The Rinuccis: Carlo, Ruggiero & Francesco

CHAPTER THREE

AT SEVENTEEN she might have wept into her pillow. At thirty-seven she lay staring into the darkness, sad but composed, before finally nodding off.

She even managed a prosaic, unromantic night’s sleep. But next morning Della awoke early and the memories came flooding back, bringing regretful thoughts.

It would have been nice, she thought. We could have been fond of each other for a while, before he found someone his own age. But, oh boy, did I ever make a mess of it! If there were a prize for handling things as badly as possible, I’d win the gold. I should have known better than to hide the truth, but I wasn’t thinking straight.

At this point she found herself smiling wistfully.

But had any woman ever thought straight in his company? She doubted it. Not guilty on the grounds of impaired judgment. She’d wanted to make the moment last, and she had never thought how it would seem to him.

What now? Return to Pompeii and try to find him? After all, he’s ideal for the programme.

Nuts to that! She just wanted an excuse to see him again. He was like a light coming on and then going out too soon. But what was done was done. She’d just chalk it up to experience and leave Naples today.

It was a relief to have made up her mind. Jumping out of bed, she stripped and headed for the shower, running it very cold to infuse herself with common sense. She was just drying off when there was a knock on the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Room Service.’

She hadn’t ordered anything, but perhaps this was courtesy of the hotel. Huddling on a silk dressing gown, she opened the door.

Outside stood a tall man, dressed as a waiter. That was all she could tell, as he was holding the tray high, balanced on the fingers of one hand, at just the right angle to conceal his face.

‘Scusi, signora.’

He seemed to glide into the room, contriving to keep his features hidden as he headed for the little table by the window and set down the tray.

Della’s heart began to dance. He might hide his face, but his hair was unmistakable. Instinctively she pulled together the edges of her thin dressing gown, conscious of how inadequately the silk covered her.

‘Orange juice,’ he said, turning to her with a flourish. ‘Fruit? Cereal?’

‘So you’re not still angry with me?’ she asked, laughing.

‘No, I got over my sulk fairly quickly. Forgive me?’

It was so good to see Carlo standing there that she forgot everything else and opened her arms to him. He took two swift steps across the room, and the next moment she was enfolded in an embrace that threatened to crush the breath out of her.

‘I was afraid you’d have packed your bags and left last night,’ he said between kisses.

‘I was afraid I’d never see you again. I’m sorry. I never meant it to happen the way it did—it just sort of—’

‘It doesn’t matter. It was my fault for making a fuss about nothing.’

‘I always meant to tell you, but things just happened, and I lost track of what I was supposed to be thinking—’

‘Yes,’ he said with meaning. ‘Me too.’

He kissed her again before she could speak, moving his mouth hungrily over hers, pressing her body close against his own. Now she could feel everything she had suspected yesterday, the hard, lean length of him, muscular, sensuously graceful, thrilling.

But it was dangerous to hold him like this when she was nearly naked. The gossamer delicacy of her gown was no protection against the excitement she could sense in him, nor against her own excitement, rising equally fast. Nearly naked wasn’t enough. Only complete nakedness would do, for herself and him.

There was an increasingly urgent sense of purpose in the movements of his hands, and her answering desire threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted this. She wanted him.

It was the very power of that wanting that made her take fright. Twenty-four hours ago she hadn’t met this man. Now she was indulging fantasies of fierce passion, desire with no limits. She must stop this now. She forced herself to tense against him, drawing her head back a little so that he could see her shake it from side to side.

‘No—Carlo—please—’

‘Della—’ His voice was edgy, and it seemed as though he couldn’t stop.

‘Please—wait—’

She felt his body trembling against hers with the effort of his own restraint, and at last he was still. Now he would think her a tease. But when she looked into his eyes she saw only understanding.

‘You’re right,’ he whispered.

‘It’s just that—’

‘I know—I know—not—not yet.’

He spoke raggedly, but he was in command of himself. Della only wished she could say the same about her own body, which was raging out of control, defying her wise words. She pulled herself free, grabbed some clothes, and vanished into the bathroom.

When she emerged, safely dressed, he had discarded his waiter’s jacket and was sitting at the table by the window, pouring her coffee. He seemed calm, with no sign of his recent agitation—except that she thought his hand shook a little.

‘Here’s food,’ he said, indicating rolls and honey. ‘But if you need something more substantial I’ll buy you a big lunch after we’ve been to Pompeii.’

‘We’re going back there?’

‘Just for an hour, while I give my team their instructions. Then we’ll have the rest of the day free.’

His manner was demure while he served her, as if their moment of blazing physical awareness had never been. But then she glanced up to find him watching her, and it was there in his eyes, memory and, more than that, an anticipation amounting to certainty.

‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ she said again. ‘I was going to tell you last night, but—’ She made a helpless gesture.

‘It was mostly my fault,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I just talked about myself all the time, which is a fault of mine. Mamma always says if I’d shut up now and then I might learn something.’

‘But you’ve never taken her advice long enough to find out if she’s right,’ Della chuckled.

He grinned. ‘You really do sound just like her. Besides, I know now that she was right. Today you’re going to do all the talking, and I won’t say a single word.’

‘Hmm!’ she said sceptically.

He looked alarmed. ‘You understand me too well.’

‘In that case we have nothing left to say to each other.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, isn’t that every man’s nightmare? A woman who understands him?’

‘I’m getting more scared of you every minute.’

‘Then you’d better steer well clear of me. If I call the airport now there’s bound to be a plane back to London today.’

At once his hand closed over hers, imprisoning it gently but firmly.

‘I never run away from danger,’ he said lightly. ‘How about you?’

There was a moment’s hesitation, because something told her that never in her life had she met a danger like this. Then, ‘Me neither,’ she said.

‘Good. In that case…’ He paused significantly.

‘In that case—?’

‘In that case I suggest we hurry up and finish our breakfast.’

She choked into her coffee. She had always been a sucker for a man who could make her laugh.

At Pompeii, his team was waiting for him in the canteen. A brief time in his company had made her more sharply aware of things she had overlooked before, and now she saw at once how the young women in the group brightened as soon as he appeared, and flashed him their best smiles.

She couldn’t blame them. There was a life-enhancing quality to him that brought the sun out, and made it natural to smile.

Della lingered only a short while as he talked to them in Italian, which she couldn’t understand, then wandered away to the museum.

Here she found what she was looking for—the plaster casts of the bodies that had lain trapped in their last positions for nearly two thousand years. There was a man who’d fallen on the stairs and never risen again, and another man who’d known the end was coming and curled up in resignation, waiting for the ash to engulf him. Further on, a mother tried vainly to shelter her children.

But it was the lovers who held her the longest. After so many centuries it was still heartbreaking to see the man and woman, stretching out in a vain attempt to reach each other before death swamped them.

‘There’s such a little distance between their hands,’ she murmured.

‘Yes, they nearly managed it,’ said Carlo beside her.

She didn’t know how long he’d been there, and wondered if he’d been watching as she wandered among the ‘bodies’.

‘And now they’ll never reach each other,’ she said. ‘Trapped for ever with a might-have-been.’

‘There’s nothing sadder than what might have been,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why I prefer these.’

He led her to another glass case where there were two forms, a man and a woman, nestled against each other.

‘They knew death was coming,’ Carlo said, ‘but as long as they could meet it in each other’s arms they weren’t afraid.’

‘Maybe,’ she said slowly.

‘You don’t believe that?’

‘I wonder if you’re stretching imagination too far. You can’t really know that they weren’t afraid.’

‘Can’t I? Look at them.’

Della drew nearer and studied the two figures. Their faces were blurred, but she could see that all their attention was for each other, not the oncoming lava. And their bodies were mysteriously relaxed, almost contented.

‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘While they had each other there was nothing to fear—not even death.’

How would it feel to be like that? she wondered. Two marriages had left her ignorant of that all-or-nothing feeling. What she had known of men had left her cautious, and suddenly it occurred to her that she was deprived.

‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked.

He drove back to the little fishing village where they had eaten the day before. Now the tide was in, the boats were out, and the atmosphere was completely different. This was another world from that sleepy somnolence, as he proved by taking her to the market, where the stalls were brightly coloured and mostly sold an array of fresh meat and vegetables.

The ones that didn’t offered a dazzling variety of handmade silk.

‘The area is known for it,’ Carlo explained. ‘And it’s better than anything you’ll find in the fashionable shops in Milan.’

As he spoke he was holding up scarves and blouses against her.

‘Not these,’ he said, tossing a couple aside. ‘Not your colour.’

‘Isn’t it?’ she asked, slightly nettled. She had liked both of them.

‘No, this is better.’ He held up a blouse with a dark blue mottled pattern and considered it against her. ‘This one,’ he told the woman running the stall.

‘Hey, let me check the size,’ Della protested.

‘No need,’ the woman chuckled. ‘He always gets the size right.’

‘Thank you,’ Carlo said hastily, handing over cash and hurrying her away.

‘You’ve got a nerve, buying me clothes without so much as a by-your-leave,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to thank me.’

‘I wasn’t. I was saying you’re as cheeky as a load of monkeys.’

‘Slander. All slander.’

To Della’s mischievous delight he had definitely reddened.

‘So you always get the size right, just by looking?’ she mused. ‘I mean, always as in always?’

‘Let’s have something to eat,’ he said hastily, taking her arm and steering her into a side street where they found a small café.

There he settled her with coffee and a glass of prosecco, the white sparkling wine, so light as to be almost a cordial, that Italians loved to drink.

‘So now,’ he said, ‘do what I wouldn’t let you do yesterday, and tell me all about yourself. I know you’ve been married—’

‘I married when I was sixteen—and pregnant. Neither of us was old enough to know what we were doing, and when he fled in the first few months I guess I couldn’t blame him.’

‘I blame him,’ he said at once. ‘If you do something, you take responsibility for it.’

‘Oh, you sound so very old and wise, but how “responsible” were you at seventeen?’

‘Perhaps we’d better not go into that,’ he said, grinning. ‘But he shouldn’t have simply have walked out and left you with a baby.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I wasn’t abandoned in a one-room hovel without a penny. We were living with my parents, so I had a comfortable home and someone to take care of me. In fact, I don’t think my parents were sorry to see the back of him.’

‘Did they give him a nudge?

‘He says they did. I’ll never really know, but I’m sure it would have happened anyway. It’s all for the best. I wouldn’t want to be married to the man he is now.’

‘Still irresponsible?’

‘Worse. Dull.’

‘Heaven help us! So you’re still in touch?’

‘He lives in Scotland. Sol—that’s Solomon, our son—visits him. He’s there now.’

Light dawned.

‘Was Sol the one you were talking to on the phone last night?’

‘That’s right.’

So there was no other man in her life, he thought, making urgent calculations: her son might be twelve, if she’d been so young at his birth. He was almost dizzy with relief.

‘What made you go into television?’ he asked, when he’d inwardly calmed down.

‘Through my second husband and his brother.’

‘Second—? You’re married?’ he demanded, descending into turmoil again.

‘No, it didn’t work out, and there was another divorce. I guess I’m just a rotten picker. Gerry ran off leaving a lot of debts, which I had to work to pay. The one good thing he did for me was to introduce me to his brother, Brian, who was a television producer. Brian offered me a job as his secretary, taught me everything he knew, and I loved it—the people I met, the things it was possible to do, the buzz of ideas going on all the time. Brian loaned me some money to start up for myself, and he recommended me everywhere.’

‘So now you’re a big-shot,’ he said lightly. ‘Dominating the schedules, winning all the awards—’

‘Shut up,’ she said, punching his arm playfully.

‘You’re not going to tell me you’ve never won an award, are you?’

His eyes warned her that he knew more than he was letting on.

‘The odd little gong here and there,’ she said vaguely.

‘You’re not the only one who knows how to use the internet, you know. You won the Golden World prize for the best documentary of the year—’

‘You’ve really been doing your detective work, haven’t you?’

‘Sure—and, to show you how clever I am, I know how to use a telephone as well.’

‘No kidding?’

‘I made a few calls last night and spoke to someone who knows your work and admires it.’

He didn’t add that his friend had known nothing about her personal life. It had been a frustrating call.

‘He mentioned a big new project you were gearing up for, but he didn’t know any details. He just said glumly, “I suppose the rest of us can give up for the next year, while she walks off with everything in sight.”‘

‘You’ve been checking up on me with a vengeance,’ she said, laughing at him with her head on one side.

‘Which makes us quits, since you came to look me over.’

‘You were recommended to me so strongly and by so many people that I started to get a bit cross with you. I must admit that I half hoped to find that you were useless. But you were quite the reverse, and that made me even more annoyed.’

‘So you’ve reluctantly decided to offer me a job? How about I make it easy for you and refuse?’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions before you know everything. I’m doing eight hour-long episodes, each one concentrating on a place where a notable event happened. I don’t just need a frontman, but someone who’s an archaeologist and a historian in his own right, who will have some authority.’

‘You mean they’re all going to be things like Pompeii?’

‘One of them will be underwater.’

‘Don’t tell me—let me guess. Titanic.’

‘No, the Titanic has been done to death. But she had two sister ships, and one of them, the Britannic, also sank. It was used as a hospital ship in the First World War, but it went down after only three months—probably because it hit a mine. The odd thing was that after Titanic went down Britannic was partly redesigned, to make her safer, yet she sank even faster. She’s in the Aegean Sea, and there’s still a lot to be learned about her fate.’

To her surprise he grew pale.

‘And you want me to go down there and—?’ he asked in a faint voice. ‘Sorry, but that’s not my area of expertise.’

‘Of course not. I’ll have professional divers—although you could make a trip down if you wanted to.’

‘No, thank you,’ he said at once.

‘Not even out of curiosity?’

‘Nope.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I’m chicken,’ he said frankly. ‘I’ll climb any height you want, descend into any cave, but when it comes to diving in deep water—not a hope. It’s my nightmare.’

‘That’s quite an admission,’ she said, enchanted by this frankness.

He smiled, looking slightly red.

‘It’s better for me to admit it than wait for you to find out. So, that’s that. You’ll have to get somebody else.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ll do the frontman stuff from dry land.’

‘Is that a promise? Because otherwise I’m out of here.’ He edged a few inches away.

‘Will you stop?’ she asked, laughing.

‘I just don’t want misunderstandings,’ he said, giving up the performance and coming closer again. ‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool coward, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Yeah, right. You’re a coward.’

‘We’re all cowards about something,’ he said, suddenly serious.

‘I guess that’s true.’

‘So what’s your fatal weakness?’ he asked unexpectedly.

‘Oh—’ she said vaguely, ‘I have a dozen.’

‘But none you’re prepared to share with me?’

‘I have too much sense of self-preservation.’

‘Is that how you see me? A danger that you need to be armed against?’

Looking at him, smiling and gentle, gilded by the sun that streamed through the windows, she knew he was the biggest danger she had ever faced. But she would not arm herself against him. Even if she’d wanted to, it would have been pointless.

But she kept a teasing note in her voice to say, ‘Hell will freeze over before I flatter your vanity by answering that.’

‘So the answer would flatter me?’ he teased back.

‘My lips are sealed.’

‘They are now,’ he said, and swiftly laid his mouth over hers.

It was the briefest possible kiss, over almost before it had begun, and then he’d risen to go to the counter, leaving her shaken. Lightly as his lips had touched hers, she seemed to still feel them there when he had moved away.

But when he returned, with more coffee, he made no mention of what had happened, leaving her free to get her bearings in peace.

‘What about the third ship?’ he asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said stupidly.

‘You said the Titanic had two sister ships. What happened to the other one?’

‘She sailed for twenty-four years before being taken out of service. Nothing dramatic there. I’m still researching other places, although I’ve half decided to cover the battlefield of Waterloo. I’d got a file of ideas, but none of them are quite what I’m looking for.’

‘You can’t go by what you see in a file. You need to visit these places. I know of a few around here—it would mean going south, maybe as far as Sicily. We could set off at once.’

She looked at him. ‘You mean—?’

‘We’d be on the road for about a week, if you can spare the time.’

‘But can you spare it? Your work at Pompeii—’

‘My team know what I expect of them. They can do without me for a few days, and I’ll keep in touch.’

She was silent, torn by temptation. To be alone with him, cocooned from the real world, free to indulge the feelings that were taking her over: it was like looking at a vision of heaven.

‘I could call my secretary and tell her I’ll be a while coming home,’ she said slowly.

‘Drink your coffee and let’s get out of here,’ he said.

On the drive to the hotel Della sat in happy contentment. She was crazy to be doing this with a man she’d known only a day, yet she had no doubts. Everything in her yearned towards him.

She knew that by agreeing to go she’d answered an unspoken question. They wanted each other in every way. Their minds were happily in tune, but right now that was secondary to the physical attraction that was clamouring for release. She wouldn’t have agreed to this trip if she wasn’t prepared to make love with him. He knew it, and she knew that he did, and he knew that she knew. The knowledge lay between them, brilliant and enticing, colouring every word and thought.

When they reached her hotel she half expected him to come upstairs with her and take her into his arms at once. She would not have protested. But she was charmed by the delicacy with which he bade her goodbye in the foyer, after first greeting several people who hailed him by name.

‘I know too many people here,’ he said. ‘It’s like being under a spotlight, and that’s—not what we want.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Tonight I have to visit my mother and explain that I’ll be away a few days. I’ll see you early tomorrow.’

He gave a nervous look at the receptionist, who was smiling at him, and departed without kissing Della.