‘No!’ she retorted furiously. ‘You have offloaded your guilt—please spare me your need for forgiveness!’ She sank down on one of the wrought-iron benches that stood in the shade of a cypress tree. Then looked up at him with hurt, bewildered eyes.
‘Who is she?’
‘No one!’
‘Yes! Somebody!’
‘A girl. Just a girl I met in England and—’
She cut across him icily, ‘Was she the first?’
He stared at her incredulously and then his eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘Of course she was the first!’
‘There’s no “of course!” about it!’ She studied the engagement ring on her finger, then looked up at him, her gaze very steady. ‘The first? And only?’
Giovanni could see the hurt in her eyes, but there was, he realised, no surprise whatsoever. Almost as if she had been expecting him to stray. His mouth hardened as he thought of all the women he had turned down over the years. One misdemeanour, and you were scarred by it forever. And he had only himself to blame.
And Kate, of course, he thought with a kick of something akin to both hatred and desire. Kate with those smooth, pink nails which had curled around his arm so possessively, enchaining him with the sweet seduction of her touch.
‘The first,’ he agreed quietly. ‘And the only.’
‘Oh, why did you have to tell me, Giovanni?’ she whispered sadly and again he felt the sharp pang of remorse as she saw the white glitter of the diamond which sparkled on her finger. ‘Most men would have tried to get away with it.’
‘Because I could not bear to live a lie with you, Anna,’ he told her softly, and a muscle worked in his cheek as he silently cursed the day his path had crossed with that of Kate Connors.
Back in London, Kate sat staring at the telephone as if it were an alien just landed from Mars.
Engaged, she thought in a frozen kind of disbelief, starting as the doorbell began to ring, and she remembered the last time it had rung like that.
Like a zombie, she walked out to answer it, some stupid hope making her wish that history could repeat itself and that Giovanni would be standing there, telling her that there was no fiancée. That she had made a terrible mistake.
But it was Lucy, her copper hair pulled back into a pony-tail, and not a scrap of make-up on her face—but that didn’t matter, thought Kate. Not when your eyes were like emeralds sparkling in such a pale, clear face.
‘Hello, Lucy,’ she said, and then her voice began to tremble.
Lucy swept her a swift, assessing look and her face took on a mixture of concern and anger. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Giovanni Calverri!’ Lucy spat the name out.
‘Seen him?’ Kate very nearly laughed, but tears were much too close to the surface to allow her the luxury of laughter. ‘Yes, you could say that I’ve seen him.’
Lucy came into the flat and shut the door behind her. ‘And?’
Kate bit her lip. Who else could she tell? Who else could she bear to tell? Someone who loved her enough never to judge her. And Lucy did.
She tried to recount the whole sorry story matter-of-factly. ‘He turned up yesterday after I’d been to see you.’
Lucy nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘He… I… We…’ Kate shook her head and tried again. There was no pretty way to phrase it. ‘We went to bed,’ she said simply.
‘You what?’ breathed Lucy.
‘You sound shocked,’ commented Kate drily.
‘That’s because I am! Oh, no,’ she amended suddenly as Kate’s lips began to tremble again, ‘not because of what you did—but because it?