Count Valieri's Prisoner

chapter FIFTEEN



WHAT TOOK MADDIE slightly aback was the general lack of surprise over the news of her broken engagement. Uncle Patrick murmured that they’d ‘often wondered’, while Aunt Fee merely whisked away the wedding dress, and produced one of her sumptuous roast duck dinners.

Trisha and Sally took her clubbing, and Todd, with his usual single-mindedness, said he welcomed the news if it meant she would not be leaving any time soon.

And no-one asked her if she was sure she was doing the right thing.

What did they see that I didn’t? Maddie wondered, but decided not to enquire.

All the opposition came from Jeremy, who laid siege to her, with texts, emails, armfuls of flowers and visits to the office and the flat, with pleas to ‘talk things over, my darling, before it’s too late’.

To all of which, she replied quietly and firmly that there was nothing to discuss. Her decision had been made once and for all, and she intended to treat the past as a closed book.

The flowers she took to a local hospice. Her conversation with Esme she kept strictly to herself.

And if she seemed quiet, with a propensity for staring into space, lost in thoughts that were clearly not happy—well, that was surely natural after a broken engagement. So people drew the obvious conclusions, and tactfully forbore to ask questions that she would have found impossible to answer with any degree of truth, if at all.

Time passed slowly, turned into one week, then two, and if her days were easier than her nights, then that was something she admitted only to herself.

Work continued to be her salvation. She and a colleague were researching material for a programme on people whose newly discovered talents had changed their lives. They’d already talked to a roofing engineer who’d learned to play the clarinet and was now performing regularly with a jazz band, a security guard whose watercolours had found a market in a London gallery, while Maddie had just arranged to go to Oxford to interview a retired female academic who’d written an explosively bloodthirsty thriller, when Todd emerged from his office, his eyes popping with excitement.

He said, ‘Remember your wild goose chase to Italy? Well, the goose has been found. Floria Bartrando has made contact, would you believe, and she’s willing to talk to us.’

For a moment, Maddie felt as if she’d been turned to stone. When she could speak, she said, ‘Well good luck to whoever does it.’

Todd stared at her. ‘For heaven’s sake, Maddie, it’s you. She’s asked for you by name.’

Maddie shook her head. ‘I can’t do it, Todd. I—I can’t possibly go back to Italy. Please don’t ask me to explain.’

‘But she’s not in Italy.’ He slapped a triumphant hand on Maddie’s desk. ‘She’s here in London, staying at the Mayfair Royal hotel, Suite Fourteen, and she’ll see you this evening at half seven. How about that?’

She took a breath. ‘I suggest you send Holly. I have plans for tonight.’

Todd gave her a level look. ‘Then change them. I’ve told you—it’s you she wants to see, and no-one else.’ He looked at her pale mutinous face and sighed. ‘God, I’ll never understand women. You’re gone for days on end looking for her, and now she’s turned up you don’t want to know. I thought you’d be turning cartwheels.

‘Well, this is your project, honey, so—whatever the problem—deal with it.’ And he went back into his office and banged the door.

She wanted to go after him—to scream, ‘It’s not a problem, it’s a nightmare.’ Except that would involve her in explanations she could not afford to make.

‘I’m in the wrong job for secrets,’ she muttered under her breath.

She achieved little for the rest of the day, and went home early, pleading a headache. ‘Take some ibuprofen,’ Todd called after her. ‘Make sure you’re on top form for seven-thirty.’ And his tone made clear it was an order rather than a suggestion.

She dressed down deliberately for the interview—straight grey skirt, plain white blouse, low-heeled black shoes—and pulled her hair back from her face, fastening it severely at the nape of her neck with a black ribbon.

Making it clear to the Contessa that she was no longer the girl her son had brought to Portofino.

The Mayfair Royal was an old-fashioned hotel, with no canned music or loud voices in its hushed and spacious foyer, luxuriously decked out in mahogany and marble.

A polite receptionist confirmed to Maddie that she was expected, and directed her to the lift.

As Maddie emerged on the first floor, a thin grey-haired man was waiting for her.

‘Signorina Lang.’ He gave her a kind smile. ‘My name is Guido Massimo. Will you come with me, please?’

She walked beside him, her feet sinking into the thick carpet, waiting as he produced the key card for Suite Fourteen and opened the door, standing back politely to allow her to precede him.

Maddie stepped into an elegant sitting room, furnished in shades of blue. Glancing round her, she supposed that the double doors to her left and right led to the bedrooms, while ahead of her, a pair of tall windows, giving access to a wrought iron balcony, admitted the fading sunlight of the early June evening.

Behind her, she heard the door close softly, and, turning, realised that Mr Massimo had not accompanied her into the room and that she was alone.

So who will be making the grand entrance? she wondered, mentally bracing herself. Floria Bartrando or the Contessa Valieri?

But when the left hand bedroom door opened, she stood transfixed, her eyes widening endlessly in disbelief as Andrea walked into the room, lean in a sombre dark suit, his shirt open at the throat, his silk tie pulled loose. He paused, hands on hips, tight-lipped, the golden eyes brooding as he looked at her.

He said, ‘So you came. I was not sure that you would.’

‘I am here,’ she said, recovering her breath, ‘to talk to your mother. No other reason.’ She looked past him, proud of the chill steadiness of her voice. Thankful, too, for her sedate choice of clothing in such marked contrast to the little she’d been wearing at their last confrontation. A memory that made her want to die inside all over again.

‘So,’ she went on, ‘where is she, please?’

‘She is visiting friends outside London. She will return tomorrow.’

She swallowed. ‘In that case, so shall I.’

‘I cannot force you to stay,’ he said. His fleeting smile was wry. ‘Much as I might wish to do so. But before you go, answer me one question. Is it true that you are no longer engaged to Sylvester’s son?’

She flushed. ‘That is not your concern.’

‘Then let us make it so,’ he said. ‘I have travelled a long way, Maddalena, to hear your reply.’

‘Then you’ve wasted your time, signore.’

‘Hope,’ he said, ‘is never wasted.’

On her way to the door, she turned. ‘Hope?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘What can you possibly be hoping for?’

He said softly, ‘Why, for you, carissima, if you are no longer promised to the man you left me for.’ He took a step towards her. ‘You by my side, in my arms, in my bed. Mine completely.’

Her outer tension had not relaxed, but she was trembling inside with shame and anger. And an irrational sense of disappointment.

‘How very flattering,’ she said savagely. ‘So I’ll be your girl in London as opposed to the ones in Genoa—Turin—Rome—or any bloody where. No doubt the list is endless. Is that what you’re suggesting? Because the answer’s no.’

‘Do not insult yourself, or me, Maddalena. I do not pretend there have not been women in my life. I am not a eunuch.’ His eyes met hers directly, compellingly. ‘But, since I met you, no-one. I swear it.’ He paused. ‘It was—impossible.’

‘You’re conveniently forgetting your lady friend in Viareggio.’ Maddie flung back her head.

He said quietly, ‘I visited Giulia once, to say goodbye. She deserved that courtesy.’

‘But you went back to her,’ she said. ‘The night before I left. You told me so.’

‘No, mia cara. I used that as an excuse. Infatti, I drove to Trimontano and stayed alone at the hotel where you had your reservation, in the room where you would have slept.’

He shook his head. ‘I wanted you so badly, my sweet one, that I did not dare spend another night under the same roof with you, or find you still there in the morning.’

‘If that’s true,’ Maddie whispered, ‘then why—why did you want to send me away?’

‘In order to fulfil my bargain with the Sylvesters.’ His voice was suddenly harsh. ‘Because I had promised on my honour that I would do so, even though it was like tearing the heart out of my body.

‘And I knew if I took you—enjoyed the sweetness you were offering—that I would break my word and never let you go.’ He spread his hands almost helplessly. ‘And I had no guarantee that you would want to stay, even if we’d become lovers. Persuading you to give yourself for one night is very different to asking you to be with me forever.’

He added more gently, ‘And from the beginning, time after time, you told me all you wanted was to return to England and the man you were to marry. So, to have you and then lose you again if you realised that your heart truly belonged with him—that had all the makings of a special kind of hell.

‘So I sent you back to him—my enemy that you loved—to find your real happiness—the happiness you believed in—and told myself I must learn to live without you. And that too was hell, especially when I learned you were once again wearing your ring, and preparing for your wedding.’

She said wonderingly, ‘How did you know that?’

His mouth twisted ruefully. ‘Because in spite of all my brave intentions, I could not release you. Could not say, “This, too, is over.”

‘You might be separated from me forever, but I still needed to know what you were doing—how you looked—if you were indeed happy. And I still had the means to find out.’

He saw the shock in her face and flung up a hand. ‘Ah, mia cara, I am not proud of this. But I was desperate—desperate to prove that you, with your courage and your strength, could not commit your life to such a man.

‘As before, I devoured every scrap of information that came to me about you, but this time for very different reasons. And I suffered.’

He shook his head, ‘Holy Madonna, I did not know such pain existed. That this was what love could do. I realised then that I had been insane to put my given word before what I felt for you, especially when I was dealing with a family themselves without honour,’ he added grimly.

‘I told myself that instead of sending you back to them, I should have gone on my knees to you and begged you to stay with me for the rest of our lives. To love me and be my wife.’

He paused, and she saw the naked vulnerability in his face. The fear and yearning in his eyes.

He said in a low voice, ‘The good God knows I have given you no reason to care for me, Maddalena, but perhaps, if I am patient, you could learn. I ask only for that chance, my sweet one. The chance to hope.’

He took another step. ‘Do I have that chance? Say something, even if it is again “no”.’

A smile trembled on her lips. ‘You haven’t given me much opportunity to speak.’ She took a deep breath. ‘When you left as you did, I—I was devastated. I felt ashamed because I’d made a fool of myself, and guilty because, in doing so, I’d betrayed Jeremy. And I told myself he didn’t deserve that because he wasn’t responsible for what his father had done, and probably didn’t even know about it.

‘I wanted to make amends to him, to start over and recapture what we’d once had. But I couldn’t. Because I wasn’t the same person. But neither was he, and I realised that perhaps I’d never really known him. Just seen what I wanted to see. Believed what I wanted to believe.

‘As I did when I first met you.’

‘Carissima...’

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Let me finish, my darling. Since I came back, I haven’t been living, I’ve been existing. And I also thought I had nothing to hope for. That all I would ever have was loneliness and regret. But here you are—like a miracle. And it makes no sense, because we hardly know each other, and maybe we’ll both need patience, but if you truly want me, I’m yours.’

Andrea repeated, on a shaken laugh, ‘If I want you? If...?’ He took one long stride and she was wrapped in his arms, his mouth locked to hers in a deep and passionate kiss. She yielded rapturously, pressing closer against his body as if she wished to be absorbed into him, flesh, blood and bone.

He muttered hoarsely, ‘So much for patience.’ Then lifting her into his arms, he carried her into his bedroom.

She expected to be taken quickly, their mutual hunger swiftly appeased, and would have given herself without reserve to his urgency.

Only she was wrong. Because suddenly it seemed there was all the time in the world for them to savour every delicious, intimate minute. For her to discover that his hands were gentle and unhurried as he dealt with the fastenings of her clothing, smiling his delight into her eyes as he uncovered her completely. Whispering his encouragement as she began, shyly, to undress him in turn.

At last knowing the joy of his naked body against hers as she lay in his arms. The remembered pleasure of his fingers caressing her breasts, his tongue liquid fire as he teased her hardening nipples. The accompaniment of slow, sweet kisses as he stroked her belly and her slackening eager thighs. The flurried excitement of her breathing as his hand slid between her legs, pushing into her heated wetness while one fingertip played with her tiny engorged mound, making her entire body clench with aching desire.

And she was touching him too, running her hands along his shoulders, across his chest, and down over the flat abdomen to clasp the power and strength of his arousal, her fingers moving delicately, provocatively from the base of the rigid staff to its tip, until he groaned his pleasure aloud.

But when Andrea moved over her, lifting her towards him to enter her, she tensed involuntarily and he paused, his eyes searching her face.

‘What is wrong? You don’t want this?’

‘Yes—oh, yes.’ She hesitated, then said in a rush, ‘But I’m scared.’

‘That I’ll hurt you?’ His surprise was evident. ‘I promise I will not.’

‘Not that. Scared of disappointing you. Of not giving you what you expect.’

‘Ah,’ he said softly, his eyes tender. ‘And if I tell you that I am also nervous because for the first time I am making love to the girl I love and her happiness means everything to me —what then?’

Her mouth curved into a smile. ‘Then maybe I should stop fussing—and be happy.’

‘I think so,’ he said, and eased his way slowly and gently into her body, filling her. And she took him, deeply and completely, all inhibitions flown, as if all her life she had been waiting for this moment. And for him.

She raised her legs, locking them round him, responding to every potent, fluid thrust, feeling with astonishment the sharp irresistible build of sensation from the innermost depths of her womanhood. Until all control slipped away, leaving her lost—consumed in a spiral of mindless agonising rapture.

Heard Andrea call out to her, his voice hoarse and almost desperate, as he shuddered into his own scalding release.

Afterwards, when the world had stopped reeling, they lay quietly together, their sweat-dampened bodies still joined, Andrea’s head pillowed on her breasts.

And heard him whisper, ‘You are mine and I am yours’ against her skin.

Later, between slow, sweet kisses, they talked.

So,’ he said. ‘We get married at once. As soon as arrangements can be made.’

Maddie put her lips to the pulse in his throat. ‘Are you sweeping me off my feet, signore?’

‘I think I must, signorina.’ There was faint ruefulness in his tone. ‘I did not use protection when we loved, as I should have done.’

‘Don’t you want children?’

‘Of course,’ he said, dropping a kiss on her tangled hair. ‘But maybe not quite so soon.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Only time will tell.’ She paused. ‘Whatever is your mother going to say?’

His grin was lazy. ‘If she arrives at this minute—a great deal.’

‘But she told me about the prophesy—that a fair-haired foreigner would cause the end of the House of the Wolf.’

‘But that has already happened, my sweet one. Now it is the House of Summer that awaits my summer bride.’

‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘So, it is. I—I’d forgotten that. But I still don’t think your mother’s going to be very happy about the situation. I knew she disapproved of me being with you at Portofino.’

‘She was concerned,’ he said. ‘Because she knew I had fallen irrevocably in love with a girl who belonged to another man, and that if I could not have her as my wife, I would never marry, and there would be no heir to carry on the Valieri name. That grieved her for my stepfather’s sake.’

He kissed her again. ‘But what she will tell you when we all meet tomorrow, is that she intends to sing in public again—and the first time will be at our wedding.’

‘Oh.’ Maddie choked a little. ‘Oh—that would be so wonderful.’

‘And I have no doubt,’ he added in a resigned tone, ‘that she will wish to take you shopping.’

For a moment, she saw herself reflected again in a swirl of wild silk. Found she was visualising the aisle of a church, and seeing Andrea turning from the altar to watch her walk towards him, the passion in his gaze mingled with reverence. The man she loved, waiting with love.

‘But not for a dress,’ she said dreamily. ‘Because I already have the perfect one. All it needs is one last stitch.’

And she raised her smiling mouth for his kiss.