And this—this she reminded herself forcefully, is why Vito and I are best having no contact whatsoever! We fire each other up like two volcanoes.
‘Is it true?’ she countered.
‘That is none of your business,’ he sliced.
Her flashing eyes narrowed into two threatening slits. ‘Watch me make it my business, Vito,’ she warned, very seriously. ‘I’ll put a block on our divorce if I find that it’s true and you are planning to give Marietta any power over Santo.’
‘You don’t have that much authority over my actions any more,’ he derided her threat.
‘No?’ she challenged. ‘Then just watch this space,’ she said, and grimly cut the connection.
* * *
It took ten minutes for the phone to start ringing. Ten long minutes in which Catherine seethed and paced, and wondered how the heck she had allowed the situation to get so out of control. Half of what she had said she hadn’t meant to say at all!
On a heavy sigh she tried to calm down a bit before deciding what she should do next. Ring back and apologise? Start the whole darn thing again from the beginning and hope to God that she could keep a leash on her temper?
The chance of that happening was so remote that she even allowed herself to smile at it. Her marriage to Vito had never been anything but volatile. They were both hot-tempered, both stubborn, both passionately defensive of their own egos.
The first time they met it was at a party. Having gone there with separate partners, they’d ended up leaving together. It had been a case of sheer necessity, she recalled, remembering the way they had only needed to take one look at each other to virtually combust in the ensuing sexual fall-out.
They had become lovers that same night. Within the month she was pregnant. Within the next they were married. Within three years they were sworn enemies. It had all been very wild, very hot and very traumatic from passionate start to bloody finish. Even the final break had come only days after they’d fallen on each other in a fevered attempt to recapture what they had known they were losing.
The sex had been great—the rest a disaster. They had begun rowing within minutes of separating their bodies. He’d stormed off—as usual—and the next day she’d gone into premature labour with their second child and lost their second son while Vito was seeking solace with his mistress.
She would never, ever forgive him for that. She would never forgive the humiliation of having to beg his mistress to send him home because she needed him. But he’d still arrived too late to be of any use to her. By then she had been rushed into hospital and had already lost the baby. To have Vito come to lean over her and murmur all the right phrases—while smelling of that woman’s perfume—had been the final degradation.
She had left Italy with Santo just as soon as she was physically able, and Vito would never forgive her for taking his son away from him.
They both had axes to grind with each other. Both felt betrayed, ill-used and deserted. And if it hadn’t been for Vito’s mother Luisa stepping in to play arbiter, God alone knew where the bitterness would have taken them.
Thanks to Luisa they’d managed to survive three years of relative peace—so long as there was no personal contact between them. Now that peace had been well and truly shattered, and Catherine wished she knew how to stop full-scale war from breaking out.
But she didn’t. Not with the same main antagonist still very much on the scene.
When the telephone began to ring again she went perfectly still, her heart stopping beating altogether as she turned to stare at the darned contraption. Her first instinct was to ignore it. For she didn’t feel up to another round with Vito just yet. But a second later she was snatching up the receiver when she grew afraid the persistent ring would wake Santo.
‘Catherine?’ a very familiar voice questioned anxiously. ‘My son has insisted that I call you. What in heaven’s name is going on, please?’
Luisa. It was Luisa. Catherine wilted like a dying swan onto the sofa. ‘Luisa,’ she breathed in clear relief. ‘I thought you were going to be Vito.’
‘Vito has just stormed out of the house in a fury,’ his mother informed her. ‘After cursing and shouting and telling me that I had to ring you right away. Is something the matter with Santo, Catherine?’ she asked worriedly.
/> ‘Yes and no,’ Catherine replied. Then, on a deep breath, she explained calmly to Luisa, in the kind of words she should have used to Vito, what Santo’s problem was—without complicating the issue this time by bringing Vito’s present love-life into it.
‘No wonder my son was looking so frightened,’ Luisa murmured when Catherine had finished. ‘I have not seen that dreadful expression on his face in a long time, and I hoped never to see it again.’
‘Frightened?’ Catherine prompted, frowning because she couldn’t imagine the arrogant Vito being afraid of anything.
‘Of losing his son again,’ his mother enlightened. ‘What is the matter Catherine? Did you think Vito would shrug off Santo’s concerns as if they did not matter to him?’
‘I—no,’ she denied, surprised by the sudden injection of bitterness Vito’s mamma was revealing.
‘My son works very hard at forging a strong relationship with Santo in the short blocks of time allocated to him,’ her mother-in-law went on. ‘And to hear that this is suddenly being undermined must be very frightening for him.’
In three long years Luisa had never sounded anything but gently neutral, and Catherine found it rather disconcerting to realise that Luisa was, in fact, far from being neutral.
‘Are you, like Vito, suggesting that it’s me who is doing that undermining, Luisa?’ she asked, seeing what she’d always thought of as her only ally moving right away from her.