The Sin of Cynara (4 page)

  Carol looked at him then, daring those eyes that penetrated her defences like golden knives. 'What makes you say that, signore baróne?'

  His eyes dwelt on her hair, braided at the crown of her head so that her neck had a vulnerable look in the white collar of her sedate grey dress.

  'Need I elaborate, signora?' He gave her that title of a married woman, even though they both knew it to be false on account of that Italian girl with the passionate mouth, who had assured Carol that the baróne would kill her for coming here and re-opening old wounds.

  'Appearances can be deceptive,' she rejoined. 'You shouldn't be so certain of your own judgments.'

  'Ah, but in this instance I am fairly sure. Your hair — can you sit on it when you release it from the plaits?'

  'Just about.' A warmth stole into her skin and Carol realised that she was blushing ... it struck her as incredibly erotic to be talking of her hair and its length to this man ... hair that was only let down in the privacy of her bedroom. Was he of the same disposition as Vincenzo? Did his wife have to endure his partiality for other Women?

  'Most unusual in this day and age.' His eyes held a certain curiosity as they ran over her hair, his black lashes half shading their golden irises. 'Young women with modern ideas of liberation would regard such long hair as a burden. Can you truly sit on it?'

  'I've just told you I can, signore.'

  'And what if I choose to disbelieve you?'

  'I would then assume that you consider me a liar.'

  'Are you a liar? You arrive here out of the blue, holding a child by the hand, and you tell me that my brother married you.'

  'I have my so-called marriage lines, signore, if you care to examine them.'

  'Why, I wonder, did he marry you? Or, at least, go through a form of marriage with you?'

  'Oh, he told me why.' Carol tilted her chin and remembered that bitter row with Vincenzo. 'He said I was the type who had to have a wedding ring before the wedding night.'

  'Ah yes, they would be his sort of words. And so from this corte e amore there came a son?'

  'Yes, Vincenzo's son.' Her heart twisted, for this man had asked if she was a liar, and what could be a greater lie than for her to pretend that her union with Vincenzo had been real and she had borne the little boy whom she had carried into church and had christened with the Roman name of Terence.

  'There is no need to assure me that the boy is a Falcone.' That twist of a smile came and went on the scarred lips. 'My brother lives again in that small piece of humanity—'

  'I pray that he won't have his father's ways,' she broke in. 'I hope that all Teri has inherited of Vincenzo is that look of good breeding.'

  'And for the rest, signora, he must take after you, his mother?' The falcon eyes raked her face. 'Are you such an angelic creature, then, with no faults to pass on to your son? Have you no pride, no temper, no dark and secret desires that trouble your sleep at night? Do you never lose patience with other people, and are you always scrupulously honest?'

  'I - I try to be as honest as possible.' Her heart thudded and she sensed that this man who had known Vincenzo so well had doubts about her, and he meant to pursue them in his own devious way. 'I'm no angel - I would never pretend to be. White lies are some-times necessary in order to protect someone who matters.'

  'What about black lies, madam?' Now his eyes had a merciless look in them and Carol knew for certain that he was grilling her, and with a certain finesse, leading up to it with a dark velvet interest in her long blonde hair. 'Have you never resorted to one of those?'

  'Not about my hair.' She forced a note of flippancy into her voice, needing desperately to divert him from his pursuance of that doubt in his Italian mind that she had ever been one of his brother's women. 'It's my one vanity, or so I like to believe. If I let down my braids will you be convinced of my — veracity?'

  'Any man convinced of a woman's veracity is either a dolt or a saint, and I am neither. I have also learned that a woman does no man a favour without exacting something in return. What do you want of me, English Miss?

  She almost gasped aloud, for her heart seemed to

  leap right into her throat at the way he spoke those last two words, his voice sinking down into a sort of darkness.

  'I -I want a better life for Teri than I can give him — that's all, signore baróne.' There was a throb in her voice ... almost a sob.

  'That is all?' Smoke curled about his features, losing itself in the thrusting bones and hollows and fearful scars. 'Surely not all - from his mother who gave him life?'

  'All right!' She sat there very straight in the high Italian chair and she looked directly into those searching eyes. T want to stay with Teri if you say he can live here at Falconetti. But I don't want your charity - I've never taken that from anyone and I've always worked for my bed and board.'

  'And what would you like to work at in my house?'

  'I - I can help around the palazzo, which is obviously a large establishment. I'm unafraid of hard work, signore.'

  'I have housemaids and a cook, and they would be highly indignant if I took on English help in my very Italian household.'

  'I see.' Carol's hands were trembling in her lap, for it had cost her a lot of pride to appeal to this man in this way. 'You will accept Teri, but not me?'

  'Have I said so?'

  'Not in so many words, but it's there in your face -what you feel.'

  'Really, madam? I can hardly feel anything with one side of my face, for the nerves are dead. Perhaps you assume that my heart is dead to go with my face?'

  'N-nothing of the sort, signore. It just seems obvious to me that I wouldn't fit into your household, and I can almost read your mind as you look at me and see the - the woman Vincenzo lived with in England.'

  'Never presume to know my mind.' He spoke curtly and ground out the remains of his cigar in the bronze ashtray. 'It just wouldn't suit me to have my nephew's mother working as a servant in my house.'

  'I wouldn't mind—'

  'I would, and so it is out of the question.'

  'I see.' Hope began to die coldly inside her at the implacability of the baróne's face and voice. 'Hasn't a palazzo as large as this one a library of many books? It was my work, caring for books, before - oh, before I worked for my aunts in their tea-room. I love working among books—'

  'Truly an old-fashioned girl, eh?'

  'Yes -I suppose so.'

  'With hair to the base of your spine, or so you claim.'

  'Beyond my spine, and I can prove it.'

  'Very well !' Something came into his eyes that made her think vividly of Vincenzo; a devil light that cast out responsible thinking and took in its place a moment of sheer recklessness. 'If you can really prove to me that you can sit on your hair, then the job in my library is yours. But if you've been bragging—'

  'I never brag, signore.' Carol stood up and thrusting from her that first prudish impulse to make a dash from this man who might be far more dangerous than Vincenzo had ever been, she lifted her hands and began the ritual of letting down her light golden hair ; a ritual seen only by one other male, and he a small boy of five.

  Now in front of a man almost a stranger she released the gleaming serpent of hair until it rolled slowly down her back, uncoiled and alive with motes of gold, dropping down the slimness of her body until it reached past her hips and then her slenderly curved bottom.

  She stood there in a stream of sunlight through the high Italian windows and felt curiously naked as the eyes of Rudolph Falcone ran down her body and her unbound hair.

  'Sit down,' he ordered.

  She did so and the soft tails of her hair were under the curve of her body in the dark chair carved all over with garlands and tiny masks. She could feel herself trembling as the baróne rose to his feet and came right round the desk to look at her. He was exceptionally tall, lean as steel sheathed in a suit of dark grey.

  'So you win your bet,' he said, and his voice was even darker toned, strewn with gravel that seemed to rake across her skin. 'Stand up again, if you please.'

  Again she obeyed him in utter silence and he stepped nearer to her and her breath almost stopped in her throat as he extended one of his darkly beautiful hands and ran his fingers down the soft living gold of her beautiful hair.

  'Never cut it,' he said. 'It would be like the destruction of a Verzelini goblet, with coiled serpent tails supporting the delicate bowl. A living serpent of gold, eh?' And suddenly he wrapped the blonde hair right around her body and used it to pull her against him.

  He held her like that and made her suffer the close impact of his eyes and his face. 'Vincenzo's woman, eh? Why, I wonder, do you tremble?'

  'Because you're a stranger to me ...' Carol could feel her heart pressed to him and never had its apprehension been so acute. 'Because you've made me let down my pride in order to beg something of you, and I -I swore that I wouldn't beg anything.'

  'A woman will do many things for her child.' His eyes moved searchingly over her face. 'Love is like the quemedero, eh? A flame that burns deeply - my face shocks you, does it not?'

  'Shocks me, yes.'

  'Does it also repel you?'

  'No-'

  'No?' he mocked. 'One of your white lies, I think, in order not to hurt my feelings. I am beyond being hurt — least of all by Vincenzo's woman.'

  A woman! His wife, who might at any moment enter this room and find them like this. 'Please, I'd like to tidy my hair, signore'

  'And I,' he said, his voice deep in his throat, 'would like to tangle it.'

  'Please — I didn't come here for this.' Suddenly it struck her that he must inevitably think of her as his brother's 'woman' and all that the word implied. Vincenzo had left behind at Falconetti a legal wife, and now she came to the isola with a child, and by asking to stay here with that child she laid herself wide open to the inference that she was willing to repay the baróne in this way. Her skin felt as if it were scorching and she gave a sudden jerk away from him that tugged at the roots of her hair.

  'What do you take me for?' she gasped. 'Let me go before we're seen like this - I don't want to make an enemy of your daughter, or your wife.'

  'My wife?' His eyes were suddenly topaz-hard in his dark face. 'Are you pretending that you know nothing at all of Vincenzo's family? You lived with him, yet you profess total innocence of his background !'

  'He never talked about his family, so I assumed there had been some kind of — break-up. I certainly never knew that he already had a wife.' She looked up into Rudolph Falcone's eyes and dared him to call her a liar. 'Do you imagine I'd have lived with a man who was married?'

  'One way or another you did exactly that, madam.* His eyes were sardonic as they locked with hers. 'You have the evidence in the shape of the boy, have you not? Just how old is he?'

  'Five,' she said, and felt a growing antagonism for this man who had a far more subtle and dangerous approach to a woman than the charm used by Vincenzo. He was shrewd and tortured, and like the falcon he wouldn't let go of his prey until he drew blood.  'Why did you wait all this time to come to Falconetti?' he asked. 'Vincenzo has been dead about that length of time, so I assume the child was a mere baby at the time of the accident.'

  'Teri was born two months after Vincenzo died,' she said, and she couldn't keep her voice from quaking.

  Now she was on quicksands, and she could have sunk into them and been glad to be free of this man's eyes and the way they stabbed into her. 'I've tried to give him the things he should have, but I just don't earn enough money. I have my pride, signore. I didn't want to turn to Vincenzo's family for help, but Teri is a bright child and I - I want him to have a proper life and not a deprived one.'

  'Most commendable, but if Vincenzo never talked of his family then how could you be sure that we could be of assistance to you? We might have been poor people, just able to support ourselves, let alone the child and woman of Vincenzo.'

  'For heaven's sake don't keep calling me his woman !' A tremor of distress ran all through Carol. 'I believed him to be my husband, and that's no lie. I guessed that his people were well-to-do.'

  'Did you love him?' Inexorably came the question. 'In my experience my handsome brother was incapable of being faithful to any woman, and I have the curious feeling that you were never quite his — type.'

  'He's dead,' she said quietly. 'The memories are buried with him, and I only care about the boy. Will your wife accept us, signore?'

  'I doubt it,' he said drily.

  'Then—?' Carol looked at him with perplexed eyes.

  ‘I don't happen to be married. Flavia is my foster-child. Her father was my business partner and I became responsible for her when her parents lost their lives in a boating accident along with their young son. Flavia was away at school at the time. Wife! What woman could love this?' With an abrupt movement he forced Carol's hand up against his scarred cheek and she couldn't stop herself from crying out. 'It isn't a very romantic face for a woman to touch and kiss, is it?' A cruel mockery lurked in his eyes. 'What woman could caress my face with loving hands?

  Equally abruptly he let go of Carol, pulling his fingers free of her long hair. 'I have no wife and it's just as well. The falconmen don't make the best of husbands, and when I had my - accident, I was fortunate not to be blinded. To be blind would be far more insupportable than to be scarred. I, at least, can live with it.'

  As he spoke he turned from her so that only the unflawed side of his face was showing; proudly chiselled with high bones that thrust with a kind of hunger against the dark skin. He fingered the bronze faun that stood on his desk and his hands were exactly the same colour and equally well made. 'Stay at Falconetti with your son - and now I had better know your name.'

  'It's Carol—' She hastily bit her lip, remembering in time that she no longer had the right to Vincenzo's surname. 'Carol Adams.'