He collapsed back into the pillows to catch his breath, the rapid beep of machines filling the void, while Raoul sat down by his side and bowed his head, his thoughts in turmoil, conflicted beyond measure.
Damned if he would let a Garbas worm his way into Umberto’s granddaughter’s fortune. Damned if he would ever let that happen after what he had suffered. But Raoul was the last person who could keep her safe.
Besides, did Umberto really think it would be such a simple matter to get a twenty four year old woman—any woman, for that matter—to agree to marry him? Why should she give him a second glance when he could give her nothing in return? She would be some kind of fool if she did.
He took his friend’s hand again, half-wondering, half-knowing that this would be the last time they met. ‘Umberto, old friend—my friend—I love you with my life, but this makes no sense. There must be a better way to keep Gabriella safe and I will find it. But I would be no kind of husband for your granddaughter.’
‘I’m not asking you to love her!’ he blustered from the bed, the machines beside him going into overdrive. ‘Just marry her. Keep her safe!’ The door burst open, a nurse rushing through, pushing the visitor aside as she checked her patient.
‘Visit’s over,’ she snapped out without looking over her shoulder. ‘You’re upsetting my patient.’
Raoul raised his face to the ceiling in supplication and frustration. When he looked back at the bed where the nurse fussed, checked and adjusted drips and machines, his old friend looked so forlorn and desperate and beyond tired, a shadow of a man who had once been great. It struck Raoul that his last moments, his last days, should not be wasted in worry such as this, even if it meant promising the impossible so that he might at least die in peace. Umberto deserved that at least.
‘I’ll marry her, old friend, if that is what you ask,’ he said, ignoring the warning scowl he earned in reward from the nurse, grinding the words out between his teeth as the wire in his gut pulled inexorably tighter and trying desperately not to think of the cost to them both. ‘I’ll marry her.’
Three weeks later
WINTER had come early, the late-September day dressed in drab colours as if the planet itself was mourning the death of her grandfather. But the inclement weather found only empathy with Gabriella D’Arenberg, the damp air and misty rain matching her mood as she stood beside her grandfather’s flower-strewn grave in the Cimetiere de Passy. Then the last of the mourners whispered condolences and pressed cold lips briefly to her cheeks before drifting away along the path.
She would leave shortly too, once Consuelo had returned from the call he had excused himself to take, and they would join everyone at the hotel where the caterers were no doubt already serving canapés and cognac. But for now Gabriella was happy to be left alone in quiet reflection in the cold, dank stillness of the graveyard. Here, under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, there was nothing to intrude, the sounds of the city barely penetrating the stone walls.
Until a dark shadow made her gasp and look around.
He appeared out of the fog, tall, broad and dark as night as he moved stealthily between the funeral sculptures, the winged angels and fat cherubs suspended ghost-like in the swirling mist as he passed. A shiver of recognition—or was it of relief?—washed through her and bizarrely, for the first time that day, she felt warm.
Raoul.
She had seen him at the service; it had been impossible to miss his dark presence in the back of the tiny crowded chapel. Her heart had lifted at the prospect of seeing him again after so many years, only to exit the chapel to a bubble of disappointment when she had found him nowhere amongst the mourners gathered outside.
Raoul, who with his intense black eyes and passionate mouth had been her every adolescent fantasy—dark fantasies she’d had no right to imagine. Wicked fantasies that brought a blush to her cheeks just thinking about them. And, when she’d got news that he’d married, she’d cried for two days solid. She’d cried for him a year later when she’d learned of his wife’s death. Thank God he had no idea about any of it or she could never face him now. Thank God she was over all that.
The crunch of boots on gravel grew louder, his long leather coat swirling about his legs, his hair pulled back into a ponytail that served to accentuate the strong lines and angles of his chiselled features. His eyes, if anything, were even more intense than she remembered under that dark slash of brow. Tortured, even. And something about that intensity frightened her a little, just as if his purposeful stride held a portent of danger, sending a tremor skittering down her spine.
The mist, she thought in explanation, as she continued to log his approach with her eyes. The cold, swirling air …
The air shifted and parted before him and then he was there, standing before her, a mountain of blackness in a mist-shrouded world, so tall that she had to tilt her head back to look up at him and his unflinching expression. He didn’t smile. She didn’t expect him to, not really, not this day.
But this was Raoul, an old family friend, so she dismissed her feelings of foreboding and danger and ventured a nervous smile of greeting, slipping her hands instinctively into his as easily as she had once done, relishing their instant warmth, thinking, you came. ‘Raoul, it’s so good to see you.’
For a moment he seemed to tense, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark by presuming familiarity. Then his hands squeezed hers and the tightness around his mouth relaxed just enough to give an answering smile that still spoke of sadness and loss. ‘Gabriella,’ he said in a way that seemed to cherish every syllable as he uttered it.
Then he leaned down to kiss first one cheek, and then the other, slow, lingering kisses. She shuddered under the brush of his lips against her flesh, his warm breath curling into hers and peeling back the years. She breathed him in, taken by the way he smelt so familiar, of clean skin and warm leather and the same woody notes of his signature scent that she recalled—yet there was so much more besides, as if what she’d remembered had been but a shadow of his essence.
‘I am so sorry for your loss.’ He drew back then, letting her hands drop, and she tried desperately not to be disappointed by his absence, shoving her hands in her coat pockets, not just to keep them warm but more to stop them reaching out for him. Those teenage fantasies might have been behind her, but Raoul was here now, real, broad and achingly close. Inside her pockets, her hands curled into fists.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she managed a little shakily, surprised he could still affect her so deeply and so fundamentally, even after so many years. ‘Or you could have stayed at the house. Where are you staying? You should have let me know.’
He rattled off the name of a hotel that barely registered in the force of the impact of seeing him again. But then, she was hardly herself right now. Memories, especially memories of anything and anyone connected to her grandfather, seemed all too willing to bubble to the surface. Raoul had been close to her grandfather for longer than she had, their two families intertwined as long as she could remember, at least until the tragedy that had wiped out both sets of parents. ‘And of course,’ she said, acknowledging that truth, ‘It’s your loss too.’
‘Umberto was a good man,’ he said with a nod, his deep voice rich with emotion. ‘I will miss him more than I can say.’ Then he blinked and something skated across his eyes, something so sharp and painful she could almost feel its sting, so fleeting it was gone before she could make sense of it, even if he hadn’t turned his head to look down at the grave.
Remembering, she assumed, as she studied his profile and catalogued the changes time had wrought. He had always been on the outer edge of good-looking, his dark, strong features organised in a way that was compelling rather than handsome in any conventional sense, the shadows in his features hinting at unknown dangers and untold secrets.