conducted some phone calls in Italian while they were en route, and soon they were pulling into a private part of the airport where a small silver jet was waiting.
The pilot and staff welcomed them on board and Lara accepted a glass of champagne when they were airborne. Below them Rome was bathed in a magical golden sunset.
She sneaked a look across the aisle to see Ciro holding his own glass of champagne, which didn’t look at all ridiculous in his big hand. Her belly fluttered with nerves and awareness. Would he expect her to sleep with him tonight? Take it as his due? Would he force her?
She shivered. He wouldn’t have to. Not like her first husband. She diverted her mind from that bilious memory.
As if sensing her regard, Ciro turned and looked at her. She cast around for something to say—anything but what was on her mind. ‘All those people at the wedding and afterwards...do you know them?’
Ciro’s mouth twitched slightly. ‘Of course not. They’re mostly peers...business acquaintances. A small number of friends and staff whom I trust.’
Whom I trust.
Lara smarted at that. Even though he’d married her, he didn’t trust her. She thought of the pre-nuptial agreement and how it had specified that no children were expected from the union.
They hadn’t really discussed children before. Lara had just assumed Ciro would want them, as he was the last in the Sant’Angelo line.
However, for her it had been more complicated. The memory of losing her own parents and her brother had been so painful she’d always believed she couldn’t have borne that kind of loss again, or inflicted it on anyone else... And yet after meeting Ciro, she’d found herself yearning to be part of a family again. He’d made her want to risk it for the first time.
Ciro was still looking at her, as if he could probe right into her brain and read her thoughts. Terrified in case he might ask her what she’d been thinking about, she scrabbled around for the first thing she could think of.
‘Where are we going in Sicily?’
‘My family’s palazzo. Directly south from Palermo—on the coast.’
‘Does anyone live there?’
He shook his head. ‘Not since my grandfather passed away a few years ago. It was his property and he left it to me because he was afraid my mother would persuade my father to sell it or turn it into a resort. She never liked Sicily.’ Ciro’s jaw clenched. ‘As you might have noticed from her absence at the wedding, we’re not really in contact.’
Lara said nothing. He’d told her before of his mother’s serial philandering, and the way his father had devoted himself to her regardless of the humiliation. How his mother had persuaded his father to move to Rome, away from his homeland of Sicily. But Ciro had spent a lot of time there with his grandfather.
Lara had always believed that his experience at the hands of his mother had explained the ease with which Ciro had believed in Lara’s duplicity and betrayal. He had told her once that when he was very small she’d used to make him collude with her in hiding the evidence of her infidelity from his father. Making him an accomplice. Lara could understand how her own betrayal must have been a huge blow to his pride, and more.
But while knowing all that was very well, it didn’t really do much to help her now. Ciro’s beliefs were entrenched, and what she had done had merely confirmed for him that women were not to be trusted.
Lara was quiet. Unnervingly so. Ciro remembered the way she’d used to chatter when they’d first met. She’d ask him so many questions that he’d resort to kissing her to stop them. And yet there’d been those moments when no conversation had been required and she hadn’t filled the silence with nonsense. She’d been just as happy not to talk. Something he’d found refreshing.
This time around he was under no illusions.
He thought of the moment just a few hours before, when he’d emerged from the cathedral with Lara on his arm. When the paparazzi’s cameras had exploded into life he’d felt her flinch ever so slightly on his arm, and the sense of triumph which had been so elusive had finally oozed through his veins.
He’d envisaged that moment—the beauty marrying the beast. And yet when he’d looked down at her she hadn’t had a look of revulsion on her face at being photographed with Ciro and his livid scar—she’d looked haunted by something else entirely and he hadn’t liked that...
In fact, since they’d met again he’d never got a sense from her that she considered him some sort of monster—which was how he felt sometimes, when people looked at him with horror or fascination. In her eyes there was something else...something almost like...sympathy. Or guilt. Which made no sense at all.
Ciro looked over Lara’s form broodingly. Her head was turned away, as if the shape of the clouds outside the window was utterly fascinating. The silk of her dress clung to her slim curves in a way that made his hands itch to uncover her inch by inch and see the bounty he had denied himself before...
He’d been such a fool. Lust had clouded his judgement the first time around. Of course a woman as beautiful as Lara couldn’t have been a virgin. Or if she had been she wasn’t one now.
No matter. Tonight she would be his in every way—wife and lover. Tonight he would slake the hunger he’d felt since the moment he’d laid eyes on her. Tonight he might finally feel some measure of peace again.
* * *
The late summer dusk was tipping into night as they made the journey up a long and winding driveway to Ciro’s Sicilian palazzo. All Lara could see was the wide open lavender sky full of bright stars and acres and acres of land rolling down to the sea. It was quiet.
They climbed an incline, and when they reached the top she sucked in a breath.
The palazzo seemed to rise out of nowhere and cling to a cliff-edge in the distance; a soaring cluster of buildings with a tower that looked like something from a movie. As they got closer she could see just how massive it was. Lights shone from high windows, and they drove into a huge courtyard with a fountain in the middle. Wide steps led up to a huge open door where light spilled out. It looked incongruously welcoming in spite of the intimidating grandeur of the building.
‘You said once that you spent a lot of time here growing up?’ Lara said as Ciro drew the SUV to a stop at the bottom of the steps.
He cut the car’s engine and put both hands on the steering wheel. Lara was conscious of the missing little finger on his right hand. It made her chest ache. She looked away.
‘Yes. We were mainly in Rome, after my parents moved there, but I spent most holidays here with my grandparents. My nonna died when I was small, but my grandfather was alive until not long ago.’
‘Were your mother’s parents alive?’
His mouth compressed. ‘They lived in Rome and they didn’t approve of her choice of husband. They had nothing to do with me or my father—even though my father moved to Rome to keep my mother happy.’
‘That was harsh.’
She’d never really realised how lonely Ciro must have
