‘You’re mad,’ she sighed, her red-gold hair glinting in the sunlight as she sent him a look of weary frustration. ‘You have to be—if you are this pig-headed!’
‘You think me mad?’ He laughed. ‘No—no.’ He denied the charge. ‘For I can remember that what we had was so damned special only a madman would let it slip through his fingers—which I am not about to do!’
‘You let it go once before,’ she reminded him.
‘But I did not know why you drove me to do so,’ he countered. ‘You let me believe it was my fault, something you could not stand about me! I could not overcome your physical aversion then, Joanna, but I can now, and I will,’ he stated grimly. ‘I’ll overcome your sad determination to punish us both for something neither of us had any control over!’
With that, he turned and climbed into the car, leaving her to follow or stay as she felt fit. She followed, because she was heavily aware that she had no real choice about it.
No choice.
She almost laughed, except the situation warranted tears, not laughter.
He already had the engine running by the time she got in beside him, his dark expression set in stone and the atmosphere so bad now that neither of them made any attempt to ease it. They drove back down the cypress-lined driveway without another word passing between them.
She felt angry and guilty and cruel and petty. Maimed, that was what she was, she told herself bitterly. Maimed to the very roots of her persona if she could treat him as badly as this.
It was not a very pleasant thing to know about oneself.
That was why this relationship could never work for them. She would always be letting him down like this. Just as she had always let him down before.
So the gulf between them seemed to get even wider, and the antagonism to get so biting that Sandro curtly excused himself the moment they arrived back at the apartment late that afternoon, and disappeared behind a slammed door to his private study.
Joanna winced, recognising the sound from three years ago. This is it, she likened dejectedly; the slippery, sliding slope back into emotional carnage.
And it wasn’t over yet. She was just coming out of her bedroom, after showering and changing into a cool cotton sundress, when she heard voices in the drawing room. With a sinking heart she recognised the voice of their visitor, and she gritted her teeth and made herself walk into the room.
Sandro and his mother were standing sharing soft-voiced, angry words, by their tones. They were speaking in Italian, so Joanna had no idea what they were actually saying, but the moment they both noticed her standing there they clammed up so tightly that she knew they must have been discussing her.
‘Mamma has just discovered we are here in Rome,’ Sandro informed her coolly, ‘and decided to pay us a visit.’
His mother winced, and Joanna understood her desire to do it. Sandro’s voice had been sliced through with grating sarcasm.
‘Buona sera, Joanna,’ his mother greeted her, rather ruefully. She was a short, slender, very elegant creature, with dyed dark hair and her son’s velvet brown eyes. Eyes that were fixed coolly on Joanna at the moment ‘It is good to see you again, my dear...’
Was it? Joanna didn’t think so, going by the look in those eyes right at this moment. ‘Thank you,’ was all she said, stepping forward to allow their cheeks to brush in the expected Latin way of greeting. ‘I w-was about to make some coffee,’ she murmured, looking desperately for a way of escaping this awkward situation. ‘Perhaps you would like to s-sit down while I go—’
She was already turning for the door when a telephone began ringing in Sandro’s study. ‘I need to answer that,’ Sandro said grimly. ‘You stay and talk to Mamma.’
Joanna stared at him in horror as he went striding by her. Don’t you dare do this to me! her eyes pleaded furiously. He ignored her, still so angry with her that she supposed this was his way of getting his own back.
‘Please, Joanna, come and sit by me and tell me what you have been doing with yourself since we last met.’
Oh, damn. Joanna’s shoulders dropped, her bank of energy along with them. Turning with an air of dull fatalism, she made herself walk over to the sofa and sit down beside Sandro’s mother.
‘You are looking well,’ his mother remarked politely.
‘Thank you,’ she replied again. ‘And s-so are you,’ she felt compelled to add. ‘Sandro has been telling me that you’ve been ill recently.’
The older woman nodded. ‘Last year it was necessary I underwent some open heart surgery,’ she explained, with a small grimace that revealed a reluctant acceptance of her illness. ‘Alessandro took me to Orvieto to convalesce afterwards. It is such a peaceful place to be, away from Rome’s constant rush and noise, when one is feeling under the weather...’
‘Yes.’ Joanna nodded, her eyes glazing with a wistful understanding of what her mother-in-law meant.
‘Of course,’ his mother acknowledged. ‘For you have just arrived back from visiting the old Campione estate. Alessandro was explaining why I could not reach him by telephone today. I discovered by pure accident, you see, that you were here with my son.’
And here it comes, Joanna noted, her spine straightening slightly, because she had a fairly good idea what was going to come next, like—What the hell do you think you’re up to, disrupting my son’s life a second time?
Yet it didn’t come. ‘You liked the estate?’ Sandro’s mother asked instead.