and she had shown him the
fierce Sicilian passion and intensity that was her true heritage.

‘Let go of me!’ she had
demanded.

Caesar’s mouth hardened against
the images her words had set free from his memory. Images and memories so
sharply painful that he automatically recoiled from them. So much pain, so
much damage, so much guilt for him to bear.

So why do what he had to do now?
Wasn’t that only going to increase her deserved animosity towards him, and
increase his own guilt?

Because he had no choice. Because
he had to think of the greater good. Because he had to think, as he had
always had to think, of his people and his duty to his family line and his
name.

The harsh reality was that there
could be no true freedom for either of them. And that was
his
fault. In every way,
all of this was his fault.

His heart had started to pound
with heavy hammer-strokes. He hadn’t built in to his calculations the
possibility that he would be so aware of her, so affected by the sensual
allure of her. Like Sicily’s famous volcano, she was all fire, covered at
its peak by ice, and he was far more vulnerable to that than he had expected
to be.

Why? It wasn’t as though there
weren’t plenty of beautiful, sensual women all too ready to share his
bed—who had, in fact, shared his bed before he had been forced to recognise
that the so-called pleasure of those encounters tasted of nothing other than
an emptiness that left him aching for something more satisfying and
meaningful. Only by then he’d had nothing he could offer the kind of woman
with whom he might have been able to build such a relationship.

He had, in effect, become a man
who could not love on his own terms. A man whose duty was to follow in the
footsteps of his forebears. A man on whom the future of his people
depended.

It was that duty that had been
instilled into him from childhood. Even as an orphaned six-year-old, crying
for his parents, he had been told how important it was that he remember his
position and his duty. The people had even sent a deputation to talk to
him—to remind him of what it meant to stand in his late father’s shoes. By
outsiders the beliefs and customs of his people would be considered harsh,
and even cruel. He was doing all he could to change things, but such changes
could only be brought in slowly—especially when the most important headman
of the people’s council was so vehemently opposed to new ideas, so set in
his ways. However, Caesar wasn’t a boy of six any more, and he was
determined that changes
would
be made.

Changes. His mind drifted for a
moment. Could truly fundamental things be altered? Could old wrongs be put
right? Could a way be found…?

He shook such dreams from him and
turned back to the present.

‘You haven’t answered my question
about your grandparents,’ he reminded Louise.

* * *

As little as she liked
his autocratic tone, Louise was relieved enough at the return of something
approaching normality between them to answer curtly, ‘Yes.’

All she wanted was for this
interview, this inspection, to be over and done with. It went against
everything she believed in so passionately that she was patently expected to
virtually grovel to this aristocratic and arrogant Sicilian duke, with his
air of dangerously dark sexuality and his too-good looks, simply because
centuries ago his family had provided the land on which this small village
church had been built. But that was the way of things here in this remote,
almost feudal part of Sicily.

He was owner of the church and
the village and heaven knew how many acres of Sicilian land. He was also the
patronne
,
in the local Sicilian culture, the ‘father’ of the people who traditionally
lived on it—even if those people were members of her grandparents’
generation. Like his title and his land, it was a role he had inherited. She
knew that, and had grown up knowing it, listening to her grandparents’
stories of the hardship of the lives they had lived as children. They had
been forced to work on the land owned by the family of this man who now
stood in front of her in the shaded quiet of the ancient
graveyard.

Louise gave a small shiver as she
looked beyond the cloudless blue sky to the mountains, where the volcano of
Etna brooded sulphurously beneath the hot sun. She checked the sky again
surreptitiously. She had never liked thunderstorms, and those mountains were
notorious for conjuring them out of nothing. Wild and dangerous storms,
capable of unleashing danger with savage cruelty. Like the man now watching
her.

* * *

She wasn’t what he had
expected or anticipated, Caesar acknowledged. That wheat-blonde hair wasn’t
Sicilian, nor those sea-green eyes—even if she did carry herself with the
pride of an Italian woman. She was around medium height, fine-boned and
slender—almost too much so, he thought, catching sight of the narrowness of
her wrist with its lightly tanned skin. The oval shape of her face with its
high cheekbones was classically feminine. A beautiful woman. One who would
turn male heads wherever she went. But her air of cool serenity was, he
suspected, worked for rather than natural.

And what of his own feelings
towards her now that she was here? Had he expected them? Caesar turned away
from her so that she wouldn’t be able to see his expression. Was he afraid
of what it might reveal to her? She was a trained professional, after all—a
woman whose qualifications proved that she was well able to dig down deep
into a person’s psyche and find all that they might have hidden away. And he
was afraid of what she might find in him.

He was afraid that she might rip
away the scar tissue he had encouraged to grow over his guilt and grief, his
pride and sense of duty, over the dreadful, shameful demands he had allowed
them to make on him. So was it more than just guilt he felt? Was there shame
as well? He almost didn’t need to ask himself that question when he had
borne those twin burdens for over a decade. Had borne them and would
continue to bear them. He had tried to make amends—a letter sent but never
replied to, an apology proffered, a hope expressed, words written in what at
the time had felt like the blood he had squeezed out of his own heart. A
letter never even acknowledged. There would be no forgiveness or going back.
And, after all, what else had he expected? What he had done did not deserve
to be forgiven.

His guilt was a burden he would
carry throughout his life, just as it had already been, but that guilt was
his private punishment. It belonged solely to him. After all, there could be
no going back to change things—nor, he suspected, anything he could offer
that would make recompense for what had been done. So, no, being here with
her had
not
increased his guilt—he already bore it in full measure—but it had sharpened
its edge to a keenness that was almost a physical stab of pain every time he
breathed.

They were speaking in English—his
choice—and anyone looking at her would have assumed from the understated
simplicity and practicality of her plain soft blue dress, her shoulders
discreetly covered by simple white linen, that she was a certain type of
educated middle class professional woman, on holiday in Sicily.

Her name was Louise Anderson, and
her mother was the daughter of the Sicilian couple whose ashes she had come
to bury in this quiet churchyard. Her father was Australian, also of
Sicilian origin.

Caesar moved, the movement making
him aware of the letter he had placed in the inside pocket of his suit
jacket.

* * *

Louise could feel her
tension tightening like a spring being wound with deliberate manipulation by
the man watching her. There was a streak of cruelty to those they considered
weaker than themselves in the Falconari family. It was there in their
history, both written and oral. He had no reason to behave cruelly towards
her grandparents, though. Nor to her.

It had shocked her when the
priest to whom she had written about her grandparents’ wishes had written
back saying that she would need the permission of the Duke—a ‘formality’, he
had called it—and that he had arranged the necessary appointment for
her.

She would rather have met him in
the bustling anonymity of her hotel than here in this quiet, ancient place
so filled with the silent memories of those who lay here. But his word was
law. That knowledge was enough to have her increasing the distance between
them as she stepped further back from him, this time checking first to make
sure there were no potential obstructions behind her, as though by doing so
she could somehow lessen the powerful forcefield of his personality. And his
sexuality…

A shudder racked her. She hadn’t
been prepared for that. That she would be immediately and so intensely aware
of his sexuality. Far more so now, in fact, than…

As she braked down hard on her
accelerating and dangerous thoughts, she was actually glad of the sound of
his voice commanding her concentration.

‘Your grandparents left Sicily
for London shortly after they married, and made their home there, and yet
they have chosen to have their ashes buried here?’

How typical it was of this kind
of man—a powerful, domineering, arrogant overlord—that he should question
her grandparents’ wishes, as though they were still his serfs and he still
their master. And how her own fiercely independent blood boiled with dislike
for him at that knowledge. She was
glad
to be given that excuse for the
antagonism she felt towards him.
No
—she didn’t need an excuse for her feelings. They
were hers as of right. Just as it was her grandparents’ right to have their
wish to have their ashes interred in the earth of their forebears
fulfilled.

‘They left because there was no
work for them here. Not even working for a pittance on your family’s land,
as their parents and theirs before them had done. They want their ashes
buried here because to them Sicily was still their home, their
land.’

Caesar could hear the accusation
and the antagonism in her voice.

‘It seems…unusual that they
should entrust the task of carrying out their wishes to you, their
grandchild, instead of your mother, their daughter.’

Once again he was aware of the
pressure of the letter in his pocket. And the pressure of his own guilt…? He
had offered her an apology. That was the past and it must remain the past.
There was no going back. The guilt he felt was a self-indulgence he could
not afford to recognise. Not when there was so much else at
stake.

‘My mother lives in Palm Springs
with her second husband, and has done so for many years, whilst I have
always lived in London.’

‘With your
grandparents?’

Even though it was a question, he
made it seem more like a statement of fact.