The Sin of Cynara (6 page)

  'The boy is Vincenzo's,' said the baróne, without any hesitation. 'You will be in no doubt when you see him. This young woman, Gena, was another of his — victims.'

  'Oh - I see.' The topaz eyes swept up and down Carol's slim figure in the grey and white dress, coming to rest on her rather pale face under the crown of blondq hair.

  'Mrs. Adams, meet my sister Angelina, whom we call Gena.'

  'How do you do?' Carol managed a troubled smile. 'My first name is Carol — I prefer to be called that, for it seems that I'm not a married woman after all.'

  'Really? Vince was a deceiver ever!' Gena smiled, and her handsome face softened considerably. 'They call me Gena because I'm no angel - there never was a Falcone who aspired to heavenly heights. Are you going to stay with us?'

  'The baróne has been good enough to say that we might, signora.'

  'It's signorina.' Gena waved a ringless hand. 'No man would dare to take on a female Falcone, for we're far too arrogant and fond of our own way. Where is this boy who has sent Bedelia into hysterics?'

  'He's with Flavia,' said the baróne. 'This young woman needs a meal, Gena, and an apartment. Will you arrange those for me? The boy will wish to be close to his mother, for he's only five years old. He's a Falcone right enough and his place is with us.'  'If you say so, Rudi.' His sister spoke with a kind of casual indifference, as if she left all important decisions to her brother and didn't question his authority. 'You do realize, mio, that Bedelia isn't going to be happy to have here the son and heir she wanted for Vince, but that is your problem.'

  'Most things are,' he said drily. 'The child is five, there is no doubt about his relationship to us, and whatever our faults, Gena, we don't shirk our responsibilities, eh? Bedelia will have to accept my decision to let Mrs. Adams and her son live here at Falconetti.'

  'Then come with me,' Gena said to Carol. 'Did you bring any luggage with you?'

  'Yes. Oh, it wasn't that I was all that certain we'd be welcome here, but I - I had no real intention of returning home. Teri and I would have found a room for ourselves in Rome and I'd have got a job there.'

  Carol turned impulsively to the baróne. ‘I want to thank you again, signore, for making Teri welcome and giving me that job.'

  'What job?' Gena asked, quirking a slim brow in a way that made her look like her brother. 'Rudi, you aren't going to make this poor girl work for her keep?'

  'It was her idea.' His eyes dwelt sardonically on

  Carol's face. 'She assumed, correctly, that we have here a large library and she has been trained in the art of caring for books. I have said that she may work in the library and repair any volumes that need attention. I have noticed myself that endpapers and covers are loose on a number of the books and it seems a pity to let them worsen when we have with us a willing pair of hands. The library is at your disposal, Mrs. Adams, but the child comes first and I know that you would prefer to have him in your charge. Does he yet go to school?'

  'He had just started school - is there one on the isola, signore! He speaks excellent Italian and he's very bright—'

  'Of course he is.' The baróne accepted that as if it were a foregone conclusion that any member of his family would be intelligent, at least. 'There is a school, but I think it might be better if I arranged a tutor for him.'

  'Oh, just because he's a Falcone?' Carol exclaimed. 'I want him to have friends—'

  'He will find his friends on the estate among the children of my staff, but the reason I suggest a tutor is that we are quite a financially secure family.' His eyes fixed Carol, hard and cold as stones in his scarred face. 'Would you want anything to happen to your son? I have enemies, and I have money, and kidnapping is not so rare in Italy as it might be in England. Do I make myself clear?'

  He not only made himself clear, but his face and his eyes frightened Carol as never before.

  'Yes, signore.' Her voice shook and when she placed the wine cup on his desk it almost toppled off and sent her heart into her throat. She almost felt like dashing off in search of Teri and taking him away from the dangers and tensions of this house, and she gave a visible shudder when Rudolph Falcone reached out and took her by the wrist. His fingers were dark and lean against her skin, and their touch was warm and curiously penetrating.

  'Every Eden has its serpent, Mrs. Adams, and Falconetti is no exception. There are no dream islands where the sun always shines and the shadows never fall, if that is what you hoped to find.'

  'I -I don't know what I hoped for - the best I could find for Teri, perhaps, but I don't want him hurt !'

  She stared up at the baróne's face in the lamplight, dark and made sinister by his scars.

  A quiver ran across her own face and she wished desperately that he would remove his hand from her arm ... but instead his fingers tightened as the door burst open and Teri came dashing in, flying headlong towards her with fruit juice and laughter all over his face that was a small replica of Vincenzo's.

  'Cally, it's smashing here!' He paused breathless in front of her. 'They have horses and ponies, and I've had three peaches and sat on the swing in the orchard. Let's live here for always, Cally! It's a palace, you know, and — and—'

  He broke off and stared at the baróne, and the way he was gripping Carol's wrist.

  'Don't do that,' he muttered.

  'Do what, young man?'

  'Don't touch my mummy.'

  There was an instant of acute silence, and then Gena broke it by laughing. 'Jealous little devil, aren't you? Come here and let me look at you.'

  Gena took hold of him and swung him to face her; she gazed down at his grubby, pouting face, and a half-sad look came into her topaz eyes. 'You are the image of your papa, aren't you, little boy? But I wonder if you're going to take after him - he was acquisitive but not really possessive.' Gena flung a look at Rudolph. 'There might be a dash of you in this child, Rudi. Are you amused?'

  'Profoundly,' he drawled. 'Your release, madame,' he added, letting go of Carol. 'It would seem that your son wishes to stay with us, would you not agree?'

  'Yes,' she sighed, and looking at Teri she saw the Falcone heritage in his face ... passionate, self-willed, in the frame where it belonged.

  Falconetti !

CHAPTER THREE

  THE ceiling had a great moulded scene of Apollo chasing Daphne in and out of the laurel trees. Serpents entwined on the tall bedposts, and curtains, draperies and upholstery were all hand-woven.

  A pair of rooms, interjoined by a white stone archway, with enormous closets embellished with brass and mother-of-pearl, and on the dressing-table in Carol's room an assortment of Italian flowered pots and bowls reflected in a mirror huge as a Roman shield.

  Teri was entranced by the half-moon of steps that led up to Carol's huge bed, and amused himself hopping up and down them, and tracing with his sticky fingers the carvings on the bedposts. 'Snakes and acorns,' he murmured, 'toolips and toadstools.'

  Gena grinned at Carol and leaned back in the cane-seated rocking chair with a cheroot in her hand. 'Mustn't it be great to be a carefree child? We don't realize the perfection of it until we're too old to start again. Would you like to start all over and have things less complicated for you?'

  'Who wouldn't?' Carol pressed a table napkin to her lips and felt very much refreshed by a delicious cup of coffee and several sandwiches of tender and tasty ham. 'I expect for most people there's a point in their lives when they wish they could turn back the pages and start anew, aware of their mistakes and prepared to avoid them.'

  'I gather,' Gena leaned forward and lowered her voice, 'that you'd avoid my brother if you could erase the last half dozen years from your life.'

  'Yes—' And then Carol glanced at Teri, who had curled up in the centre of the bed and lay there with the wooden redskin they had unpacked from his suitcase. 'But then I wouldn't have my boy — I'd have nothing.'

  'That's just it, isn't it?' Gena smiled ironically. 'Each cloud has its silver lining, and I don't care if it is a cliché. I guess if we regret our mistakes and wish them wiped out, we lose out on the bits and pieces of joy we collect along the way. By the way, if my speech strikes you as being rather Americanized it's because I lived in New York for several years and sang at the Metropolitan Opera House. Only in the chorus, but it was enormous fun, and then Rudi had his - accident, and I came home to Italy to keep him company and to keep house for him.'

  Directly Gena spoke of her brother's accident with that angry hint of hesitation before the word, Carol wanted to ask about it. Gena tossed ash from her cheroot and her face held a brooding expression.

  'Don't get me wrong,' she said, 'I don't begrudge being here, for it wasn't as if my voice was ever good enough to land me lead singing roles — nice enough, but I can't hit those real high notes. No, I had good times and I'm quite content to live here. It's just that Rudi will never marry, and when I remember how attractive he was — my dear, he could have had any woman he fancied. He adopted Flavia, and though she's a dear child she wants to return to her convent school to become a member of their Order. Rudi will give his permission, of course, if it's what she truly wants. Dio mio, to be a nun ! It wouldn't suit me.'

  Gena gave her warm chuckle and crossed her long slim legs. 'Yes, I had a great time in America. I've had lovers, Carol. Does that confession shock you?'

  'I'm surely the last person to be shocked ' Carol smiled slightly and was unsurprised that a woman like Gena, with her humorous eyes and her generous mouth, should have enjoyed the company of men. It only surprised Carol that she was unmarried . . . was her loyalty to her brother too strong to allow of it?

  'Because of Vince?' Gena narrowed her eyes through her cheroot smoke as she gazed at Carol. 'Because you had his child?'

  'Yes—' The great lie had to be a convincing one and having committed herself to it Carol was prepared to act the part for all that Teri was worth. She didn't enjoy deceiving people, but she didn't think the baróne's reaction would be a very gentle one if he found out that she hadn't even lived with Vincenzo, let alone borne him that small handsome edition of a Falcone. She strongly suspected that she would be shown the door and told to make herself scarce, and it wouldn't worry that man if Teri screamed for her. She had the feeling that he was hardened to the pain of other people.

  'Vince was ever an unholy terror,' Gena admitted. 'We Falcones are a rather headstrong lot. Tell me, what is it like being the mother of a boy and having no man to share his growing up?'

  'Worrying more than anything.' Desperately so, Carol could have added, especially when that child was not your own.

  'Were you crazy about Vince?' Gena ran her eyes over Carol's face.

  'At the beginning — then I thought him my dream suitor, I suppose. I was very young and carried away by his looks.'

  'Yes, he was a stunner, and he found out very early that he could make fools of women. Did you know about Bedelia before you came here?'

  'Oh no ! I shouldn't have come had I known that I wasn't - that he'd married me under false pretences.'

  'Why shouldn't you come here? Vince made you a mother, and Rudi has enough money to see that neither of you go without. You should have come before, when Teri was a baby and it must have been difficult for you to manage.'

  'Your brother the baróne intimated that your mother wouldn't have accepted us.'

  'Probably not as residents here, but Rudi would have made sure you were provided with an income.'

  'Is he tremendously well off?' Carol nibbled a sweet biscuit and thought of what he had said about the danger of kidnapping.

  'As wealth is measured these days, with exorbitant tax on income. He's a designer of high-speed motor engines, both for use on the road and the water. He designed the Spada and it's made a mint. Didn't you know that Vince had this sort of background?'

  'He spoke very little about his family and I — I wouldn't probe.' Carol remembered why and couldn't stop the old hurt from coming into her eyes; the disillusion and the disenchantment. 'I guessed from the look of him that he came from a good family—'

  'Good!' Gena laughed cynically. 'We've breeding, my dear, but hardly your sort of goodness. Breeding, brains and beauty, the three requisites for being bad and usually getting away with it.'

  'I don't think you're bad,' Carol said. 'Cynical, perhaps.'

  'And sinful, though I daresay Rudi likes to think that I'm a proper sort of Italian woman, waiting in dewy-eyed expectancy for the right man to come along.' Gena smiled and dropped a sandal from her foot and wriggled her long toes. 'Feet are sensuous things, aren't they? I like a man to stroke mine with the very ends of his fingers - my boy-friends have been Americans, you know, and that would shock Rudi, who is one hundred per cent Latin. God, he was the best looking guy in Italy before that bitch—'

  Gena broke off sharply. 'We have an American on the isola at the present time. Saul Stern is his name. He's a writer of film and television scripts and he's working on something right now. Rudi rented him a beach house belonging to the estate — he's rather attractive, in that tough New York way that I rather like. Women are funny creatures. We go through our lives always liking the same type of man, and I have this weakness for Yanks. How about you, Carol? Is it always going to be the dark, smouldering Latin type?'

  'I hope not!' Carol spoke the words in almost a panic. 'I have no plans to make a fool of myself with any other man. I just want to make a good life for Teri - my happiness will come from that.'

  'You hope !' Gena looked sceptical. 'It's okay if a girl is born like Flavia, who wants to give herself to the chaste life, but you've had a lover, Carol, and you've had a baby. You can't suddenly turn off your natural feelings just because you've been hurt by one man. It would be a kind of starvation of your real self.'