She felt the hysteria in her throat again, felt her eyes distend, felt pressure in her head as if it might explode. Felt her fingers tremble as the last of the hooks were undone and the heavy, beaded satin and lace gown plummeted to the floor.
She stepped out of it, twisted out of her shoes. God knew where her veil was—she’d torn it from her as she’d gained the vestry, with Vito’s arm clamped around hers. If it hadn’t been she’d have fainted on the spot. As it was she’d swayed, felt the church whirling around her, and heard a choking noise come from her throat.
She could be glad of that—glad that it had given her a lie to cling to.
‘The bride is indisposed...’
Hysteria clawed again. Yes, ‘indisposed’—that was what she was.
Not jilted, not rejected, not spurned.
Somewhere in the depths of her head she knew, with a kind of piercing pain, that she had only got what she deser
ved.
I forced Vito to the altar—behaved shamefully...selfishly.
Desperately.
She walked into the bathroom, yanking on the shower. She stepped under the plunging water, still in her underwear, her hair still pinned into its elaborate coiffeur, soaking herself in the hot, punishing water.
How long she stood there, she could not say. She knew only that it seemed to take an agony of time to peel off the underwear clinging to her streaming wet body—to free herself from the silken mesh of her stockings, push down her panties, yank off her bra, until she was standing there, a mess of lingerie in the shower tray, her hair covering her face, her back, standing there in the scorching hot water, shivering violently...
With shaking hands she turned the water off, pushed the dripping locks from her face, clambered out of the cubicle to seize a towel for her hair, for her body, her feet. She was still shaking, though her skin was red and overheated.
Somehow she made it to her bed. Somehow she thrust the wet towels from her, crawled under the covers like a wounded animal. Somehow, she curled her body, knees drawn up, arms wrapped about herself, her still wet hair damp on the pillow.
She felt the world recede and the blessed mercy of sleep came over her. The oblivion she sought.
CHAPTER NINE
CESARE SMILED AT his hostess, greeting her with a kiss of her hand. He’d flown in from the USA that morning, back from a visit to Francesca—his first as her fiancé.
In America, seeing her for several days in her work environment, as opposed to seeing her as his guest with her family at the Castello Mantegna, she had seemed very...well, American...
There, she was not Donna Francesca, she was Dr Fran Ristori—the aristocratic honorific ‘delle’ had been abandoned, he noticed—and she was clearly completely at home in the high-altitude intellectual freemasonry of her colleagues.
The conversation at the dinner party she’d given for him at her apartment on campus, to introduce him to her colleagues, had been virtually incomprehensible to him, excellent though his English was. It was his ignorance of astrophysics that had let him down...
But seeing her with her academic colleagues, speaking English with an American accent, so at home in the rarefied atmosphere of her subject, had made him think to ask her again if she were sure of her decision to marry him.
Had she hesitated? If she had, then her words had only negated that hesitation.
‘Yes. You’ve assured me I can be both a dottore di fisica and Contessa di Mantegna. That was what I needed to hear. But...’ Her clear blue eyes had rested on him. ‘What of you, Ces?’ She’d paused minutely, then spoken again. ‘My spies tell me my arrival was something of an...an interruption for you.’
For the space of a heartbeat he had been silent. Then he had answered. ‘What was interrupted is over, Francesca. Be very sure of that.’
Her eyes rested on him again. ‘And are you?’ she’d asked quietly. ‘Are you very sure?’
He had felt the beat of his heart, the pulse of his blood. How many beats? Two? Three? More? Enough for him to exert the necessary control to say what he must.
‘Yes,’ he had answered. ‘She is marrying someone else. I wish her well.’
In his head he had felt the serration of that same knife that had stabbed him when he’d learnt of Carla’s engagement to Vito Viscari. He’d remembered the jab he’d felt that last night at the restaurant with Carla, when he’d heard that note of affection for her step-cousin in her voice.
Is that why she’s marrying Viscari—just as I am marrying Francesca? An old affection, born of long years of familiarity? A marriage of mutual convenience for them both?
So how could he object? What justification was there for that knife blade slicing into his head as he told Francesca he wished her well? He would not permit it to be there. It served no function and had no cause. No justification. No place in his life. Just as Carla now had no place in his life.