Gino’s Arranged Bride

‘Oh, no, Mummy-’ Nikki was up in arms at the thought that Gino could survive without her protection.

‘We must go home, darling.’

‘But he might die if we’re not here,’ Nikki sobbed.

‘No.’ It was a croak from the bed. Gino’s head was turned towards Nikki. ‘Not die,’ he whispered. ‘Because-of- you.’

‘He needs to sleep,’ Laura told Nikki. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow.’

But Nikki had one more thing to do before she was ready to leave. Carefully negotiating the tubes she edged forward and kissed Gino’s cheek.

‘’Night,’ she said.

‘’Night,’ he murmured.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again the nurse was still there, but the other two had gone. She glanced up and smiled at him.

‘Your daughter’s a real character,’ she said. ‘You must be very proud of her.’

Your daughter. He frowned, wondering if the nurse had really said that, but he was too tired to think about it. He drifted into an unquiet dream.

They found Sadie and Claudia at home, having arrived so recently that they were still in their outdoor clothes.

‘We couldn’t think why the house was dark and empty,’ Sadie said. ‘Where did everyone vanish to?’

Laura told the story and they exclaimed over Gino’s misfortune and Nikki’s quick thinking.

‘But now it’s time to go back to bed,’ Laura said. ‘It’s two in the morning.’

As she got into bed Nikki said, ‘He is going to be all right, isn’t he?’

‘He is, now,’ Laura said, tucking her in. ‘Darling, did you really tell them he was your daddy?’

‘I suppose so. I just said the first thing that came into my head, about how he was choking to death, and our address. I didn’t think much about the rest.’

‘Darling, please don’t think of Gino as your father.’

‘It’s just-wouldn’t it be nice if-?’

Laura’s heart ached for her daughter, to whom life never gave anything she wanted.

‘It can’t happen, pet. Please don’t think about it.’

‘But he’s special,’ Nikki insisted.

‘Yes, he is. Very special. I know he’s your best friend-’

‘And yours too.’

‘And mine too. I hope he always will be, but he doesn’t belong to us, and he never can.’

Nikki didn’t argue further. At nine she could accept disappointment without rebellion, being so used to it.

She snuggled down and gave her mother a smile.

‘It would have been nice, though,’ she said, and closed her eyes.

‘Yes,’ Laura whispered. ‘It would.’

She held Nikki’s hand until the child fell asleep. As she slipped out of the room she heard the phone going in the hall downstairs.

She found Claudia taking the call, looking shocked.

‘It’s the hospital,’ she said. ‘They seem to think you’re Gino’s wife and they want you to go back as fast as you can. He’s taken a sudden turn for the worse, and they’re really worried.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS good to be home. He’d missed the crimson sunsets and glowing colours of Tuscany. Even more, he’d missed the loving family that had always been his. His father, bellowing, jovial, mischievous, infinitely loving. And his brother Rinaldo, gruff, unyielding, withdrawn, but with a fierce power of love that had equalled their father’s.

Why had he left them?

Then he realised that nothing was quite as he remembered. He’d meant to come home, but home no longer existed. Where was his father? He looked around him for the farmhouse he loved, with its two incongruous flights of stone steps up the front.

But the landscape was a desert, and in the centre, strangely, was a funeral.

There was Rinaldo, his face full of rage and hostility. Why? And the fair-haired woman, watching them both across the open grave. Who was she? Surely he should know her? But there was a mystery about her that he couldn’t unravel.

Agitated voices reached him out of the mists. ‘His temperature’s shooting up again. We have to get it down fast. This wasn’t supposed to happen.’

No, it hadn’t been supposed to happen. He shouldn’t have fallen in love with Alex, because when they tossed a coin for her, Rinaldo had won. But he hadn’t wanted her, until it was too late for all of them and disaster had been inevitable.

Now he knew the woman watching them across the grave with cool, appraising eyes. She was Alex who had lit up his life and then left him desolate.

He and Alex had spent the first day of her trip together. He’d shown her the city of Florence, and then they’d driven out into the country to hire riding horses. That was how he remembered her best, laughing as she rode beside him through the sunlight.

He could feel that sunlight on him now, fierce, blazing, almost unbearably hot. She had flowered in that heat, becoming a woman of Italy, discovering that she belonged there.

He’d known then that he loved her, not like his other ‘light o’loves’, but finally, completely, with a total giving of himself, nothing held back. That was something he’d never felt able to do before, and it had fulfilled him.

After that there could be no other woman but her, and the knowledge filled him with joy. He’d seen that joy mirrored in her-or so he’d thought until the moment he found them together in Rinaldo’s bed, folded in each other’s arms.

He tried to shy away from that memory. It brought too much pain. But his mind insisted on forcing him to confront it, as though it was trying to convey an urgent message.

He saw them again, naked limbs entwined, lost in each other, and he knew there was something here that he’d failed to understand, but which he must understand if he were ever again to know peace.

There was her face again, blurred this time, but he could see that she was gazing at him sadly, anxiously. She’d looked like that at their last meeting, not the day of her wedding to Rinaldo, but before that, when they’d spoken alone, face to face, for the last time.

‘Be damned to the pair of you!’ he’d cried in his anguish, although she’d tried to make him understand that she hadn’t taken him seriously, had thought he was only playing at love. And it had been true to start with.

‘But then I found I was really in love with you.’

That was what he’d told her, and now he tried to say it again through parched, swollen lips. He wanted to make her understand.

‘Gino-Gino-’ Her voice reached him down long, echoing corridors.

‘Carissima-’

‘Gino try to wake up-look at me, please-’

‘I always loved-to look at you,’ he told her sadly. ‘Do you remember-that day in the barn, you were so beautiful-’

She was silent, but he could still feel her hands holding his.

‘I wanted to take you in my arms,’ he murmured. ‘I loved you so much.’

‘Did you?’ she whispered.

He thought she sounded almost wistful, but that must be part of his fevered madness.

‘You never knew,’ he murmured, ‘but I woke up thinking about you and went to bed thinking about you. Such dreams of you I had-I’d be ashamed to tell you-’