Count Valieri's Prisoner Read online

  But not to sleep. Instead she’d lain, staring into the darkness, counting the hours. Twice she’d got up, stumbling over to the door to his room and standing there, her fingers clasping the handle but afraid to turn it.

  Wondering which would be worse—to find the bed unoccupied or risk another rejection.

  When he’d said it was over, she hadn’t realised he also meant she had served her purpose. That at best she had been a challenge but now she had become an inconvenience to be dispensed with as soon as possible. A line had been drawn and her pathetic ill-judged attempt to cross it had simply ended in her own humiliation.

  In the morning, all the other possessions she’d brought to Italy were waiting in the hall, as she came downstairs with her travel bag. Nothing had been overlooked.

  Removing all trace of me, she thought, and the hurt of that was not assuaged by discovering at the airport that she’d been upgraded to first class.

  Waiting for the flight to be called, she’d rung Aunt Fee, Todd and her flatmates warning them of her imminent return.

  But not Jeremy. She wasn’t ready to face him. Not immediately.

  I’ve too much to hide, she’d told herself, and I need some leeway.

  Because she was too muddled, too emotionally bruised to be making major decisions about her future. Her days at the House of the Wolf had thrown her entire life into chaos and somehow she needed to pick up the threads of her existence and weave them back into a pattern that made sense.

  Because, with the only certainty in her reeling world, she knew that if Andrea Valieri had taken her when she offered herself, she would not have left.

  That she would have given herself, body and soul, for good or ill, and for as long as he wanted.

  And the knowledge terrified her.

  But now she had a whole weekend of peace and quiet in which to pull herself together, close the door on the past, and rebuild her future. The real future she had so nearly betrayed.

  ‘Back where we belong,’ Jeremy had said, and he was right. Because that was surely what she had to aim for. To remember, to the exclusion of all else, why she’d fallen in love with him, and agreed to be his wife. Because nothing else mattered.

  After all, it would be wrong to assign any real blame in the Marchetti affair to him. He wasn’t responsible for something his father had done before he was born and lied about ever since.

  Essentially, she needed to create a strong marriage which would act as a counterweight to Nigel Sylvester’s influence. It wouldn’t be easy, because she couldn’t destroy Jeremy’s illusions about his father, but it must happen if they were to have any chance of happiness.

  And I’ll make it happen, she vowed silently.

  Sally and Trisha had gone to the cinema, so she had the flat to herself when she got back. There was quiche and salad waiting in the fridge, so she ate a quick supper and decided to look through some of the emails that had accumulated on her personal laptop while she’d been absent.

  As she scrolled down, the name ‘Janet Gladstone’ leapt out at her. My wedding dress, she thought, faintly puzzled. I wasn’t expecting to hear from her.

  She clicked on the message, and sat, staring in disbelief. ‘It was a rush,’ it read. ‘But I’ve managed to get it finished. Please let me know when you can come for a final fitting.’

  For a moment, Maddie felt as if a cold hand had touched her skin. Did Mrs Gladstone practise clairvoyance in her spare time? she wondered. Because this was more than odd. In fact, it was seriously weird, and distinctly premature.

  ‘What a surprise,’ she wrote back, after some thought. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend.’

  And I’ll be asking some questions at the same time, she thought as she pressed Send.

  * * *

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Maddie said almost reverently, letting the wild silk shimmer round her as she turned slowly in front of the full-length mirror. ‘Beautiful. And it needs no alterations at all.’ She shook her head. ‘Amazing. Thank you so much.’

  Janet Gladstone beamed with satisfaction. ‘Not completely finished. Just one last stitch needed in the hem before you leave for the church. I like the old superstitions.’

  Before I leave for the church, thought Maddie, trying to imagine it. To see herself walking up the aisle on Uncle Patrick’s arm to where Jeremy waited. To feel her heart lift as he turned to smile at her.

  But this inner picture was strangely blurred, and, as she tried to focus, it wavered and vanished.

  As the dress was wrapped in sheets of tissue then carefully encased in its plastic carrier, Maddie asked her question.

  ‘Mrs Gladstone, why did you think this was a rush job? The date I gave you is still weeks away.’

  ‘But Mrs Sylvester told me that date no longer applied. She said that she was calling on your behalf to warn me that the wedding would now be much earlier, and that the order would be cancelled if I couldn’t finish the dress in the time available.’

  She added, looking anxious, ‘I hope I haven’t got it wrong, but she seemed so definite.’

  ‘Well, the mistake isn’t yours,’ Maddie said lightly. ‘And what really matters is that I have a wonderful dress.’

  She paid the bill and took the dress carrier back to the parking area, placing it carefully across the rear seat of Aunt Fee’s car.

  She’d intended to go straight home, but when she reached the crossroads, she turned left, heading for Fallowdene.

  The housekeeper who answered the door agreed that Mrs Sylvester was at home, and conducted her to the drawing room where Esme was lounging on a sofa reading ‘Vogue’, a tray of coffee on the table in front of her.

  ‘Madeleine,’ she said. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ She put down her magazine and waved her to the opposite sofa. ‘Mrs Ferguson, please bring another cup.’

  ‘Thank you, but I don’t want any coffee.’ Maddie paused. ‘I’ve just collected my wedding dress, and I’d like to know why you wanted it finished in such a tearing hurry—and in my absence.’

  Esme Sylvester’s elegant brows rose. ‘The Gladstone woman’s actually managed it? How unexpectedly efficient. But I was just the messenger. And a very surprised one, let me tell you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t think there was going to be a wedding. Neither my husband nor my stepson like having their express wishes ignored, and Jeremy wants a wife who’ll do as she’s told and fall into line when required. Your Italian trip was quite the last straw.

  ‘But then you were kidnapped, and they had to think again.’

  She paused. ‘If it had been only about money, they’d never have paid, of course, whatever the kidnappers had threatened. Some statement would have been issued about it being morally reprehensible to yield to blackmail.

  ‘But this, of course, was far worse. This was loss of face. Potential ruin.

  ‘Which is why they had to get you home, and why Jeremy has to sweep you off your feet and into instant matrimony. Because, my dear Madeleine, you now know far too much about the Tommaso Marchetti unpleasantness, and they need those particular facts kept safely in the family.’

  Maddie’s lips felt stiff. ‘You—and Jeremy both know the truth?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Esme sounded almost bored. ‘Jeremy and his father have no secrets from each other. And, unlike you, I never had any illusions about the man I was going to marry. But the rewards have more than compensated for any passing moral qualms. Will you be able to say the same?’

  ‘I don’t believe any of this,’ Maddie said desperately. ‘You’re simply saying these things to make trouble, because you’ve never liked me.’

  Esme smiled cynically. ‘You mean Jeremy hasn’t already questioned you about what the Valieri man intends to do with his information? Whether he can be trusted to keep his word about Nigel’s confession?’

  ‘How—how did you know that?’

  ‘Because, my naïve child, I know the Sylvesters and you don’t�
�or not yet, anyway. And until they get an answer, they won’t stop asking.’

  She paused. ‘And I’m trying to do you a favour here, because you’ve no idea what you’re getting into.’

  She gave a short laugh. ‘You always made it so transparently clear you were planning to prise Jeremy lovingly from his father’s grasp. But that will never happen, because, whatever you may choose to believe, Jeremy is no longer the boy you fell in love with years ago, but his father’s own son.’

  She lowered her voice confidentially. ‘In fact, I can see a time when Nigel will learn from him. And I’m not at all sure you’ll be able to cope with that, however rich you become. You see, we’re so very different, you and I.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maddie said quietly. ‘Yes, we are.’ She eased the diamond ring from her left hand and put it on the table. ‘Thank you. It’s been—illuminating. You see I’d almost convinced myself that Jeremy needed me.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Esme said softly. ‘Those two only need each other.’

  Maddie was never sure how she got out of the house and back into the car. And of the journey home, she could only remember pulling over on to a verge somewhere and kneeling on the grass being violently sick.

  And when the paroxysms were over, she sat up, knowing she was absolved from guilt and heart searching, and half-laughing, half-crying with the relief of it. Knowing too that being completely and utterly alone was so much better than settling for less than second best.

  And that, somehow, she could learn to live with that.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHAT TOOK MADDIE slightly aback was the general lack of surprise over the news of her broken engagement. Uncle Patrick murmured that they’d ‘often wondered’, while Aunt Fee merely whisked away the wedding dress, and produced one of her sumptuous roast duck dinners.

  Trisha and Sally took her clubbing, and Todd, with his usual single-mindedness, said he welcomed the news if it meant she would not be leaving any time soon.

  And no-one asked her if she was sure she was doing the right thing.

  What did they see that I didn’t? Maddie wondered, but decided not to enquire.

  All the opposition came from Jeremy, who laid siege to her, with texts, emails, armfuls of flowers and visits to the office and the flat, with pleas to ‘talk things over, my darling, before it’s too late’.

  To all of which, she replied quietly and firmly that there was nothing to discuss. Her decision had been made once and for all, and she intended to treat the past as a closed book.

  The flowers she took to a local hospice. Her conversation with Esme she kept strictly to herself.

  And if she seemed quiet, with a propensity for staring into space, lost in thoughts that were clearly not happy—well, that was surely natural after a broken engagement. So people drew the obvious conclusions, and tactfully forbore to ask questions that she would have found impossible to answer with any degree of truth, if at all.

  Time passed slowly, turned into one week, then two, and if her days were easier than her nights, then that was something she admitted only to herself.

  Work continued to be her salvation. She and a colleague were researching material for a programme on people whose newly discovered talents had changed their lives. They’d already talked to a roofing engineer who’d learned to play the clarinet and was now performing regularly with a jazz band, a security guard whose watercolours had found a market in a London gallery, while Maddie had just arranged to go to Oxford to interview a retired female academic who’d written an explosively bloodthirsty thriller, when Todd emerged from his office, his eyes popping with excitement.

  He said, ‘Remember your wild goose chase to Italy? Well, the goose has been found. Floria Bartrando has made contact, would you believe, and she’s willing to talk to us.’

  For a moment, Maddie felt as if she’d been turned to stone. When she could speak, she said, ‘Well good luck to whoever does it.’

  Todd stared at her. ‘For heaven’s sake, Maddie, it’s you. She’s asked for you by name.’

  Maddie shook her head. ‘I can’t do it, Todd. I—I can’t possibly go back to Italy. Please don’t ask me to explain.’

  ‘But she’s not in Italy.’ He slapped a triumphant hand on Maddie’s desk. ‘She’s here in London, staying at the Mayfair Royal hotel, Suite Fourteen, and she’ll see you this evening at half seven. How about that?’

  She took a breath. ‘I suggest you send Holly. I have plans for tonight.’

  Todd gave her a level look. ‘Then change them. I’ve told you—it’s you she wants to see, and no-one else.’ He looked at her pale mutinous face and sighed. ‘God, I’ll never understand women. You’re gone for days on end looking for her, and now she’s turned up you don’t want to know. I thought you’d be turning cartwheels.

  ‘Well, this is your project, honey, so—whatever the problem—deal with it.’ And he went back into his office and banged the door.

  She wanted to go after him—to scream, ‘It’s not a problem, it’s a nightmare.’ Except that would involve her in explanations she could not afford to make.

  ‘I’m in the wrong job for secrets,’ she muttered under her breath.

  She achieved little for the rest of the day, and went home early, pleading a headache. ‘Take some ibuprofen,’ Todd called after her. ‘Make sure you’re on top form for seven-thirty.’ And his tone made clear it was an order rather than a suggestion.

  She dressed down deliberately for the interview—straight grey skirt, plain white blouse, low-heeled black shoes—and pulled her hair back from her face, fastening it severely at the nape of her neck with a black ribbon.

  Making it clear to the Contessa that she was no longer the girl her son had brought to Portofino.

  The Mayfair Royal was an old-fashioned hotel, with no canned music or loud voices in its hushed and spacious foyer, luxuriously decked out in mahogany and marble.

  A polite receptionist confirmed to Maddie that she was expected, and directed her to the lift.

  As Maddie emerged on the first floor, a thin grey-haired man was waiting for her.

  ‘Signorina Lang.’ He gave her a kind smile. ‘My name is Guido Massimo. Will you come with me, please?’

  She walked beside him, her feet sinking into the thick carpet, waiting as he produced the key card for Suite Fourteen and opened the door, standing back politely to allow her to precede him.

  Maddie stepped into an elegant sitting room, furnished in shades of blue. Glancing round her, she supposed that the double doors to her left and right led to the bedrooms, while ahead of her, a pair of tall windows, giving access to a wrought iron balcony, admitted the fading sunlight of the early June evening.

  Behind her, she heard the door close softly, and, turning, realised that Mr Massimo had not accompanied her into the room and that she was alone.

  So who will be making the grand entrance? she wondered, mentally bracing herself. Floria Bartrando or the Contessa Valieri?

  But when the left hand bedroom door opened, she stood transfixed, her eyes widening endlessly in disbelief as Andrea walked into the room, lean in a sombre dark suit, his shirt open at the throat, his silk tie pulled loose. He paused, hands on hips, tight-lipped, the golden eyes brooding as he looked at her.

  He said, ‘So you came. I was not sure that you would.’

  ‘I am here,’ she said, recovering her breath, ‘to talk to your mother. No other reason.’ She looked past him, proud of the chill steadiness of her voice. Thankful, too, for her sedate choice of clothing in such marked contrast to the little she’d been wearing at their last confrontation. A memory that made her want to die inside all over again.

  ‘So,’ she went on, ‘where is she, please?’

  ‘She is visiting friends outside London. She will return tomorrow.’

  She swallowed. ‘In that case, so shall I.’

  ‘I cannot force you to stay,’ he said. His fleeting smile was wry. ‘Much as I might wish to do so. But before you go, answer me
one question. Is it true that you are no longer engaged to Sylvester’s son?’

  She flushed. ‘That is not your concern.’

  ‘Then let us make it so,’ he said. ‘I have travelled a long way, Maddalena, to hear your reply.’

  ‘Then you’ve wasted your time, signore.’

  ‘Hope,’ he said, ‘is never wasted.’

  On her way to the door, she turned. ‘Hope?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘What can you possibly be hoping for?’

  He said softly, ‘Why, for you, carissima, if you are no longer promised to the man you left me for.’ He took a step towards her. ‘You by my side, in my arms, in my bed. Mine completely.’

  Her outer tension had not relaxed, but she was trembling inside with shame and anger. And an irrational sense of disappointment.

  ‘How very flattering,’ she said savagely. ‘So I’ll be your girl in London as opposed to the ones in Genoa—Turin—Rome—or any bloody where. No doubt the list is endless. Is that what you’re suggesting? Because the answer’s no.’

  ‘Do not insult yourself, or me, Maddalena. I do not pretend there have not been women in my life. I am not a eunuch.’ His eyes met hers directly, compellingly. ‘But, since I met you, no-one. I swear it.’ He paused. ‘It was—impossible.’

  ‘You’re conveniently forgetting your lady friend in Viareggio.’ Maddie flung back her head.

  He said quietly, ‘I visited Giulia once, to say goodbye. She deserved that courtesy.’

  ‘But you went back to her,’ she said. ‘The night before I left. You told me so.’

  ‘No, mia cara. I used that as an excuse. Infatti, I drove to Trimontano and stayed alone at the hotel where you had your reservation, in the room where you would have slept.’

  He shook his head. ‘I wanted you so badly, my sweet one, that I did not dare spend another night under the same roof with you, or find you still there in the morning.’

  ‘If that’s true,’ Maddie whispered, ‘then why—why did you want to send me away?’

  ‘In order to fulfil my bargain with the Sylvesters.’ His voice was suddenly harsh. ‘Because I had promised on my honour that I would do so, even though it was like tearing the heart out of my body.