Spiders crawled up her back; the light from the lamp flickered ominously. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the truth about why I married you.’
THE air in the turret room was too thin to breathe, the raging storm outside a soundtrack for what was going on in her head. Here, in this room, her future lay in the balance. He had come back. He had left her this morning but he had come back, as she had wanted him to, as she had prayed. Except now she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.
‘So why did you marry me?’
‘Gabriella—Bella—I have so much for which to seek your forgiveness.’
‘No, forget about forgiveness. Tell me why you married me. Clearly it was not, as I imagined in my pathetic little brain, because you loved me.’
‘I … It shames me to say that it was not.’
She squeezed her eyes shut and sagged into a chair, uncaring about the dust that welled up in a cloud. Right now she had more important things on her mind, like the heart that lay trampled and bleeding all over the floor. ‘Then tell me why.’
‘I made a promise. To a man I loved and respected above all others. A man who had been like a father to me. Even though I knew it was wrong, even though I knew I could not be the husband you needed, I made that promise to him.’
She looked up at him, chilled to the bone, knowing there could be only one man who would have made him promise such a thing. ‘My grandfather made you promise to marry me?’
‘He was dying, Bella. He was worried about you.’
She remembered the visit he’d made before Umberto’s death, the conversation he’d skirted around when she’d asked him for the details. But it was too impossible to believe, too horrendous; hysteria built inside her like magma ready to erupt at any moment. ‘You promised to marry me because my grandfather asked you to?’
‘He wanted to be sure you would be safe when he was gone.’
She put the heels of her hand to her forehead, the drumming in her temples growing louder, the pressure growing heavy and insistent behind her brow. It was insane. Did he actually realise what he was saying?
Suddenly she couldn’t sit. She sprang to her feet, pacing the floor. ‘And you agreed to this? You said, anything you ask, Umberto; of course I will marry her?’
‘I tried to tell him—’
‘You told him you would marry me—so you lured me into a loveless marriage only to dump me in a godforsaken castle in Spain where your dead wife rides shotgun—’
‘No! I told him it wouldn’t work. I told him I would make no kind of husband. I told him you would hardly be safe with me—a man who had not been able to save his own wife. How could you be safe with me?’
‘And yet you still said yes. You took me to Venice and you set out to seduce me. You made love to me! I thought you loved me, Raoul. When you held me in your arms and you made love to me, I thought you loved me! But you lied, every one of those times you kissed me. Every one of those times we lay in bed together, every one of them was a lie!’
He took a step closer and held out one hand to her. ‘No, Bella.’
She turned away. She never wanted to touch him again. ‘And all the time you couldn’t wait to be rid of me. You couldn’t wait to drop the pretence and dump me.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
She spun back around. ‘You deceived me!’
‘What choice did I have? Marry you, or say no to Umberto and watch Garbas get his greedy hooks in you?’
She stilled, her breathing hard and frantic in her chest, her mind seizing on the one thing that finally pulled the pieces together. ‘This is all about Consuelo? Grandfather was so worried about my friendship with him that he would get his henchman to marry me? Why couldn’t he have just warned me if he was so worried?’
‘Would you have listened—you, who always sees the best in everyone? You, who could not believe he was a criminal even when he was charged with fraud by the police? Try to see it from Umberto’s point of view: Garbas knew you would inherit as soon as you turned twenty-five. Umberto wanted to ensure you would be safe from his greed.’
She shook her head. ‘Even if what you say is true, what danger is Consuelo to me now that he’s been charged?’ And even as she said the words a creeping suspicion filtered into her psyche, no more than a floating piece of black silk on the wind at first, it took shape and form and became three-dimensional and ugly.
‘You were responsible for that, weren’t you. It was no surprise to you that day of the funeral—no surprise that Consuelo had disappeared. Because you already knew. You were the one who tipped off the authorities. You—you wanted to be sure he could not touch me. You got Consuelo arrested.’
‘He’s a criminal, Bella. It’s no more than he deserves.’
She blinked, appalled at his implied confession, horrified by the sheer magnitude of his machinations—all to ensure she would marry him. ‘You don’t even try to deny it. You always hated Consuelo. Always!’
‘And why wouldn’t I hate him? He was the one who called me asking for money one too many times and, when I refused and told him he was a fool, he gloated that I was the fool and that his brother was having an affair with my wife! He gloated that I was the last to know, that everyone—everyone—knew and were laughing about me behind my back.’
A bolt of lightning squeezed through the shutters; a blast of thunder rent the skies and rumbled long into the distance.
‘Consuelo’s brother died here …’ she said.
‘Manuel was having an affair with my wife. He was supposed to be a friend. They were both supposed to be my friends.’
‘And you were so worried I would marry someone who did the dirty on you that you put me through all this. How considerate of you.’
‘He’s a scumbag, Bella. You deserve better.’
‘He’s a scumbag?’ She looked up at him, wondering how she could ever have imagined that she loved him—someone who manipulated people, facts and the truth to gain his own ends. ‘So what the hell does that make you?’
She saw him flinch. She was glad that she could cause him half the pain he had caused her. ‘The joke’s on you, of course,’ she continued. ‘For I had no intention of marrying Consuelo. Yes, I liked him—but as a friend, that was all. Maybe you might have given me some credit for making my own decisions.’
‘You think he would have left you alone, knowing you were coming into your inheritance? Don’t kid yourself. It was the money he was interested in.’
‘Maybe you’re right. It would not be the first time I had fallen prey to a man who wanted nothing more but to use me and abuse me for his own purposes.’
‘Bella, listen to me …’
‘Why should I, when all you have ever told me is lies?’
‘No. Hear me out. Yes, what I did was wrong, but I was bound by a promise I had made to a dying man. I would marry you, I had decided, but I was going to let you go—once I knew you were safe. I wanted you to find someone worthy of you, who loved you for who you were and not how much money you had.’
‘How very noble of you. And meanwhile you lock me up in some cold, barren castle in Spain and pretend you are not interested in me. Or were you pretending when we did make love?’
‘That