My goodness, she was a cracking little dancer! How we kicked up our heels that night! It was her way of showing the world that she was fancy-free. Which she wasn’t.’
‘That is not what she told me,’ Gustavo said slowly.
‘She told you what she knew you wanted to hear. The fact is that she was madly in love with you, but she saw you kissing the other girl, so she gave you your release papers, and fed you some cock-and-bull story to make it easy for you.’
He paused to see if Gustavo would speak, but there was no sound. Gustavo’s eyes seemed to burn into him.
‘When we met again a year later, I thought she might be over you,’ Freddy went on. ‘But she wasn’t. Mind you, I wasn’t sure until after we were married. I may not be the sharpest tool in the box but I know when I’m making love to a woman who’s pretending I’m another man.’
Like a shaft of lightning a memory came back to Gustavo.
‘More than one way of being unfaithful,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what you said.’
‘That’s right. Jo was always strictly faithful to me in the technical sense, but there were always three of us in the bed, if you know what I mean.’
‘But…’ Gustavo struggled for the right words, trying not to yield too easily to the spurt of joy that was mounting inside him ‘…this is only a theory. You might have misunderstood—’
‘Well, I didn’t. I know that because we once had a bit of a barney and she virtually admitted it. She was fond of me in her way, and it was a good marriage to start with. We can share jokes, you see, and that can paper over a lot of cracks for a while. But when it came down to it, you were always the one.
‘That’s partly why I turned up at Etta’s wedding, because I’d heard a rumour that you and she were going to be there together, and you were divorced. I wanted to talk about Billy as well, but, as Jo pointed out, I could have done that by phone.
‘I needed to see you, get the lie of the land. That’s also why I barged in on you in that rude way. I wanted to catch you unawares. Yes, yes, I know I’m a vulgarian. Let’s take that bit as read. Anyway, I found out what I wanted to know.’
‘And what do you think you found out?’
‘She’s nuts about you, you’re nuts about her. End of story. Or it should be if you weren’t such a pair of chumps. Get on with it, for Pete’s sake, before I lose patience.’
Gustavo sat in silence, feeling as though something had winded him.
‘Did it really never occur to you,’ Freddy asked kindly, ‘that Jo did what she knew you wanted, and broke her own heart in the process?’
Gustavo shook his head.
‘Damned if I see how you could have missed it.’
Gustavo gave a faint smile, directed at himself.
‘Maybe I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, either,’ he admitted.
‘No “maybe” about it. Isn’t it time you did something? Or are you going to wait another twelve years?’
Gustavo slammed his glass down.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
In the hall he met Billy.
‘Have you seen my dad?’
‘In the library. Have you seen your mother?’
‘In her room.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks.’
He marched into Joanna’s room without knocking. She was just drying off after stepping out of the shower, and she whirled on him indignantly.
‘You’ve got a nerve—’ she said, trying to grab the towel.
‘I have now. I lost my nerve for a while but I’ve got it back. We’ve got to forget all the nonsense we talked the other night because…’
It should have been so easy, he thought distractedly. Where were the speeches of love, the declarations of passion that had come so easily the other time?
But the other time hadn’t mattered like this, and suddenly he was tongue-tied. The only words that would come were—
‘Is your ex-husband an honest man?’
‘What?’
‘Is he an honest man? When he says you love me, that you’ve always loved me, going right back to last time—can I believe him?’
She stared at him, incredulous. He met her eyes, his own filled with a terrible intensity that showed what this meant to him. For a moment the whole world seemed to hang in the balance.
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘You can believe him. I fell in love with you back then. I knew you didn’t love me but I’d have married you and hoped for the best. I was going to make you love me. Only then Crystal turned up and I knew it was no use. You can’t make people love you.’
‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘You can only wait and hope that their eyes will open and they’ll see the truth before it’s too late.’
He grasped her shoulders so urgently that the last of the towel slipped to the floor. She didn’t notice.
‘Tell me it isn’t too late for us,’ he begged.
Her eyes shone. ‘It will never be too late as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Since we met again I’ve known that you were the one and only, but telling you so was impossible. There seemed to be so many things in the way, but they were all fantasies. I’d have known that if I were seeing straight.
‘I said once that you shouldn’t have released me, but if you hadn’t it would never have worked out well for us. We could never have had then the marriage that we’re going to have now.’
‘Are we?’
He took her in his arms. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we are.’
It was a kiss to mark the end of the lonely years and seal a promise.
‘Tell me that you love me,’ he whispered against her lips.
‘I’ve always loved you, and I always will. Gustavo, my darling, are you quite sure?’
‘I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.’
‘People will call you a fortune-hunter.’
‘They can call me what they like as long as you call me husband. I was blind for far too long. But now I can see the way ahead, and it’s there for both of us.’
He lifted her up in his arms, holding her against his chest.
‘Come, my darling,’ he said. ‘No more waiting. Our time has come, and nothing will ever part us again.’
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6246-5
THE ITALIAN’S RIGHTFUL BRIDE
First North American Publication 2005.
Copyright © 2005 by Lucy Gordon.
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*The Italian Brothers
*The Italian Brothers