Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,96

up Erin loosed her grip and leaned back on her heels, her grave blue eyes trained on his face as he swept the blue-black hair back from his brow.

‘I can’t even begin to imagine what it must feel like …’ she said softly.

‘You really want to know?’ he yelled, turning his seething anger on her. ‘Will that satisfy your grubby, prurient curiosity? You’re just like all the others, pretending sympathy while enjoying the misfortunes of another!’

Erin flinched at the bile in his tone but did not try and defend herself or protest this very black view of human nature.

‘If you want to tell me, Francesco.’

She realised he had never stopped blaming himself for his brother’s death.

‘I wake up every morning and there’s a dark empty space inside me … a black hole.’ He pressed a hand to his chest and turned eyes that were filled with bitter self-reproach to Erin. ‘It hurts knowing that I will never see him again, never hear his voice again, and the worst part is I could have stopped it. I should have known.’ He swallowed, the muscles in his brown throat working as he closed his eyes.

Hand pressed to her mouth, Erin watched as he fought to regain control. She was shocked and horrified. How long, she wondered, had he been carrying around this guilt and pain?

‘It never even occurred to me that he was ill.’

Certainly when Rafe had turned up at his place looking the personification of a tragic hero Francesco had been more irritated than alarmed. The state of his brother’s marriage, like his mood, had see-sawed violently between bliss and dark, brooding despair.

‘Why didn’t I see that his mood swings were getting worse?’

‘Why should you?’

Francesco’s head came up; he gave her a guarded look. ‘Why?’

‘Yes, why?’ ‘I should have.’

‘We don’t analyse minutely the behaviour of the people close to us.’

‘Maybe Rafe didn’t want me to see, and who could blame him? It’s not as if I’d been wildly sympathetic before.’

Erin flung up her hands in frustrated exasperation. Francesco seemed totally determined to blame himself for what had happened to his twin. ‘Did you tell him everything?’

Francesco dismissed the question with an impatient gesture. ‘That’s not the same thing. If he hadn’t felt he had to hide his illness from me.’ teeth clenched, his features rigid, he ground his clenched fist into the bed frame ‘… if I had known I would have made sure he took his medication. If I’d thought before I doled out advice Rafe might still be alive.’

‘That’s a lot of ifs, Francesco. When bad things happen we look for a reason,’ she began, choosing her words with care. ‘It’s human nature, but sometimes,’ she said sadly, ‘there simply isn’t one to find. Bad things just happen; they happen to good people who don’t deserve it. You can’t blame yourself for what happened to your twin, Francesco. It isn’t your fault.’

He gave a twisted smile. ‘That’s what the doctors said,’ he admitted. ‘They talked about chemical imbalances, but it wasn’t a chemical imbalance in his blood that killed Rafe; it was black despair.’ His voice shook with the depth of his feelings and raw emotion. ‘And I stood by and watched it happen.’

Erin could not bear to hear any more of this. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it!’ she protested. ‘Do you really think your brother would want you to beat yourself up over this?’ she demanded.

He looked startled by the question. ‘I never really.’

‘Thought about it like that? Well, that’s obvious, because if you had you’d have realised that he wouldn’t have any more than you would have wanted him to if the situation had been reversed.’

‘Rafe was always there for me. He always had time for me.’

‘This hair-shirt look really doesn’t suit you, Francesco. In fact all this self-flagellation is pretty self-indulgent.'Ashamed of yelling at him when she ought to have been soothing him, she added a guilty-sounding, ‘Sorry.’

He schooled his laboured breathing to something that approached normality. ‘No, it is I who should be sorry.’ It might be his imagination but Francesco was conscious of feelingfor want of a better word—lighter than he had in a long time.

‘What for? I’m the one who scolded you.’

‘I needed scolding,’ he reflected, a shadow of a smile lifting the sombreness of his expression. ‘You’re right—I am wallowing in self-pity.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No?’ He arched a dark brow and shrugged, one corner of his sensual mouth lifting in a crooked smile that just tore at her sensitive heart. ‘Maybe