The Devil to Pay (16 page)

“But
you
have, Rianna.”

Her body instinctively stilled. She was furious with him and desperately hurting. But something wasn’t quite right. She sat down on the bed and gestured for him to follow. “I think you’d better get all this off your chest before I go.”

“I
said
I didn’t want you to go...”
He placed his hand over hers and pulled it close to his chest. “Why don’t you stay?”

“Stay?” Her brain froze momentarily. Surely he couldn’t be suggesting...?

“Yes. Stay. Have a holiday. You deserve it. Have the gap year you never had, with me. Why not?”

A holiday.

Her heart sank and the small thread of hope that had existed for a split second shrivelled like an uprooted seedling in the sun. She pulled her hand away and felt sick. How could she have imagined he would be offering her anything more? How stupid and naïve of her. “You know I can’t—you’ve just given me a quarry to run—and I can never thank you enough for it. But there’s still the children to consider.” She turned her face away to hide her crushing disappointment.

“The quarry will cope without you sitting in a Portakabin cubicle every day. A temp can do the basics, if you’re really worried,” he urged softly. “And as for the
children,
they’re OK right now, aren’t they? What’s going to happen in a few more weeks or months to change that?”

“They’re fine right now,” she replied, moving away from him. “But I can’t leave them without at least one reliable, healthy adult in their lives. Until Bill’s back and able to look after them properly, I have to be there. Gran’s health is very poor, and I’m all they really have to properly rely on.” The silence in the room was chilling as she slapped the palms of her hands on her hips in a gesture of resignation. She felt physically weakened by the gut-wrenching emotion ripping through her.

“They’re only a few hours flight away,” he murmured.

“Annoying as it may be,” she continued, a protective instinct spurring her on, “not to mention inconvenient, but those poor children are a fact. They exist, they need me, and they’re a non-negotiable part of my life. I could never abandon them for the sake of my own selfish pleasure.”

“We can find a way round this—”

She stood up angrily and when she reached the window, turned to face him. If this was coming to a horrible end, she needed to see the truth in his eyes when she asked the next question, to be sure there never really had been any hope for them. “I’m sure there are plenty of less troublesome, much more attractive and compliant women out there queuing up to be your playmate, your mistress of the moment.” The breath caught in her lungs. “I assume that’s the arrangement you are proposing? A no-strings short-term affair until all the fizz goes out of it and then we go our separate ways?” Her laughter was hollow. “Will you end up promising me we’ll remain ‘good friends,’ Daniel? Can I expect to be introduced as ‘an old and dear acquaintance’ to your next conquest?” Her fists were clenched so tight, pain shot up her forearms. “Is that how it usually works? Because I just couldn’t stand it.”

“You’re making this very difficult for me,” he muttered. “I can’t promise you a ‘forever,’ if that’s what you’re getting at, but I couldn’t with anyone. I don’t believe it’s possible to make a promise you can’t be sure of keeping, and it’s not fair of you to try and coerce it out of me.”

“
Coerce
it out of you!” Rianna forced herself against the windowsill to look him in the face, a face which suddenly appeared grey and tired in spite of his olive skin. “Do you really think I’m so shallow I could settle for that? Do you think I could live such a lie? You can’t have much respect for me as a person if you do, but what else should I have expected or hoped for? You’re clearly used to buying your women with baubles, toys, and champagne—”

“Enough,” he growled.

“Is it?” The shrillness of her own voice jarred her. “Well, I’m not so sure it is actually. Perhaps it’s time you heard a few home truths about yourself, Daniel Bracchi. But of course you’re not used to being on the receiving end are you? Not pleasant I imagine.”

“Enough!” His angry face was now just millimetres away, his eyes lasering into hers with ice-blue fury, and she could feel the heated irregularity of his breath on her brow.

This was a world away from the hope and joy she had experienced the previous evening as they ate lobster on the terrace, under a dusky apricot- streaked blue sky with candles dancing in the warm breeze. Daniel made such a fuss of her when she came down to dinner in a full-length midnight blue silk dress. She felt like royalty. It had been a perfect evening.

She admired the huge swimming pool set at the edge of the property and playfully suggested a midnight swim, but to her surprise, Daniel said the pool was rarely used and he was thinking of having it converted into a sunken garden.
She teased him about not being able to swim as well as she could, and they ended up on his private beach, skinny-dipping under the stars. The dress was ruined, but neither of them cared. It was quickly forgotten by the time they had made it back to the villa, back to his bed.

Now the dream had come to an end. Rianna’s heart felt as heavy and toxic as lead, as she realised she couldn’t spin the fairytale out any longer. She pushed him too far by demanding what he couldn’t give. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t love her like she loved him. So this was it, the end of the road. To her dismay, a large tear trickled down her cheek and fell like a heavy raindrop onto the marble floor.

“Don’t cry,
cara mia
,” he whispered, all trace of anger in his voice now gone, and wiped away the wet trail on her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “We can work this out.”

“I don’t see how we can.”

“I need to talk to you seriously. There are things you need to know to help you to understand, things that will explain why I said some stupid, hurtful things earlier. Will you let me?”

Rianna shrugged and looked at her toes. “Go on, then.”

“You can’t leave the children, and despite the stupid things I said earlier, I agree. It would be unthinkable. But I really can’t let you leave—not even for a short time—you’ve come to mean too much to me.”

“So why don’t you come back with
me
, if I mean so much to you? It’s not all terraced streets and rain, and the quarry’s yours morally, Don’t you have any interest in it? As you said before, it’s only a two-hour flight.” She frowned and a dark cloud of suspicion settled on her mind. “Or would it be far too much trouble for you?”

“Something terrible happened to me in Taff’s Weir. It changed me and distorted my life afterwards. It altered things for the entire family. Visiting Wales, where it all happened, is like staring into hell for me. Every second is torment, from the minute my feet touch its damp soil. It reduces me to a little boy, scared, uncertain. Guilty. I can’t even enjoy a meal there. Everything tastes like mud.”

“You’d better tell me what happened.” Rianna strode to a sofa and sat down. She gestured for him to join her. Instinct suddenly told her something in this large, strong man was broken and she couldn’t just walk away. From the man she loved with all her heart, even though he would ultimately crush it. She was drawn as a moth to the flame by wanting to heal him. It would be her ruination.

“It was one of those stupid student macho things. Everyone did it, had done for decades.” He swallowed heavily. “So you had to join in with the boys or lose face. Going down by the river on February the thirteenth, the day before Valentine’s Day, was a tradition. It was a distraction from the dullness of the place, high spirits, an excuse to get stupidly drunk in the pub by the bridge.”

“Yeah, I know it.” She nodded for him to continue.

“You’ll know about the bridge jumps then?”

“Yes. But it was banned some time ago if I’m not mistaken.”

He let out a low sigh. “Well, some good news at least.”

Rianna leant her elbow on the arm of the sofa. “I interrupted you. I’m sorry, carry on.”

“Gino was the golden boy, my older, cleverer cousin. Never short of a woman, they loved him. There was something about him, a wildness I could never emulate. I wanted to. He was so damn cool.” He rubbed his brow. “The idiot.”

“He jumped?”

“Yes. He insisted on going first, saying he’d get the pick of the
dolly birds
up at the Students’ Union that night as his reward. He’d come over for a few weeks to see me. He wasn’t just my cousin. He was my best friend, like a brother. The only one I could ever talk to apart from Nonna, but there were things I couldn’t really discuss with her. Girls, drugs, that sort of thing.”

Rianna nodded mutely.

“Well, Gino climbed up onto the bridge wall. It was getting dark and something suddenly didn’t feel right. Those industrial buildings, the chapels, the dark green of the park all seemed to be bearing down on us, like a warning, or maybe,”—he let out a bitter laugh—“we were just more drunk than we realised.” He ran his hands through his hair and then shook his head.

“I’m listening, carry on.”

“But it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t my imagination. There was a strange tension in the group and a handful of us tried to persuade him down. It didn’t feel right. We said he’d have the pick of the girls anyway and just standing on the curve of the stones proved he was fearless enough. But he wouldn’t have it. He laughed and called us all lightweights. I reached out to grab his rugby shirt as he limbered up, but missed. He went... He went in. He went down.”

Rianna watched the colour drain from his face until his skin looked like ash. “God, no...”

“Down so deep, the green and black took him. I could see the white of his hands as they were carried by the current. It all happened so quickly we couldn’t grab him before he started to drift.”

“That’s awful,” Rianna whispered. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

“There’s more,” he replied and took a deep breath. “It took a few minutes, but I managed to get to him. The water was freezing. I grabbed him by the collar and got his head above the water, but the current was too strong and we were both swept way downstream. If I’d had time to think about it, I’d have been terrified. It was like a slow motion nightmare where you run and scream, but get nowhere. And nobody hears you. It was a slow hell, clawing us both back to the bank, swimming with one arm, but eventually we made it. The path was cut off by a barbed wire fence surrounding the industrial estate so the rest of the boys couldn’t get to us. I hauled Gino up onto the bank and started CPR, but it was too late.”

“You did everything you could—”

“No. He didn’t drown. They kept him alive until his family could make the decision to turn off the life support, but he was brain dead. The primary cause of death was severe spinal injury and swelling to the brain. They couldn’t rule out the rough nature of his rescue may have made his initial injuries worse. He may well have survived the jump itself if I hadn’t mauled him about. I as good as killed my best friend.”

“You can’t say that. If he hadn’t jumped in the first place, if you hadn’t pulled him out, he’d have drowned—”

“Our family doesn’t agree. They were devastated. My uncle, my aunt, my dad, they need someone or something to blame for losing the Bracchi heir, their beautiful boy. I took the rap. It felt like my own life was over anyway when he went. I deserve the punishment.”

“The Bracchi heir?”

“Yes, Gino should be running Bracchi International now. He was my Uncle Aldo’s only child and the empire was supposed to pass to him. Instead, when Aldo had a heart attack and died, it all passed to my father, Tomos. A legacy he never expected, never wanted and was unprepared for. He will never forgive me for inflicting it on him. He’s said as much.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s not something the family has wanted to dwell on more than necessary.”

“So after Gino died?”

“Things went from bad to worse then. People shunned me, I got beaten up a few times. I couldn’t focus on my studies. Everything slipped away from me and in the end, I got kicked off my course. I couldn’t put Nonna through it all anymore and begged her to come back to Italy with me, but she’s tough. She refused to be intimidated and I’m glad to say when I left, it all stopped. Dad was disgusted with me.”

Rianna reached for his hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “Keep going.”

“In the weeks and months after Gino died, the only person who cared for me was Nonna. My mother never came, never even called. I think Dad had told her not to interfere, that I had to be a man and sort it out for myself. I can’t really blame her. She always did what Dad said and she’d spent decades bringing up her own siblings. Her own mother neglected them all, and by the time I was born, she’d had enough of mothering. She’d done her bit. And having me as a son turned her into a depressive. My nannies were always of the highest calibre though...”

“I bet you gave them hell.”

He managed an ironic grin as he stroked one finger along the length of Rianna’s hand. “Dad wrote a few times before I went back to Italy mainly to say he’d disown me if I didn’t finish the degree. He didn’t in the end, but he made sure the next few years were as uncomfortable as possible. I spent most of the time underground, ‘learning the business from the bottom up.’ It felt like I’d been sent to the Siberian salt mines, not the gold seams of Bardi.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just try to understand why I’m so reluctant to go back there. I want you to see why I don’t want you to go back as well. I’ve secured the future of the quarry—I knew you’d never let those people down—so I took care of it. It can be managed in just the same way as I’ve been doing it, two hours away, no more. And I don’t want you within a mile of the bastards who hurt you either.”

Rianna frowned. She didn’t want to discuss her exes again. “But my family—”

“Bring them all over! Rescue them from the fog and poverty. For the first time my wealth can achieve something fantastic. New beginnings.” He continued in spite of the fact Rianna was shaking her head. “And when Bill’s up to it, he can join the children, start afresh. Whatever is best for everyone.”