Lucy Gordon - The Millionaire Tycoon's English Rose

‘It’s as safe for me as for anyone. I was on a line. Ken could have hauled me in at any time.’

‘You went behind my back,’ he said harshly.

The bitterness in his voice dulled the edge of her anger, reminding her how easy it was to hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt him, She wanted to love him as she’d done in their first carefree days; days that she knew would never come again.

‘You don’t give me any choice,’ she cried. ‘I had to do it without telling you because you’d have made such a fuss. You always do that if I try to do anything a little bit unusual.’

‘A little bit?’ he echoed. ‘You were scuba diving.’

‘Yes, and I managed perfectly well. As I knew I would. But you can’t bring yourself to believe that, can you? Sometimes I think you actually hate it when I manage to do something without you.’

‘For God’s sake, do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Yes, I’m saying I want to live my life as an adult, without having to apply to you for permission to take every breath.’

‘I’m only trying to keep you safe.’

‘I don’t want to be safe. I want the freedom to take the same risks as other people, and before I met you I had it. I loved it. But you set yourself to take it away from me, wrap me in cotton wool and lock me in a cocoon. I can’t live in there, Francesco, not even if you’re there with me. It’s like a prison, and I have to break out.’

‘Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?’ he demanded

‘Not from where I’m standing.’

‘Meaning that I’m a gaoler?’

‘The kindest, most loving gaoler in the world,’ she said, trying to soften it. ‘I know that you love me, and it’s your love that makes you overprotective, but I can’t live that way. I’ve got to get as far out on the edge as I can without you trying to drag me back.’

‘Drag you—Now you’re talking nonsense.’

‘Anything you disagree with is nonsense, according to you. I can’t live my life wondering if you’re standing there behind me, trying to bring everything to a halt.’

‘You don’t—’

‘Francesco, listen to me, please. The really sad thing about today is that I would have loved to share it with you. It would have been wonderful to go into the water together and sink down, hand in hand. I even came to the edge of telling you. But I backed off at the last minute because I knew you’d do everything to stop me.’

‘Because I don’t want to lose you,’ he growled.

‘But you are losing me,’ she said piteously. ‘Oh, why can’t you see that?’

‘By trying to protect you? Isn’t that my job? We’re practically husband and wife, and a man looks after his wife—’

‘That shouldn’t mean putting a ball and chain on her.’

She heard his sharp intake of breath. ‘That’s a lousy thing to say.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I’d sure as hell like to know how you did mean it,’ he said bitterly.

‘It’s just that to you life is one big word—no.’

‘All right, maybe I take things a little too far,’ he grated, ‘but I don’t just ask you to say no to things you want. I wouldn’t do that without being prepared to do the same.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked, with a sudden keen edge to her voice.

He failed to hear its significance,

‘My firm asked me to start an Italian branch, in Naples—’

‘Your home town,’ she gasped in delight. ‘That’s great. When do we leave?’

‘We don’t. I turned it down.’

‘You did what?’

‘How could I possibly ask you to come to Italy with me? You manage well enough in England, but what would you do in a strange country?’

‘Meaning that I’m too stupid to find the way? Are you forgetting that I’ve already learned Italian?’

‘We’ve done some together, cara, and it’s been delightful—’

‘A delightful game, you mean?’ she said in a hard voice. ‘Humouring me. You made a big decision like that without consulting me because you didn’t think I was up to the task?’

‘I only meant—’

‘How dare you? How dare you?’

‘I was only thinking of you,’ he retorted.

‘Did I ask you to think of me? I’m not a child, Francesco, and I’m not an idiot. And I’ve had enough of you treating me that way.’

‘Look, we’ll talk about it when you’ve calmed down.’

‘I’m not worked up. Inside I’m as cold as ice, and I’m telling you that I want you to go.’

‘Go where? I live here.’

‘Not any longer. It doesn’t work between us. I think perhaps it never could. Please go quickly. I don’t want to see you here again.’

‘You don’t want to what?’

‘Go!’

‘Celia, for pity’s sake, stop this before it’s too late.’

‘It’s been too late for a long time,’ she whispered.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I went too far. But after all we’ve been to each other you can’t just—’

‘It’s over,’ she said, feeling that she would start to scream in a minute. ‘Please go, Francesco. Just pack a bag and go tonight. You can get the rest of your things later. But go now.’

In the silence she could sense that he was totally stunned. He knew she meant it.

Suddenly she broke.

‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Just get out!’

‘GET out. Just get out.’

He heard the words before he awoke. They echoed in the darkness behind his eyes, screaming around his head like curses.

Then his eyes were open and he was sitting up in bed, trying to understand the world around him. He didn’t know where he was. Surely this was his home back in London, but where was she? Why not in bed with him?

Then the haze cleared, the walls fell into place. He was back at his parents’ home, the Villa Rinucci in southern Italy, a place where he hadn’t lived for years.

Now he was using it as a refuge until he could clear his head. Nothing had been straight in his mind since the day Celia had thrown him out. Somehow he’d organised himself, agreed to return to Naples to set up the Italian branch of his firm, and left England. There had been one brief meeting with Celia when he’d collected his things, but they had spoken to each other like strangers, and he hadn’t seen her again. She was behind him. Finished. Over and done with.

Except that her cry of ‘Get out!’ still echoed with him, day and night. And the worst thing, the thing that actually scared him, was that it wasn’t only her voice he heard. It was as though someone had cast a malign spell, triggered by those words and those alone. And he couldn’t escape.

Francesco got out of bed and went to the window, seeing the dawn beginning to break over the Bay of Naples. As he sat there, unwilling to return to bed and risk a repetition of the nightmare, he heard a soft footstep in the corridor outside and knew that it was Hope, refusing to accept that a man in his late-thirties didn’t need to be hovered over protectively by his mother.

He heard her stop outside his door and waited with dread for the knock. He loved his mother, but he shrank from the questions he couldn’t answer because he didn’t want to face them.

After a while she went away, leaving him alone with the brightening dawn that had no power over the darkness inside him.

‘Are you looking at those again?’ Toni Rinucci asked his wife warmly.

Hope smiled, looking up from the book of wedding photographs she was studying.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘They are so beautiful.’

‘But Ruggiero has been married for three months now,’ he said, naming one of their twin sons.

‘The pictures are still beautiful after three months,’ Hope said. ‘Look at little Matti.’

Ruggiero’s toddler son stood just in front of his father and Polly, his new stepmother. Although only two years old, he’d already managed to steal the limelight.

‘He looks like a little angel in that pageboy suit,’ Hope said sentimentally.

‘Yes—you’d never know that he’d covered it with mud ten minutes later,’ Toni observed with grandfatherly cynicism.

‘He’s real boy,’ Hope declared happily. ‘Oh, look!’

She’d reached the picture showing all six of her sons.

‘It’s so good to see them all together.’ She sighed. ‘Francesco has been away so much—first America, then England—but this time he was here. Oh, it’s so good to have him finally back where he belongs.’

Toni was silent as they went down the stairs together, and Hope, who could read his silences, glanced at him.

‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure he’s home to stay. He’s not a boy any more.’

‘But of course he won’t stay with us for ever,’ Hope conceded. ‘He’ll find his own place and move out. But we’ll still see him far more often than when he was living abroad.’

Hope made some coffee for the two of them, and took it out onto the terrace with its view over the bay. They both loved these moments when they had the house to themselves and could indulge in gossip about everyday matters—their household, their sons, their growing army of grandchildren, their upcoming thirty-fifth wedding anniversary—or just about nothing in particular.

‘That isn’t really what I meant,’ said Toni as she set his coffee before him, just as he liked it. ‘I sense something strange about his coming home now.’

‘He came home for the wedding,’ Hope pointed out.

‘Yes, but we thought he’d be here a few days, and bring Celia with him. Instead, he came without her, and stayed. Why did he suddenly leave England? He had a good career there, in a successful firm. He owns shares in it and was making a fortune.’

‘But he’ll do even better by setting up here,’ Hope pointed out. ‘It made sense for them to send him to his own country.’

‘I don’t like things that are too sensible,’ her husband complained. ‘There’s something else behind it.’

Hope nodded. ‘I think so, too,’ she conceded. ‘I just hope it isn’t—’

‘What?’ Toni asked, laying his hand over hers.

‘He used to tell us so much about Celia. Every phone call, every letter was all about her. I was surprised when he said she was blind, because he’s not a man who—Well—’

‘Yes, I can’t imagine him living with a woman he has to care for all the time,’ Toni agreed. ‘But I thought we were wrong. I was proud of him. He even sent us photographs of her, and called her his English rose. I’d never known him to be so committed to a woman before.’

‘Then suddenly it’s all over,’ Hope said, ‘and he comes home without her. He’s been back for three months now, and he never speaks of her. Why?’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘That he left her because his love wasn’t great enough for him to cope. I should be sorry to think that was true of any son of mine.’

‘But you didn’t like him living with her at the start,’ Toni pointed out. ‘You said her blindness would hold him back.’

She made a face.

‘All right, I admit I’m not consistent,’ she conceded. ‘Is anyone?’

‘Never, in all the years I’ve known you, have you been consistent,’ her husband said fondly.

‘I wanted him to be sensible.’ she said, ‘But I suppose I don’t like him to be too sensible. I wanted to believe that my son is better than myself, kinder and more generous.’

‘Nobody is more generous than you,’ Toni protested. ‘But for the generosity of your love my life would be nothing.’

‘You praise me too much,’ she said with a little smile. ‘It isn’t generous to love a man who gives you everything you want.’