Marrying the Enemy (17 page)

Was he hoping to provoke her into
a show of hostility he could use against her to deny her request? She
certainly didn’t trust him not to do so. If that was indeed his aim, she
wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She could hide her feelings well.
She had, after all, a wealth of past experience to fall back on. That was
what happened when you were branded as the person who had brought so much
shame on her family that her own parents had turned their back on you. The
stigma of that shame would be with her for ever, and it deprived her of the
right to claim either pride or privacy.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘I went to
live with them after my parents divorced.’

‘But not immediately
after?’

The question jolted through her
like an arc of electricity, touching sensitive nerve-endings that should
have been healed. Not that she was going to let
him
see that.

‘No,’ she agreed. But she
couldn’t look at him as she answered. Instead she had to look across the
graveyard—so symbolic, in its way, as a graveyard of her own longings and
hopes which the end of her parents’ marriage had brought about.

‘At first you lived with your
father. Wasn’t that rather unusual for a girl of eighteen? To choose to live
with her father rather than her mother?’

Louise didn’t question how he
knew so much about her. The village priest had requested a history of her
family from her when she had written to him with regard to the burial of her
grandparents’ ashes. Knowing the habits of this very close Sicilian
community, she suspected enquiries would have also been made via contacts in
London.

The thought of that was enough to
have fully armed anxiety springing to life inside her stomach. If she
couldn’t fulfil her grandparents’ final wishes because this man chose to
withhold his permission because of
her
…

Automatically Louise bowed her
head, her golden hair catching the stray beams of sunlight penetrating the
green darkness of the cypress-shaded graveyard.

It had been an unwelcome shock,
and the last thing she had felt prepared for, to see
him
, and not the priest
as she had anticipated. With every look he gave her, every silence that came
before another question, she was tensing her nerves against the blow she
knew he could deliver. Her desire to turn and flee was so strong that she
was trembling inside as she fought to resist it. Fleeing would be as
pointless as trying to outrun the deathly outpouring from a volcano. All it
would achieve would be a handful of heart-pounding, stomach-churning,
sickening minutes of time in which to imagine the awfulness of her fate.
Better, surely, to stand and defy it and at least have her self-respect
intact.

All the same, she had to grit her
perfectly straight, neat white teeth very hard to stop herself giving vent
to her real feelings. It was none of his business that she and her mother
had never been close, with her mother always being far more concerned with
her next affair or party than having a conversation with her daughter. In
fact she’d been absent more than present throughout Louise’s life. When her
mother had announced she was leaving for Palm Springs and a new life Louise
had honestly felt very little other than a faint relief. Her father, of
course, was rather a different story—his constant presence served as an
endless reminder of her own failings.

It was a moment before she could
bring herself to say distantly, ‘I was in my final year of school in London
when my parents divorced, so it made sense for me to move in with my father.
He had taken a service apartment in London, since the family house was being
sold and my mother was planning to move to Palm Springs.’

His questions were far too
intrusive for her liking, but she knew that to antagonise this man—even if
she
was
coming to resent him more with every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made
into the protective shield she had wrapped around her past—would prove to be
counterproductive. She was determined not to do so.

All that mattered about this
interview was getting this arrogant, hateful overlord’s agreement to the
burial of her grandparents’ ashes in accordance with their wishes. Once that
was done she could give vent to her own feelings. Only then could she
finally put the past behind her and live her own life, in the knowledge that
she had discharged the almost sacred trust that had been left to
her.

Louise swallowed hard against the
bitter taste in her mouth. How she had changed from that turbulent
eighteen-year-old who had been so governed by emotion and who had paid such
a savage price.

She still hated even
thinking
about those
stormy years, when she’d witnessed the breakdown of her parents’ marriage
and the resulting fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That
fall-out had seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents’
two separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where
her father’s new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which,
according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought such
shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives they were
building for themselves.

Looking back, it was no wonder
that her parents had considered her to be such a difficult child. Was it
because her father’s work had made him an absent father that she had tried
so desperately to win his love? Or had she known instinctively at some deep
atavistic level even then that her conception and with it his marriage to
her mother had always been bitterly regretted and resented by
him?

A brilliant young academic, with
a glowing future ahead of him, the last thing he had wanted was to be forced
into marriage with a girl he had got pregnant. But pressure had been brought
to bear on him by a Senior Fellow at Cambridge whose family had also been
members of London’s Sicilian community. The brilliant young Junior Research
Fellow had been obliged to marry the pretty student who had seen him as an
escape from the strictures of an old-fashioned society or risk having his
career blighted.

Louise didn’t consider herself to
be Sicilian, but perhaps there was enough of that blood in her veins for her
always to have felt not just the loss of love but also the public
humiliation that came from not being loved by her father. Italian
men—Sicilian men—were usually protective and proud of the children they
fathered. Her father had not wanted her. She had got in the way of his plans
for his life. As a crying, clingy child and then a rebellious, demanding
teenager she had first irritated and then annoyed him. For her father—a man
who had wanted to travel and make the most of his personal freedom—marriage
and the birth of a child had always been shackles he did not want. Because
of that alone her attempts to command her father’s attention and his love
had always been doomed to failure.

Yet she had clung determinedly to
the fictional world she had created for herself—a world in which she was her
father’s adored daughter. She’d boasted about their relationship at the
exclusive girls’ school her mother had insisted on sending her to, with
daughters of the titled, the rich and the famous, clinging fiercely to the
kudos that went with having such a high-profile and good-looking parent.
He’d had a role as the front man of a hugely popular quasi-academic TV
series, which had meant that her fellow pupils accepted her only because of
him.

Such a shallow and fiercely
competitive environment had brought out the worst in her, Louise
acknowledged. Having learned as a child that ‘bad’ behaviour was more likely
to gain her attention than ‘good’, she had continued with that at school,
deliberately cultivating her ‘bad girl’ image.

But at least her father had been
there in her life, to be claimed as being her father—until Melinda Lorrimar,
his Australian PA, had taken him from her. Melinda had been twenty-seven to
Louise’s eighteen when they had gone public with their relationship, and it
had perhaps been natural that they should compete for her father’s attention
right from the start.

How jealous she had been of
Melinda, a glamorous Australian divorcee, who had soon made it clear that
she didn’t want her around, and whose two much younger daughters had very
quickly taken over the room in her father’s apartment that was supposed to
have been hers. She had been so desperate to win her father’s love that she
had even gone to the extent of dying her hair black, because Melinda and her
girls had black hair. Black hair, too much make-up and short, skimpily cut
clothes—all an attempt to find a way to be the daughter she had believed her
father wanted, an attempt to find the magic recipe that would turn her into
a daughter he could love.

Her father had obviously admired
and loved his glamorous PA, so Louise had reasoned that if she were more
glamorous, and if men paid her attention, then her father would be bound to
be as proud of her as he was of Melinda and as he had surely once been of
her mother. When that had failed she’d settled for trying to shock him.
Anything was better than indifference.

At eighteen she had been so
desperate for her father’s attention that she’d have done anything to get
it—anything to stop that empty, hungry feeling inside her that had made it
so important that she succeed in becoming her father’s most loved and
cherished daughter instead of the unloved failure she had felt she was.
Sexually she had been naive, all her emotional intensity invested in
securing her father’s love. She’d believed, of course, that one day she
would meet someone and fall in love, but when she did so it would be as her
father’s much loved daughter, someone who could hold her head up high—not a
nuisance who was constantly made to feel that she wasn’t wanted.

That had been the fantasy she’d
carried around inside her head, never realising how dangerous and damaging
it was, because neither of her parents had cared enough about her to tell
her. To them she had simply been a reminder of a mistake they had once made
that had forced them into a marriage neither of them had really
wanted.

‘But when you started your degree
you were living with your grandparents, not your father.’

The sound of Caesar Falconari’s
voice brought her back to the present.

An unexpected and dangerous
thrill of sensation burned through her—an awareness of him as a man. A man
who wore his sexuality as easily and unmistakably as he wore his expensive
clothes. No woman in his presence could fail to be aware of him as a man,
could fail to wonder…

Disbelief exploded inside her,
caused by the shock of her treacherous awareness of him. Where on earth had
it come from? It was so unlike her. So… Sweat beaded her forehead and her
body was turning hot and sensually tender beneath her clothes. What was
happening to her? Panic rubbed her nerve-endings as raw as though they had
been touched with acid. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t…wasn’t
permissible
. It
wasn’t…wasn’t
fair
.

A stillness like the ominous
stillness that came just before the breaking of a storm gripped her. This
should not be happening. She didn’t know why it was. The only awareness of
him she could permit herself to have was an awareness of how dangerous and
damaging he could be to her. She must
not
let him realise the effect he was
having on her. He would enjoy humiliating her. She knew that.

But she wasn’t an emotionally
immature eighteen-year-old any more, she reminded herself as she struggled
to free herself from the web of her own far too vulnerable senses to find
safer ground.

‘As I’m sure you know, given that
you obviously know so much about my family history, my bad
behaviour—especially with regard to my father’s new wife-to-be and the
impact she felt it might have on her own daughters—caused my father to ask
me to leave.’

‘He threw you out.’

Caesar’s response was a
statement, not a question.

There it was again—that twisting,
agonising turning of the knife in a new guilt to add to the old one he
already carried.

Given that for the last decade he
had dedicated himself to improving the lot of his people, what he had
learned about Louise and the uncaring and downright cruel behaviour she had
been subjected to by those who should have loved and protected her, could
never have done anything other than add to his burden of guilt. It had never
been his intention to hurt or damage her—far from it—and now, knowing what
he did, he could well understand why she had never responded to that letter
he had sent, acknowledging his guilt and imploring her to forgive
him.

It went against the grain of
everything that being a Sicilian father meant to abandon one’s child, yet at
the same time for a family to be so publically shamed by the behaviour of
one of its members left a stain on that family’s name that would be passed
down unforgotten and unforgiven throughout the generations.

Louise could feel her face
starting to burn. Was it through guilt or a still-rebellious sense of
injustice? Did it matter? It certainly shouldn’t. The counselling she had
undergone as part of the training for her career as a much sought after
reconciliation expert, working to help bring fractured families back
together again, had taught her the importance of allowing oneself errors of
judgement, acknowledging them, and then moving on from them.