Stolen Bride

‘Okay,’ she said at last, a lump rising in her throat as she grasped the door handle. ‘I’ll get out of your way then.’

He reached across her, his hand on hers, her body stilling at the close contact. His face was only inches from her own, his eyes probing deep into hers. Then he pulled back, her hand imprisoned in his, and gazed at her for a few moments.

‘Let’s start again, shall we?’ he said softly. ‘First of all, is there any place that you could safely go? Somewhere Luca and your uncle won’t be able to coerce you?’

‘There is only my uncle’s home,’ she said in a low voice. Finn was stroking the back of her fingers with his thumb, almost as if it was helping him think. Her first instinct, to pull away completely, slowly melted at the oddly comforting sensation.

‘Maybe,’ she began diffidently, ‘maybe it would be all right if I went home. If I tell them it wasn’t nerves, that I truly don’t love Luca, then maybe they’ll listen.’

‘Really?’ Finn drawled. His eyes gazed into hers, and she reddened and looked away.

‘I’m sure my uncle wants only what is best for me,’ she said in low voice.

‘Uh-huh,’ he replied, his tone loaded with disbelief, and she glanced angrily at him.

‘Who are you to pass such judgement on my family?’ she demanded.

‘Let’s say I’m an interested observer,’ he said at last.

‘Observer?’ she echoed. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Finn—’

‘Cormac!’ she interjected, pulling her hand away and glaring at him. ‘Finn Cormac. I know now! You are the...’ She tried to think of a suitable swear word and failed. “The...thing who wrote all those lies about Luca’s family. You made millions out of blackening his name. You—’

He held up his hand. ‘Save it,’ he interrupted. ‘In the first place, everything I wrote was true. Luca is just one step ahead of the police at the moment, and two steps from a very long jail term. And in the second, the money I made out of that book, I earned. Unlike the fortune his family has extorted and stolen and been bribed with over the last thirty years.’

Her jaw dropped. ‘That’s a lie,’ she whispered.

‘Okay.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a lie, and your jilted bridegroom is a saint in disguise. So what are you going to do about it?’

She jerked open the car door. ‘I’m going home,’ she snarled, angry tears beginning to fill her eyes.

‘To marry Luca?’ he said softly.

Her hand stilled on the door. ‘What else can I do?’ she said in a low voice. ‘I have nowhere else to go. I have no one but my family.’ She swallowed a sob. ‘Luca’s not so bad, I suppose.’

Finn shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a woman in the late twentieth century,’ he said. ’Have you no independence at all?’

She stiffened her body and stared at him. ‘Independence?’ she echoed, trying to match his tone. ‘In my family? How can I be independent? I have no money, I am not qualified to do anything except...’ She waved her hands. ‘Except marry, run a home and bring up children.’

She glared at him. ‘Maybe if I’d been brought up somewhere else I’d be running an oil company, like in those soaps you see on TV. But I wasn’t, and I’m not, and I can’t help it.’

He looked at her for a long moment and then lifted his hands helplessly and dropped them. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I suppose that was a rather stupid remark.’

Cara relaxed a little at his tone. ‘I know that I have led a very sheltered life,’ she said carefully. ‘But I never saw it as something particularly to regret until I found myself locked into marrying Luca.’

She shrugged self-consciously, ‘If I’m honest, at first I liked the idea. I thought of the nice big house we would live in, and I imagined the dinner parties, the clothes...’ Her voice faltered. ‘The children I would have.’

She bit her lip and then went on more steadily. ‘And then little by little, I realised that in every picture I conjured up, none of them contained Luca.’

She raised her eyes to Finn’s. ‘Not one,’ she repeated. ‘Isn’t that crazy? It was as if I was just day-dreaming. And then someone, I forget who, someone made a joke about my wedding night, and I realised that I really was going to marry Luca, that it was all set, and that after all the things I had imagined—the ceremony and the fuss and the party—1 was actually going to have to get into bed with him.’

Her voice trailed away and she swallowed. ‘You probably think this was really silly of me, that it took so long to come to grips with reality. But Luca has always been in my life. I just never thought of him as a husband.’

Her eyes rested briefly on Finn’s face and then slid away while she waited for him to tell her how stupid she had been. Why on earth had she told him all that? He was a stranger who at best probably thought she was as dim as Luca did. She oughtn’t to be telling him anything.

It was with a bolt of pure shock that she felt him take her hand and raise it to his lips. ‘What... what are you doing?’ she blurted.

He kissed her hand and smiled at her. ‘Just a spur of the moment thing,’ he drawled. ‘But it seems kind of appropriate to kiss the person who’s belted Luca Finzi right where it hurts.’

She tugged her hand away. ‘Well, don’t,’ she said, more sharply than she meant to. It was just silly, the way he was making her feel. Desperately, she cast around for something to say. Anything.

‘If I could choose,’ she said hurriedly. ‘If I was independent, then maybe I would go to England.’ She looked him straight in the eye and tried to ignore the way her heart was thumping erratically. ‘My nanny was English, and my uncle always used to listen to her. He said Sarah talked a lot of sense. Maybe if I went to her, he would listen again.’

There was a long silence, so long that she looked away and began to wonder if he had lost interest in the whole conversation. Maybe he was waiting for her to get out of the car.

Then he sighed, and she looked quickly at him. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

‘It stinks,’ he said simply.

Her eyes narrowed, but before she could say anything Finn went on, ‘Let’s get this straight, okay? Just so there’s no confusion. We are on the run from the Mafia and you think the only person they will listen to is some decrepit old nanny of yours who probably spends most of her days mumbling over her knitting?’

Cara thought of the last time she had seen Sarah. Even now her nanny wouldn’t be more than fifty, and her natural elegance was the kind that drew all eyes. Her jaw dropped at the picture Finn was drawing, but in the circumstances his conclusions were probably reasonable enough. She just had to get him to see her point of view. ‘You’re being over the top,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Over the top?’ he echoed. ‘Me? Uh-uh. There’s somebody in this car who has a screw loose, and it’s certainly not me. Not even a baby would think that your answer to Mary Poppins will be able to wave a magic wand and save you.’

Cara shrugged angrily. ‘Take me back to the church, then,’ she said recklessly.

He grabbed her other arm and gave her a little shake. ‘Are you crazy?’

She glared at him. ‘Do what you like,’ she snapped. ‘I’m perfectly sane. And so is Sarah. She’s the only one that stands any chance of making my uncle listen.’

He looked at her scathingly, and she burst out, ‘Well, she is! And for your information I don’t think she does much knitting.’

‘Probably past it,’ snapped Finn. ‘Isn’t there anybody else you know?’

‘No one,’ Cara said firmly. ‘She is our best bet, truly.’

‘So why wasn’t she at the wedding?’ he demanded.

Cara shrugged. ‘Uncle Pancrazio said she was too ill to come.’

Finn nodded. ‘That figures,’ he said drily.

Cara realised she was pleating a small square of her dress. ‘Would you lend me the money for a plane ticket to England?’ she asked at last, not daring to look up.

‘No,’ he replied, and her heart sank. ‘There’s no way you could get on a plane without being spotted and stopped by Luca’s men,’ he added. ‘I’m going to England. I have contacts there who may be of use. I’ll take you.’