It had been a recipe for utter disaster. But for the first few blissful months of their relationship it had been a glorious blending of both passionate temperaments fused together by that wonderfully enthralling sensation she’d used to describe as—true love.
It hadn’t seemed to matter then that the words were never actually spoken, for they had been there in each look, each touch, in the way neither had seemed able to be apart from the other for more than a few hours without making contact—if only with the intimate pitch of their voices via the telephone. Even when she’d fallen pregnant and the warring had begun, she had still believed that love was the engine which had driven them towards marriage.
Meeting Marietta on her wedding day, and learning that this was the woman Vito would have chosen to marry if she had not instead married his best friend Rocco, had placed the first fragile seeds of doubt in her mind about Vito’s true feelings for her.
Yet neither by word nor gesture had Vito revealed any hint that there could be truth in the whispers, and she had very quickly managed to dismiss them when his attention towards her remained sound right through her first troubled pregnancy and into her second.
Then Rocco had been killed in a tragic boating accident, followed within weeks by Vito’s father dying from a massive stroke. And before she’d realised quite what was happening, Vito and Marietta had hardly ever been seen apart.
‘A shared grief’, Vito used to call it. Marietta had called it—inevitable. ‘What do you think Vito did when you trapped him into marriage—put on a blindfold and forgot it was me he was in love with? While Rocco was alive he may have been willing to accept second best in you. But with Rocco gone …?’
‘I’ll believe Marietta’s not your mistress when hell freezes over.’ Catherine came out of her bitter reverie to answer Vito’s question. ‘Now get away from me,’ she commanded, trying to tug open the door.
But Vito’s superior strength held it shut. ‘When I am good and ready,’ he replied. ‘For you started this, so we may as well finish it right here and now, before my son arrives.’
‘Finish what?’ she cried, spinning to stare at him in angry bewilderment. ‘I don’t even know what it is we’re fighting about!’
‘This thing you have against Marietta,’ he grimly enlightened her, ‘is your obsession, Catherine. It always has been. So it therefore follows that it must be you who has been filling Santo’s head full of this nonsense about Marietta and me.’
Catherine stared at him as if she didn’t know him. How a man as intelligent and shrewd as Vito was could be so fatally flawed was a real mystery to her.
‘You are the blind one, Vito,’ she informed him. ‘You are a blind, stubborn and conceited fool who could never see through the charm she lays on you that Marietta is as evil as they come!’
‘And you are sick,’ he responded, his dark face closing into a mask of distaste as he stepped right away from her. ‘You have to be sick, Catherine, to think such things about a person who only wanted to befriend you.’
Befriend me—? ‘I’m sorry if this offends you, Vito.’ She laughed, almost choking on her own fury. ‘But I don’t make friends of my husband’s lovers!’
Honeyed eyes began to flash dire warnings of murder. ‘She has never been my lover!’ he repeated furiously.
‘And you are such a dreadful liar!’ she sliced right back.
‘I do not lie!’
‘I know Marietta has been feeding her poison to Santo just as she once fed it to me,’ she doggedly persisted.
‘I will not continue to listen to this,’ Vito said, reaching out as if to grab her arm so he could shift her away from the door and leave himself.
‘Then will you listen to Santo?’ she challenged.
The hand dropped away, his chin lifting stiffly. ‘It is what I am here for, is it not?’
Why did his accent always thicken when he was under stress? she found herself wondering. Then blinked the silly question away because it had no bearing on what was happening here.
‘But will you believe him?’ she wanted to know. ‘If he tells you that what I have been telling you is the truth?’
‘And what if it is you who has fed him his version of the truth?’ he countered.
Catherine sighed in disgust. ‘Which I presume means that you have no intention of believing your own son’s word—any more than you once believed mine!’
‘I repeat,’ he said. ‘You are the one with the obsession. Not Santo and not me.’
And I am banging my head against a brick wall here, Catherine decided grimly. But what’s new about that? she asked herself, with a deriding twist of her mouth that seemed to set his tense frame literally pulsing.
‘Then I think you should leave,’ she said, moving away from the door and crossing the room to get right away from him. ‘Now, before Santo wakes up and finds you here. Because he will not thank you any more than I do for showing such little faith in his word.’
‘I did not say that I disbelieve what Santo is thinking, only that I disbelieve his source.’
‘Same thing.’ Catherine shrugged that line of argument away. ‘And all I can say is that I find it very sad that you can put your feelings for Marietta before your feelings for your son—which makes your journey here such a wasted gesture.’
Vito said nothing, his face locked into a tight, grim mask as he went over to the kettle and began pouring boiling water into the coffee jug. From her new place by kitchen sink Catherine watched him with an emptiness that said she saw no hope for happiness for him. The man was bewitched by the devil. He had to be if he was so prepared to risk the love of his son for the love of that woman.
But was he? Catherine then pondered thoughtfully. For he was here, wasn’t he? Breaking a court order, willing to risk his visitation rights, because it was more important at present for him to be where his troubled son was. Be of help, if he could. Reassure, if he could …?
‘Well, as a tit-for-tat kind of thing,’ she murmured slowly, ‘let’s just test your love for Marietta against your love for your son, Vito.’
‘It isn’t a competition,’ he denounced.
‘I am making it one,’ she declared. ‘And I’m going to do it by giving you a straight choice. So listen to me, Vito, for I am deadly serious. Either you renounce all intention of ever marrying Marietta,’ she said, ‘or you marry her and forfeit all rights of access to Santino.’
Turning with his coffee cup in hand, he murmured levelly, ‘Word of warning, cara, You will not come between my son and me again, no matter what tricks you try to pull.’
‘Yet pull them I will,’ she instantly promised. And the tension between them began to edge up to dangerous levels again, because she wasn’t bluffing and Vito knew that she wasn’t.
Her father had been an eminent lawyer before his premature demise. He’d had friends in the profession, powerful
