Edward, leaving Edward’s wife to put her brother’s vile misconceptions in order. She even smiled in cold satisfaction as she heard the beginning of it before the door closed behind her.
‘She is not the woman Edward betrayed me with!’ Alegra was saying furiously. ‘She is the child his betrayal spawned, you fool…!’
Giancarlo caught up with Natalia just as she was leaning over a distraught Edward and trying to calm him down. ‘Shh,’ she was soothing him—just as Giancarlo had been soothing Alegra not so long ago. ‘Please, darling, don’t do this, you’re going to make yourself worse!’
But Edward wouldn’t be soothed. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere. I tried your house, the office, I even tried Giancarlo! But he said he’d sent you away on a fact-finding mission to Fillens in Manchester, and I believed him!’ he choked out in self-disgust. ‘I actually believed him and put you aside to worry about Alegra and myself instead.’
‘As you should have done,’ Natalia attempted to console him.
‘No, I shouldn’t,’ Edward groaned. ‘I should have smelled a rat from the moment he said it! But it took me two whole weeks before it suddenly hit me—in Nassau of all the places—that there was no way he would send you anywhere like that unless he had an ulterior motive for doing so!’
‘Shh,’ she tried again.
‘So I rang the firm,’ Edward continued hoarsely. ‘Got Howard Fiske who’d apparently not long come back from Milan. The swine was more than happy to tell me that you’d moved in with my brother-in-law within days of him arriving. And that’s when it really hit!’ he gasped out. ‘Why Giancarlo had arranged the cruise and put himself in my place here in London. He must have found out about you and was doing the typical Sicilian thing by taking revenge for my sin out on you!’
‘You mean—he came here to deliberately seduce me?’ Natalia said, while Giancarlo stood there unnoticed, feeling the full weight of his own culpability land squarely upon his own rigid shoulders.
‘Natalia…’ he murmured, unable to remain quiet any longer.
She turned towards him, and for the first time Giancarlo looked into her eyes and saw Edward’s eyes looking accusingly back at him. He looked at her hair and saw the colour Edward’s hair used to be before the silver had overrun the gold. His stomach contracted, for what he was seeing was a terrible truth that had been staring him in the face from the very beginning, but he had been too blinded by prejudice to see it.
Sexual prejudice, he expanded sombrely.
Sex probably covered his blindness very well—in the beginning at any rate. He had wanted Natalia Deyton so badly from the first moment he’d looked into those eyes that to see then what he should have seen would have stopped his plans of seduction dead in their tracks. So he hadn’t let himself see. For how did a Sicilian male seduce the daughter of one of his own family members? He didn’t. It was as simple and neat as that.
And it was quite monstrous to know how low he had trodden in his want for Edward’s beautiful daughter.
‘You stay away from her!’ Edward clearly held the same bitter belief. ‘You’ve had your revenge, now get the hell away from both of us!’
It was the ugly scene in the waiting room playing itself out in reverse, Giancarlo noted. And he quietly tried again. ‘Natalia—’
‘Just go,’ she cut in, having to use both hands to keep her father from getting up off the bed in his weak effort to protect her. ‘You are making him worse.’
Could it get any worse? ‘We need to talk,’ he insisted, and saw by the sudden darkening of her eyes that she would rather slay him than speak to him. His grimace acknowledged her right to think like that—but he didn’t back down. ‘Talk,’ he repeated warningly, and, with a final glance at Edward’s angry struggle, he turned and walked away, taking the sight of Natalia’s tears right along with him…
‘He hurt you, didn’t he?’ Edward had seen the tears too. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’
‘Nor will I,’ Natalia agreed, but had to wonder why that knowledge wounded her so much.
You know why, she then mocked herself. Because you love him, cruel, hard, ruthless man that he is. ‘Please stop fighting me, Edward,’ she pleaded. ‘Do you want me to lose you along with everything else?’
‘I’m all right,’ he snapped out impatiently. ‘It was just a little panic attack during the flight, that was all. Nothing worthy of all this fuss!’
He should have said heart attack but Natalia didn’t correct him, because he was probably half right, and panic was what had helped bring it on in the first place.
‘What did he do to you?’ he muttered, falling back in frustration because he was too weak to even throw off a lightweight like Natalia.
/> ‘He thought I was your mistress,’ she said, then smiled at her father’s shocked expression because he just hadn’t realised the twisted view others had had of their little deception.
After that she told him everything, quietly and unemotionally because there had been enough of that expended tonight. And also because the truth needed to be told from all angles if this muddled situation was ever to be sorted out.
But, ‘God, I’m going to kill him!’ Edward rasped when she withered to an empty finish, and he started trying to get up again.
‘You will do nothing of the kind, you stupid—stupid man!’ another angry voice commanded. ‘Not when you are the one to blame for all of this!’
It was Alegra. Instantly placed on the wary defensive, Natalia straightened stiffly away from him while Edward sank with a groan back against the pillows.
‘If you’ve come here to continue your family vendetta then you can turn about and leave again,’ Edward grimly informed his wife of twenty-five years.