‘There’s no equation to be worked out.’
Riccardo glanced at her. ‘No equation? Then tell me what you want and let’s get this over with. As I said to you, I am not a man who appreciates mysteries and this one is outstaying its limited welcome.’
Julia paled, realising that retreat was no longer an option. Had never really been an option, although there had always been the illusion of one. But how was she going to phrase what she had to say? She was a teacher. She should have had a thousand words at her disposal, but none that catered for this particular reality. Unfortunately.
She lifted her eyes bravely to look at him and was overwhelmed by the dark, brooding intensity of his gaze.
‘It’s about your wife. Your ex-wife. Caroline.’ She watched as the darkly handsome contours of his face stilled. When he made no response, Julia took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have recognised my name,’ she said quietly. ‘Well, Nash. I thought you might have recognised my surname. But Caroline must not have ever told you…’
Surprises are always unpleasant. Riccardo could remember his father telling him that, many years ago, when the biggest surprise of his life had heralded the receivers coming into his company.
This surprise, though, left him winded. Caroline was the memory he had put behind him, buried beneath other willing women and only seeping out in the angry thrashing of his nightmares. And even those had disappeared.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Julia’s anxious eyes met his and he summoned up all the will-power at his disposal, which was considerable, to maintain his cold, unshaken exterior.
‘What is there to say?’ he rasped tautly. ‘I have no intention of having a cosy chat to you about my ex-wife. May she rest in peace.’ He began to stand up and one slender hand reached out, touching him lightly on his forearm.
‘Please.’ Julia’s voice was gentle. ‘I’m not finished.’
Riccardo looked at the offending hand with distaste, but remained where he was, locked into place by the vile-tasting surge of memories that had risen unbidden from deep inside, like ghouls breaking through the barriers of the earth to roam freely.
Julia had half risen from her chair. Now she sat back down and was relieved when he did as well, though not before he had ordered another drink and wine for her, even though she had not asked for any.
‘Why should I have recognised your name?’ His voice was flat and hard, like the expression in his eyes.
‘Because,’ she faltered, ‘because my brother was Martin Nash. The man who…who…’
‘Why don’t you say the words, Miss Nash? The man who replaced me.’ His mouth twisted into lines of bitter cynicism. ‘And to what do I owe the pleasure of this trip down memory lane? From what I recall, she was a very wealthy divorcee when we finally parted company. She and her lover. So, did they thoughtlessly not see fit to leave you in their will when they died?’ His voice was an insulting mimicry of sympathy and Julia’s back stiffened in a flare of rage.
This man was every bit as bad as Caroline had described. Worse. Julia felt a trace of sympathy for the decision her sister-in-law had made. To break off all contact. To say nothing. At the time she had done her best to persuade her otherwise. Through all those shared confidences she had had to steel herself against the unquiet feelings in her heart that a momentous decision was just morally wrong.
Had she known the true nature of the beast, perhaps she wouldn’t have made quite such an effort.
‘I loved my brother, Mr Fabbrini. And I loved Caroline as well.’ Her voice sounded unnaturally still.
Riccardo felt such rage at that admission that he had to clench his hands into tight balls to stop them doing what they wanted to do. His eyes were blazing coals, however, and Julia could feel them burning her skin, searing through her head like knives of scorching steel.
‘In which case, please accept my condolences,’ he sneered coldly.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘No. I don’t, and I am quite sure you can understand why. You might have loved my ex-wife. You might have seen her as the paragon of beauty and gentleness that she convincingly portrayed, but she was neither so gentle nor was she so compassionate that she couldn’t conduct a rampant affair with another man behind my back!’ His voice cracked like a whip around her, causing a group of people at the nearby table to glance around in sudden interest at the explosive scenario unfolding in front of them.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Julia protested with dismay.
‘It hardly matters now, does it,’ he said in a dangerously soft voice. ‘It was five years ago and life has moved on for me. So why don’t you just get to the point of all of this and then leave? Go and find a life to live. If you imagine that you are going to find a sympathetic listener in me then you are very much mistaken, Miss Nash. Any feeling I had for my dearly departed ex-wife dried up the day she told me that she had been seeing another man and was in love with him.’
‘I haven’t come here searching for your sympathy!’ Julia retorted.
‘Then why did you come here?’
‘To tell you that…’ The sheer magnitude of what she was about to say made the words dry up in her throat. She removed her spectacles and went through the pretence of cleaning the lenses, her hands unsteady on the wire rims.
Without her glasses, she looked wide-eyed and vulnerable. But Riccardo wasn’t about to let himself feel sympathy for this girl. The mere thought that she was his replacement’s sister was enough to fill his throat with bile. He could imagine her sitting down in a cosy threesome, nodding and listening to their vilification of him, ripping him apart when he hadn’t been there to defend himself.
He finished his second drink and was contemplating a third, which might at least blunt the edge of his mood, when she replaced her spectacles and looked at him. He decided that he wasn’t going to help her. Let her stutter out the reason for this bizarre meeting.
‘Caroline and my brother had, well…had been seeing each other for the last four months of your relationship before it all came to a head.’ The wine had arrived and Julia gulped down a mouthful to give herself some much-needed Dutch courage. ‘But they hadn’t been sleeping together.’
Riccardo gave a derisive snort of laughter. ‘And you believed them, did you?’
‘Yes, I did!’ Julia’s head snapped up in angry rebuttal of his jeering disbelief.
‘Well, I may be a little more cynical than you, Miss Nash, but I could not imagine a man and a woman, both in their prime, spending four months holding hands and whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears without the whispering turning to lovemaking. My ex-wife was remarkably beautiful and highly desirable. I doubt if your brother could have kept his hands to himself even if he had wanted to!’
‘They never slept together,’ Julia repeated stubbornly. That was what Caroline had told her and Julia had believed every word. It had had nothing to do with sexual attraction and everything to do with the man studying her blackly from under his brows. Caroline had been afraid of him. She had confided that to her over and over in the beginning, and the truth of what she had confided had been plain enough to read on her beautiful, pained face.
Riccardo Fabbrini had terrified her. During their brief courtship, she had seen his dark, brooding personality as exciting, but the reality of it had only sunk home once they had married and she had become suffocated by the sheer explosive force of it. Nothing in her sweet-tempered reserves had equipped her to deal with someone so blatantly and aggressively male. The more dominant he became, the less she responded, wilting inside herself like a flower deprived of essential nutrients, and the more she wilted, the more dominant he had become, like a raging bull, she had whispered, baffled by her tongue-tied retreat.
Martin, with his conventional,