Sins of the Past (6 page)

He was angry. She couldn’t understand how he could be so angry. Not if he loved her! He should have been pleased, flattered …

‘I—I didn’t think you’d mind.’ Reduced by the experience of a lifetime and then his frightening anger, she let slip the charade of sophistication that had resulted in her winding up in bed with him.

‘You didn’t think I’d
mind
!’ On his feet now, he swung
away from the bed, slapping his forehead as he did so. ‘My dear, reckless girl.
Mamma mia!
Did you even
think?’

Shamed by his unexpected reaction, and by how irresponsible he thought her, she covered her small breasts with the sheet and asked candidly, ‘Why is my virginity so anathema to you?’ And, in view of how gladly she had sacrificed it for him, she murmured, ‘Shouldn’t you be glad?’

‘No, I darn well shouldn’t! What did you imagine I would say?
“Grazie, signorina?
That was very generous of you"?’

‘Stop it!’ She couldn’t bear it! Not his mood, nor his angry words, let alone the meaning behind them. He was reducing what they had just done to nothing. No—worse than that—to something sordid, making her feel no better than a whore.

‘And what if I’ve made you pregnant? Had you thought of that?’

Yes, she had, she remembered thinking, but only fleetingly, caught up in too many other emotions—desire, passion, embarrassment, the fear of rejection.

‘Do you really think I will have any sympathy with you if you come crying to me in a few weeks saying you’re going to have my baby?’

Numbed by the significance of what those last words could only mean—that he didn’t love her—Riva couldn’t believe he could hurt her any more until, with eyes narrowing into cold, speculative slits, he added, ‘Or was that all part of the plan?’

Pain and bewilderment crumpled her forehead. ‘What?’ She couldn’t even follow what he was saying. ‘What plan?’

‘Is that why you lied to me about being on the pill?’ His features were growing harder with every syllable. ‘Were you hoping to snare me in the same way your mother has snared poor, unsuspecting Marcello? Was the magnanimous gift of your virginity just one more clever ploy to try and feather your own nest? The older woman takes on the uncle, while the younger little siren makes a bid for the even wealthier deluded nephew!’

Even now Riva winced from the spearing cruelty of his words. He had been using
her,
although she hadn’t realised it then, but he hadn’t been able to swallow the knowledge that he might possibly have been a victim of the same treatment—which he certainly hadn’t been.

‘No!’ she’d flung back, rejecting every cruel sentence he’d seemed to think it was his right to throw at her. ‘And anyway, I
am
on the pill!’ She couldn’t bear him knowing she had been such a fool—not after his cold and lacerating accusations. ‘And my mother hasn’t
snared
Marcello. How you can say that?’

Ignoring her wounded question, he said only, ‘You were a virgin.’

She gave a miserable little shrug. ‘So? I knew I was coming to Italy.’ Wretchedly she went on, compounding the lies and worsening the situation for herself in an attempt to prevent him thinking that she was reckless and foolish, and most of all that she might possibly be in love with him. ‘Every girl has to start somewhere.’

‘So you chose me to initiate you?’ He began pulling on his clothes, his body fit and tanned and agile. ‘I’m flattered!’ His voice, his face and the hard purpose of his actions assured her he was anything but.

‘Why not?’ She was near to tears but dared not show it, although her voice was so close to trembling that she didn’t risk saying any more.

‘Well, I sincerely hope I didn’t disappoint you! Unless those cries of pleasure to which you treated me were as fake as you are!’ He left her then, with his shirt flying open, his angry exit punctuated by the thunderous closing of the door.

A couple of days later her mother came crying to her because Marcello had broken off the engagement. Damiano, it seemed, had had both women investigated, and had convinced his uncle of their unsuitability to marry into the D’Amico family. He had found out about Riva’s father, Chelsea’s protest marches, her jobs in downmarket pubs and restaurants. Her
emotional breakdowns. The flat she had once vacated, dragging a sleepy six-year-old with her in the night, in a hurry, and without paying the rent.

Though she’d never actually disclosed any of this, Riva realised that it was the innocent seeds she had sown in his mind during their long conversations which had nurtured the suspicions he’d already had about them both, and led him to discover all the things that her mother—that both of them—had tried to cover up, or rather wanted to forget.

Riva confronted him about it, shaking with anger and wounded pride, and it was then that he took great satisfaction from calling her a liar. After all, she
was,
she thought, unable to defend herself. The way she had behaved with him, pretending to be sophisticated, experienced, not letting on about her true background, her upbringing.

‘You’ll excuse me if I’m not too distressed by not seeing the name of my family dragged down by the likes of you and your mother,
carissima.’

The sarcasm behind his endearment cut into her like a knife as she remembered how tenderly he had whispered it against her cheek, her throat, her hair, when he had been making love to her; when she had thought he meant it.

Her eyes were like dark green pools in the strained, pale structure of her face. ‘You used me.’ It was difficult hiding the pain behind that accusation.

Some private emotion seemed to flit across the harsh lines of his face, but all he said in a cool, detached voice was, ‘And you were very obliging.’

She had to restrain the urge to slap his cruel, handsome face. He’d taken everything else from her—her girlish dreams, her pride, her innocence—and taken the most important thing of all: her mother’s happiness. She wasn’t going to let him take her dignity as well.

‘It seems we both had our agendas,’ he stated coldly, when she was too wounded by his cruelty to speak. ‘Mine was to uphold and safeguard the reputable name of my family.’

‘You’re unscrupulous,’ she breathed, still unable to believe it, her pained eyes frantically searching his for any small grain of contrition—remorse—for what he had done. But there was none.

His mouth moved in a travesty of a smile. ‘Then it seems that we have both been … what is the expression? … tarred with the same brush. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.’ And with that closing remark he turned and strode purposefully away from her, taking with him all her love and trust and the foolish fantasies she had dared to weave around him.

She remembered how they had left that afternoon, with only a manservant seeing them off the premises, how Chelsea had sunk into dejection after that. There had been weeksperhaps months afterwards—when her mother had shown signs of improvement, but Riva’s hopes that the woman would eventually recover from her depressions were short-lived.

When she had come back from the shops that day, and tried in vain to wake her pitiful parent, she’d hadn’t even needed to ask herself why it had happened.

Damiano! He had ruined her mother’s happiness and the pain of it had taken its toll. There was no question in Riva’s mind that he was to blame.

She had cried herself to sleep for weeks, wishing she had never set eyes on him, wishing her mother had never met Marcello D’Amico, that she had never been persuaded into going to Italy with her.

Never mind, she thought now, bringing the car to a hurried standstill in front of the house with the brightly coloured sign outside. At least there was one good thing that had come out of that whole miserable period of her life.

‘M
UMMY!’

Riva laughed, her eyes suddenly aglow, her anxious features smoothing into more relaxed lines as she crouched down to hug the little boy who came rushing into her arms.

‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ she gasped breathlessly to the young woman who ran the little preschool and who came following the little boy out of the house, having seen Riva’s car draw up. She hated being late.

‘That’s perfectly all right.’ Rounded and motherly, Kate Shepherd was her friend as well as her childminder, with two older children of her own. ‘You know I never mind keeping him. He’s an angel,’ she breathed, smiling down at the small figure, now intent on showing Riva something he was holding. ‘It’s just that I have to take my mother for her doctor’s appointment at six today.’

Apologising again, Riva studied the brightly coloured cutout shapes that had been pasted onto the card. A card for her, she realised, reading the higgledy-piggledy writing scrawled over its shiny surface.

‘He made it all by himself.’

Riva’s heart swelled as she hugged him again.

This was the moment she longed for every working day of the week—when she could pick up Ben and listen to him chattering on about his day. He was a very sociable little boy, and enjoyed learning through play. Already he seemed to be
displaying signs of his father’s sharp brain, she realised, her pride in her child’s abilities tempered today by the disturbing and unwelcome memory of the scene that had transpired between her and Damiano earlier.

He didn’t know—how could he? she thought poignantly—that he had fathered a son.

When she had discovered she was pregnant, her mother had urged her to tell him. After all, he was as responsible for what had happened as Riva was, the woman had reasoned. And even if he didn’t want anything to do with her—the truth of that statement had hurt Riva more than she’d been prepared to let her mother know—wasn’t it his responsibility to provide for the child he had fathered?

‘Whatever you think of him,’ Chelsea had made a point of expressing, mistaking Riva’s reluctance for indifference, ‘he
does
have a right to know.’

Which he probably did, Riva thought now, knowing that her mother’s insistence had stemmed largely from all the hardship she had endured herself in bringing up a child single-handed; she didn’t want to see her daughter struggle in the same way. But Riva hadn’t been able to bring herself to do what her mother had advised.

Damiano had made it clear just what he thought about her when he had as good as accused her of wanting him to impregnate her so she could use him as a meal ticket for life!

Bitter anger stirred in her still from the sting of his brutal remark, but she wasn’t going to let it show in front of Ben.

Perhaps her mother had been right, she thought, ruffling the boy’s shiny brown hair, but she hadn’t been able to face Damiano again—not after what he had done. And she certainly had no intention of ever asking him for anything. He had thought her reckless, calculating, a fortune-hunter. She didn’t want the shame and humiliation of having to go crawling back to him and admitting that, on one of those counts at least, he had been right. If she had gone back to him pregnant, he would simply have thought that he’d been right on those
other two counts as well—that she was a gold-digger who had planned for it to happen—and so she had determined right from the start that she would go it alone.

Damiano didn’t know she had conceived during that hot Italian summer, any more than little Benito Singleman knew of his Italian dynasty—that Damiano D’Amico, one of the wealthiest and most influential men of his generation in Italy, was his father. He hadn’t started asking awkward questions yet, but one day he would. And one day she would tell him, Riva determined. But not yet. Because how could you tell an innocent child that his father—the man he should most look up to—was responsible for destroying his grandmother? That she would probably be alive today if it wasn’t for him?

‘Come on, darling,’ she murmured, putting on a bright smile as she led her little son to the car.

Having always slept well, Ben was surprisingly restless over the next few nights, sleeping as fitfully as Riva did. In fact the night before she was due to go to the Old Coach House again, for an early-morning meeting with Damiano, the little boy was so fretful that after several trips to his room to try and soothe him back to sleep Riva woke, startled by the alarm, feeling as though she’d barely slept a wink.

Dressing hurriedly, and fixing a light breakfast for herself and Ben, it took all Riva’s efforts to get the little boy up and on his feet, and she felt decidedly guilty when she finally left him at the childminder’s, still rubbing his eyes with sleep.

‘He might be a bit grouchy today,’ she told Kate, as she handed over the grizzling youngster, and was made to feel even worse than she was already feeling when, having rushed back to her car and started the engine, she glanced back and saw that he had started to cry.

‘It’s all right, Ben. The day’s going to fly, and Mummy will soon be back,’ she called out through the saloon’s open window.

Who was she kidding? she berated herself, with her insides
knotting up as she raced away. Whether he was happy—as he normally was—or fractious and wanting to stay with her as he’d been this morning, it didn’t alter the fact that it was still a long day. The only glimmer of consolation she could take from leaving him was in reminding herself that she was doing it so that she could give him a better childhood than the impoverished and unsettled one she had known herself.

It helped, but only a little. It also wasn’t doing her any good having to acknowledge that she had been so worked up over having to see Damiano again this morning that she had scarcely been able to spare poor Ben any time at all.

Had she forgotten to leave his coat? No, it wasn’t on the back seat. Had she given him his muesli bar? Did he have enough money? Her brain was whirring by the time she reached the Old Coach House, keyed up, shattered, but nonetheless on time.

‘Late night?’ Damiano quipped, missing nothing as she came into the room at the back of the house, where he was typing on his laptop at the table.

‘You could say that,’ she retorted, in no mood this morning to take any of his jibes about ‘special dates'.

He looked so fresh and vital, in a pale grey suit, white shirt and silver tie, with his thick hair groomed to perfection, falling tantalisingly over his immaculate collar. While all she had had time to do was rake a quick-fix gel through her hair, throw on her clothes, wave her mascara wand over her eyelashes and rush out the door.