A Sicilian Husband - Kate Walker [30]
‘Paolo’s mother?’ Her voice was just a raw croak as if it had been forced from a desperately sore and infected throat.
‘Yes…and my wife.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
TERRIE supposed she should be thankful that at least he had been honest with her, but thankful was the last thing she felt. She wanted to rage at him, to scream and shout, to express her savage feelings in violent language. She was even sorely tempted to launch herself straight at him, hands flying, to pummel angry fists against his hard, unyielding form.
But although the thoughts were there, although the need was like an explosion inside her head, she found that, disturbingly, it was impossible to move. She could only stand there, frozen, her fingers clenched tight on the revealing photograph, her glazed eyes staring unseeingly into the woman’s—Gio’s wife’s—face.
What was surprising was that the woman wasn’t, in the conventional sense, at all pretty. She was petite and dark, and she had her son’s wide, brilliant smile. But no one would ever have called her stunning. She didn’t possess a slim, model-like figure either, but was surprisingly rounded at breasts and hips, something that her lack of height accentuated.
‘Wha—what’s she called?’
And why had she asked that? Why did she want to know such a small, but such an intimate detail? Would it make the woman any the more alive, any more real if she knew?
How could it? How could anything make this terrible thing more real, more true? If she knew everything about this woman, where and when Gio had met her, how long they’d been married, exactly when the little boy Paolo had been born—when he had been conceived—would it make things any easier to bear? Would the pain be any the less because she knew—or wouldn’t it in fact be impossible to make it any worse?
‘Her name is Lucia.’
Why phrase it like that? Gio was forced to wonder. Why not spill out the whole truth and then it would all be out in the open? Why not be strictly accurate, use the correct tense, say ‘Her name was Lucia’? Because that, after all, was the fact.
But he hated the thought of actually framing the words. Of hearing them spoken out loud like this in this room, in this situation. His clouded gaze went to the wildly ruffled bed where to his astonishment the pillow on the side where he had slept still bore the vague imprint of his head in evidence of the night he had spent there.
OK, so he hadn’t been unfaithful to Lucia in the strictest sense of the term, but it still felt that way in his heart.
But the problem was that his feelings for Lucia were now further complicated by the present situation.
Porca miseria! He should have gone when he had had the chance!
Or, rather, he should never have acted last night. Never have let his most basic desires, his most primitive needs, cloud his normally cool-headed thinking.
Thinking! The word was like an explosion inside his head. Face it. He hadn’t been thinking at all. He had simply been reacting. And reacting to the tug of his sexuality, every instinct below the waist, and nothing in his head at all.
And that was what had got him into this mess in the first place.
‘Lucia Paolina Cardella.’
‘Thank you.’
The ice in her voice stung none the less for being deserved. And the burning glare from those soft-coloured eyes was a bitter reproach to him. Unsettlingly so. Because she had known from the start that it had only been for the night—hadn’t she? ‘Fun’ was what she had said that she was after. She couldn’t have expected anything more.
‘I’m so glad you finally decided to tell me.’
Her tone said the exact opposite; and the hand that held the photograph tightened convulsively on the picture, threatening to crush it badly.
‘Scusi…’
Leaning across the bed, he took hold of her hand, trying to lever her clutching fingers free, earning himself another furious glare.