The Italian's Rightful Bride - By Lucy Gordon Page 0,6

have nothing to offer you.’

‘Why can’t we be happy?’ That was Crystal’s voice. ‘Don’t you love me?’

‘You know I love you,’ he said, almost violently. ‘I didn’t know I could feel like this. If I had—’

He stopped. Joanna listened, her heart beating madly. If he had…

‘If you’d met me first, you wouldn’t have proposed to Joanna, would you?’

‘Never,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Don’t you want to marry me, my darling?’

‘Don’t ask me that.’

‘But I must ask it,’ she persisted in her soft, enticing voice. ‘If we’re going to lose each other, at least give me honesty.’

‘All right, I want to marry you,’ he said in a fierce, passionate voice. ‘I can’t, but neither can I stop loving and wanting you. You’re there with me every moment, night and day, waking or sleeping.’

‘Then how can you cast me aside?’

‘Because I have made promises to Joanna. My darling, I beg you to understand, I must keep those promises.’

‘Why? She doesn’t love you any more than you love her.’

‘But we’re a few days from our wedding. How can I humiliate her in front of the world?’

‘Gustavo, have you thought of the future? All those years tied to a woman you don’t love. How will you endure them?’

The silence that followed froze Joanna to the soul. Just a few seconds, but enough to make her feel that she was dying. At last his answer came in a voice that was bleak with despair.

‘I’ll survive, somehow.’

She’d thought her heart couldn’t break any more, but when she heard that she knew she was wrong.

And strangely, it was the knowledge that there was nothing more to hope for that made it possible for her to step out from behind the tree, smiling and saying brightly, ‘Isn’t there something you want to tell me?’

Their faces were imprinted on her memory forever, Gustavo’s pale and shocked, Crystal’s with an expression she couldn’t read. Only later did she think of cats and cream. At the time she was concentrating on what she must do.

Crystal spoke first, sounding suitably uneasy.

‘Joanna, we didn’t mean you to find out like this.’

‘It doesn’t matter how I found out,’ she answered with a fair assumption of gaiety. ‘The point is that we’re still in time to put matters right.’

‘I have no intention of asking you to free me.’ Gustavo’s voice was hollow.

‘But perhaps I’d like to chuck you out,’ she replied with a shrug. ‘Oh, come on, this isn’t the nineteenth century. The sky isn’t going to fall if there’s a last-minute change of plan.’

She never forgot the look on his face then, sheer blinding hope at the thought of not having to marry her.

‘You—mean that?’ he asked as though unable to believe his ears.

‘Of course I mean it. Honestly, darling,’ she added, using the term of endearment for the first time, ‘if you’re in love with someone else—well, why should I want you?’

‘But the formalities—’

‘Blow the formalities. We’ve changed our minds. Both of us. Come on, let’s get it over with.’

She turned away quickly, not sure how long she could keep up the façade. As she began to walk she heard Gustavo call, ‘Joanna…’

And there it was, the note she had dreamed of hearing in his voice, warm and emotional now that he was grateful for his release. She fled back to the house.

She had only the dimmest recollection of what followed. There was family uproar, scene after scene in which she did most of the talking, laughing as she insisted that it was a mutual decision and she couldn’t be happier.

She doubted if anyone was fooled, especially as the engagement to Crystal came immediately after. But in the face of her determination there was nothing anybody could do.

A special licence was obtained with Crystal’s name on it and the wedding was to go ahead on the same day in the same church, with one bride substituted for another. Joanna sailed through the whole process, apparently with not a care in the world. She dreaded their wedding, but knew she had to be there or the world would know why.

For a while the need to put on an act kept her mind on the terrible ache inside. At night she sobbed herself to sleep. By day she smiled and smiled and smiled.

By the night before the wedding the strain of weeping in secret was tearing her apart. She wanted to scream aloud, impossible in that house.

Outside it had begun to rain, water coming down in noisy torrents with the occasional thunderclap. Too distraught to think clearly,