really liked you six years ago. You see, he couldn’t see through you as I could. Oh, yes, he thought you were a hell of a guy!’ she proffered in a choked voice of distaste. ‘But you don’t give a snap of your fingers for what he’s going through now, do you? All you can see is an opportunity to humiliate me further. And I will not give you that weapon, Carlo. You see, I have my pride too.’
He was pale beneath his naturally olive skintone but he wouldn’t give an inch. And she hadn’t expected him to. Censure rarely came his way. In receipt of it, he silently seethed, presumably thinking it beneath his dignity to defend himself against such charges.
Eyes as flaming gold as the heart of a fire burned her face. ‘Were you happy with him?’
On her passage to the door, she froze and slowly turned. He hadn’t absorbed a thing she had said. Pain dug lines of stress into her face. He was asking about Simon. She looked away. ‘He was my best friend,’ she said finally.
‘And this ... this being a best friend is your ideal of marriage?’ Carlo demanded, his usually fluent English curiously letting him down.
No, but it was what she had ended up with, she reflected sadly. Her troubled eyes slid back to him and collided with questioning gold and something twisted tight deep down inside her stomach. The atmosphere fairly throbbed with undertones. She stopped breathing, was sentenced to sudden stillness, every bone in her body pulling taut. For a split-second, she experienced the most extraordinary physical pull in his direction and resisted it with every last remaining drop of self-discipline. But that split-second shook her inside out.
‘I would have been your lover, your soul, your survival,’ Carlo gritted, and the anger was there, the anger she had feared, suddenly flaring up at her without warning in a blazing wall of antagonism that made her step back. Burnished golden eyes alive with derision and fury bit into her with a look as physical as a blow.
‘Get out of here,’ Carlo told her roughly. ‘Get out of here before I lose my temper and show you just how sensitive I can be!’
Jessica required only that one invitation. On unsteady legs, she backed out in haste. Out in the corridor, she closed her eyes and breathed in slowly and deeply. She felt bereft, alone, wretched, and the sensations were intense. Carlo confused her, cast her into turmoil. He always had. They were opposites in every way but just for a moment... for a strange and highly disturbing moment she had recognised an utterly inexplicably pang of empathy. She had wanted to put her arms round him.
Crazy, unbelievable, just one of those mad tricks of the mind when one’s emotions were on a high, she translated inwardly. After all, would she pet a sabre-tooted tiger plotting to put her on his dinner menu? But she could not escape the feeling that she had hurt him. And yet wasn’t that what she had always wanted to do?
When she was with Carlo Saracini she didn’t know herself. It had always been that way. With other people she was introverted and quiet, never bitchy or hot-tempered and certainly not violent. Dear heaven, she thought as she recalled the manner in which she had launched herself at him like a screaming shrew. He drew out everything that was bad in her character. He made her feel as though she could turn into a woman like her mother ... wasn’t that what frightened her the most?
She got into her car without remembering leaving the hotel. She didn’t start the engine. She stared out the windscreen unseeingly. The way she had felt when he touched her six years ago still haunted her. And every so often she made herself draw those memories out to reinforce her own disgust and shame. Not only did she look like her mother, she had found that she could behave like her too. That had been the most devastating discovery of all. That there was this weakness inside her, this ability to forget everything ... loyalty, self-restraint, even love... and lose all control in a man’s arms.
Sometimes, Jessica had even told herself that she ought to be grateful for that sordid incident with Carlo. She had been afraid then that if she didn’t remain constantly on her guard, virtually policing even her thoughts, she too might easily turn into a slut. If it hadn’t been for that noise next door, Carlo wouldn’t have stopped, she knew that. Sex was a terrifyingly powerful force if you knew yourself to be as vulnerable as Jessica felt herself to be. One weak moment in the vicinity of a male like Carlo and that would be that. She had been incredibly lucky to escape unscathed.
Only somehow, she thought now on a tide of bitter pain, it had never occurred to her that she might be just as unscathed six years on, after five years of marriage. Untouched by human hand. A virgin, no less. And wouldn’t Carlo just love to know that, she reflected painfully, shuddering at the very idea. He would find it hilarious.
Jessica drifted out of her thoughts to find herself sitting shivering inside a very cold car with all the windows fogged up. She drove off but somewhere down deep in her mind was an image of Carlo as she had last seen him in the hotel suite. Angry, contemptuous... bitter? What the heck did he have to be bitter about? Had he really imagined she would accept that grossly insulting offer? Three months in Carlo’s bed, working out her penance for daring to marry another man. What a monumental ego he must have! And the utterly peculiar way he had gone about making that offer ... Her head was thumping again, tension twisting through her like a steel wire.
It was too late to go barging in on her father. Tomorrow morning first thing, she would be on his doorstep, and if he hadn’t seen a lawyer yet she would see that he did. It was a crisis and she was good in a crisis. For years it seemed her life had lurched from one crisis to another.
She was about to phone her father when the doorbell went. She peered through the peephole and recognised the broad, weathered features of the heavily built man on the other side of the door.
‘Dr Guthrie ... ?’ Her brow furrowed. Henry Guthrie was one of her father’s oldest friends. He and his wife ran a private nursing home.
‘I tried to ring you earlier but you were out,’ he proffered.
‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded, anxiously scanning his troubled face.
‘Your father’s going to stay with us for a day or two until- I can get him sorted out—’
‘But why... mean, I gather you know what’s happened... but what’s the matter with him?’ Jessica prompted sickly.
Henry Guthrie sighed. ‘Gerald’s been receiving treatment for depression for some months, now—’
She paled. ‘He didn’t tell me...’
‘He’s been quietly going off the rails ever since your mother died.’
She shut her eyes and groaned. Four months ago, they had received news of her mother’s death in a car crash. From the day she walked out until the day she died, neither Jessica nor her father had had any contact with Carole. Her mother hadn’t wanted any contact. She had wiped them both out of her life and had embarked on a new life abroad.
‘But he seemed to take it so well,’ she protested shakily.
‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that he took it too well?’ the older man murmured. ‘I think that he still hoped that she would come back. But when she died, he had to finally face that she was gone. That’s when the depression came and the gambling started. Now I understand he’s got himself in one hell of a mess—’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, tears stinging her eyes.
‘He just can’t cope with it, Jess,’ Dr Guthrie sighed. ‘He took some sleeping tablets this afternoon—’
Jessica
