Eloise’s voice was bright. As bright as it was brittle.
Her four-year-old charge was a happy lad, and unspoilt despite his parents’ wealth. It was Eloise’s task to keep him that way. She had been glad—grateful—to find a post so quickly, via her mother’s contacts, and had moved out to the Carldons’ massive mansion on Long Island.
Johnny’s father was based on Wall Street, at the family banking house, where his mother Laura worked as well, though she planned to work part-time from home once she had her second child. Until then young Johnny needed a live-in nanny. His parents usually stayed mid-week at their Manhattan apartment, putting in the punishing hours that top jobs on Wall Street demanded, so they could spend long weekends on Long Island with their son, so Eloise was often in sole charge of Johnny, alone in the Long Island mansion apart from the Carldons’ housekeeper Maria and chauffeur Giuseppe.
It had been an uncomfortable jolt to hear the married couple speak Italian to each other, but Eloise had gritted her teeth and endured it.
Just as she was enduring her entire existence.
There was a bleakness inside her...a tearing misery she could not shed. Her mother’s bracing admonition ‘You’re well rid of him!’ seemed only to make the world bleaker still. She knew the truth of her mother’s words—but all they did was pain her more. As painful as the tormenting memories of how happy she had thought she’d been with Vito, of the shining hopes she’d been filled with.
She could tell herself all she liked that she’d tried to be cautious about her whirlwind romance, that she’d warned herself that it might be nothing more than a starry-eyed infatuation, an intoxicating dream.
Her expression bleached. It hadn’t been that at all, though, had it? Not a dream—nothing but a sordid, clandestine fling with a man promised to another woman.
I wanted to know what I felt about him! Wanted to know if he was going to be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with! I found out the truth too late...
That was the cruelty of it. Her hopes and dreams had already started to weave around him—and now, four thousand miles away from him, they still had the power to haunt her.
A toxic mix of anger and misery filled her, rising up with a familiar sick feeling in her stomach. She fought it back. Oh, what use was there in feeling like this? Her mother was right! She had to get over it—had to put Vito in the past. Stop her useless anguish over it all! There was no choice for her but to get over him—turn off, smother, kill whatever it was she’d felt for him. No matter what those feelings had been—or might have become—it didn’t matter now.
Now, and for her entire future, only one thing was important. There was only one joy to look forward to, only one meaning for her life. Only one way to heal her bruised and battered heart. Only one outlet for the love inside her.
She lifted her chin, fighting the dumb misery inside her. She would not let it win. She must not. Her future was changing—changing for ever—and that was all she must focus on now!
Emotion welled up in her, fierce and protective. Her time with Vito had been a disaster—but out of it had come a blessing she had not looked for and which now would be the reason for her life.
The only reason.
Another wave of nausea hit her...
* * *
Vito stood, stiff and immobile, at the altar rail of the church of Santa Maria della Fiore. Its showy, baroque splendour fitted the tastes of his bride, who was burning with desperation to show the world she was not a discarded, spurned creature, too lowly to be contessa of an ancient name, but was instead the enviable bride of one of Rome’s most eligible and desirable bachelors, her glittering wedding as lavish as Marlene could devise.
All Vito was required to do was go through with it.
Keep his promise to his dying father. Get back his uncle’s shares. Make the Viscari legacy safe at last.
Whatever it cost him to do so.
Into his head fleetingly, like a bird soaring high and out of reach, memory flashed.
Eloise—her arms opening to him, drawing him close to her, the scent of her, the fragrance of her hair, the silk of her skin, the warmth in her eyes, the tender curve of her mouth—
He shook the memory from him. She was gone from his life. What she had been to him was over. What she might have become he would never know.
He shifted his stance. What use to think of Eloise now, as he stood on the brink of marrying another woman? A woman he did not want, did not desire. But who brought with her the means to safeguard what his family had built up for over a century.
All around him he heard the organ music swelling, the choir’s voices lifting, and knew that his bride was approaching. He heard the congregation rising to its feet, saw the officiating priest start to step forward. In minutes now he would commit himself to marriage.
Words thrust themselves into his head as he stood there, rigid and immobile, as if chained where he stood by forces he could not defy. Making himself endure it with a strength he had to find.
Is this what you want me to do, Papa? Is this how you want me to get back your brother’s shares? Is this the price you want me to pay for them?
The choir’s soaring voices reached a crescendo before stilling.
Every muscle in Vito’s body tensed, as if he were forcing himself to stand stock-still. Carla was beside him, the folds of her couture wedding dress brushing his leg, her lace-veiled figure as rigid as his, the rich fragrance of her heavy perfume cloying.