‘It wouldn’t have been charity.’
‘No, but you would’ve been buying my silence and theirs!’ she lashed back at him angrily. ‘I watched what you did with Mayhill—all aboard the Ravelli gravy train to keep everyone quiet about Gaetano, Mary and their kids.’
‘Didn’t you climb aboard the same train with a wedding ring?’ Cristo taunted with sizzling derision.
‘No, I darned well didn’t!’ Belle hurled back, temper leaping up in a surge of inner flame. ‘Because no matter what you think I’m not a gold-digger or a social climber! I married you for the sake of my brothers and sisters, so that they would never have to go through what Bruno and I went through!’
‘What did you go through?’ Cristo demanded with galling impatience.
‘When Mum started the affair with Gaetano and then later when she gave birth to Bruno, I think people were inclined to turn a blind eye to it all because everybody knew she’d had a rough time with my father until he died.’ Belle breathed in deep, angry pain and mortification coursing through her slender length. ‘Back then the locals felt sorry for her—my father was an abusive drunk.’
‘And then?’ Cristo’s attention was locked to her beautiful face and the glistening lucidity of her wide green eyes.
‘And then it went sour for all of us because Mum continued the affair with Gaetano and went on having children. Everyone knew Gaetano had a wife abroad. They decided Mum was shameless and bold and stopped talking to her, wouldn’t even serve her in some village shops,’ Belle recounted unhappily. ‘But she lived in the Lodge outside the village and shopped elsewhere so the hostility didn’t really touch her...but I went to local schools with the children of those judgemental parents...’
Her voice momentarily ran out of steam and then picked up again as she shared a memory, a haunted look on her face as if she had drifted mental miles away, and in a way she had because she was back there, walking into a classroom as a vulnerable adolescent, being called a slut by a bunch of girls because everyone knew her mother was a woman who had just given birth to two more children by her married lover. Nobody had intervened when she was bullied because it was widely known and accepted that Mary Brophy was a wicked woman raising her children in a degenerate home where the most basic rules of morality and decency were being broken on a regular basis.
‘I never had any friends apart from Mark,’ she admitted curtly. ‘The other mothers wouldn’t let their daughters mix with me or come to my house. It got worse as I got older because then I had the boys calling me names as well and making approaches...well, you can imagine the approaches.’
Cristo, raised from an early age in a city that bred anonymity, was genuinely taken aback by what she was telling him. He’d had no suspicion of the moral rectitude in a small rural community where those who dared to defy public opinion and break the rules could be punished by exclusion and enmity.
‘I didn’t want my sisters or my brothers to go through that.’
‘Obviously not, cara,’ Cristo murmured ruefully, suddenly grasping one very good reason why his bride had been inexperienced because she had naturally been denied that outlet as a teenager and young woman when to give way to the desire to experiment could have surely seen her labelled as having followed in her mother’s footsteps. ‘And Bruno?’
‘I’ll tell you about that some other time but he was bullied as well. That’s why he and Donetta were sent to boarding school in the first place.’
‘Are you coming back up to the house?’ Cristo enquired in the dragging silence that had fallen. ‘It is two o’clock in the morning.’
Belle prayed for calm and restraint as she walked away from the pavilion. ‘You were very offensive and insulting...and disrespectful too.’
‘Sì, bellezza mia, but it is possible that complete honesty could be the best way forward in a marriage such as ours,’ Cristo stated thoughtfully.
Belle mulled that concept over while she mounted yet another endless flight of steps. All the emotion and activity of the day were suddenly hitting her in one go and exhaustion was weighing her down. ‘I haven’t forgiven you, though,’ she was quick to tell him, lest he be assuming that the slate had been wiped clean when it wasn’t.
Having watched her pace flag, Cristo closed an arm round her slender spine to guide her up the steep incline. ‘That’s okay.’
Cristo felt surprisingly buoyant as he urged her back upstairs to their bedroom. In the light he could see the marks of tear stains on her face and his conscience pierced his tough hide. She was so much more emotional than he was and that unnerved him. He would never forget the wounded expression on her face when she had told him about the bullying she had endured at school. To his way of thinking, her mother had been every bit as selfish in her own way as his father, he reflected grimly, but he knew better than to share that thought.
At the same time, he could only be impressed by how very protective Belle was of her brothers and sisters. He had never known that family intimacy, never appreciated that love could bond a family so tightly together, and he could not help wondering how different he might have been had he shared a similar experience. In spite of the misfortunes Gaetano had caused Mary Brophy’s children, they remained a very closely connected unit.
‘I’m not getting back into the same bed,’ Belle announced one step inside the bedroom door.
Payback time, Cristo acknowledged. ‘I’m not that insensitive. I wasn’t about to make a move on you.’
Her eyes were prickling with the sudden heat of tears and she held them wide to hold the tears back. ‘I know, but I still need my own space for a while,’ she said tightly.
Cristo searched the pale, unhappy tightness of her lovely face and compressed his stubborn mouth, knowing without even thinking about it that he didn’t want her away from him and, even worse, had a disturbing desire to keep her close. ‘I’d prefer you to stay with me.’
Mere minutes later, having won that last battle, Belle settled heavy as a stone into the comfortable bed in the room next door and lowered her lashes on her damp eyes. She had wanted to be with him but had angrily denied herself that choice because common sense had told her it would be wrong. Wrong to let Cristo think he could do and say as he liked without consequences, wrong to let him hurt her and then put a brave face on it to the extent that he would think he might as well do it again. Blackmailer, gold-digger, social climber? Was it even possible for her to disprove such suspicions? And should she even want to? Did it really matter? After all, theirs was a marriage of convenience and she simply had to learn to keep a better hold on her emotions and stop looking for responses she was unlikely to receive. She couldn’t afford to start caring about a male who didn’t care about her but, regardless of every other factor, she was utterly determined that, at the very least, Cristo would give her respect.
Cristo lay sleepless in bed and expelled a groan. He knew Belle was treating him just as she treated Franco with the ‘no means no’ approach and the withdrawal of privileges until better behaviour was established. In the darkness he suddenly surprised himself when amusement surged over him and he laughed out loud. She had thrown him a challenge. No woman had ever done that to Cristo before and it bothered him to appreciate that he actually admired her nerve.
* * *
The next morning, Cristo wakened when something bounced hard on the bed and his eyes flew
