A Tainted Beauty

‘Because I’m sorry for having judged you so wrongly,’ he said savagely. ‘That I was right about you all along—that you aren’t like other women. And that there isn’t a predatory or mercenary bone in your beautiful body.’

Lily sucked in an unsteady breath. ‘Don’t—’

‘No, wait. I haven’t finished.’ He suddenly realised why he’d always damned the words ‘I love you’ as being too easy to say, because in a way—they were. But he also knew how important they were. That they meant so much—and especially to women. But right then, he discovered that they meant a lot to him, too.

‘I love you, Lily,’ he said simply. ‘And my life has been empty without you. I thought I’d be able to go back to the man I’d been before, but I can’t and, what’s more, I don’t want to. Because I am no longer that man. You have changed me, Lily. You’ve changed the way I think. The way I view the world—and other people in it.’

‘Ciro—’

‘Let me tell you this,’ he said urgently. ‘After you’d gone, the apartment seemed so … empty and I thought about everything you’d said about me and about my unforgiving nature. I sat there for a long time mulling it over and then I went to see my mother—’

She blinked in surprise. ‘You did?’

‘Yes, I did. For the first time in my life, I listened properly to what she had to say. I tried to see what had happened from an adult point of view, rather than a child’s. She asked for my forgiveness and I gave it to her and then I asked for hers, and she reciprocated. And I wept,’ he admitted, feeling the lump rise in his throat as he remembered the powerful emotion which had taken him by surprise. ‘But I was weeping for my own lost love as much as anything else. Can you believe that, Lily? Ciro D’Angelo shedding tears?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I can—and so what? Tears don’t make you less of a man,’ she declared fiercely. ‘They make you more of a man. Because a man who is afraid of showing his feelings is an emotional coward and you’re no coward, Ciro!’

He walked over to the window to where she stood, her face working furiously as she tried to contain her own emotion. And he was staring at her as if it had been a lifetime since he’d seen her rather than a few short weeks. ‘My mother told me something I already knew—that you were the best thing that had ever happened to me and I had been a fool to let you go. But how could I have stopped you from going, when I had judged you so harshly? I realised I had to ask for your forgiveness—and to ask whether you’d consider coming back to me.’ For a moment he didn’t speak, but maybe that had something to do with the difficulty he was having framing these very important words. ‘To be my wife again, only this time—my wife in every sense there is. No pretence, Lily. Only honesty. And love. Enduring love.’

Lily bit her trembling lip. Surely he must have read the answer in eyes which were suddenly having to blink back tears of her own? But through her haze of gratitude that he had come to her like this, she realised that she must take her part of the blame. That Ciro should not bear all the burden of what had gone wrong.

‘I was wrong not to have told you I wasn’t a virgin.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, feel

ing like a man who had been walking around half-asleep. How could he have ever thought it important enough to risk losing her?

‘I realise that it probably seemed like a deliberate deception, but that’s not how I ever intended it to be, Ciro. You see, I loved you so much that it felt like the first time and the only time for me. You made the past fade into something so insignificant, it was almost as if it had never happened.’

‘You loved me?’ he repeated, his eyes narrowing. ‘Past tense?’

‘I love you—present tense,’ she said softly. ‘Now and always. My darling Ciro. The man without whom I feel only half a person.’

For a moment he was too choked to speak. Too full of emotion to do anything but pull her into his arms and to hold her very tightly. At last he lowered his head and kissed her, as he’d dreamed of doing since that bleak day when she’d walked out of his life. When he had pushed her so far that there had been nowhere left for her to go.

But there was no need for her to run any more. No need for him to have to go and find her. From now on they would always be together—either here, or in Naples. Wherever they were didn’t matter, just as long as they were together. Because when they were together, any four walls became a place they could call home.

EPILOGUE

CIRO looked at the large canvas. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

‘Don’t be so obtuse, darling,’ whispered Lily. ‘It’s you, of course. Jonny’s very proud of it—and all his tutors all love it. So you mustn’t say anything negative about it over lunch. Promise me.’

Ciro screwed up his eyes to observe a crudely drawn circle containing two black spots and a large splodge of orange, shaped like a carrot. He failed to see any resemblance to himself, indeed to anything at all—except perhaps for a snowman. But if the connoisseurs in the art world applauded it, then who was he to question their judgement?

‘I promise you I will give him nothing but the praise he so richly deserves. And since it’s helped earn him a distinction and the opportunity to go and study in Paris, then it must be good,’ he told Lily diplomatically.

Lily gave a little sigh of pleasure as she thought about Jonny’s wonderful degree results, wondering if this much happiness could possibly be good for a person. Sometimes she’d wake up and wonder if she might be dreaming—usually when she got out of bed in the morning and wandered out onto the terrace of their Neapolitan home to stare at the matchless view of the bay. But she was just as likely to wake up with disbelieving pleasure in her old home.

Ciro had decided against turning the Grange into a hotel. Instead, they had lovingly restored it into the beautiful home it was meant to be and which they visited whenever possible. She knew that he intended it should go to Jonny and, indeed, there was plenty of room to provide a huge artist’s studio for her talented brother. In fact, there might end up being several studios. Jonny had been speaking to Ciro about the possibility of opening up the house for painters who were financially stretched—as artists so often were. And Ciro had warmly embraced the idea.

She looked up to find his dark eyes smiling at her and she smiled back. ‘I’m just going to freshen up before lunch.’

‘Then I will wait for you here, dolcezza,’ he murmured indulgently.

Finding a restroom and running her wrists under the cold tap, Lily stared at herself in the mirror, thinking how much she had changed. And how women’s lives were often reflected in their hairstyles. For the first few years of their marriage, she’d kept the style really short. Ciro had insisted he liked it—and she believed him. That declaration meant a lot to her, for all kinds of reasons —though she was no longer the insecure woman who believed he only fancied her when she had cascading hair! People often told her that with her elfin look she reminded them of the actress Mitzi Gaynor, who had also worn the distinctive nineteen fifties clothes which Lily favoured.

But lately, she’d made a few sartorial decisions. For a start, she was letting her hair grow—because it required too much in the way of maintenance. And soon, she wasn’t going to have quite so much time for getting her hair cut…