The Reluctant Husband

‘Stop running away. It only makes your grandfather angrier, only convinces him that you have been very badly brought up and cannot be trusted out of the house. He is a strict man, and your continued defiance makes him much nastier than he woul

d normally be—’

‘Did Father Vassari say Grandfather was nasty?’ Frankie had prompted, wide-eyed.

‘Of course not.’ Santino had flushed slightly. ‘But Gino Caparelli has the reputation of being a stubborn, unyielding man. What you must do is bite your tongue in his presence and appear willing to do as you’re told, even if you don’t feel willing—’

‘I bet the priest never told you to tell me to act like a hypocrite!’

‘You’re smart for a twelve-year-old!’ Santino had burst out laughing when she’d caught him out. ‘My great-uncle is very devout, but he is sincerely concerned by your unhappiness. He wanted me to tell you to respect and obey your grandfather in all things—’

‘But you didn’t say that—’

‘Where there is as yet no affection, I think it would be too much to ask of you.’

‘I just want to go back to London,’ she had mumbled, the tears threatening again. ‘To my mum... my friends, my school—’

‘But for now you must learn to live with the Sardinian half of your family, piccola mia,’ Santino had told her ruefully.

He had been so straight with her and, after long, frightening months of being treated like an impertinent child whose needs and wishes were of no account, she had been heartened by Santino’s level approach. But then he had been clever. He had known how to win a respectful hearing, and the bait he had dangled in reward for improved behaviour had convinced her that he was on her side. She had trusted him to find out where her father was.

When he had brought instead the news of her father’s death in a car crash, she had been devastated. But, in the years which had followed, Santino had become Frankie’s lifeline. He had visited his great-uncle every couple of months, more often as the old man’s health had begun to fail, and Frankie had learnt to live for Santino’s visits for he always made time for her as well.

She had had nothing in common with her father’s family. It had been an unimaginable joy and relief to talk without fear of censure to Santino and just be herself. He had sent her English books and newspapers to read and she had started writing to him. His brief letters had kept her going between visits. Learning to love and rely on Santino had come so naturally to her.

As she dredged herself out of the past, Frankie found poignant memories of Gino, Maddalena and Teresa threatening to creep up out of her subconscious. Stiffening, she closed her Sard relatives out of her mind again. Her grandfather had ignored her letters in the last five years and that hadn’t been a surprise. He could neither have understood nor condoned the actions of a granddaughter who had deserted her husband. Her father’s family had thought the sun rose and set on Santino. In their ignorance of the true state of his marriage, they would have been angry and bitterly ashamed of her behaviour.

Frankie left her room. She emerged into a panelled corridor, lined with dark medieval paintings and beautiful rugs that glowed with the dull richness of age. When she saw a stone spiral staircase twisting up out of sight at the foot of the passageway, she was tempted to explore. Well, why not? If the villas on the Costa Smeralda were not to be made available to the agency, she was now technically on holiday. She really ought to give Matt a call, she conceded absently. He might be wondering why he hadn’t heard from her in three days.

Through the studded oak door at the top of the spiral flight of steps, Frankie stepped out onto the roof...or was it the ramparts? With astonished eyes, she scanned the big square towers rising at either end and then, walking over to the parapet, she gazed down in dizzy horror at the sheerness of the drop, where ancient stone met cliff-face far below her, and then she looked up and around, drinking in the magnificent views of the snowcapped mountains that surrounded the fertile wooded valley.

‘You seem to have made a good recovery.’

Frankie very nearly jumped out of her skin. Breathlessly she spun round. Santino was strolling towards her and this time he looked disturbingly familiar. Faded blue jeans sheathed his lean hips and long, powerful thighs, a short-sleeved white cotton shirt was open at his strong brown throat. He walked like the king of the jungle on the prowl, slow, sure-footed and very much a predator.

Sexy, she thought dizzily, struggling weakly to drag her disobedient gaze from his magnificent physique. Incredibly sexy. He was so flagrantly at home with his very male body, relaxed, indolent, staggeringly selfassured. She reddened furiously as he paused several feet away. He sank down with careless grace on the edge of the parapet, displaying the kind of complete indifference to the empty air and the terrifying drop behind him that brought Frankie out in a cold sweat.

‘I saw you from the tower. I thought you’d still be in bed,’ he admitted.

‘I’m pretty resilient,’ Frankie returned stiffly, thinking that it would mean little to her if he went over the edge but, all the same, she wished he would move.

‘One committed career woman, no less,’ Santino drawled, running diamond-bright dark eyes consideringly over the plain businesslike appearance she had contrived to present in spite of the heat. ‘To think you used to wash my shirts and shrink them.’

Frankie was maddened by the further flush of embarrassment that crept up her throat. It reminded her horribly of the frightful adolescent awkwardness she had once exhibited around Santino. Not that that surprised her. Santino was drop-dead gorgeous. Santino would make a Greek god look plain and homely because he had a quality of blazing vibrance and energy that no statue could ever match. If she hadn’t fancied him like mad all those years ago, there would have been something lacking in her teenage hormones, she told herself.

‘Did I really?’ she said in a flat, bored tone.

‘I always wondered if you boiled them,’ Santino mused, perversely refusing to take the hint that the subject was a conversation-killer.

‘Well, you should have complained if it bothered you,’

‘You were a marvellous cook.’

‘I enjoyed cooking for you about as much as I enjoyed scrubbing your kitchen floor!’ And she was lying; she hated the fact that she was lying and that, worst of all, he had to know that she was lying.

But what else had she known? The formal education she had received from the age of eleven had been minimal, but her domestic training as a future wife and mother had been far more thorough. Between them, her father’s family had seen to that. No matter how hard she had fought to preserve her own identity, she had in the end been indoctrinated with prehistoric ideas of a woman’s subservient place in the home. Endless backbreaking work and catering to some man’s every wish as though he were an angry god to be appeased rather than an equal... That was what she had been taught and that was what she had absorbed as her former life in London had begun to take on the shadowy and meaningless unreality of another world.

Her spine notched up another inch, bitter resentment at what she had been reduced to steeling her afresh. She had sung as she scrubbed his kitchen floor! She had thought she knew it all by then. She had thought that by marrying Santino, who said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and even, amazingly, ‘That’s too heavy for you to carry,’ she had beaten the system, but in truth she had joined it. She had been prepared to settle for whatever she could get if she could have Santino. For the entire six months of their marriage, she would not have accepted a plane ticket out of Sardinia had it been forced on her...