The Reluctant Husband

It didn’t feel generous to Frankie; it felt horribly humiliating and degrading. She recalled the derision in his gaze and shrank inside herself. Santino had seemed almost like a stranger in the café, but that impression had melted away when she’d seen flashes of the Santino she remembered. Only now he was a stranger again.

‘The choice is yours.’

‘I don’t see a choice.’ If she didn’t stay, he would prosecute Della. She could not bear to think of her mother being dragged through court on a charge of serious fraud, even if that was very probably what she deserved, she allowed painfully. ‘I have no option but to agree,’ she breathed tightly.

‘Don’t pluck violin strings,’ Santino advised very drily as he dug a mobile phone out of his pocket, punched out a number and proceeded to speak to someone in Italian too fast for her to follow. Retracting the aerial, he slung the phone aside. ‘The eviction order will not be served.’

In a silent daze of disbelief at the agreement he had forged on her, Frankie sank clumsily down on the rug and tipped the wine to her parched lips with a trembling hand.

CHAPTER FOUR

A FIRM hand shook Frankie’s shoulder and she opened her eyes. The sun had changed position in the sky.

‘It’s time to leave.’ Reaching down to close his hands over hers, Santino pulled her upright with easy strength.

It was afternoon. Her last recollection was of setting down that empty wine glass. She had slept for a couple of hours. Awkwardly smoothing down her creased trousers, Frankie straightened and finger-combed her wildly tumbled hair out of her drowsily bemused eyes. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

‘I assumed that you still needed some extra rest.’ Santino swept up the rug and folded it. The picnic basket had already gone.

‘Why did you bring me to this place anyway?’ Frankie demanded with helpless curiosity.

‘Perhaps I was foolishly attempting to resurrect fond memories of the family you abandoned on this island.’

At that charge, Frankie froze in shock. ‘I beg y-your pardon?’

‘Gino, Maddalena and Teresa,’ Santino enumerated with cutting precision. ‘Although you have yet to ask, your grandfather and your great-aunts are all alive and well.’

Santino swung fluidly on his heel and stro

de back up the grassy track towards the road. Turning a furious pink at that censorious assurance, Frankie raced after him. ‘I wrote several times and my grandfather never replied once!’

‘Don’t tell me any more lies,’ Santino advised with an icy bite in his tone as she drew level with him. ‘You didn’t write. I would’ve been the first to hear of it if you had.’

‘I did write...I did!’ Frankie protested defensively, but then in her mind’s eye loomed the memory of Della taking the letters from her and assuring her that she would post them. Her heart sank like a stone. Had those stilted communications she had sweated blood and tears over ever been posted? After all, any exchange of news between Frankie and Gino Caparelli might have endangered Della’s plans to enrich herself at Santino’s expense.

‘I bet Mum didn’t post my letters!’ she exclaimed.

Santino skimmed her a look of silent and crushing contempt.

Frankie turned her head away, conscious that he didn’t believe her and that her excuse sounded pitifully weak. Yet she had written several times to her Sard relatives. But those first months back in London had also been a period of frightening disorientation and readjustment for Frankie...

Suddenly plunged back into the world her father had taken her from, she had felt utterly lost and had holed herself up in her mother’s flat like a wounded animal, surrendering to both depression and self-pity. Finding Santino with that other woman in Cagliari had devastated her. Santino had been her whole world then—the focus of her love and trust, the support she leant on in times of crisis and the source of all her self-confidence.

And then, in one appalling moment of revelation, she had finally been forced to face the demeaning reality that their marriage had never been anything other than a cruelly empty charade and a burden on his side of the fence. Well, no matter how badly Santino thought of her now, she certainly wasn’t about to tell him how she had fallen apart after leaving him or how long it had taken her to pull herself back together again!

She climbed into the four-wheel drive. ‘A bloody rich man’, he had called himself. Vitale...the bank in Cagliari... Vitale. She could even recall seeing that name a couple of years ago in a glossy magazine, recognising it because it had once so briefly been her name as well. The story had been about a banking family, a great and legendary Italian banking family, who shielded their privacy to such an extent that photographs of any one of them were rare. And that extreme caution had stemmed from the kidnapping of a family member thirty years earlier.

Two months after her very first meeting with Santino, he had come to tell her grandfather that his son, Frankie’s father, Marco, had been killed in a car crash in Spain. Frankie had been savaged by the news, not least because by that stage she had begun thinking resentfully of the father who had deserted her as being no better than a kidnapper. In her guilt-stricken distress, she had admitted as much to Santino.

‘When your father lied to you and told you that he and your mother were reconciling, when he brought you here and chose to leave you with a family who were strangers...yes, that was irresponsible, selfish and wrong,’ Santino had responded fiercely. ‘But don’t you ever say that you were kidnapped, piccola mia. I have an uncle who many years on still bears the scars of that crime. Kidnappers are cruel and violent criminals who deprive innocent people of their freedom for profit!’

Sinking back to the present, Frankie stole a shattered glance at Santino’s hard classic profile as he ignited the engine of the powerful car and drove off. What was it he had said earlier? That the sight of a Vitale bank draft with his signature on it would make her feel sick? He had also mentioned having an office in Rome.

‘Why were you working in that bank in Cagliari?’ she asked in a wobbly voice, because even though she had had it hurled in her teeth by him already she just found it so incredibly hard to believe that the man she had married at sixteen might always have had a life far removed from hers which he’d chosen to keep secret.

‘I was the manager there. My father believed that it would be useful practical experience for me before I took my seat on the board. However, he did think that choosing to bury myself in a small branch of our bank in Sardinia was going to severe extremes. But he was not then aware that I had other reasons for making that curious choice of locality ... not least a child-bride stashed away in the mountains!’

Our bank. Frankie gulped, realisation dawning. ‘And all the time you owned a blasted castle at the other end of the island!’