All around them people were going about their business, but for Marco his world had come to a halt and was now poised trembling on the brink of something momentous. Lily. His heart pounded and surged inside his chest cavity, as though trying to break free of unwanted bonds. Lily. She had turned to him. She had wanted his help and she had trusted him to give it. Trust. Trust was a rare and precious gift when it was exchanged between two people. Lily had offered him the gift of her trust, and that gift demanded surely that he reciprocate in kind. Trust Lily? Trust anyone with his own vulnerabilities? He couldn’t. He scarcely trusted himself with them. That was why he had had to lock them away.
A car horn sounded in the traffic and the moment was gone, banished by the demands of the real world. The danger had passed. The path he had laid down for himself had forked, and briefly he had been tempted to take the wrong fork, but thankfully he had recognised the folly of doing so. Practicality reasserted itself within him, much to his relief—if for no other reason than because it was easier to deal with practical matters than it was for him to deal with emotions.
They had finished their work for the day and, whilst he’d intended to take Lily on a tour of a silk mill as she’d requested, it was plain to Marco that right now she was in no state to do anything. The best thing he could do was get her back to the privacy of the Duchess’s villa.
She didn’t speak as they were driven back to the villa, simply sat stiffly at his side, her stiffness occasionally broken by the tremors that shook her body.
The Duchess was out visiting friends, and Lily made no objection when Marco suggested that she might want to rest in their room, letting him guide her up the stairs and along the corridor to their suite, where she subsided onto the bed, sitting tensely at its edge as she spoke for the first time. ‘Please don’t leave me here on my own,’ she begged.
‘You’re safe now, Lily,’ Marco responded. ‘He can’t come back into your life now—unless you choose to ask him to do so.’
‘Ask Anton into my life?’ Lily shuddered. ‘Never. Never …‘
‘You must have cared for him once.’ The cool words, a product of his suspicion and refusal to trust, were forced into the open by those voices within him that warned he had already let down his guard far too much, and that now was the time to rectify that mistake whilst he still could.
But they made Lily flinch visibly, causing him to feel an unexpected stab of guilt as she denied emotionally, ‘No. Never. I disliked him from the start. But he was my father’s friend and I couldn’t avoid him.’
She had met the other man through her father? Even the logical, searching, suspicious voice within him had to accept that that changed things—but it still insisted on reminding her, ‘You were lovers.’
CHAPTER NINE
LILY raised her head and looked up at Marco, revulsion darkening her eyes. Marco’s words had filled her with anguish and fear, flooded her mind with memories that undermined her already shaky self-control.
She had kept her secrets to herself for so long—refusing to unburden herself to anyone, bearing the horror of them alone—but now suddenly everything was too much for her. She couldn’t go on any longer. She couldn’t bear the pain and the guilt any more.
She was shivering and trembling, lost in the grip of her emotions and the past.
‘No!‘ she told Marco vehemently. ‘No. I would never let him even touch me.’ She shuddered. ‘I hated him—loathed him.’ The words gathered speed, spilling out of her in jerky uncoordinated sentences. ‘He kept saying things to me … looking at me … even though he knew how much I hated him. That just made him laugh. He said that he’d get his way in the end and that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. I was only fourteen, and my father …’
She shuddered again and Marco listened, every word she uttered a fresh lash of anguished guilt against new emotions still raw from having the protective cover he had used to smother them ripped from them. Whilst he had been clinging to his refusal to trust her she had been at the mercy of her tormentor.