One Night In…

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘MAY I come in?’

Emilia Bentano stood at the doorway of the Milan town house, a heavy designer bag over one shoulder.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Meghan managed through stiff lips, after the shock of seeing this woman again—at her door—had eased.

‘I know I didn’t come off well in Greece,’ Emilia said. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Are you?’ Meghan doubted it. So why was the woman here? To sow more discord between her and Alessandro?

That, she thought grimly, could hardly be done. In the week since they’d returned from Amorphos he’d been aloof, removed. The mask firmly in place. It happened every time their bodies— their souls, their hearts—joined, no matter how briefly.

He drew away; he grew cold. His charm was interspersed with careless mocking comments, a calculated indifference meant to drive her away.

Sometimes Meghan wondered if it would be enough to make her go.

She was so tired of the strain, the pretence. She wanted something real and warm and safe.

This was not part of our bargain.

Leaving him would tear her apart, heart and soul, mind and body. She would never be the same again. She would never be whole.

She didn’t know what else to do.

This slow torture was accomplishing the same thing, only more slowly, more painfully.

And yet at night Alessandro reached for her. Their bodies merged with a desperate yearning that seemed at odds with the strained pleasantries exchanged each day.

They didn’t speak, yet his eyes burned into hers as if memorising her features, as if sending forth a plea.

She just didn’t know if she had the strength to believe any more. To fight for it.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Emilia said quietly, sensing Meghan’s indecision, offering sincerity. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Alessandro … perhaps explain why he is the way he is.’

Meghan’s hand tightened on the door handle. A warm breeze caressed her face; she could smell the begonias that tumbled in a riot from their pots onto the steps.

‘What do you mean?’

Emilia shrugged, smiled. ‘Don’t you have questions? Haven’t you wondered? Everyone has seen what a transformation Alessandro has made in these last months … wondered if it will last. If it’s real.’

‘I know it’s real,’ Meghan said coldly, but her heart was hammering and there was a hollow ring to her words that even she heard.

Emilia raised her eyebrows, cool and knowing. ‘Do you? Do you really, Meghan? Because if I were you in your place I’d wonder. I’d wonder very much.’

‘But you’re not in my place,’ Meghan observed with a detachment she was far from feeling. ‘As much as you may have once wanted to be.’

Emilia was unfazed. ‘Did Alessandro tell you that? Yes, we were lovers. I once thought we might marry … After all, a man like Alessandro would expect to marry eventually, and we’re very much alike.’

The thought that Alessandro was similar to this walking piranha made Meghan taste bile in her throat. Alessandro was nothing like this … not the Alessandro she knew.

The man she wanted him to be … the man she thought he wanted to be.

Yet was that really him? Or a façade?

A fake.

‘I think,’ Meghan said slowly, ‘you’re just trying to cause trouble. But I know you’ll bother me until I let you have your say, so you might as well come in.’

Emilia’s mouth curved up into a triumphant smile. Meghan stepped reluctantly aside, and the other woman sashayed into the house with such sultry confidence that Meghan wished she hadn’t given in.

Yet she wanted to know.

No matter what the truth meant, what it revealed.

She wanted to know.

Then there would be no more secrets.

‘What a quaint little home,’ Emilia said with a gurgle of laughter. ‘Does Alessandro spend much time here?’

Meghan heard the disbelief in her tone, as if she couldn’t imagine Alessandro relaxing in such a boring, bourgeois place.

Maybe he was bored, she thought numbly. Maybe it was all getting too old, too familiar. And it had only been a few weeks.

She led the way into the friendly square lounge, with its squashy red sofas, its long windows spilling sunshine onto the wide pine boards of the floor.

Emilia looked around with an expression of mild distaste, wrinkling her nose as if she were too polite to mention how awful she found it all.

Meghan gritted her teeth. ‘Sit down.’

‘Thank you.’ She perched elegantly on the edge of a sofa, her bag on her lap. She wore, Meghan saw, a tightly fitting red leather jacket and matching skirt, her legs long and bare, her toenails in open sandals painted scarlet.

Meghan sat across from her in an armchair.

‘Now, what is it you want to say?’

‘Ah, yes. Well … in fact …’ Emilia smiled the smile of a sly cat, a cat with a mouse’s tail dangling from its sleek jaws, and opened her bag. ‘I thought these might tell the tale better than I ever could.’ She took out a sheaf of newspaper clippings. Meghan’s stomach dipped.

She held out her hand and took them silently, grateful that her hand didn’t tremble. She leafed through them, one eye-brow raised, making her uninterest known though her mouth was dry.

Meghan handed them back, heart pounding, for the meaning was obvious enough. The clippings were plastered with photographs of Alessandro at parties, his arms around various scantily clad women, his expression somewhere between a rake’s smile and a drunken leer.

He looked, Meghan thought with a sinking feeling, like someone she never wanted to know.

Emilia smiled and said sweetly, ‘Look at this one.’ She took the clippings, sifting through them until she came to the one she wanted and handed it back to Meghan, tapping the photo with one scarlet nail.

Meghan glanced down, recoiled slightly from the photograph of a smoking ruin of a car left on the side of the motorway. The one word in big block letters stood out in bold relief: OMICIDIO?

Murder.

She stared unseeingly, unthinkingly, down at the newspaper. She heard Emilia purr, ‘Now do you want to know?’

‘I think,’ Meghan replied, barely keeping her voice above a whisper, ‘that you’re going to tell me.’ She looked up, her eyes still dry, her heart weighing heavy like a stone. ‘And then you’re going to leave.’

‘You know Alessandro was a bit of a playboy?’ Emilia began, clearly relishing the telling.

‘More than a bit, I believe,’ Meghan replied, and Emilia looked slightly discomfited that she took this news so calmly.

‘Did you know, then,’ she continued in a harder voice, ‘that he and his brother were involved in a car accident? A highly suspicious one, with Alessandro as the driver.’

‘Suspicious?’ Meghan repeated, trying to sound scornful and not quite succeeding. ‘What’s suspicious about a car accident?’

‘A lot of things. They’d just had a very public argument—at one of Milan’s fashionable parties. Alessandro was angry, and accused Roberto of something—no one heard exactly what this was, and no one would have believed him anyway, of course. Roberto was loved by everyone—kind, gentle, always turning a blind eye to Alessandro’s antics. But this time he got upset. I was there and I saw it.’ She leaned forward, eyes glittering, involved now in the story, the drama. Meghan, afraid now, could only watch and listen.

‘Roberto looked terrible,’ Emilia recalled. ‘Pale, shaken, like he was going to be sick. Alessandro kept on at him, accusing him, so Roberto tried to leave. Alessandro wouldn’t let him, though— he grabbed his arm and started shouting. They ended up leaving the party together—Alessandro threatening, Roberto looking terrified. The next thing we knew Alessandro had crashed the car, killing his brother while he walked away with barely a scratch.’

Meghan’s mind and heart reeled from this information. It could explain so much … if she were able to understand it. Still she shook her head, managed to give a disdainful little laugh. ‘Do you honestly expect me to believe that he engineered an accident where his brother was killed and he remained uninjured? That’s ludicrous.’

Emilia inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘Perhaps. But the accident was on a stretch of smooth road—not a car in sight, no twists or turns. According to police reports, the car just veered off the road into a tree.’

‘It’s been known to happen before,’ Meghan said.

The bands around her chest, her heart, eased—if only a little. An accident couldn’t assign blame, no matter what the newspapers said.

‘What did Alessandro say about it?’ she asked now. ‘He must have given some explanation.’

Emilia shrugged. ‘Of course he was driving recklessly. But with the di Agnio name … The car had to have been going seventy miles an hour. It’s a miracle he wasn’t killed.’

‘And the press twisted this into a case of murder?’ Meghan shook her head.

‘You have to admit it makes a certain amount of sense,’ Emilia persisted in a silky purr. ‘Think what Alessandro stood to gain from his brother’s death—CEO of one of Italy’s most important companies, prestige, respect …’

‘Oh, has he got those?’ Meghan queried sharply. ‘Because it doesn’t seem to me he has.’

Emilia was silent for a moment, watching Meghan with a sneering pity. ‘You have no idea what he was like, do you? He may seem like a handsome knight in shining armour now, all set to rescue you, but in this country he was reviled. Pictures of him have been smeared across the tabloids for years, and I know from experience that rumours about him tend to be true.’ Her mouth curved in a lasciviously knowing smile that made Meghan bite down on her lip, taste the metallic tang of blood. ‘The public turned a blind eye to all his playboy antics, his women, but they couldn’t stand what he did to his brother. They blamed him. They wanted to blame him. He destroyed the beloved Roberto di Agnio, Italy’s golden boy.’

‘I’m sure the press had a field-day with it,’ Meghan said tightly, her control beginning to splinter. ‘It still doesn’t make it his fault.’

‘Unless,’ Emilia said, her voice little more than a whisper, a hiss, ‘he did mean to crash the car …’

Meghan felt the blood drain from her face, her body turning icy and numb. Lifeless.

‘He had nothing to lose,’ Emilia continued with dangerous softness. ‘He was a rake, a reprobate, his family had practically disowned him for the things he’d done, the shame he’d brought to them. In a moment of violent jealousy …’ She shrugged delicately. ‘Who knows what could have happened?’

Meghan sank unsteadily into a chair. Could Alessandro have been so desperate, so unhappy, so murderous, he’d tried to kill both himself and his brother?

Could he have been so vile?

‘I want you to go,’ she said in a thin voice. ‘Now.’

Emilia chuckled softly. ‘I’ve given you enough to think about, have I? Good. At least now you know what he’s capable of. Alessandro was a desperate, dangerous man, Meghan. He still is. I’ll leave the clippings here … just in case you want to look through them again. Ciao.’

The front door clicked softly shut behind her.

Meghan let out a shuddering breath and glanced down at the newspaper photograph of the smoking ruin of a convertible. He didn’t drive those any more. Now she knew why.

She picked up the sheaf of clippings with numb fingers, a numb heart. She sifted through them, steeled herself against the images, glaring, garish, painful.

Alessandro with his arms wrapped around a blonde who was poured into a dress. Alessandro kissing another woman, one eye on the camera, giving a lascivious wink. Alessandro with a woman on each arm and a sardonic smile twisting his features, making him someone she could hate.

It was horrible.

It was wrong.

It was the truth.

She stared at the photographs until her eyes were gritty, forcing herself not to close them against the onslaught of images, realisations, shattered dreams.

This was Alessandro. This was the man he had been, the man he insisted he still was. As much as she’d suspected and feared what he’d done, this was worse. This was so much worse.

She believed he’d changed, but could a man actually change that much?

Was Alessandro even trying to change?

Her heart cried yes, he was; her mind ruthlessly reminded her of every cruel thing he’d said, every harsh warning he’d given.

He’d told her not to trust him, not to love him. He’d told her not to try to understand, to know.

Now she knew, and her ignorance—and innocence—were gone for ever.

How could he be at times so tender, so kind, so understanding, so loving? her heart cried out, and her mind replied dispassionately, You always knew men abused power.

Meghan stared at the photograph of the car, half-wrapped around a tree on a deserted road. It was charred, a wreck of a car, wrecking a life.

Two lives.

Three.

What had happened that night? Could Emilia possibly be right?

Meghan desperately wanted to believe she couldn’t be, yet doubt had created a treacherous crack in her heart she couldn’t ignore.

She was faced with the bleak reality that despite what her heart said her mind told her the truth.

She didn’t know what kind of man Alessandro was.

She couldn’t fathom what he was capable of.

So intent was Meghan on the clippings that she didn’t register the click of the front door, the sound of soft footsteps. She didn’t even notice the shadow that fell over her as Alessandro came into the room, didn’t realise he was there until he spoke, ice coating every word.

‘Ah. I see you’ve discovered my past.’

‘Alessandro!’ Meghan’s stomach plunged with nerves; the clippings fell from her lap onto the floor.

His lips curving in a sardonic smile, Alessandro stooped to pick them up. ‘Enjoying yourself?’ he asked softly. ‘Indulging in some vicarious pleasure? I have Emilia to thank for this, no doubt. Or did you manage to dig these up all on your own?’ Menace turned his eyes dangerously indigo, his mouth a hard, thin line.

‘It was Emilia,’ Meghan whispered.

‘Ah. She always liked to cause trouble.’

He riffled through the clippings with an uninterested air. ‘Ah, yes. I think I remember this one. She was quite good in bed, if I recall. Daring.’

Meghan closed her eyes.

‘And this one … Hmm, memory’s a bit fuzzy there. Probably had too much to drink. I often did.’

‘Don’t do this.’ She felt faint, dizzy, sick.

Alessandro glanced at her over the top of the clippings and smiled coolly. ‘But why not, Meghan? Isn’t this what you want to know? Isn’t this why I found you here, staring at these photos?’

‘I was trying,’ Meghan replied as levelly as she could, ‘to find out why you are the way you are.’

‘Do not!’ His voice came out sharp. ‘Do not psychoanalyse me. I know who I am. These clippings prove it. And if you fell in love with me, Meghan, then you fell in love with a false image. What you wanted me to be, not what I am.’

It was what her own mind had been telling her, and it hurt. It hurt more than she’d ever thought it would to hear him say it, admit it.

‘You were kind to me,’ Meghan whispered, her eyes starting to pool with tears. The room, the clippings, Alessandro, were all a blur. ‘You told me you would never hurt me.’

‘Da tutti i san, by now you should’ve realised that wasn’t true!’

Her vision swam; she clutched the arm of her chair like an anchor. ‘Are you telling me you lied?’

‘I got what I wanted,’ Alessandro replied dispassionately. ‘You.’

‘I don’t believe it.’ She clung to one last hope that even now he would relent. Change. ‘This isn’t you.’

‘Yes, it is. I warned you, Meghan.’

Alessandro’s face was a mask, terrible in its blankness. It was as if the life had drained out of him, and Meghan didn’t know if she could get it back. She dragged breath into her lungs. ‘What about the car accident?’

He stilled, and for a tense moment Meghan wasn’t sure what he would do next. What he was capable of. She stiffened, forced herself to remain still.

‘Are you asking me if I killed my brother?’ he asked, his voice indifferent. ‘You saw the headlines. Omicidio. Assassino. They speak the truth.’

‘It was an accident.’

‘Was it?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I read the tabloid gossip, every word. Maybe I picked that stretch of road—crashed the car in a way that would only injure the passenger. Who knows?’ He smiled mockingly, and Meghan shook her head, desperate now.

‘Alessandro, that can’t be true. Even if you were capable of such a thing, it would be an insane risk.’

He walked up to her, tilted her chin with cool fingers so Meghan was looking with anguish into his own blank eyes.

‘But don’t you know by now that I like to take risks? It’s what makes me good at business. You were a risk, weren’t you, gattina? Too bad that one hasn’t worked out.’

She shook her head. ‘No, it can’t …’ Her voice trailed off into desperate silence.

His fingers tightened on her chin. ‘Tell me, Meghan,’ he said softly, ‘when you look at those clippings, what do you feel, think? What do you believe?’

Her mind spun, whirred hopelessly like a stalled engine. She thought of what she’d felt: the horror, the repulsion, the fear, and knew they were reflected in her eyes, her face. She tried to think of a word, an explanation, but nothing came out.

Something flickered to life in Alessandro’s eyes and then deadened. Like ash, dust, ice. ‘You see?’ he said softly. ‘You do believe it, don’t you? I warned you before. I won’t change.’ He paused, his voice turning ragged. ‘I can’t.’

She stared. Her mind blanked. She couldn’t speak.

He dropped his hand from her face and glanced down at the clippings; the photograph of the ruined car was on top. ‘Damned by silence,’ he mocked.

‘Alessandro, don’t …’ she began, her voice a thread, but he ignored her.

‘Never mind. It’s just as well, you know. I was starting to get bored.’

‘Bored?’ she repeated faintly, and he smiled, a bitter twisting of his lips.

‘Surely you saw in those papers that I’m a man of many tastes, pleasures? I’ll get a few things,’ he continued tonelessly, ‘and move to my flat. You can continue to live here. I don’t mind.’

Meghan felt as if she were plummeting through a cold, dark tunnel. She gazed at him in shock, her mind finally catching up, making sense of what was happening. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying,’ Alessandro replied in clear, cutting tones, ‘that I don’t want to live with you any more. This marriage was a mistake, a bad risk, but unfortunately neither of us can undo it now. I won’t bring shame to the di Agnio name again.’ He held up one hand to still the wave of protests rising within her, unspoken. ‘You’ll still get what you want. I’ll come with you to that godforsaken town in Iowa you once called home. I’ll give you security. You, on the other hand, need give me nothing.’

‘Alessandro …’ Meghan was on her knees on the chair, tears streaking silently down her face. She felt as if her world had been torn apart in a matter of minutes and lay around her in bloody shreds. And she hadn’t lifted a finger to stop it. She hadn’t had the strength. ‘This isn’t what I want.’

He looked at her as if he didn’t care. As if he’d already moved on, forgotten. ‘Pity,’ he remarked, ‘because this is what you’re going to get.’

Meghan remained half kneeling on the chair as Alessandro moved through the house. She knew he was gathering his things, preparing to leave her for ever.