at his jacket, looking up at Cristo with adoring brown eyes, and Cristo was at least tolerating the child, she reasoned ruefully, wondering if that was the most she could hope for from him when it came to the children. And her? Would he only be tolerating her as well? A shiver of distaste at that image ran down her back until she was warmed by the recollection of his considered response to Bruno.
‘Where are you going?’ Cristo enquired when she brushed past him to head for the stairs.
‘I’m getting changed...for the flight you mentioned,’ she extended awkwardly, lashes screening her strained green eyes.
He was her husband, for goodness’ sake, and he had decreed that they would be flying out of Ireland within hours of the ceremony. She had thought about arguing but then had seen no point in trying to put off the inevitable. She had given up her life to enter his and leaving home was the first step in that process.
‘No. I like the dress. Don’t take it off.’
Thoroughly taken aback by the command, Belle glanced up at him in astonishment at the request. ‘I can’t trudge through an airport dressed like this.’
‘I have a private jet and we won’t be trudging anywhere. Don’t take the dress off, bellezza mia,’ Cristo instructed sibilantly, a strong dark forefinger curling below her chin to lift it so that she collided with smouldering golden eyes. ‘I want to be the one who takes it off.’
Face burning, breath coming in tortured bursts, Belle fled upstairs, barely able to credit that he had said that to her. She had read about male fantasies and he had just told her his with a lack of embarrassment that made her all the more conscious of her own ignorance. He was already fantasising about removing her bridal gown. It was a useful message as to what went on in Cristo’s arrogant head. While she was worrying about him getting to know and like their brothers and sisters he was thinking about sex. Was that all their marriage meant to him? Sex and the threat of a big scandal removed?
And if it was, what on earth could she do about it? All her gran’s warnings and dire predictions came crashing down on her at once. What if he was cruel? Unfaithful? Belle swallowed hard, mastering her tumultuous emotions. You made your bed, now you have to lie on it...literally, she told herself sternly as she checked that she had packed the most essential things for herself and Franco.
* * *
Franco cried and begged to get out of his car seat all the way to the airport. Aware of the irritation Cristo couldn’t hide and with her own spirits low at having left home and everything and almost everyone familiar behind her for goodness knew how long, Belle tried to distract the child.
‘Why did your mother have so many children with my father?’ Cristo asked suddenly.
‘She always wanted a big family and I think the kids were her compensation for not seeing much of your father,’ Belle opined and then, hesitating, added, ‘Gaetano wanted nothing to do with them though. When he was here they went to stay with Isa and maybe only saw him once for about ten minutes and it would be very strained. He just wasn’t interested.’
‘He was the same with me and my brothers.’
‘I hated him!’ Belle admitted in a driven undertone. ‘I felt guilty about that when he was killed in the crash.’
‘You shouldn’t, cara,’ Cristo parried. ‘He was a very selfish man, who lived only for his pleasure and his profit. Nothing else mattered to him.’
Belle settled into her seat on Cristo’s opulent private jet. Franco was in the sleeping compartment and, once she had settled her little brother down for his nap, Cristo had informed her that he had hired a nanny for the child, who would be waiting when they reached their destination.
‘Which...is?’
‘Italy. I’m taking you to my home in Italy.’
‘Venice...we’re going to Venice?’ Belle carolled in sudden excitement.
‘No, that is where my mother and stepfather live. I inherited a house in Umbria, which has belonged to my mother’s family for generations. Sorry, it’s not Venice,’ Cristo quipped.
‘Won’t your mother be upset that she wasn’t at your wedding?’ Belle prompted, shooting him a look of wide-eyed curiosity.
‘I doubt it. Anything that reminds Giulia of Gaetano puts her in a very bad mood,’ Cristo admitted, compressing his lips. ‘She never recovered from what he put her through. You couldn’t be in her company for five minutes before she told you that he stole the best years of her life, robbed her blind and slept with—among others—her best friend and her maid.’
‘Good grief...’ Belle breathed, reeling from that blunt admission.
During the flight, even with his laptop open in front of him, Cristo found his attention continually straying from the financial report he was checking. He studied Belle’s delicate profile from below his dense lashes, marvelling at the display of innocence and vulnerability that she continued to exude. Was he supposed to be impressed? Did he strike her as that stupid? After all, Mary Brophy’s daughter was considerably shrewder than her mother had ever been because she had not hesitated to use Gaetano’s children as a weapon to enrich herself. But his awareness of that aspect of her less than stellar character faded whenever Cristo looked at her, appreciating the vibrancy of her Titian curls against her porcelain-pale skin, the clarity of her beautiful green eyes, the feminine elegance of the fingers and unpainted nails adorning the slim hands that held a magazine. She always looked so amazingly natural, he registered, black brows drawing together in a bemused frown as he questioned the depth of his fascination and hurriedly returned to his financial report, trying and singularly failing to rustle up an immediate image of Betsy’s face.
The nanny, Teresa, a middle-aged woman with a warm smile, greeted them at the airport and gathered up Franco with enough appreciation to persuade Belle that her little brother would enjoy the best of attention. Though quite what Cristo expected her to do with her time while someone else looked after Franco, she had no idea. After driving through miles of extensively cultivated agricultural land the sun was going down fast when the limousine began to climb mountain roads with hairpin bends that soon slowed the speed of their passage.
‘It feels as if we’re travelling to the end of the world,’ Belle commented.
‘As far as my mother was concerned, the Palazzo Maddalena, named for one of her ancestors, might as well have been. It was never her style.’
And as the car travelled slowly towards to the massive stone building presiding over the hill tops, Belle knew it wasn’t her style either and her heart and her courage sank to their lowest ever level. For the first time it really hit her exactly what marrying Cristo entailed and the little girl whose earliest home had been a tiny house was ready to surface again because the adult woman was overpowered by the sheer size and grandeur of the property confronting her. Ancient mellowed stone encased the three-storeys-tall palazzo, which had graceful wings spreading to either side. Elaborate terraced gardens in an ornamental pattern spread down the hill in front of it and behind the solid bulk of the building loomed the imposing snow-capped tops of the Sibillini mountain range.
As pale as a newly created ghost, Belle climbed out of the car, her lovely face frozen and expressionless, her wedding gown glimmering eerily in the twilight. Cristo surveyed her with a level of satisfaction that disconcerted him. His wife, his home where he was free to be himself. Her tension, though, was not a surprise because Cristo was convinced he knew precisely why
