Husband By Necessity

‘In some ways,’ he said after a moment.

She couldn’t pursue the subject, because she remembered just in time that what she knew of his situation didn’t come from him.

They strolled out onto the terrace. Night had fallen, and in the velvety blackness the only lights came from the house behind them.

He was bound to kiss her now, she thought, and she found she was longing for it to happen. He was different from all other men, and his kisses would be different too. Through the few inches that separated them she could feel him trembling.

Then he did something that left her completely taken aback. Slowly he took her hand in his two hands, raised it, and laid it gently against his cheek.

‘Perhaps-’ he said, and seemed unable to continue.

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps-we should be getting back to the others. I’m being a very bad host.’

With another man she would have said, I think you’re being the perfect host, in a teasing voice and a smile that would tell him she was interested. But the flirtatious banter died on her lips. Somehow, with Bernardo, the words wouldn’t get themselves said.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘We ought to go back.’

CHAPTER TWO

BERNARDO’S dream was always the same. The young boy was alone in the house, waiting for the return of his mother. The boy was himself, but he could stand aside and watch him, knowing everything he was thinking and feeling as the darkness fell and the knock on the door told him that the world had changed forever. His mother would never return. She lay dead at the bottom of the mountain, trapped with his father in the smashed wreck of a car.

Like a slide show the scene changed. The boy was there again, fighting back the tears over his mother’s body, making frantic, grief-stricken promises, to protect her memory, to honour her forever. For her neighbours had called her prostituta, and the fact that her lover had been a great man made no real difference, except on the surface. They’d deferred to her, because otherwise Vincente Martelli would have made them suffer. But she was still a prostituta.

He’d known, and he’d sworn to erase that stain, to become a strong man like his father and force them to respect her memory. But he’d had to break his promises almost at once.

A different scene. Himself, hiding in the darkness of his mother’s house while the argument raged about what to do with him, for he was only twelve, too young to live alone, and the house now belonged to his dead father’s family. There’d been talk of an institution. He was a bastardo. He had no rights and no name.

Another knock on the door, and the world changed again. Outside stood a beautiful, frail woman in her forties. Signora Baptista Martelli, his father’s betrayed wife, who must surely hate him. But she only smiled sadly and said she had come to take him home.

He’d wept then, to his eternal shame, for he considered himself too old for weeping. But the sobs had devastated him, making it impossible to explain that this was his home and he wanted no other. Having started, he couldn’t stop. He wept for days, and all the while everything he loved and valued was taken away from him, and the wealthy Martellis swallowed him up, a helpless prisoner.

It was at this point in the dream that Bernardo always awoke to find his pillow wet and his body shaking. He would be in his room at the Residenza, for the nightmare came to him nowhere else. It stripped away the twenty years that had passed since, making him a grieving, helpless child again, instead of the hard, confident man that the world saw.

He pulled on some jeans and went, bare-chested, out onto the small balcony outside his window. The cool night air awoke him properly and he stood holding onto the rail, feeling the distress fade until he could cope with it again.

Tomorrow he would leave this place and return to his home in the mountains, among his mother’s people, where he belonged. He would come back in time for the wedding.

Below he could see the broad terrace. A flicker of white curtain caught his eye and he knew it came from the room where the bride and her companion slept. He wished he hadn’t thought of that, for it seemed to bring Angie there before him, teasing as nobody had ever teased him before, bringing warmth to his hard, joyless life.

So strong was the vision that when he heard her soft laughter floating up he didn’t at first realise that she was really there. But then a very real, human voice said, ‘Psst!’ and he looked down to see her sitting on the stone ledge of the terrace, gazing impishly up at him.

He was a man of few social graces. His brothers would have appreciated the audience, Renato with cynical speculation, Lorenzo with amused relish. Bernardo tensed, affronted at being looked at when he was unaware, and horribly conscious of his bare chest. But then he noticed how the moonlight picked out her slender legs, and the way her hair was fluffed up as though she’d only just risen from bed, and he thought-he was almost sure-that beneath her short robe she had nothing on.

A stern sense of propriety made him try to ignore the thought-after all, she was a guest in the house. But there was no ignoring the impish way she looked up at him, or the way his own body was responding to the thought of her nakedness.

‘This is all wrong, you know,’ she called.

‘What’s all wrong?’ he asked, suspicious at not understanding her.

‘It’s Juliet who’s supposed to stand on the balcony, and Romeo who looks up from below.’

Her voice carried sweetly on the night air, like the singing of nightingales, and he could only look at her dumbly.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ she asked, her head on one side, like a pretty, expectant little bird.

‘Yes-I was going to ask if you rose to see the dawn. It will be very soon.’

‘I expect it’s lovely.’

‘It’s lovely here, but even more so in my home, because it is so high.’ He took a deep breath and forced himself to say, ‘I’m glad to see you now, because I have to leave very early tomorrow, to return there.’

‘Oh.’ That was all she said, but the disappointed droop in her voice was more than he could bear. The next words came out despite his determination that they shouldn’t. ‘Perhaps you would care to come with me.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘We leave very early.’

‘No way!’ she almost squeaked, trying to remember the sleepers in the house and express her outrage at the same time. ‘I get up early when I go to work. I’m on holiday.’ She almost danced with indignation.

He grinned, enchanted by her. ‘I’ll wait for you. Now be off back to bed, or you’ll oversleep.’

She laughed and vanished. Bernardo stayed a long time looking at the place where she’d been. He knew he’d done something dangerous to his peace. If he was wise he would write her an apologetic note, leave it with a servant, and depart at once.

But he wasn’t going to. Because suddenly he didn’t want to be wise.

Next morning was a bustle of departure. Lorenzo was off to Stockholm to finish some work before the wedding. Renato was taking Heather sailing so that she could decide whether to accept the offer of his yacht for the honeymoon. Angie politely declined the offer to accompany them, explaining that she was going to the mountains with Bernardo.

‘You be careful,’ Heather warned.

Angie smiled, thinking of last night, and the way the silver moonlight had limned Bernardo’s chest and the muscles of his shoulders and arms. ‘Where’s the fun in being careful?’ she murmured to herself, as she got into the shower.

She chose her clothes thoughtfully. White jeans, with a deep blue silk top that turned her eyes to violet. It was