did not blackmail you!’ Belle exclaimed, sliding off the bench to stand up and walk down the steps before turning back to face him while his attention lingered on her slender leggy proportions in the denim shorts and camisole she wore. ‘Evidently my plans to go to court on the children’s behalf put you between a rock and a hard place but you made the decision to propose marriage!’
Lean, strong features set in forbidding lines in the shadowy candlelight, Cristo stared broodingly back at her. ‘I did but even now I know that your plans to have your day in court would have damaged those children more than you can possibly appreciate.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘I know exactly what I’m talking about—in fact nobody knows better!’ Cristo parried with unexpected rawness, his dark eyes glittering like stars. ‘Gaetano trailed my mother through court in a supposed attempt to gain custody of me when I was a child. Of course what he really wanted was a bigger payoff from the divorce. He didn’t want me; he never wanted me. All the dirty secrets of my parents’ marriage were trailed out in court and made headlines across Europe and you can still read about it online if you know where to look. Do you really think those children would thank you either now or years from now for seeing their parents’ less than stellar private life splashed across the tabloids and the net?’
That angle hadn’t occurred to Belle and she gulped. ‘Naturally I didn’t want your charity when the children were legally entitled to a share in their own name.’
‘It wouldn’t have been charity.’
‘No, but you would’ve been buying my silence and theirs!’ she lashed back at him angrily. ‘I watched what you did with Mayhill—all aboard the Ravelli gravy train to keep everyone quiet about Gaetano, Mary and their kids.’
‘Didn’t you climb aboard the same train with a wedding ring?’ Cristo taunted with sizzling derision.
‘No, I darned well didn’t!’ Belle hurled back, temper leaping up in a surge of inner flame. ‘Because no matter what you think I’m not a gold-digger or a social climber! I married you for the sake of my brothers and sisters, so that they would never have to go through what Bruno and I went through!’
‘What did you go through?’ Cristo demanded with galling impatience.
‘When Mum started the affair with Gaetano and then later when she gave birth to Bruno, I think people were inclined to turn a blind eye to it all because everybody knew she’d had a rough time with my father until he died.’ Belle breathed in deep, angry pain and mortification coursing through her slender length. ‘Back then the locals felt sorry for her—my father was an abusive drunk.’
‘And then?’ Cristo’s attention was locked to her beautiful face and the glistening lucidity of her wide green eyes.
‘And then it went sour for all of us because Mum continued the affair with Gaetano and went on having children. Everyone knew Gaetano had a wife abroad. They decided Mum was shameless and bold and stopped talking to her, wouldn’t even serve her in some village shops,’ Belle recounted unhappily. ‘But she lived in the Lodge outside the village and shopped elsewhere so the hostility didn’t really touch her...but I went to local schools with the children of those judgemental parents...’
Her voice momentarily ran out of steam and then picked up again as she shared a memory, a haunted look on her face as if she had drifted mental miles away, and in a way she had because she was back there, walking into a classroom as a vulnerable adolescent, being called a slut by a bunch of girls because everyone knew her mother was a woman who had just given birth to two more children by her married lover. Nobody had intervened when she was bullied because it was widely known and accepted that Mary Brophy was a wicked woman raising her children in a degenerate home where the most basic rules of morality and decency were being broken on a regular basis.
‘I never had any friends apart from Mark,’ she admitted curtly. ‘The other mothers wouldn’t let their daughters mix with me or come to my house. It got worse as I got older because then I had the boys calling me names as well and making approaches...well, you can imagine the approaches.’
Cristo, raised from an early age in a city that bred anonymity, was genuinely taken aback by what she was telling him. He’d had no suspicion of the moral rectitude in a small rural community where those who dared to defy public opinion and break the rules could be punished by exclusion and enmity.
‘I didn’t want my sisters or my brothers to go through that.’
‘Obviously not, cara,’ Cristo murmured ruefully, suddenly grasping one very good reason why his bride had been inexperienced because she had naturally been denied that outlet as a teenager and young woman when to give way to the desire to experiment could have surely seen her labelled as having followed in her mother’s footsteps. ‘And Bruno?’
‘I’ll tell you about that some other time but he was bullied as well. That’s why he and Donetta were sent to boarding school in the first place.’
‘Are you coming back up to the house?’ Cristo enquired in the dragging silence that had fallen. ‘It is two o’clock in the morning.’
Belle prayed for calm and restraint as she walked away from the pavilion. ‘You were very offensive and insulting...and disrespectful too.’
‘Sì, bellezza mia, but it is possible that complete honesty could be the best way forward in a marriage such as ours,’ Cristo stated thoughtfully.
Belle mulled that concept over while she mounted yet another endless flight of steps. All the emotion and activity of the day were suddenly hitting her in one go and exhaustion was weighing her down. ‘I haven’t forgiven you, though,’ she was quick to tell him, lest he be assuming that the slate had been wiped clean when it wasn’t.
Having watched her pace flag, Cristo closed an arm round her slender spine to guide her up the steep incline. ‘That’s okay.’
Cristo felt surprisingly buoyant as he urged her back upstairs to their bedroom. In the light he could see the marks of tear stains on her face and his conscience pierced his tough hide. She was so much more emotional than he was and that unnerved him. He would never forget the wounded expression on her face when she had told him about the bullying she had endured at school. To his way of thinking, her mother had been every bit as selfish in her own way as his father, he reflected grimly, but he knew better than to share that thought.
At the same time, he could only be impressed by how very protective Belle was of her brothers and sisters. He had never known that family intimacy, never appreciated that love could bond a family so tightly together, and he could not help wondering how different he might have been had he shared a similar experience. In spite of the misfortunes Gaetano had caused Mary Brophy’s children, they remained a very closely connected unit.
‘I’m not getting back into the same bed,’ Belle announced one step inside the bedroom door.
Payback time, Cristo acknowledged. ‘I’m not that insensitive. I wasn’t about to make a move on you.’
Her eyes were prickling with the sudden heat of tears and she held them wide to hold the tears back. ‘I know, but I still need my own space for a while,’ she said tightly.
Cristo searched the pale, unhappy tightness of her lovely face and compressed his stubborn mouth, knowing without even thinking about it that he didn’t want her away from him and, even worse, had a disturbing desire to
