‘I was raped one week before our perfect wedding!’ she cried. ‘You were here in Rome! I was deep in shock! It was h-horrible!’ She shuddered, her arms wrapping tightly around herself. ‘I didn’t want to remember it, never mind talk about it! I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened and keep floating through the perfect dream marriage you had mapped out for us!’
‘So you thought you could marry me, come to my bed and pretend you were exactly what I was expecting?’ He spun back to lance her with embittered eyes and she lowered her gaze.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Something like that.’
‘But when it came to it you could not even let me touch you, never mind make love to you. So the perfection was ruined anyway. You should have told me then,’ he directed. ‘Explained then. Absolved me of blame for your revulsion! But instead you let me suffer,’ he rasped out thickly, ‘not knowing what it was about me you could not tolerate! What you did, Joanna, was punish me for the sins of those animals who attacked you!’
He was oh, so deplorably right! So much so that she suddenly decided she couldn’t take any more! ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, spinning jerkily towards the door.
‘No!’ The ref
usal seemed to explode violently from somewhere deep down inside his angry breast, pulling her to a tense standstill. ‘We will deal with this now!’ he insisted. ‘We will drag it all out into the open and kick each other to death with it, if we have to! But we will deal with this now, Joanna. Right here and now!’
‘What more do you want from me?’ she reeled back to blast at him. ‘Absolution of all blame? Well, you have it!’ she declared, with a wild wave of one badly shaking hand, eyes glinting, hair shimmering, slender body quivering with a furious provocation. ‘I was at fault! I didn’t trust you enough to confide in you! I punished you for other men’s sins! I made your life a misery!’
‘You broke my heart and did not even notice,’ he tagged on gruffly.
That rocked Joanna on the very axis upon which she stood. She couldn’t believe he had actually said it! It was such an awful, awful thing for a man like him to openly admit!
Yet there was no longer any anger in his lean, dark expression, no biting regret that he had been driven to voice such a dreadful admission. He was simply responding to his own dictum and telling it as it was.
The truth, the full truth and whole truth—even if it was a gut-wrenching truth!
‘But you did more than that,’ he went on in a voice suddenly devoid of all emotion. ‘You despoiled me, cara. As surely as those men despoiled you without a qualm, you emasculated me with your revulsion. You stripped me naked of my pride in myself as a man—in my manhood! You scorned me as a lover and you revolted at my touch. You recognise these effects? They ring bells for you?’
‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered in shaken comprehension.
‘Now we will discuss cause and effect for you, if you please.’ As always, when his emotions were under pressure, his near perfect English slipped into a bone-melting Italian inflection. ‘For I think I have earned the right to know exactly what happened to make you treat me like that!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS downright amazing! Joanna decided astoundedly. How he had somehow managed to turn everything on its head like this! Just what did he think it was? she wondered. A competition as to which of them had received the worst treatment? Did he think she liked doing that to him? That she liked becoming that abominable creature he had just described to her?
‘All right!’ she declared, facing up to him like a boxer who had decided to come out of her corner and fight. ‘You want the full and gory details, Sandro? OK, I’ll give them to you!’
And, leaning forward to brace her hands on the back of one of his elegant lemon-drop sofas, she told him—told him everything in a tight staccato voice that described in detail the whole wretched ordeal, from the moment she’d found herself alone with those two men to the moment when they’d walked away from her.
By the time she came to a shuddering halt she was whiter than white, and Sandro had dropped into a nearby chair where he had buried his face in his hands.
Then he was slowly sliding his hands away from his face, though his dark head remained lowered, as if he was unable to bring himself to look at her now the full truth of it was out. It was like adding insult to injury, considering he was the one who had insisted on all of this.
Perhaps he was thinking something similar, because, ‘I’m sorry,’ he dropped with a dull thud into the drumming silence. ‘I should not have put you through that. But I needed—’
‘To know,’ she finished for him when he stopped to swallow. ‘If their “despoiling” of me was as brutal as my emasculation of you? Well, actually, it wasn’t. They didn’t even hurt me,’ she informed him, hands rubbing up and down her ice-cold arms. ‘I had no cuts,’ she explained, ‘no bruises. Nothing much at all to show that anything dire had ever actually happened. So I went home to Molly and said nothing,’ she said. ‘I went to work the next day and the next and the next...’
‘Stop it now, Joanna, please,’ Sandro inserted rawly.
But she couldn’t stop—didn’t want to stop. He had started the torrent, now it had to run its full course whether he wanted to listen or not.
‘I dressed myself up in white for purity, and walked down the church aisle with you as the perfect virgin bride. I smiled for the cameras, for you, for Molly and your family. The hazy fog surrounding me only lifted when I found myself alone with you here in this apartment, and I looked at you and thought—My God! This man is expecting his bride to be a virgin! And, well...’ She shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’
Oh, yes, she confirmed silently, Sandro knew the rest. He had already described it with a raw and cutting honesty.
His life with a wife who had been utterly incapable of being a wife.
The day she left him she’d had visions of him going down on his knees to thank Heaven for deliverance from a marriage made in Hell; she had expected to feel the same way about the break-up herself!
But living without him had been worse than living with him—and living with him had been torment enough. She loved him and had missed him, even though the thought of going anywhere near him had brought her out in a cold sweat.