Wed To The Italian: Bartaldi's Bride / Rome's Revenge / The Forced Marriage

She said with forced brightness, ‘If you’ll excuse me now, Marchese.’

‘Go in peace, signorina.’ She could hear the undercurrent of amusement as he imitated her own formality.

As she turned away, his voice reached her softly, almost tauntingly. ‘But I do not apologise for the dress, Chiara. How could I, when you look so beautiful? A dream of desire for any man’s eyes.’

His words shivered through her being, tapping the turbulent well of emotion he had already created. Clare saw the sunlit day splinter into sparkling fragments as she fought back her tears. Battled with the yearning to go back to him, whatever the cost.

‘You don’t play fair, signore,’ she threw back huskily, keeping her back resolutely turned to him. ‘Has no one ever told you that?’

‘Many people, mia cara.’ There was a quietly implacable note now. ‘And they will also tell you I always play to win.’

She said coolly and clearly, ‘Then it’s fortunate that your prize is Paola, and not myself, signore, or you’d lose. Good afternoon.’

And, forcing her shaking legs to obey her, she walked into the house, and up to the fragile security of her room.

She tried to rest, to sink down into the softness of the big bed and close out the world for a while, but she couldn’t relax. Her mind and body were too much on edge. And even when she closed her eyes, Guido’s image seemed to be stamped inside her eyelids, offering her no escape.

But this was the wrong room in which to evade thoughts of passion, she realised unhappily, recalling what he’d said about his own parents, and their long-ago clandestine lovemaking.

She’d hung the blue dress in a corner of the wardrobe. She wouldn’t wear it again, but she couldn’t bear to throw it away either. At least not yet. One day there would be a time when she would look back on this Umbrian summer with nothing more than a rueful smile, and then she could get rid of it as just another unwanted souvenir. At least, she prayed it would be so.

In the meantime, she had to deal with the sultry heat of the afternoon, the heavy quiet which had descended on the entire household, admixed with the scent of the flowers from the garden below and the drowsy hum of insects.

It was not, she thought grimly, the kind of atmosphere for solitude. It was all too evocative of whispered words, stifled laughter, and the slow, languorous movement of bodies reaching a familiar and precious attunement. A time when love was reaffirmed, and babies were made…