It wasn’t Raphael’s fault. It was her own. But knowing that didn’t make her pain any easier to bear. She had tried to escape it by spending all her waking hours working. She was almost always the first at the garden in the morning and the last to leave at the end of the day, returning to the palazzo to write reports late into the evening, but not even that could keep Raphael out of her thoughts. He was there all the time, overshadowing everything else, and Charley knew that he always would be.
The nights were worse than the days. She’d delay going to bed until the early hours, convinced that she would be so exhausted that she would sleep, and she did. But only for a while, waking up often to find her pillow wet with her tears, her body and her heart aching for Raphael.
Charley looked round the pretty, feminine salon. Whenever she imagined Raphael’s mother here, perhaps sitting at the desk where Charley herself worked, writing her letters, another image would appear: Raphael himself as a young boy. Her heart turned over inside her chest, a yearning spreading through her. Now she could understand, as she had never understood before, the need of a woman to conceive the child of the man she loved. To have that child as a living, breathing memorial of what they had shared, to be loved and cherished as a precious gift.
But of course there could be no such gift for her. Her all too brief span of time in the paradise that being Raphael’s lover had created for her was over. Raphael himself had closed the gates on their return.
Wearily Charley looked down at the desk. It was far too small really, for the amount of paperwork she had to deal with, but Anna had offered her this room so proudly that Charley hadn’t had the heart to tell the housekeeper that she needed a working space that was more functional.
So far they were ahead of schedule with the work of clearing the garden in readiness for the actual renovation—although Charley suspected that sometimes the contractors would have preferred it if she didn’t put in such long hours, assessing the progress of everything. But working herself hard was the only way she had of trying to stop the pain of loving Raphael.
In a few minutes she would go downstairs and drive out to the site, and then this evening she would update her schedules for the week and input them into her computer, ready to send to Raphael with her report as she had done for the previous three weeks. So far, though, Raphael had not e-mailed her back—not even to say that he had received her reports. Because he was afraid that if he contacted her she would plead with him as she had done in Florence? It was Charley’s prayer that she would never humiliate herself and irritate Raphael by doing that.
There were moments when she longed for the comforting presence of her sisters, so that she could unburden herself to them and be comforted by them, but then there were other times when she simply couldn’t bear the thought of disclosing her pain and the reasons for it to anyone, because it was so raw.
‘All the statues have now been removed. Those that are only slightly damaged will be repaired in my workshops in Florence, whilst those that cannot will be measured and photographed so that exact copies can be made.’
Charley nodded her head as she listened to Niccolo giving her his progress report. It had been a long day, and now the warmth was dying out of the sun as it sank towards the horizon.
‘You’ll let me have a detailed report to pass on to Raphael?’
‘Of course. No work will be done until he has sanctioned it. As you know, we’ve already photographed each piece of statuary, and the location where it was found.’
Charley nodded her head again. She too had taken photographs of everything, meticulously numbering them and pinpointing the sites on her own personal plan of the garden. She wasn’t going to take any chances of being found wanting in her professional capacity, even if Raphael had found her not good enough to keep in his bed.
‘We are doing very well. Raphael will have every reason to be extremely pleased with our progress,’ Niccolo told her, as he left to return to Florence.
Half an hour later Charley too was ready to call it a day. The last rays of the setting sun were fading as she locked the heavy gates. It would be dark by the time she returned to the palazzo, where she would shower and eat and then start work on her evening’s paperwork.
Since it was Friday, once she had updated everything she could e-mail it to Raphael—her treat of the week, her only precious contact with him. Just thinking about e-mailing him made her stomach muscles cramp with a mixture of pain and longing—and the desperate hope that he would e-mail her back.
How pathetic she was, Charley derided herself contemptuously. She looked towards the small Fiat Raphael had given her to drive, and then looked again in disbelief when she saw the sleek sports car parked next to it.
‘Raphael…’ Without thinking, desperate to get to him, she stepped into the road, oblivious to the car coming towards her until she heard the blare of its horn.
Raphael was out of the Ferrari in a flash, running faster than he had ever run in his life, grabbing hold of Charley and dragging her bodily out of the way as the car swerved to avoid her.
Charley felt the heat of its engine, the sting of the stones it threw up on her skin, and she heard the curses of the driver—but none of that mattered. All that mattered was that she was with Raphael. But he was shaking her, violently and almost painfully, over and over again, his face drained of colour, his hands hard on her arms as he demanded furiously, ‘Why didn’t you look before you crossed the road? Are you blind? What were you trying to do? Kill yourself?’
Charley had never seen him so angry. She could almost feel the heat and the power of his rage.
Shocked and frightened, more by her near-miss than by his anger, she trembled in his hold and begged him, ?
?Stop it.’
Immediately Raphael thrust her away from him, so hard that she staggered, and then leaned on the side of his car.
Reaction had begun to set in, reducing her to a shaking bundle of jelly-legged awareness of the danger she had been in.
‘Get in,’ Raphael ordered her, yanking open the door.
‘I’ve got my own car,’ Charley reminded him, but the last thing she felt like doing was driving.
‘I’ll arrange for that to be collected later.’
She was in the car, still feeling shaky and sick, wanting Raphael to hold her tenderly and comfortingly instead of being angry with her.
Raphael drove them back to the palazzo at speed, without speaking to her, and Charley was glad to be able to escape from him once they were inside, hurrying up to her room, wincing as she heard the furious slam of his office door on her way upstairs.