Her eyes rested on a man prepared to marry a woman solely for financial advantage. Because he’d been bribed to marry her.
A man prepared to sell out, to put profit before people.
That was the taint in his character that would stain him for ever. Impossible to love such a man, to want to make a family with him...
Emotion stabbed at her again, and it made her v
oice harsh as she spoke again.
‘You couldn’t resist it, could you?’ she said tautly. ‘You imagined you could string Carla along, stash me away somewhere secretly for the duration, get hold of the shares, and come up smelling of roses!’ Her voice filled with derision, lashing her own stupid hopes as well as him. ‘Still, you turned the bribe down in the end, so at least your conscience is clear now!’
A laugh broke from Vito—harsh and brief. ‘I hardly think so,’ he said.
He caught the barman’s eye—beckoned him over, ordered another martini. To hell with it—he was going to hell in a handcart here, and he might as well go there with another martini in him! It might numb him against the ride...
Eloise was frowning. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘You did the decent thing in the end, Vito—’
He turned towards her. His expression was savage now. ‘Did I? I’ll go and tell that to my father’s tombstone, shall I?’
She was staring at him. Staring at him with clear blue eyes—as clear as her conscience.
‘What do you mean?’ she said again. There was blankness in her voice. Incomprehension.
Vito seized the second martini as it was placed in front of him. It burned as he swallowed. Burned like the memory he did not want to remember. But which had forced itself into his head.
‘Get the shares back, Vito, my son, my son! Any way you can—whatever the cost...pay any price...promise me—promise me!’
His father’s breathless, stricken voice, his dying gasps...imploring him, begging him to promise.
Time sucked him back to the present and he slid his eyes away from the clear blue eyes gazing at him with incomprehension.
‘When my father had his fatal heart attack,’ he said, his voice dull, his gaze fixed on the way the green olive in his martini was speared—as he had been speared, ‘I rushed to the hospital. The doctors said he had little time left. My mother was there—’
He broke off.
‘It was...very bad. My father wanted to speak to me, say his last words to me. He...he begged me...made me promise that whatever it cost, whatever price I had to pay, I would get back the shares his brother had left to Marlene. He said I must not lose the legacy that four generations of our family had built up from nothing. I must not betray that. I must do whatever it took to get the shares back into Viscari possession. Keep them safe.’
His eyes darkened.
‘That day—the day you left me...’ he took another razoring breath ‘...Marlene threatened to sell her shareholding to Nic Falcone if I didn’t immediately announce my engagement to her daughter.’
Eloise stared, shock ravaging through her. ‘She did what?’
That wasn’t a bribe—that was blackmail. Blatant, vicious blackmail. Forcing his hand in the most ruthless way imaginable.
Vito looked at her. His eyes were blank. ‘That’s why Carla confronted you—demanded I tell you I was her fiancé. And that,’ he said, biting the words out viciously, ‘was why I could not deny it. I had to somehow keep my promise to my father.’
He reached for his martini again. Took another burning slug.
‘A promise I betrayed when I jilted Carla at the altar. Marlene sold the shares to Falcone that evening.’ His expression twisted. ‘So, no, my conscience is not clear—it never can be. Never! I can argue with myself all I like, say that I was right not to marry Carla, but it doesn’t absolve me of breaking my promise to my dying father! Nothing can—’
He fell silent, hunched over his martini glass. Seeing before him only the contorted face of his father, hearing only the broken, stricken sobbing of his mother, feeling only the desperate, frail clutch of his father’s failing grip on his arm as death swept over him and took him from his wife, his son, for ever.
And then, faintly, he was aware of another touch on his arm. A gentler one now. And a voice speaking.
‘You gave this promise to your father on his deathbed?’
There was questioning in the voice now. But not accusation. Something else.