* * *
The next morning, Vivi was packing a travelling bag when Zoe appeared in the doorway. ‘You had a fight with him last night,’ she muttered, wide-eyed with consternation. ‘You told him you weren’t going to marry him, after all.’
‘And he didn’t listen!’ Vivi hissed back between furiously gritted teeth. ‘Raffaele doesn’t listen to what he doesn’t want to hear. Well, he’ll soon find out that I mean what I say.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going down to John and Liz for a few days. I need a break and I’ve got some holiday time to use. If I hurry I can catch the early train,’ she pointed out, looking at her younger sister with belated concern. ‘Will you be all right here on your own for a while?’
‘Of course,’ Zoe assured her, gently removing a top from Vivi’s crushing grip to shake it out and fold it neatly before slotting it into the bag for her enraged sibling. ‘If you don’t marry him, where does that leave John and Liz?’
Vivi swallowed hard, thinking it took Zoe to voice that leading question and paling as the consequences of her angry refusal formed in front of her. ‘I don’t know. I’ll work something out,’ she swore.
Raffaele had always prided himself on his nerves of steel but when Vivi extended her leave and stayed missing right up until forty-eight hours before the wedding, he was desperate enough to visit her sister again and ask if she knew where she was.
‘Our foster parents’ place,’ Zoe revealed. ‘I assumed you must know.’
Raffaele clenched his teeth, got the address and organised a helicopter. He didn’t know what he was planning to say to Vivi. He toyed with the idea of telling her the truth about that dossier on Arianna but who could tell what would happen if he opened that can of worms? Would she even care about the threat to her former friend’s happiness? Would that revelation cause trouble between her and her grandfather? And if it did cause trouble, how might that rebound on Raffaele and Arianna when he could not picture the older man backing down? He had no answers to those questions and decided he would have to work out his strategy according to what he learned when he got there.
That particular morning was a very trying one for Vivi. She had spent ten days with her foster parents in the familiar hurly-burly whirl of life at the old farmhouse. Not much had changed there. There was still a queue for the single bathroom every morning, noisily knocked doors, raised voices, shouts, squabbles and the thunder of noisy impatient feet on the stairs. Only when she heard John drive off with a carload of teenagers to do the school run did she emerge from the attic room where she had been staying. When she crept into the now vacant bathroom, she could hear Liz clattering round downstairs while she tidied up the kitchen and Vivi’s heart was in her mouth as she opened the pregnancy testing kit she had bought the day before.
She was late and she had never been late before, her cycle usually being as regular as clockwork. Furthermore, the signs she had assumed were signalling the arrival of her period had intensified without the expected event arriving. She had waited and waited, hoped and prayed but the sensitivity of her breasts, the occasional bouts of nausea and the other unusual changes troubling her had persisted.
It couldn’t be, it simply couldn’t be, she was thinking as she performed the test with shaking hands and sat down to wait for the result. It couldn’t possibly happen with Raffaele di Mancini, whom she hated...could it? No, fate couldn’t be that cruel. Her hands coiled together tight and squeezed hard. She had had sex with him without precautions. Logic warned her that she deserved whatever she got from that ill-judged encounter. It was not as though she were stupid, it was not as though she hadn’t known the risk as well as any other young woman. Unhappily, common sense hadn’t featured in that episode and now she was appreciating that passion was even more dangerous than she had thought and that uncontrolled passion in that particular field could mean life-changing consequences.
Overhead she heard the irritating thwack-thwack of a helicopter and she winced, her head aching from a troubled night of sleep. Ironically she had fled to what had once been her home in search of peace only to discover that peace wasn’t available to her anywhere because she could not run away from the repercussions of her angry decision not to marry Raffaele. Even now, at this late stage, she was listing them...the loss of Liz and John’s home, not to mention the upheaval that would cause for the children dependent on them, whose security would be torn away.
And she knew the cost of that, she knew the cost of constantly changing foster homes better than anyone, she reminded herself in anguish. Then there would be the jobs lost at Hacketts Tech, the devastation that would engulf so many lives. And her grandfather would probably never forgive her for her defiance, not that she craved his good opinion and affection that much. In short, she had reached the conclusion that only a totally selfish cow would refuse to marry Raffaele in such circumstances. In temper, she had dug herself into a corner and now she didn’t like herself very much.
Emerging from that despairing flood of reflections, Vivi belatedly recalled the pregnancy test and checked her watch before standing up to check the result. And the result sent a wave of dizziness currenting through her like a stinging electric charge. Dry-mouthed, she read the positive result and tottered down onto the edge of the bath because she didn’t think her legs would hold her up any longer.
Panic filled her. A baby...her as a mother with a baby. That alien concept shattered what remained of her composure. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and scanned the result again but it didn’t change. She thought of her little nephew, Teddy, and her tense face softened because she adored her sister’s little boy. Were she to have a Teddy or a female equivalent of Teddy, she would love her baby, protect and nurture her child. She had a big heart and plenty of love to offer even though she couldn’t currently see a way through the practical difficulties lying ahead. But should she even be considering bringing this child into the world when the world offered other more convenient options?
But no, she could not face a termination because she believed she would be haunted for ever by such a choice. Teddy would not have existed had Winnie chosen that route and the idea that she might never have had the opportunity to know her little nephew appalled Vivi. No, she would have her baby, whatever the consequences, not least her foster parents’ disappointment that she could have been so irresponsible, her grandfather’s rage and her sisters’ distress that she had refused to do what she was supposed to do.
‘Vivi!’ Liz shouted up from the ground floor.
Wondering how long she had been sitting in a daze contemplating her radically altered future, Vivi stood up and disposed of the evidence of the pregnancy test before going downstairs into the kitchen, where she stopped dead, frozen into shock at the sight of Raffaele sitting at the table with a cup of coffee.
‘Vivi...you have a visitor,’ Liz Brooke greeted her with a smile. ‘I wish you’d told us what was going on.’
‘Going on?’ Vivi queried in bewilderment.
‘That you were supposed to be getting married the day after tomorrow but that you and Raffaele had a terrible row and you broke it off,’ Liz supplied ruefully. ‘I knew you were unhappy but I also knew that when you were ready to talk, you would let me know what was bothering you.’
Caught on the hop by the startling revelation that Raffaele had broken the story of the wedding to her foster mother, Vivi stiffened even more. What on earth was he doing here? How the heck had he even found out where she was staying?
Unaffected by either her dismay or self-consciousness,