They made it to the border in under twenty minutes. He’d debated between speed via the coastal autostrada versus heading for the hills, and had gone for the former. He had to take a gamble, and it was absolutely vital they get on to Italian soil.
As they passed through the unmanned border he spoke.
‘We’re out,’ he said. He leant down to haul up Ben, followed by his mother. She busied herself with seat-belts.
‘What now?’ she asked. Her voice was expressionless, but Rico heard the tremor in it. Heard the tightness of her throat. Heard the fear. The terror.
He looked at her. The chalky complexion, the bones stark in her face. Emotion surged in him, and he clamped it down yet again.
‘We get to a priest,’ he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE savage irony of it was that she still balked at marrying him. In the end he had to be brutal.
‘It is the only way I can protect you. Protect Ben.’
She stared at him, her face a web of fear.
‘It’s another trick. A trap.’ Her voice was hollow.
‘No, I swear it. I swear I did not know what they were planning—I swear. If I could, I would get you back to England—but I can’t. I’ve got you into Italy, and now you are safer, because my father will have to work through the Italian authorities and that will slow him down. But if you try and return to England you’ll be taken into custody. I can’t even get you into Switzerland. All the Italian borders will be watched. And don’t think my father won’t be able to do it—he’ll have some charge against you trumped up. It doesn’t matter what—it matters only to prevent you taking Ben back to the UK. You’ll be separated, and there’ll be some kind of court order taking him into care—something. Anything. Whatever it takes to separate you. And he’ll find a way to keep you separated.’
He took a searing breath. ‘The only way I can keep you safe is by doing what I’ve just said. Once we’re married they can’t touch you, and they can’t touch Ben. Neither legally nor because of the publicity. They will have to accept a fait accompli. I know my father—he won’t risk an open break with me. He won’t cause that kind of scandal.’
He looked at her as she sat, her arm tight around Ben, who had lolled off to sleep with the motion of the car, steadily being driven further north towards the alpine foothills. ‘I’m the only person who can protect you—keep you and Ben together.’
She stared at him.
‘Why?’ The question was a breath, almost inaudible. ‘Why do you want to do that?’
It echoed through him, reverberating through his being.
Why? She had asked why.
‘I gave you my word,’ he said. ‘Not to let Ben be parted from you. That’s why.’
In his head he heard again Luca’s voice, describing the nightmare childhood that had been planned for Ben.
Anger blinded him.
Anger at his father, his mother, his brother…the whole damn, twisted, duplicitous, hard-hearted, callous lot of them.
How could they do it? How could they even think it?
But he knew how. To them, the only important thing was duty and reputation, avoiding scandal, awkwardness, embarrassment.
And to achieve that they were prepared to take a four-year-old child and wrench it from its mother—trick the mother into coming here in good faith and then throw her out like a piece of rubbish.
His eyes went to her, went to her arm so tight around Ben, and to Ben, his head resting on her side, his hand lying in her lap. Mother and child.
Genetically she might only be his aunt, but to Ben she was everything—the whole world. So what if she were some ordinary member of the masses, utterly unfit to be a royal princess, the mother of a royal prince?
His lips pressed together. And so what that she was utterly unlike any woman he would have chosen for his wife? A woman who knew that brutal, cruel truth…
Grotesque.
That was what she thought a marriage between them would be.