The Reluctant Husband

Santino froze.

Frankie straightened her shoulders like a bristling cat, all danger of tears now banished. ‘Yes, I expect you did think that. I suppose you think you broke my heart too...well, you didn’t! I got over my crush on you in one second flat and, believe me, I didn’t waste any time in finding a man who did want me—’

‘Let’s skip the gory details of your deflowering,’ Santino interposed glacially.

Frankie flushed and dropped her head, ashamed of that outburst, particularly when it was all lies. Santino’s rejection of her love had savaged her ego and made her extremely wary of trusting any man again. She had had boyfriends, of course she had, but physical intimacy had featured in none of those brief relationships. She had never met anyone she wanted as much as she had once wanted Santino and, quite frankly, she had been in no hurry to make herself that vulnerable again.

‘Your family believe that you have been pursuing your education in the UK.’

Frankie was startled. ‘You kept in touch with them?’

‘Naturally. As far as they’re concerned, I’m still your husband; I’m family too,’ Santino extended gently.

Her husband. The designation and the awareness of the devastating choice he had forced on her earlier tensed every muscle in Frankie’s body. Three weeks in Sardinia with Santino. Her brain went into stunned suspension. She swallowed hard. She just could not imagine going to bed with Santino. She could not even imagine Santino wanting to go to bed with her. This was, after all, the same male who had held her at arm’s length and treated her like a kid sister during the six months they had lived under the same roof as man and wife.

Frankie had been tormented by the awareness that they were not properly married until the legal bond was consummated in the flesh. From the outset, Santino had slept in the bedroom next door. She hadn’t been able to understand his extraordinary reluctance to do what Teresa had once sourly warned her all men were all too willing to do given the opportunity. And she had been too ashamed of her own obvious lack of attraction to share the humiliating secret of their separate sleeping arrangements with anyone else.

But in her innocence it had still not occurred to her that Santino might simply be satisfying his sexual appetite elsewhere. Her trust had been absolute. And she would never have found out that he had another woman in his life had she not decided to surprise him by showing up to visit him mid-week in Cagliari.

A neighbour had given her a lift to the railway station and she had caught the train the rest of the way. But she had been too intimidated by the bank to go in and actually ask for Santino. It had been lunchtime, and while she had hung around outside, trying to pluck up the courage to go inside, Santino had emerged, laughing and talking with a beautiful blonde woman. He hadn’t even noticed Frankie and, disconcerted by the presence of his companion, Frankie had let them walk past. Then, scolding herself for her hesitation, naively assuming that he was merely chatting to a colleague, she had set out after them and followed them across the street. They had vanished into an elegant apartment block.

Intercepted by the security guard who asked her to explain her business, Frankie had watched in frustration as Santino and his companion strolled into the lift. And then she had watched in sick, disbelieving shock as their two bodies had merged and they’d kissed with the passionate impatience of lovers eager to be alone and out of sight of prying eyes. A split second before the doors had glided shut, Santino had lifted his beautiful dark head and seen Frankie. She would never forget the look of angry, guilty regret that had flashed across his savagely handsome features...

Dear heaven, she reflected now, five years older and wiser, and cringing from the memory of her own stupidity. Until that moment in the lift, she had sincerely believed that their marriage was a real one and that Santino had made a genuine commitment to her. But from the start Santino had naturally been planning on an annulment to regain his freedom. ‘A child-bride stashed away in the mountains’, he had called her. An embarrassing secret and, without doubt, an often exasperating and much resented responsibility...

Afternoon was fading into evening as they passed through the sleepy hill villages with their olive groves and vineyards enclosed by prickly pear hedges. As the mountain road climbed higher, the tree cover grew steadily more sparse. The pasture land took on a wild and desolate grandeur enlivened only by wandering sheep and the shepherds’ rough brushwood pens. They finally reached the bare plateau and then slanted off the road onto the long, rough, steeply descending track which eventually led down into Sienta.

Stiff as a broom handle, Frankie stared out at the familiar sights all around her. Apple orchards and mature chestnut and oak trees ringed the village in its sheltered valley setting. Tiny terraced houses, their walls covered with vines, lined the sloping, twisting single street. Santino parked outside Gino Caparelli’s home in the centre of the village and turned to look at her expectantly.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he asked.

Frankie climbed out with the slowness of extreme reluctance. Then she saw her great-aunt Maddalena peering anxiously from the open doorway. Momentarily unsure of herself, she stilled, and then, without warning, a surge of overwhelming emotion engulfed her. Within seconds she was enfolded tearfully in the little woman’s arms, crying and struggling to converse in a language which she had believed she had forgotten but which returned surprisingly easily to her lips.

‘Come in...come in out of the street,’ Teresa urged from behind her tiny sister. ‘You will have all our neighbours watching us.’

And then her grandfather was before her, greeting her with a more formal embrace, pressing a salutation to her brow and then setting her back from him, frowning dark eyes below beetling white brows inspecting her. ‘I would not have received you back into this house without your husband.’ Gino Caparelli admitted he knew the truth behind her long absence without apology. ‘But now you are back where you belong, by his side.’

Frankie’s days of arguing with her grandfather’s lofty pronouncements were far behind her. She coloured and said nothing, overwhelmed by the warm acceptance of her welcome after five years of silence. Right at that moment it felt like more than she deserved and she was humbled by the experience.

Furthermore, she was seeing things she hadn’t seen in her teens, when her every thought had been exclusively centred on Santino and escape from Sienta. She saw the suspicious brightness and satisfaction in the older man’s eyes and then the hurt look of rejection stiffening Teresa’s thin face. Darting over, she wrapped her other great-aunt in a belated and guilty hug.

‘Bring Santino a glass of wine,’ Teresa instructed Maddalena with a rare smile as she detached herself again. ‘I will show Francesca round the house.’

Frankie frowned, not comprehending why that should be necessary until she saw Santino and her grandfather walk out to the little courtyard beyond the parlour. She moved to the doorway, looking out in surprise at the table and chairs and the decorative climbing plants which now beautified the once unlovely space reserved for housing Gino’s fierce old sheepdog.

‘When the Festrinis sold up next door, your grandfather bought their house and joined it to ours,’ Teresa announced with pride. ‘We have four bedrooms now.’

‘But where on earth did Nonno get the money to do that?’ Frankie prompted in astonishment.

‘Gino manages all Santino’s land round the village and w

e look after your house,’ Maddalena chipped in cheerfully. ‘We live very comfortably now.’

In a daze, Frankie let herself be carried through to the enlarged kitchen, with its smart new stove, and on up the stairs to inspect the pristine little bathroom which was clearly Teresa’s pride and joy. The tour then took in the bedrooms, all of which were small and very simply furnished.

‘This is where you and Santino will sleep tonight,’ Maddalena informed her shyly, opening a door on a room mostly filled with a bed.

Prodded over the threshold to admire the pretty flower arrangement on the windowsill and the fresh white cotton spread on an old-fashioned wrought-iron bed that was definitely no more than four feet wide, Frankie found it a challenge to come up with the proper appreciative comments. The prospect of sharing that undersized bed with Santino deprived Frankie of all composure and strangled her usually ready tongue.