bargained on the extra work it would entail to leave the house fit for strangers. Instead of just doing the usual preparations, then shutting the front door on everything as she left it, she’d had to go hunting round for anything and everything of a personal nature and box it up ready to go into storage, arrange for that darned storage, and also arrange for a company of professional cleaners to come in and get the place ready for her new tenants.
Now she was tired and fed-up and harassed, and all she wanted to do was sit down and have a good weep because everything she’d grown to rely on for security in her life had been effectively dismantled today!
But she couldn’t weep because Vito and her son were due back at any minute, and she would rather die than let Vito catch her weeping!
But none of that—or even all of that put together—compared with the awful lunch she had endured with Marcus Templeton.
Okay, she reasoned, so their relationship was not quite on the footing that she had led Vito to believe. But it had been getting there—slowly. And she liked Marcus—she really did! He was the first man she had allowed to get close to her after the disastrous time she’d had with Vito.
He was good and kind and treated her as an intellectual equal rather than a potential lover. And she liked what they’d had together. It was so much calmer and more mature than the relationship she’d had with Vito.
No fire. No passion to fog up reality.
Marcus was tall, he was dark—though not the romantically uncompromising dark that was Vito’s main weapon of destruction. And he was very good-looking—in a purely British kind of way.
She’d wanted to want him. She’d wanted to stop comparing every other man she met with Vito and actually take a chance on Marcus being the one to help her remove Vito’s brand of hot possession from her soul for ever. But had she been in love with Marcus? She asked herself. And the answer came back in the form of a dark shadow. For, no, she had not fallen in love with him nor even been close to falling, she realised now.
But what really hurt, what really shocked and shamed and appalled her, was that she hadn’t realised just how seriously Marcus had fallen in love with her—until she’d broken her news to him today.
With a heavy sigh she sat back against the wall behind her, her packing forgotten for the moment while she let herself dwell on the biggest crime of blindness she had ever been guilty of.
She had stunned Marcus with her announcement that she was going back to Naples and to her husband. She had knocked the stuffing right out of him. So much so, in fact, that he hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed, hadn’t done anything for the space of thirty long wretched seconds but stare blankly into space.
The threatened tears arrived. Catherine felt them trickle down her dusty cheeks but didn’t bother to stop them.
Because Marcus loved her—and she’d always wanted to be loved like that—for herself and not just the heat of her passion!
Oh, he’d pulled himself together eventually, she recalled with bittersweet misery. Then he’d said all the nice, kind gentlemanly things aimed to make her feel better when really it should have been the other way around and her consoling him.
But how do you console someone you know you’ve hurt more than you would ever want to be hurt yourself?
‘Mummy?’ The concerned sound of her son’s voice reached deep inside to where she’d sunk in, and brought her shuddering back to a sense of where she was. She opened her eyes to find him squatting beside her with a gentle hand resting on her shoulder and his brown eyes looking terribly anxious. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked worriedly.
‘Oh,’ she choked, hurriedly pulling herself together. ‘Nothing,’ she said huskily. ‘Just some dust in my eye. How …?’ She rubbed at the offending evidence. ‘How did you get in?’ she asked.
‘The front door was open,’ another deeper and very protracted voice grimly informed her.
Vito. Her heart sank. And now she felt thoroughly stupid.
‘You left it on the latch.’ Her small son took up the censure. ‘And we couldn’t find you anywhere so we thought something might have happened to you.’
Couldn’t find her? Why, where was she? she asked herself with a blank stare at her immediate surroundings.
She was in her bedroom, she realised. Sitting on the floor between the chest of drawers and the wardrobe while the space around her was piled with hastily filled cardboard boxes.
Boxes in which to pack her life away, she thought tragically. And without any warning the floodgates swung wide open. It was terrible—the lowest moment of her whole rotten day, in fact.
So the tears flowed in abundance and she couldn’t stop them, and beside her Santo began crying too. He tried to hug her and she tried to comfort him by hugging him back and mumbling silly words about his mother being silly, and somewhere in the background she could hear things being shifted and someone cursing, but didn’t even remember who that someone was until her son was plucked away from her and put somewhere so a pair of strong arms could reach down and gather her up.
She simply curled up against a big, firm male body and continued weeping into its shoulder. Oh, she knew it was Vito, but to admit that to herself meant fighting him again, and she didn’t want to fight right now. She wanted to cry and be weak and pathetic and vulnerable. She wanted to be held and clucked over and made to feel safe.
He sat down on the bed with her cradled against him and beside them Santo came to put his arms back around her; he was still sobbing.
‘Santino, caro,’ Vito was murmuring with husky firmness. ‘Please stop that crying. Your mamma is merely sad at having to leave here, that is all. Females do this; you must learn to expect it.’
The voice of experience, Catherine mocked within her own little nightmare. Yet she’d never cried on him like this—ever. So where had he acquired that experience?
‘I hate you,’ she whispered thickly.
‘No, you don’t. Your mamma did not mean that, Santo,’ Vito coolly informed his son. ‘She merely hates having to leave this house, that is all.’
In other words, Remember who is listening.
‘We’ll have to stay here, then,’ his young son wailed, his arms tightening protectively around Catherine.
‘We will not.’ His father vetoed that suggestion. ‘Your mamma loves Naples too; she is just determined to forget that for now.’ The man had no heart, Catherine decided miserably. ‘Now be of use,’ he instructed his son sternly, ‘and go and get your mother a glass of water from the kitchen.’
The sheer importance of the task diverted Santo enough to stop his tears and send him scrambling quickly from the bed.
‘Now, try to control yourself before he comes back.’ Vito turned his grimness onto Catherine next. ‘You are frightening him with all of this.’
She didn’t need telling twice to realise that Vito was only being truthful and she had frightened Santo by breaking down. So she made a concerted effort to stem the tears, then pulled herself free of his arms and crawled off his lap and beneath the duvet without uttering
