How desperately wrong she had been.
Love makes slaves of us. Strips everything from us. Craves only the object of our heart...
She felt herself tremble again as she stood beside Vito, waiting for him to say the words that would keep her safe. Safe from all that tore at her.
Her mother’s cruel description seared in her head. ‘Cesare’s mistress’, she’d called her daughter. And there had been more words too...
‘No happy ending.’
Except for Cesare. Cesare with his beautiful, clever, aristocratic bride—the perfect Contessa.
‘Do you love her?’
The agonising question she’d hurled at him haunted her, seared in her head now, as she stood rigid with tension beside the man she was forcing to marry her.
And in her head Cesare’s reply came again.
‘Love is an irrelevance.’
Her face convulsed beneath her veil. Words tumbled through her head, hectic and desperate.
And it will be irrelevant for me too! I don’t love Vito, and his emotion for me is only loathing and bitter hatred for what I’ve done to him, for the price I’m making him pay to get his family shares back. But when I’m safe—truly safe—I can let him go. In six months...a year...he can get on with his life again. I’ll ask for an annulment and release Vito and then he can go and find that blonde of his if he really wants to. He can have it all—the shares, the blonde, everything... It won’t be the end of the world for him, for her. They can sort it out between them if they really want to.
As for herself—well, this time around it would be her choice not to be married! She would be the one to end it!
I’ll walk out with my head held high—no one will pity me! No one will think me scorned ever again! And Cesare and his beautiful, nobly born, terrifyingly clever, oh-so-damn-wonderful bride can go on having their wonderful life together and I won’t care—I won’t! I’ll have shown him that I can do very well without him! That I’ve survived.
As if surfacing from a deep, suffocating dive, she became aware that the silence was lengthening. That Vito was still not saying the words she needed to hear—the words that would rescue her from this hell she was in.
Her head jerked towards him, her eyes distending. Filling with urgency.
Then finally Vito was speaking. But it was not to the priest. It was to her. His face stark, he was turning towards her. Saying words that drained the air from her lungs.
‘I won’t do this, Carla.’
She heard his words. But they came from a long, long way away. There was a roaring in her head...
* * *
‘No, Mum—I said no!’
Carla’s voice was like a knife. Her mother was arguing with her, trying to make her go back to Guido’s villa with her. But she could not bear another moment of her mother’s company.
Raging, shouting, almost hysterical, Carla sat in the vestry, on a hard bench, her nails digging into her palms.
‘I’m going back to my apartment.’
How she’d got there she could not remember—one of the wedding cars, she supposed, waiting by the rear entrance to the church, had taken her away from the avid, buzzing speculation of the congregation. But now she was finally there in her bedroom, standing in her wedding dress.
Palest white, like the decor in her apartment. As if she might disappear into it...
A bead of hysteria bubbled in her throat. She fought it down. She must not let it out. She must keep it deep inside her. Must, instead, reach behind her back and with stiff, aching arms undo, hook by hook, the gown she had put on less than three hours ago at Guido’s house.
I was so nearly safe—so nearly! And now...
She felt terror beat up in her—had to fight it down. Fight down the cold, sick feeling inside her that was running in every vein like liquid nitrogen.
He jilted me. Vito jilted me. Turned me down. Rejected me. Refused to marry me... Refused, refused, refused...