The Reluctant Husband

Frankie trembled with rage. ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do—’

‘So find out the hard way what happens when you rebel. That seems to be the only way you ever learn,’ Santino said flatly. ‘Just as you learned last night that the family you spent all those years trying to escape actually love you.’

Choked up by that reminder, temper cruelly squashed by it, Frankie froze. ‘I know,’ she muttered guiltily.

‘And when I fade back out of their lives again you will stay in touch,’ Santino told her grimly. ‘You can blame me for breaking up our marriage and tell them you got the farm in the divorce. They have about as much grasp of the extent of my wealth as you once had.’

‘But they’re fond of you too...’ Frankie heard herself protest shakily.

‘I still won’t be back,’ Santino drawled with flat conviction. ‘I think that in your absence I have done everything that could reasonably be expected of me, but my responsibility here is now drawing to an end.’

‘For a bigshot like you, it must’ve been a real drag to come visiting out in the boonies!’ Frankie flung, in a distress she couldn’t even understand.

Santino’s lean hands came down on her taut shoulders to spin her round. Ice-cool dark eyes scanned her overbright gaze and the sudden intense confusion etched there. ‘Keep those emotions under control,’ he advised harshly. ‘I may want that beautiful body but that’s the only interest I have now. At the end of this little interlude, I have every intention of walking away.’

Frankie gulped. ‘You think that’s not what I want too?’

‘I think you’re programmed to attach yourself to the wrong people, and I really don’t want to pay a second time. This is just the settlement of a long-overdue debt, Francesca. Try to keep that in mind.’

Frankie stared into the mirror long after Santino had gone, registered the stricken look in her eyes and closed them because she could not bear to see what he might have seen.

CHAPTER SIX

AFTER lunch, Santino drove Frankie out to the farmhouse. She had spent the entire morning with Teresa and Maddalena, making ceremonial calls on several neighbours. In a village where most of the young people left as soon as they were old enough to seek work there was nothing unusual about the length of her absence, and warm hospitality had greeted her everywhere.

However, thunderous tension-filled silence reigned between Santino and Frankie as he turned the Landcruiser up the lane to the dwelling which had once so briefly been their home. Everywhere Frankie looked she was stabbed to the heart by memories with a very raw edge. Her first glimpse of the house with its weathered stone walls and red-tiled roof simply choked her up. Determined as she was not to betray a single emotional reaction, her facial muscles locked defensively tight as she climbed out of the car.

‘What happened to my hens?’ she enquired stiffly.

‘I should imagine someone finally ate them.’

Careful not to look at him, Frankie breathed tightly, ‘Angela?’

‘Went to that great goat heaven in the sky.’

“Milly and her calf?’ Frankie pressed even more tautly.

‘Sold.’

Frankie was now rigid. ‘Topsy...and Pudding?’ she prompted, half an octave higher. ‘They’ve gone too, haven’t they?’

‘Yes.’

Unable to contain herself any longer, Frankie rounded on Santino. ‘So what did you do with my cats?’ she demanded rawly. ‘Did you eat them, sell them or bury them?’

Brilliant dark eyes rested on her fearful, accusing face. ‘I took them back to Rome with me.’

‘O-oh...’ Reddening with sudden embarrassment and surprise, Frankie folded her arms jerkily and turned away again.

Trembling, she preceded him into the house and walked straight into the cosy, low-ceilinged lounge with its comfortable twin sofas. From the rear window she looked out in dismay at the garden which she had created five years earlier. It had been swallowed up by brambles and scrub. So what? she asked herself. This is not my home any more; this was never really my home. None of these changes matter to me in the slightest, the inner voice insisted. But, in spite of that sensible voice, pained regret and a strong feeling of resentful loss still washed over Frankie.

She had adored this house only one iota less than she had once adored Santino. After the cramped and basic confines of her grandfather’s home, this spacious house had seemed like a palace. No sixteen-year-old bride had ever been more deliriously happy with her lot. All that bright, innocent hope and unquestioning trust... She felt such a fool looking back on it now, particularly when she thought of the castello...

Maids and antique furniture and fancy bathrooms. That was Santino’s true milieu. Yet, five years ago, he had valiantly roughed it every weekend in what to him had to have been the equivalent of a hovel. In keeping with Sard tradition he had bought the house and furnished it before the wedding. He had brought her paint cards, picked her favourite colours, become the first person in Sienta to pay someone else to decorate—an extravagance which had had Gino Caparelli shaking his head with appalled incredulity. But in every other way Santino had done exactly what was expected of a Sard bridegroom.

‘I hate you, Santino,’ Frankie breathed unevenly, swallowing the great lump threatening her throat. ‘If I played house, I played house because you encouraged me to do that!’

‘What else was I supposed to do with you?’ Santino responded to that accusation levelly. ‘As you were then, you couldn’t have handled my family, and they couldn’t have handled you.’