one—all her photographs, all her mementos, locked away safe and sound for whenever you wanted to spend a moment or two with her. I never believed you slept downstairs near the kitchen. This is where you spent the first two nights of our marriage, isn’t it? Tucked away with the memories of a dead woman!’
And he cursed himself for thinking he could lock away his past behind a closed door and keep it there for ever. ‘You have no idea how wrong you are.’
‘Am I? You brought me here because you couldn’t bear to be apart from her. You married me, but once we were here you had no use for me. Because there was no room for me in our marriage, not when you had her.’
‘No!’
‘Because you are still in love with her!’
‘No! That’s where you are wrong. If this room was kept as a shrine, it was as a shrine to my own stupidity—a reminder of how naive a man can be when he believes in love.
‘I stopped loving Katia a long time ago when I discovered my love was worth nothing. When she used this room to betray me!’
She looked around uncertainly. ‘Katia …?’
‘She brought her lovers here. Her little secret room, her love nest, complete with an escape route in case someone came looking. In case I called for her.’
She shook her head, holding her arms around her waist, her hair stuck down around her face. ‘I didn’t see any escape—’
‘There is a railing outside the window—or there was—and footholds in the rock. Easy enough when the weather was fine, perilous when it was not. But she didn’t seem to care. It was a game she played, you see, a risky, dangerous game—trying to outsmart me, and succeeding. Until that storm-ridden night.’
She swallowed, remembering the surging sea, angry and frothing below the castle like a wild animal snapping and snarling to be fed, and felt a chill run down her spine. She could not imagine trying to be out there with just a railing and footholds between her and the violent sea. ‘Katia died here, didn’t she? She and her lover fell to their deaths.’
‘Now do you understand why I keep that door locked?’
He turned away, closing his eyes to blot out those images, his hands fisting in his hair. But he could still picture the scene just as clearly as if it had happened yesterday—Manuel, already disappearing from view as Raoul had run up the last few stairs into the room, roaring and almost frothing at the mouth in his fury and rage; Katia urging Manuel to hurry, as she herself had taken one look at Raoul, her eyes bright with the thrill of the game, her hair whipping around her face and her laughter still ringing out in his mind.
He had been so angry and filled with rage, rage that filled the black empty hole from where his heart had been ripped; he had been paralysed with shock. His feet had been stuck to the floor while his world, his dreams and his love had disintegrated around him.
For she had betrayed him.
She had laughed at him.
And, even when he had heard the grating, tearing sound of metal from rock, even when he had heard Manuel’s cry as he had fallen from the broken railing—even when he had heard Katia’s desperate cry as she had realised the game was no longer fun—he had stood there a moment too long, transfixed, broken and shattered, wondering what the hell had gone wrong.
A moment of inaction he would pay for for his entire life.
He reeled away from the window. What use was a pathetic lock? He should have bricked up the door to this poisoned room and its sordid memories years ago.
He felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Raoul …’
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘You would not want to touch me if you knew.’
‘If I knew what?’
‘The truth. I came back to tell you. I could not leave you like I had, not without you knowing everything.’
Spiders crawled up her back; the light from the lamp flickered ominously. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the truth about why I married you.’
THE air in the turret room was too thin to breathe, the raging storm outside a soundtrack for what was going on in her head. Here, in this room, her future lay in the balance. He had come back. He had left her this morning but he had come back, as she had wanted him to, as she had prayed. Except now she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.
‘So why did you marry me?’
‘Gabriella—Bella—I have so much for which to seek your forgiveness.’
‘No, forget about forgiveness. Tell me why you married me. Clearly it was not, as I imagined in my pathetic little brain, because you loved me.’
‘I … It shames me to say that it was not.’
She squeezed her eyes shut and sagged into a chair, uncaring about the dust that welled up in a cloud. Right now she had more important things on her mind, like the heart that lay trampled and bleeding all over the floor. ‘Then tell me why.’
‘I made a promise. To a man I loved and respected above all others. A man who had been like a father to me. Even though I knew it was wrong, even though I knew I could not be the husband you needed, I made that promise to him.’
She looked up at him, chilled to the bone, knowing there could be only one man who would have made him promise such a thing. ‘My grandfather made you promise to marry me?’
‘He was dying, Bella. He was worried about you.’
She remembered the visit he’d made before Umberto’s death, the conversation he’d skirted around when she’d asked him for the details. But it was too impossible to believe, too horrendous; hysteria built inside her like magma ready to erupt at any moment. ‘You promised to marry me because my grandfather asked you to?’
‘He wanted to be sure you would be safe when he was gone.’
She put the heels of her hand to her forehead, the drumming in her temples growing louder, the pressure growing heavy and insistent behind her brow. It was insane. Did he actually realise what he was saying?
Suddenly she couldn’t sit. She sprang to her feet, pacing the floor. ‘And you agreed to this? You said, anything you ask, Umberto; of course I will marry her?’
‘I tried to tell him—’
‘You told him you would marry me—so you lured me into a loveless marriage only to dump me in a godforsaken castle in Spain where your dead wife rides shotgun—’
‘No! I told him it wouldn’t work. I told him I would make no kind of husband. I told him you would hardly be safe with me—a man who had not been able to save his own wife. How could you be safe with me?’
‘And yet you still said
