“I can’t say that being nice to people is something I strive for,” he said with an ironic lift of a black eyebrow. “I’m not one for cultivating friendships and relationships.”
She drank more of the champagne and let it work its magic in relaxing fears that had sprung from nowhere and so needed to be consigned back to nowhere. “Consider me shocked.”
He grunted a laugh and took another drink. “To answer your question, it’s likely that if you hadn’t had dental work, I wouldn’t have felt the need to keep you at a distance. It had been many years since I’d seen you – I think the last time you’dbeen a young adolescent – and so it is equally likely that I’d have still reacted to you in the same way even if you hadn’t worn braces.”
“It was a lot more involved than just braces,” she said after another drink. “Close to four years of treatment.” Most of that had been the treatment needed to correct her severe overbite.
He shrugged. “I never met that adult Luisa so I will never know how I would have reacted to her. Your sister is beautiful too, but her beauty does nothing for me.” His black eyes swirled with a meaning that made her pelvis fizz. “Your beauty does.”
“But it doesn’t define who I am. Physical beauty is only a surface thing. It doesn’t mean anything. Another ten or twenty years and any beauty I’ve gained will have faded.” Not that he’d be around to see it fade. Maybe some other man would but not Gennaro.
“My grandmother was a beauty at your age. Now she is approaching eighty and my grandfather still sees her as the woman she was when they pledged their lives together and she still sees him as the man he once was too.”
She drained the last of her champagne. “Maybe that’s why our eyesight fades as we age, so we’re blind to the physical changes in our partners.”
The lines around his eyes creased. “An evolutionary trick to keep us faithful and monogamous?”
She conjured a smile, wondering why two people who’d just drunk a toast to their marriage being only days away from ending were having this conversation. Wondered, too, why she was the one driving it. “My mother’s had laser eye surgery and she still loves my father, so probably not.”
Bath water rose again as he moved to refill her glass. “Does she still love him the same way she did when she married him?”
“I don’t know. I just know that she loves him and is veryprotective of him, which is a strange thing for me to get my head around because my father was always the protective one; the big bear protecting his women.” She refocused her stare on Gennaro. “He changed his mind about me marrying you. Did you know that?”
He laid back and had a large drink from his refreshed glass. “It was never said but I did get that impression.”
“The morning we married, he begged me not to go ahead with it.”
“And yet you did.”
“And yet I did,” she echoed. “And I did it for him and for my mother, and for my sister too, because I love them and because none of what was happening to them was their fault.”
“And you hate me for not helping them directly. You think I should have just handed over the cash to bail them out.”
“No, I hate you for using their desperate situation to your own advantage. That was as cruel as the disease he has.”
“I didn’t see it like that. To me, it was a business arrangement. A quid pro quo.”
“A quid pro quo with the family you’d grown up with. You came to my christening – your parents are my godparents. Marisa and I called your parents aunt and uncle.”
“A quid pro quo with my parents’ friends, not my friends. I never regarded you as family. I never called your parents aunt and uncle. You all took my family at face value and believed we held the same values as you, but we don’t. We never have. Just as physical beauty is surface, so too is my parents’ love of family. They are gracious and welcoming hosts but only if there’s something in it for them. They were happy to welcome you into their home and treat you like family when you had something they wanted but as soon as that was gone, you’d used up your usefulness to them.”
“You mean when my father could no longer practise law?”
“Exactly that. My father recognised your father’s talentswhen he joined the firm he used. It’s why he cultivated his friendship and encouraged your father to set up his own practice – your father had one of the sharpest legal minds in the country and my father wanted it directed at his own affairs.”
“Not sharp enough to ensure he had adequate coverage to protect himself when things went wrong.” She grimaced. “He thought he would go on forever. He never envisaged being forced to stop working by the age of fifty-five. None of the insurance policies he’d taken came into effect before the age of sixty.”
“A harsh lesson to learn,” Gennaro conceded, also conceding why Pietro Rossellini, a man who’d brimmed with good health, had fallen into that trap. When Gennaro had made his offer to marry Luisa, he’d still had much of the old vibrancy Gennaro remembered. Pietro’s deterioration since Gennaro’s marriage to his daughter, though, had been swift. When Gennaro had made his offer, he hadn’t understood the extent of the speed at which the disease was progressing in him, something that sat with increasing discomfort in him.
“A harsh lesson for all of us. Until you stepped in with your proposal they were only weeks away from declaring bankruptcy.”
“And your father found the idea of bankruptcy preferable to his daughter marrying me?”
She held his stare without blinking. “He couldn’t bear to think of me spending what he called mybest yearsliving with a cold, unfeeling, selfish bastard.”
Despite the sudden icy twist of his heart, Gennaro deliberately didn’t blink either. “You should have listened to him. I am every bit as cold and unfeeling and as selfish as he said.”
“I would have suffered ten years with you if it meant saving them from bankruptcy and having the money to pay for decent care for him.Twentyyears. My whole life.”