It was dark when she drove home, and hurried into the house. She found the two brothers standing in silence and her heart sank.
‘What is it?’ she asked, looking from one to the other.
‘I got it wrong,’ Rinaldo said bluntly. ‘The wine was harvested too soon. It needed another week. I got it wrong.’
Her heart almost stopped. His face was ravaged, as though he were dying inside. And she could feel it with him, the pain of failure and defeat, almost beyond bearing.
‘But how-?’ she whispered.
‘Because I believed what I wanted to believe,’ he said heavily. ‘People do that every day, but I’ve cost us the best of the wine harvest.’
‘You mean it’s all unusable?’ Alex asked, shocked.
‘Oh, no, it’s not unusable,’ Rinaldo said with ironic self-condemnation. ‘Valli will buy the grapes, not at top prices for Chianti, but as second grade to bulk out some inferior wine.’
‘That’s never happened to us before,’ Gino said.
He spoke softly, but Rinaldo’s lacerated sensibilities made every word pierce him.
‘No, it’s never happened before, and it wouldn’t have happened this time if I hadn’t been such a blind fool. Say it.’
‘You made one mistake,’ Gino said kindly. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’
Rinaldo walked to the tall window that opened onto the veranda, and looked back. Suddenly his voice was almost that of an old man.
‘You’re being generous my brother, as always,’ he said. ‘But it
He walked out into the darkness.
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS warn for October and Alex slept with the window open to catch any hint of breeze. Even so her sleep was restless, and at last she awoke.
Climbing out of bed she went to the open window, not troubling to cover her nakedness as there would be nobody out there to see her.
She recalled how she had looked out of this window once before and seen Rinaldo burying Brutus. That was when she had known that he had a heart. It was awkward and prickly, and would never be given easily. But it felt deeply, powerfully. Perhaps it was then she’d begun to suspect that she wanted it.
She knew it now with total certainty. It would have been an understatement to say that she loved Rinaldo. Falling in love did not begin to express the way he’d taken possession of her heart, her mind, her hopes, dreams, instincts.
The only thing he hadn’t possessed was her body, and now more than ever she felt the need to lie with him, taking him into herself so that they could be one in the complete surrender of love. Then perhaps she might find the means to comfort him for the wretched failure he had brought upon himself, for reasons that she still did not understand.
She’d longed to follow him as he’d walked away into the night, but his prohibition blocked her way.
When she saw the man moving between the trees she thought her imagination was reliving that first occasion. Then she realised that Rinaldo was really there, and in the moonlight she could just see him well enough to know that he was crushed.
She couldn’t bear it. Whatever he said, she must be with him. Hurriedly she pulled on a short nightgown and a light linen robe, thrust some slippers on her feet, and was out of the door, running down the stairs.
As she reached the trees she lost sight of him, and for a moment she was afraid he might have moved on. But then she saw him, sitting on a log, his hands clasped between his knees, his head sunk in an attitude of despair.
He didn’t hear her approach until she dropped down on her knees beside him.
‘Rinaldo- Rinaldo-’ There was so much she wanted to say, but she could speak only his name.
She put her hands on either side of his face. ‘Don’t turn away from me,’ she begged.
He didn’t try to turn away, but he sat looking at her with the saddest face she thought she had ever seen. It made Alex abandon words and pull his head down until his lips were on hers.
He almost resisted, but he had no power to hold out against her for long. The next moment his arms went about her, drawing her tightly against him in a long, fierce kiss.
She could feel his desperation and it made her wind her arms about his neck, pressing herself against him, giving to him with everything she had.
‘Alex-’ he tried to say.
‘No,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Not yet.’
‘Not yet,’ he agreed, the words almost smothered against her mouth.
Before this he had touched her face with his lips, but he had never laid them over hers. Now he did so and the feeling was as fiercely wonderful as her dreams had promised her. He kissed her with a hard, driving urgency, as though afraid that she would be snatched away.
She responded in kind, caressing his mouth feverishly, trying to draw him on to give her what she most urgently wanted from him at this moment.
But then she felt his shoulders turn to iron beneath her hands, his whole body tensed to put a distance between them.
‘Stop!’ he said hoarsely. ‘I must tell you something.’
‘Let it wait.’ She was gasping. She wanted him and words were an irrelevance that got in the way.
‘No, you must hear me out first.’
She forced herself to calm down, sensing that this was vital to him. When his hands fell from her she seized them, holding them between her own.
‘Tell me what it is that’s making you like this,’ she said. ‘It can’t be just the grapes.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said so fiercely that she was startled. ‘If I’d been right, I’d have got top price and been ahead of the market. And that was what I wanted more than anything in life.
‘I wanted it so much that I blinded myself to the truth. I told myself I had to be right. When I tasted those grapes I found what I wanted to find.
She was shocked by the agony of self-condemnation in his voice.
‘I thought I could order things to be as I wanted.’ He gave a crack of mirthless laughter. ‘You’d think I’d have learned better than that by now, wouldn’t you?’
‘Please, don’t be so hard on yourself,’ she begged. ‘So you let your pride get in the way-’
‘Not pride, arrogance. I wouldn’t listen, would I? And now I’ve brought down my best hopes, and damaged the farm.’
‘But the rest of the harvest was good-’
‘Oh, yes, we won’t go under. We’ll survive, but not as prosperously as we should have done, because I was blind and pig-headed-
‘But what mattered that much?’ she asked.
He stared. ‘How can you ask? Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me.’
‘I might have wiped out my debt to you, or most of it. For weeks I’ve lived and breathed that. I’ve thought of nothing else but the moment when I could repay you.
‘I told you I could have got the best price if I’d been right. And I blew it. All I can do now is pay you instalments, but I’ll still be deep in your debt.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. His words had raised a hideous possibility. She had been deceiving herself. He wanted her sexually, but he’d never lost the hope of getting rid of her in the end.
‘You don’t see at all,’ he said with soft vehemence.
