The Truth Behind his Touch (12 page)

‘You should maybe come up with me.’ She gave it her last best shot to avert the inevitable, but Alberto shook his head briskly.

‘My son and I have matters to discuss. I can’t pretend there aren’t one or two things that need sorting out, and might as well sort them out now. I’ve never been one to run from the truth!’ He was addressing Caroline but staring at Giancarlo. ‘It’s much better to get the truth out than let things fester.’

Caroline imagined the showdown—well, in Giancarlo’s eyes, it was a showdown that had been brewing for the best part of his life and he had come prepared to win it at all costs. She was being dismissed but still she hesitated, searching valiantly for some miracle she could produce from nowhere, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. But there was no miracle and she retreated upstairs. The villa was so extensive that there was no way she could possibly pick up the sound of raised voices, nor could she even hear whether Tessa had returned or not to rescue Alberto from his own son.

She fell into a fitful sleep and awoke with a start to the moon slanting silver light through the window. She had been reading and her book had dropped to the side of the bed. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and a few more seconds for her to remember what had been worrying her before she had nodded off: Alberto and Giancarlo. The unbearable tension, like a storm brewing in the distance, waiting to erupt with devastating consequences.

Groaning, she heaved herself out of the four-poster bed, slipped on her dressing gown and headed downstairs, although she wasn’t quite sure what she expected to find.

Alberto’s suite of rooms lay at the far end of the long corridor, beyond the staircase. Hesitating at the top of the winding staircase, Caroline was tempted to check on him, but first she would go downstairs, make sure that the two of them weren’t still locked in a battle to the bitter end. Truth, as Alberto had declared, was something that could take hours to hammer out—and in this case the outcome would be certain defeat for Alberto. He would finally have to bow to Giancarlo and put his destiny in his hands. With financial collapse at his door, what other alternative would there be?

She arrived at the sitting-room to see a slither of light under the shut door. Although she couldn’t hear any voices, what else could that light mean except that they were both still in the room? She pushed open the door before she could do what she really wanted to do, which was to run away.

The light came from one of the tall standard lamps that dotted the large room. Sprawled on the chair with his head flung back, eyes closed and a drink cradled loosely in one hand, Giancarlo looked heart-stoppingly handsome and, for once, did not appear to be a man at the top of his game. His hair was tousled, as though he had raked his fingers
through it too many times, and he looked ashen and exhausted.

She barely made a sound, but he opened his eyes immediately, although it seemed to take him a few seconds before he could focus on her, and when he did he remained where he was, slumped in the chair.

‘Where is Alberto?’

Giancarlo swirled the liquid in his glass without answering and then swallowed back the lot without taking his eyes from her face.

‘How much have you
drunk
, Giancarlo?’ Galvanised into sudden action, Caroline walked briskly towards him. ‘You look terrible.’

‘I love a woman who tells it like it is.’

‘And you haven’t told me where Alberto is.’

‘I assure you, he isn’t hiding anywhere in this room. You have just me for the pleasure of your company.’

Caroline managed to extract the glass from him. ‘You need sobering up.’

‘Why? Is there some kind of archaic house rule that prohibits the consumption of alcohol after a certain time?’

‘Wait right here. I’m going to go and make a pot of coffee.’

‘You have my word. I have no intention of going anywhere, any time soon.’

For once, Caroline failed to be awed by the size and grandeur of the villa. For once, she wished that the kitchens didn’t involve a five-minute hike through winding corridors and stately reception rooms. She could barely contain her nerves as she anxiously waited for the kettle to boil, and by the time she made it back to the sitting-room, burdened with a tray on which was piled a mound of buttered toast and a very large pot of black, strong coffee, she half-expected to find that Giancarlo had disappeared.

He hadn’t. He had managed to refill his glass and she gently but firmly removed it from him, brought the tray over to place it on the oval table by his chair and then pulled one of the upright, velvet-covered stools towards him.

‘What are you doing here, anyway? Did you come down to make sure that the duel at dawn hadn’t begun?’

‘You should eat something, Giancarlo.’ She urged a slice of toast on him and he twirled it thoughtfully between his fingers, examining it as though he had never seen anything like it before.

‘You are a very caring person, Caroline Rossi, but I expect you’ve been told that before. I can’t imagine too many women preparing me toast and coffee because they were worried that I’d drunk too much. Although …’ He half-leaned towards her, steadying himself on the arm of his chair. ‘I’ve never drunk too much—least of all when in the company of a woman.’ He bit into the toast with apparent relish and settled his lustrous dark eyes on her.

‘So, what happened? I don’t mean to pry …’

‘Of course you mean to pry.’ He half-closed his eyes, shifted a little in the chair, indicated that he wanted more toast and drank some of the very strong coffee. ‘You have my father’s welfare at heart.’

‘We can talk in the morning, when you’re feeling a little less, um, worse for wear.’

‘It would take more than half a bottle of whisky to make me feel worse for wear. I’ve the constitution of an ox. I made a mistake.’

‘I know. Well. That’s what people always say after they’ve drunk too much. They also say that they’ll never do it again.’

‘You’re not following me. I made a
mistake
. I screwed up.’

‘Giancarlo, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course you don’t. Why should you? To summarise—you were right and I was wrong.’ He rubbed his eyes, sighed heavily, thought about standing up and discovered that he couldn’t be bothered. ‘I came here hell-bent on setting the record straight. There were debts to be settled. I was going to be the debt collector. Well, here’s one for the book—the invincible Giancarlo didn’t get his facts straight.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was always led to believe that Alberto was a bitter ex-husband who had ensured that my mother got as little as possible in her divorce settlement. I was led to believe that he was a monster who had walked away from a difficult situation, having made sure that my mother suffered for the temerity of having a mind of her own. I was drip-fed a series of half-truths! I think another glass of whisky might help the situation.’

‘It won’t.’

‘You told me that there might be another side to the story.’

‘There always is.’ Her heart constricted in sympathy. Unused to dealing with any kind of emotional doubt, Giancarlo had steadily tried to drink his way out of it. More than anything in the world, Caroline wanted to reach out and smooth away the lines of bitter self-recrimination from his beautiful face.

‘My mother had been having affairs. By the time the marriage dissolved, she was involved with a man who turned out to be a con artist. There was a massive settlement. My mother failed to do anything with it. Instead, she handed it over to a certain Bertoldo Monti who persuaded her that he could treble what she’d had. He took the lot and disappeared. Alberto showed me all the documents, the letters my mother wrote begging for more money. Well, he carried on supporting her, and in return she refused to
let him see me. She informed him that I was settled, that I didn’t want contact. Letters he sent me were returned unopened. He kept them all.’

Giancarlo’s voice was raw with emotion. Caroline could feel tears begin to gather at the back of her eyes and she blinked them away, for the last thing a man as proud as Giancarlo would want would be any show of sympathy. Not now, not when his eyes had been ripped open to truths he had never expected.

‘I expect that the only reason I received the top education that I did was because the money was paid directly to the school. It was one of those
basics
that Alberto made sure were covered because, certainly, there seems little question that my mother would have spent it or given it away to one of her many lovers, had she had it in her possession.’

‘I’m sure, in her own way, she never thought that what she was doing was bad.’

‘Ever the cheerful optimist, aren’t you?’ He laughed harshly, but when he looked at her, his eyes were wearily amused. ‘So, it would seem, is my father. Do you know, I used to wonder what you had in common with Alberto. He was a bitter and twisted old man with no time for anyone but himself. You were young and innocent. Seems you two have more in common than I ever imagined. He, too, told me the same thing—my mother was unhappy. He worked too hard. She was bored. He blamed himself for not being around sufficiently to build up a relationship with me and she took advantage of that. She took advantage of his pride, threatened to air all their dirty linen in public if he tried to pursue custody, convinced him that he had failed as a father and that visits would be pointless and disruptive. I was her trump card and she used me to get back at him.

‘God, do you know that when she died, Alberto requested to see me via a lawyer and I knocked him back?
She behaved badly, she warped my attitudes, but the truth is she was a simple waitress who was plucked from obscurity and deposited into a lifestyle with which she was unfamiliar and ill at ease. The whole thing was a mess.
Is
still a mess. Alberto didn’t know the extent of his financial losses. He’s relied on his trusted accountant for the past ten years and he’s been kept pretty much in the dark about the true nature of the company accounts. Of course, like a bull in a china shop, that was one of my choice opening observations.’

‘Stop blaming yourself, Giancarlo. You were a child when you left here. You weren’t to know that things weren’t as they seemed. Was … was Alberto okay when he heard? I guess in a way it’s quite a good thing that you came along to tell him, because if you hadn’t none of these secrets would have ever emerged. He’s old. How good is it for the two of you that all these truths have come out? How much better for you both to have reached a place where new beginnings can start, even though the price you’ve both paid has been so high?’

This time Giancarlo offered her a crooked smile. ‘I suppose that’s one upbeat way of looking at it.’

‘And I know the situation between you hasn’t been
ideal
, but when it comes to Alberto and the money, how much worse for him to have been called into an impersonal office somewhere, told that everything he’d spent your life working for had been washed down the tubes?’

‘As things turn out.’ He closed his eyes briefly, giving her some stolen moments to savour the harsh, stunning contours of his face. Seeing him like this, vulnerable and flawed but brutally, fiercely honest with himself, did something strange inside her. A part of her seemed to connect with him in a way that was scary and thrilling.

‘As things turn out?’ she prompted, while her mind
drifted to things going on in her head that made her heart beat faster and her pulses race. Could she be
falling
for the guy? Surely not? She would be crazy to do something like that, and she wasn’t crazy. But he made her feel
alive
, took her to a different level where all her emotions and senses were amplified in a way that was new and dangerous but also wonderful.

‘As things turn out, reparation is long overdue. I don’t blame my mother for the things she did. She was who she was, and I have to accept my own portion of responsibility for failing to question when I was old enough to do so.’ He held his hand up as though to forestall an argument, although the last thing Caroline was about to do was argue with him. First and foremost, she wanted to get her thoughts in order. She looked at him with a slightly glazed expression.

‘Right,’ she said slowly, blinking and nodding her head thoughtfully. She noticed that, even having been at the bottle, he was still in control of all his faculties, still able to rationalise his thoughts in a way that many sober people couldn’t. He might be ruthless with others who didn’t meet his high standards, but he was also ruthless with himself, and that was an indication of his tremendous honesty and fairness. Throw killer looks into the mix, and was it any wonder that her silly, inexperienced head had been well and truly turned? Surely that natural reaction could not be confused with love.

‘The least I can do—’ he murmured in such a low voice that she had to strain to hear him ‘—and I have told Alberto this—is to get people in to sort out the company. Old friends and stalwarts are all well and good, but it appears that they have allowed time to do its worst. Whatever it takes, it will be restored to its former glory and an injection of new blood will ensure that it remains there. And
there will be no transfer of title. My father will continue to own his company, along with his villa, which I intend to similarly restore.’

Caroline smiled without reservation. ‘I’m so glad to hear that, Giancarlo.’

‘You mean, you aren’t going say “I told you so”, even though you did?’

‘I would never say anything like that.’

‘Do you know, I’m inclined to believe you.’

‘I’m really glad I came downstairs,’ she confessed honestly. ‘It took me ages to fall asleep and then I woke up and wanted to know that everything was all right, but I wasn’t sure what to do.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I’m glad you came downstairs too?’

Caroline found that she was holding her breath. He was staring at her with brooding intensity and she couldn’t drag her fascinated eyes away from his face. Without realising it, she was leaning forwards, every nerve in her body straining towards him, like a flower reaching towards a source of heat and light.