Her mother snorted. ‘Yes, well, women make fools of themselves every day.’ She took a breath. ‘I should know. I made an idiot of myself over your father.’ She gave a heavy sigh and got to her feet. ‘Well, you can stay here as long as you want—though don’t waste your time moping over the man! You’re well rid of him!’ Her voice changed, becoming businesslike. ‘Best to start working again. I’ll ask around my acquaintances for anyone who might need a nanny—that will take your mind off him.’
Eloise’s face paled, and a look of anguish came into her eyes.
Her mother’s expression changed again. ‘You’ll get over it, Eloise,’ she said bluntly, but there was a resigned thread of sympathy there as well. Her voice softened a fraction. ‘And you got out just in time—unlike me, with you already born and your father deserting us for his brood mare! With you, however, it’s completely different. No repercussions—thank heavens!’
She glanced at her watch.
‘I must go,’ she said, back to her habitual brisk tones. ‘I’m late for work.’
She brushed her cheek briefly against her daughter’s, then walked out, leaving Eloise lying back against the pillows, her face bleak as an Arctic waste.
No repercussions, her mother had said. But she was wrong. Totally wrong.
* * *
There was a dark, bleak look in Vito’s eyes. It had been there for days—ever since he’d opened that curt, damming text from Eloise. The words were incised into his brain as if with a chisel.
You are the most despicable man I know. Stay away from me for ever. Eloise.
For days, he had rejected her order, continuing to bombard her with texts and voicemails with an increasing sense of desperation...longing for her. He had to find her, talk to her, explain—
But he hadn’t found her. She had headed to the airport and vanished. Presumably she had gone back to England—but with dismay he realised he had absolutely no idea where she might be. She’d worked as a live-in nanny—she didn’t have an address of her own. She could be anywhere...
He’d set investigators on to it, but they’d drawn a blank. All further texts and calls to her mobile had been blocked.
She does not want me to find her. Wants nothing more to do with me.
And with every passing day, and still no way of finding her, that was what he had to accept.
Eloise was gone.
Her absence from his life was a vast, desolate hollow opening inside him—a sense of loss that gave him a bitter answer to the question he had asked about her ever since she’d come into his life.
I wanted to know if she was truly special to me—if she was coming to mean more to me than any other woman I’ve known.
His mouth twisted painfully. Well, now he knew. She had become far, far more than just one of the women in his life. He knew now that she’d been quite, quite different. Knew by his constant longing for her, his need to see her there, in front of him, holding out her arms to him, lying beside him in his embrace, being with him, at his side, all the time...
To know the answer to that question now, with her absence so unbearable to him, was a cruel irony indeed. As cruel as the pain of missing her so much. As cruel as the frustration that bit into him.
I begged her to wait and hear me out—to let me explain why I said what I did in front of Carla! If she had only given me a chance to explain about Marlene and the shares. Explain about Carla and her manic need suddenly to have a fiancé!
But she had not—she had vanished instead. Rejected him totally.
I thought she would be sympathetic, understanding—like she always was! Always there for me.
But only the malign shadow of Carla was there now, her manic bitterness unabating. He could see it in the blindness of her eyes, the gauntness of her face. He did not care.
And as with each passing day he became bleakly resigned to the fact that he could not find Eloise, he felt a kind of slow fatalism numb him. If Eloise was gone—if she could not be found—then what reason was there to balk any longer at this grotesque way of fulfilling his deathbed promise to his father? Saving Viscari Hotels from dismemberment. Protecting the legacy he had been born to guard.
So, with grim decision, he determined to let Carla have her garish wedding, announcing to the world she had not been rejected by her aristocratic lover but that she was making a dynastic match of her own to fulfil her mother’s obsession. But, he spelt it out freezingly to his gaunt-faced step-cousin, within six months the marriage must be annulled. Carla could give any face-saving reason she wanted—he would not care. He would keep Guido’s shares, handing over their market value to Carla when they parted.
And then it would be done. Over.
The dreary, crushing numbness pressed down on him. The numbness that would never lift now.
* * *
‘Time to tidy up your toys, Johnny.’