The three of them must look the perfect family, she mused. But they weren’t.
In fact she and Vito had hardly swapped three words with each other since they got up this morning. He’d risen first, rolling out of the bed and striding off to the bathroom very early—but then he always had been an early riser. Catherine had stayed huddled where she was, listening until she’d heard Santo go down the stairs before she made any attempt to stir herself.
She’d needed her son as a buffer. Catherine freely acknowledged that. At least with Santo there she could try to behave with some normality. But Vito had been as withdrawn and reticent as she had been, as if his behaviour last night had pleased him as little as it had done Catherine.
‘… sunglasses in the glove compartment.’
Catching only the tail end of Vito’s blunt-edged comment brought her face automatically swinging around from the view to find him looking directly at her. Blinking uncomfortably, she turned quickly away again.
It was all right for him, she thought as she leant forward to open the door to the glove box, his eyes were already hidden behind silver-framed dark lenses, but he hadn’t been able to look at her before he’d put the darn things on!
Once through Mergellina the car began the serpentine climb on the Via Posillipo. As Catherine turned her attention to enjoying the spectacular view now unfolding beneath them, a flash of gold caught her eye.
It was Vito’s wedding ring, gleaming in the sunlight where his fingers were hooked loosely around the steering wheel. Glancing down at her lap, she saw her own slender white fingers suddenly looked distinctly bare. In what had been meant to be a dramatically expressive gesture she had left her rings behind when she left Vito all those years ago.
But now she shifted uncomfortably, a sudden wistfulness sending her thumbpad on a stroke of the empty space where her rings should be.
‘Do you want them back?’
Catherine jumped, severely jolted by the fact that he wasn’t only looking at her now, but was doing it enough to miss nothing!
‘It seems—practical,’ she said, using the same flat tone as he. ‘To avoid any—speculation. For Santo’s sake.’
For Santo’s sake. She grimaced at the weakness of her excuse, and even though she didn’t check she knew that Vito was grimacing too. Because they both knew that if she put her rings back on she would be doing it for her own sake.
Pride being another sin they were all victim to in different ways. And her pride wanted her to wear the traditional seal of office that stated clearly her position in Vito’s life. That way she could hold her head up and outface her critics—of which she expected to meet many—and feel no need to explain her arrival back to those people who probably believed their marriage had been dissolved long ago.
The car moved on up the hillside, and the higher it went the bigger the residential properties became and the more extensive and secluded became the land surrounding them. As they reached a pair of lattice iron gates that automatically swung open as they approached them, Catherine’s attention turned outwards again, her interest picking up as she viewed the familiar tree-lined approach to her old home and found herself watching breathlessly for the house itself to come into view.
The gardens were a delight of wide terraces, set out in typically Italian formality, with neat pathways and hedgerows and elegant stone steps leading down to the next terrace and so on. There were several tiny courtyard areas fashioned around tinkling fountains framed by neatly clipped box hedgerows of jasmine and bougainvillea that were a blaze of colour right now.
As they rounded a bend in the driveway the house suddenly came into view. The Villa Giordani had been standing here for centuries, being improved on and added to until it had become the most desired property in the area.
Bright white walls as thick as four feet in places stood guarding an inner sanctum. Good taste and an eye for beauty had always been present in the Giordani genes. There was no upper floor terrace exactly, but each suite of rooms had its own balcony set flat against the outer wall and marked by a thick stone arch and balustrade supported on turned stone supports. The balconies went deep—deep into the house itself—in an effort to offer shade to their occupants, who might want to sit there and enjoy the view over the Bay of Naples, which was nothing short of breathtaking from this high on the hill.
In keeping with the upper floor, the ground floor kept to the same arched theme, only the low stone balustrades had been extended out to the edge of the wide terrace which circumvented the whole house.
Nothing had ever been skimped on in the creating of the Giordani residence. Even the four deep steps leading up to the terrace had been designed to add to the overall grandeur of the place.
The driveway continued on to curve round towards the back of the house, where Catherine knew the garages lay along with a stable block, two tennis courts and a swimming pool tucked away in a natural bowl in the landscape. But Vito brought the car to a halt at the front steps and shut down the engine.
Santo was already scrambling at the back of Catherine’s seat in an effort to get out. ‘Hurry up, Mummy!’ he commanded impatiently. ‘I want to go and surprise Nonna before she knows we’re here!’
Climbing out of the car, Catherine unlocked the back of her seat to set her impatient son free, then stood watching as he raced off towards the house, bursting in through the front doors with a, ‘Nonna, where are you?’ at the top of his voice. ‘It’s me, Santo! I’m home!’
I’m home … Catherine felt her mouth twist in bitter rueful acknowledgement at just how much ‘at home’ her son had looked and sounded as his dark-eyed, dark-haired little body had shot him through those doors without a thought given to knocking first. And the words had burst from him in free-flowing Italian, as if it was the only language he knew how to speak.
As if he belonged here.
On the other side of the car, Vito stood watching also. And as her top lip gave a quiver in response to an unacceptable hurt she was suddenly feeling, he murmured, ‘Here …’ and Catherine turned only just in time to catch what it was he was tossing to her. ‘A sweet to follow the bitter pill,’ he drawled sardonically.
Frowning slightly, puzzled by both the cryptic remark and what he had tossed to her, she looked down to find that she was holding the keys to the Mercedes in her hand.
Her frown deepened, and for a confused moment she actually wondered if he was ordering her to go and garage the car! Then enlightenment struck. The sardonic words began to make sense.
He had not been watching their son; he had been watching her. And the sweetener remark had been a sarcastic reference to her reaction to the confidence with which Santo knew his place here!
But, worse than that, the keys had not been tossed to her to use to garage anything.
Vito was making her a gift of this beautiful Mercedes!
Her eyes shot up to clash with his, shaded lenses trying to probe through shaded lenses in an effort to try and discover before she responded if this was some kind of joke! Out here beneath his native skies he looked more the arrogant Italian than he had ever done. The darkness of his hair, the richness of his skin and the proud angle at which he held his head all sent the kind of tingling messages running through her that she did not like to feel.
Sexual messages. Without her being able to do a single thing to control it, the soft, springy cluster of curls nestling at the crown of her thighs began to tingle and stir beneath the covering of her thin jade summer dress. And her nipples gave a couple of sharp pricking stings in response.
It was awful, like being bewitched. She even found it shamefully sexy to note the way he had rolled up the sleeves on his pale blue shirt—as if it came as supremely natural for him to have them settle at just the right place to draw attention to the hair-peppered strength in his forearms.
‘I can’t accept this!’ she burst out