Poor thing, she could eat corn through a picket fence with those teeth….
No wonder she hides behind all that hair….
I feel bad not inviting her to my party, but she just doesn’t fit in….
An orthodontist had eventually given her a perfect smile, and flashing it now to hide the crippling shyness that still struck when she felt at a disadvantage, she said, “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m afraid your name’s slipped my mind.”
They had to be the most absurd words ever to fall out of her mouth, but if he thought so, too, he managed to hide it and said simply, “It’s Dario.”
“Dario.” She tried out the word, splitting it into three distinct syllables as he had and copying his intonation, as if doing so would somehow make it taste familiar on her tongue. It didn’t. She paused, hoping he’d enlarge on their relationship with a few pertinent details, and caught something else in his eyes. Disappointment? Reproach?
Whatever it was, he masked it quickly and gestured at the vehicle parked a few yards away. Not a long black limousine this time, but a metallic-gray Porsche Cayenne Turbo, which, although much smaller, she knew came with a hefty price tag attached. “Let’s get in the car,” he said. “The wind is like a blast furnace this afternoon.”
Indeed, yes. Her hair, or what remained of it, stood up like wheat stalks, and perspiration trickled between her breasts. She was glad to slide into the front passenger seat and relax in the cooling draft from the air conditioner; glad that she was on the last leg of the journey to wherever. Though the flight had lasted no more than a couple of hours from takeoff to landing, fearful anticipation of what lay ahead had left her weary to the bone.
Since Dario was so clearly disinclined to talk, she turned her attention to the passing scene as he drove away from the little airport, praying something she saw might trigger a memory, however slight. Soon they were headed south along the coast road the flight attendant had mentioned. It was narrow and winding, but picturesque enough.
To the left, neat patchwork vineyards protected by stone walls rose up the hillsides. Groves of stunted olive trees hugged the earth as if only by doing so could they prevent the winds from sweeping them out to sea.
On the right, turquoise waves shot through with emerald surged over slabs of lava rock rising black along the jagged shoreline. Hence the island’s other name, no doubt.
At one point they passed through a charming fishing village. Odd, cube-shaped houses were clustered next to each other with perforated domes or channels on their flat roofs.
“To catch the rainwater,” Dario explained, when curiosity got the better of her enough that she dared break his rather forbidding silence and ask what they were for. “Pantelleria is a volcanic island with many underground springs, but the sulphur content makes the water undrinkable.”
Disappointingly, this meager tidbit of information struck no more of a chord than anything else she saw. Which left quizzing her laconic husband her only other option if she wanted to arrive at her destination with at least some point of reference in a life dismayingly bereft of landmarks.
“Your flight attendant told me this island’s quite small,” she said, as the minutes ticked by and he made no further effort to engage her in conversation.
“Sì.”
“So your house isn’t very far away?”
“Nothing’s very far away. Pantelleria is only fourteen and a half kilometers long and less than five kilometers wide.”
“So we’ll arrive soon?”
“Sì.”
“I understand that’s where we lived before the accident.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Sì.”
Talk about a man of few words! “And we’ve been married how long?”
“A little more than a year.”
“Are we happy?”
He tensed visibly, a scowl marring his forehead. “Apparently not.”
Distressed, she stared at him. She had exchanged vows with this gorgeous man. Taken his name and presumably once worn his ring, although there was no sign of it now. Had slept in his arms, awakened to his kisses. And somehow let it all slip away.
“Why not?”
He shrugged and gripped the steering wheel more tightly. He had beautiful hands. Long-fingered and elegant. And there was no sign of a wedding ring. “Our living arrangement was not ideal.”
She ached to ask him what he meant by that, but the reserve in his voice was hard to miss even for someone in her impaired mental state, so she once again focused her attention on her surroundings.
He’d turned the car off the main road and was navigating a private lane leading to an enclave of secluded villas perched on a headland. By some high-tech method she couldn’t begin to fathom, a pair of iron gates set in a high rock wall opened as he approached, then swung smoothly closed again immediately afer the car had passed through.
A drive bordered with dwarf palm trees wound through extensive grounds to a residence which, while remaining true to what appeared to be a traditional island dwelling, was much larger than any they’d passed on the way, and bore an air of unmistakable opulence. Single-storied, it sprawled over the land in a series of terraced cubes, with a domed roof over the larger, central section.
Dario stopped the car outside a massive front door and switched off the ignition. “This is it?” she breathed.
“This is it,” he said. “Welcome home, Maeve.”
She opened her door and stepped out. The wind had dropped and a stand of pine trees dusted with the mauve shadows of dusk filled the air with their scent. The first stars blinked in the sky. Even from this vantage point, the estate—and estate was the only word to describe it—commanded a magnificent view across the Mediterranean.
Closing her eyes, she breathed in the peace and wondered how she could not remember such a place.
For a moment he leaned against the car and watched. The sight of her body, silhouetted sharp and brittle against the deepening twilight, brought back the shock he’d experienced when she first stepped out of the aircraft. The very second he saw her, he’d wanted to establish his husbandly right to enfold her in his arms. Peruzzi’s warning not to crowd her had been all that stopped him. That, and his fear that he might inadvertently break her ribs.
She had always been slender, but never to the point that the siroccos of autumn might blow her away if she ventured too close to the edge of the cliffs. Never to the point of such fragility that she was almost transparent. Small wonder the good doctor had urged him to patience. Restoring her physical stamina had to come first. The rest—their history, the accident and the events leading up to it—could wait. Ambushed by her intuitive questions, he’d already revealed more than he intended, but he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He hadn’t risen to the top of a world-wide multi-billion-dollar business empire without learning to dissemble if the occasion called for it. And from where he stood, this amounted to one of those occasions.
