‘You won’t listen to me,’ she pointed out strickenly. ‘But I didn’t have the abortion. I changed my mind. I had a miscarriage a couple of months later.’
‘We should return to the party.’
‘Vito, you can’t do this to me!’ she cried.
He expelled his breath in a savage hiss. ‘It’s in the past. Let us bury it forever. I should never have told you that I knew-‘
‘But you did,’ she interrupted emotionally. ‘So you can’t bury it again!’
‘We have to.’ He surveyed her ashen pallor and his dark features tightened. ‘I accept that I was mistaken in assuming that the decision you made cost you no pain. Clearly it did if the subject still causes you such distress, but you have to accept that we are each the products of a very different upbringing and I am as much a victim of that conditioning from childhood as you. I cannot change what I feel, but I can learn to put those feelings behind me. It is something I should have done a long time ago.’
In a passion of pain and bitter frustration, Ashley rose to her feet. Strive as he could, his judgemental attitude of reproach and a complete inability to understand emanated from him in waves. Hot tears brightened her beautiful eyes to luminescence. ‘Why don’t you put those feelings behind you and try concentrating on what you should be feeling?’
‘Meaning?’ he prompted drily.
‘Where the hell were you when I needed you?’ Raw emotion shrilled from the embittered demand. ‘Where were you, Vito? I was nineteen years old and there was nowhere I could turn! You got me pregnant. You walked out. You married another woman. And you say that you I-loved me? Well, the only response I have for you now is… where were you, and where was that love when I needed it?’
He was rigid with shock, all the natural vitality bleached from his golden skin. His classic bone structure stood out in harsh relief, his dazed dark eyes twinned nakedly with hers as he was finally forced to take account of his own sins of omission.
Ashley drew in a deep shuddering breath. ‘You don’t live in the real word, Vito. You never have and you never will,’ she condemned. ‘You have a loving, supportive family and an obscene amount of money. You know about as much about how the rest of us live as a cartoon character! In the whole of your life you have never been in a position where you had no easy choice. So, you can afford to have ideals set in stone. You’ve never had to wonder where your next meal is coming from or how you’re going to survive… and that’s when ideals get compromised!’ A dark rise of blood had banished his pallor. He raised a not quite steady hand and brushed away the tears streaking her cheeks. In one of those lightning-fast switches of mood that disturbed her, she found herself within an ace of throwing herself into his arms. The compulsion was so strong that she might have given in to it had not Vito abruptly withdrawn his hand and straightened again, having belatedly mastered the shocked turmoil she had briefly seen in his strained gaze.
A soft knock on the door prefaced Elena’s carefully slow entry. ‘I do hope I’m not interrupting, but there is a party out here lacking the two principal guests.’ ‘Ashley will join us in a moment.’ Deliberately placing himself so that Ashley’s distraught profile was shielded, Vito guided the older woman out of the room.
In the buzzing silence he left behind, she fought harder than she had ever fought for self-possession and calm. Somewhere a clock struck midnight, and she trembled beneath the awareness that in less than thirty-six hours she would be Vito’s wife.
‘We should reach the villa in another hour.’ Vito settled back in his seat, having enjoyed a long and apparently effortless conversation with their driver, Bandu, in Sinhalese. The house in the hill country had been in the Cavalieri family for four generations. He, had dropped that fact casually as they boarded the plane in London, modestly neglecting to mention that he also spoke the language.
Even after a nerve-racking hour, Ashley was still on the edge of her seat at the sheer death-defying style of driving in Sri Lanka. Bandu wove in and out wildly at what seemed far too great a speed for safety, jumping on his horn with gusto and making absolutely no use of any other form of signal. Behind them an ox was pulling a cart piled high with pineapples, unconcerned by the jam building up to its rear. In front was an incredibly dilapidated lorry. A lanky youth was sleeping precariously on top of the sacks, quite unaware that a sack near him had come open and was dropping coconuts at regular intervals beneath their wheels. An ancient old man, balancing a basket of fish on his head, jay-walked out in front of them at an unbelievably leisurely pace and actually stopped to adjust the load he carried. Ashley vented a stifled shriek, certain they would hit him, but Bandu simply swerved violently and continued on.
‘Driving in Colombo requires nerves of steel,’ Vito commented with wry amusement. Still shaking with reaction, Ashley suppressed a yawn.
‘You are still tired?’ Vito looked politely astonished. ‘A bit.’ Yet she had slept throughout most of that endless flight. Perhaps that was why none of this seemed real. The wedding had taken place yesterday and they had spent the night on the plane. She couldn’t understand why she was still so tired. Possibly it was the immense strain of striving to accept that she was now Vito’s wife.
It didn’t seem possible. Ashley di Cavalieri. The Press had been outside the church, dealing yet another shock to her system. She had expected a very quiet wedding. True, Vito had not said it would be, but she had assumed that, since this was not to be a normal marriage, he would prefer a register office and an absolute minimum of frills.
As a result, she had been quite unprepared for the delivery and last-minute fitting of an oyster silk wedding gown and equally unprepared for the bouquet, the two hundred guests, the private party afterwards and the exquisite wedding cake flown in specially from Rome. Actually, by that stage, Ashley had gone beyond shock. She had played a starring role in the sort of grand bridal soap opera that she had never dreamt she would experience. At the back of her mind screamed the awareness that today, thanks to the power of the media, her entire family would learn that she had married.
Her mother would be deeply hurt by her total ignorance of the proceedings. Her father would be furious that that same ignorance would be equally obvious to their neighbours. Susan would be offended. And Tim? Ashley’s soft mouth took on an anxious curve. Her brother would probably be very suspicious of the extraordinary speed and secrecy with which the marriage had taken place.
The streets, crammed to capacity with children, cattle, bicycles and every other possible form of transport, were now behind them. The narrow winding road climbed through coconut and cashew plantations. Rice grew in paddies along the way and in every direction palm fronds were etched like lacy sentinels against the deep blue unclouded sky.
A trio of dark-skinned girls, wrapped in colourful sarongs, stood washing themselves at a standpipe by the side of the road. Bandu braked to avoid the staggering steps of a naked little toddler stamping in a puddle near the pipe. Ashley grinned. Children were the same the world over. The attraction of water play was universal.
‘What a beautiful child.’ She craned her neck to catch a last glimpse of the engaging toddler.
‘The Sinhalese are a very attractive people.’ Something in his tone made her turn her head. A questioning glint lit his perceptive gaze. Suddenly conscious that she had accidentally jettisoned her role of indifference to children, Ashley avoided his eyes and stiffened.
A few miles further on, the car turned up a steep, gated drive through a grove of cassia trees. Ashley climbed out into the hot, still air and dazedly studied the building before her. Dropped into an English village, it would have looked perfectly at home there. It had all the solid charm of a Victorian country house with the addition of a wraparound veranda to permit greater enjoyment of the tropical climate.