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‘You know it’s not that simple,’ Allegra snapped. ‘Stop turning the tables on me, Stefano. You conveniently forget and remember the past—our past—however the mood strikes you! Well, allow me the same courtesy!’ She realized, belatedly, that her voice had risen yet again. People were staring.
‘This is not the place,’ Stefano said between his teeth, ‘for this discussion.’
She ignored him, shaking her head, the implications exploding through her mind. ‘I don’t even know if you’re divorced. If you have children.’
‘I’m widowed,’ he bit out. ‘I told you before, I have no children.’ His hand clamped down on her elbow. ‘Now we’re going home.’
‘Maybe I don’t want to go home with you!’ she said, jerking away from him, her voice rising to a shriek—a shriek people heard.
There was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then the conversation resumed at double speed and sound.
Allegra swallowed, felt colour stain her face and throat. She was making a scene. A big one.
And Stefano was angry about it—perhaps angrier than she’d ever seen him before.
‘Are you quite finished?’ he asked in a voice of arctic politeness.
Allegra couldn’t look at him as she nodded. ‘Yes. We can go,’ she whispered.
‘Perhaps we should stay,’ Stefano told her in a deadly murmur, ‘and brazen it out. But I’ll have mercy … on both of us.’ He took her elbow once more and guided her none too gently out of the ballroom.
She managed to hold her head high even though her face was aflame as Stefano escorted her from the room amid a hiss of speculative murmurs. They were both silent all the way to the car.
Vespas and taxis sped around them in a glitter of lights as they drove from the hotel to the quieter Parioli district.
Allegra sagged against the seat. Her behaviour, she knew, had been inexcusable. She should have waited to talk to Stefano back at his town house rather than force a full confrontation in the middle of an important business engagement.
She closed her eyes against the prickling of tears. He should have told her he’d been married.
No matter what he said now, what arguments he so reasonably gave her, he should have told her.
She should have known.
Why didn’t she know? Allegra wondered. Why had she never heard? Surely, somewhere, somehow she should have known.
Perhaps she should have felt it.
And yet, a mocking voice asked her silently, why should you have known? Didn’t you sever all ties when you left that night? She’d never seen her parents again; her father had died less than a year after, and her mother …
Her mother had got what she wanted. She lived her own life now in Milan, bankrolled by a steady stream of lovers.
As for anyone else who might have known of Stefano’s marriage … who? Who were those people? The girls she’d known at convent school? The relatives who’d shunned her?
She’d made choices in life, instinctive choices that had kept her well away from Stefano and his circle. And, really, she hadn’t wanted to know, had never asked anyone about Stefano, had avoided talking or even thinking about him. It was precisely this kind of information that she’d never wanted to hear.
Yet, in the end, none of it had worked, for here they were together, in this very car, the silence freezing and hostile, their knees still touching. And her heart was hurt, crying out once more.
The car pulled up to the town house and Allegra followed Stefano inside. She watched as he stalked into the drawing room and poured two fingers of Scotch into a glass and tossed it back.
He stood in front of the fireplace, one hand braced against the marble mantle. Outside, a car drove past and washed the room in sickly yellow light. Allegra closed the double doors, drew the curtains and turned on a lamp. All tasks to keep her from the reckoning she knew would come. What she knew she had to say.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’ Stefano asked, a trace of sarcasm sharpening his tone. ‘For seeing me again? For agreeing to help Lucio? Or perhaps for walking out on me in the first place?’
There was such savagery in his voice that Allegra could only push it away, refuse to consider the implications of his words, the turn in his tone.
‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘for my behaviour tonight. I was shocked that you were married and I … I overreacted at the party.’
‘Yes, you did.’
Her fingers nervously pleated the silk of her gown. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Why should I have?’
‘Because …’ She tried to think of a reason, a safe one. ‘Because I deserve to know,’ she finally said. ‘We’ve acknowledged the past and forgotten about it, but …’
‘But it’s still there.’
‘Yes.’ Allegra bit her lip. ‘I never heard that you’d married.’
‘Did you ever ask?’
‘No, of course not. Why would I …?’ She trailed off, not wanting to follow that line of thought and its inevitable conclusions.
‘You wouldn’t have heard,’ Stefano said after a moment, his voice resigned, ‘because it was kept quiet. By me.’
‘Why?’ she whispered.
He turned around and Allegra was surprised and alarmed by the weariness etched into his features. ‘Because I regretted it almost as soon as the ceremony was over.’
He ran a hand through his hair before sinking into a cream silk armchair. ‘If you want the facts, Allegra, I’ll give them to you. I suppose I should have considered that someone might mention my marriage to you tonight, but I didn’t want to deal with it. Not yet, anyway. So I just pushed it away and didn’t think about it.’ A smile flickered and died, and his eyes were shrewd. ‘A habit I believe we share.’
Allegra looked down. The man in front of her was one she wasn’t used to. Here was Stefano being candid, open. Vulnerable. He sat sprawled in a chair, his tie loosened and the top two buttons of his shirt undone, his whisky tumbler still held loosely in one hand.
‘So what are the facts?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘I was married to Gabriella Capoleti for six years.’
‘Six years!’ It came out in a shattered, shocked gasp. Six years. ‘When did you marry her?’
‘Three months after you left me,’ Stefano said flatly.
Left me. Not Italy, not the wedding, no innocent, innocuous phrases. Left me. Because that was what she’d really done.
Allegra felt dizzy, and she steadied herself by placing one hand on the back of a chair. ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why so soon?’
Stefano shrugged, gave the ghost of a smile. ‘My first marriage didn’t happen, so I planned another.’
‘That simple,’ Allegra whispered.
Stefano smiled, although his eyes were hard. ‘Yes.’
She swallowed. Why did this hurt? This was old ground they were covering. She’d raked it over in her own mind years ago, had laid it to rest. Yet now it felt fresh, raw, achingly painful.
It hurt.
‘I meant to marry you for your name, Allegra, remember? The Avesti name.’ He laughed dryly, without humour. ‘Not that the Avesti name has any standing these days.’
‘Don’t—’