The Sicilian's Mistress (20 page)

And she still couldn't
prove
that she was innocent. To believe her, Gianni would have to accept that Stefano was an out-and-out liar, capable of behaviour that might well have landed him in court in any other circumstances. That was a very tall order. But, even as Milly confronted that truth, she knew that it wasn't possible for her to remain silent. She would just have to deal with the fall-out when it happened.

That same afternoon, Milly was coiled in Gianni's arms in front of the log fire in the library, telling him between kisses about the new rose garden she was planning, when a knock on the door interrupted them.

With a groan of annoyance, Gianni settled her into an armchair. Milly closed her eyes sleepily.

‘Wake up,
cara mia
. We have a visitor.'

Something in Gianni's flat delivery spooked her. Her drowsy eyes opened very wide in dismay when she focused on the young man hovering in the centre of the magnificent rug. It was Stefano.

S
TEFANO
had so much strain etched on his taut face he looked a lot older then he was. His hair was shorter now. He was a little too thin. His extrovert ebullience appeared to have deserted him. His dark eyes evaded both Milly's gaze and Gianni's.

Milly glanced at Gianni and just winced. The Sicilian side of Gianni's brooding temperament was in the ascendant. He looked grim as hell, but kind of satisfied too, content that his kid brother should be nervous as a cat in his radius. Milly began to revise her assumption that she had been punished more than Stefano. The two brothers had once been pretty close. Stefano, for all his brash talk and swagger, had been heavily dependent on Gianni's approval. And Gianni, she now recognised, had cut him loose from that support system.

Milly stood up. ‘Anybody want a drink?' she gushed, to break the awful silence.

‘No, thanks…I need to talk,' Stefano announced tautly.

‘We'll talk elsewhere,' Gianni drawled, smooth as glass, but he shot Milly a grim, assessing glance, evidently having expected her to be more discomfited by Stefano's presence.

‘I don't keep a hair shirt in my wardrobe,' Milly told Gianni defiantly.

‘Milly has to be here,' Stefano stated stiffly. ‘And you have to promise to hear me out, Gianni. I don't care what you do afterwards, but you've got to give me the chance to explain things.'

‘Is there some point to that curious proviso?' Gianni enquired very drily.

Stefano lowered his head. ‘You're my brother and I've wronged you,' he breathed tightly. ‘I've lied to you, de
ceived you, and I stood by and did nothing when I could have helped you. I followed the tabloid coverage after you got married. I found out what had happened to Milly…the hit-and-run and everything since…and I guess I just couldn't live with myself any more.'

Milly sank back down into her chair because her knees were wobbling. As far as the two men were concerned she might as well not have been there, and if the knowledge of their marriage had scared Stefano into confession mode, she had no desire to distract him.

Gianni was very still. ‘
How
have you lied?'

‘About that night with Milly in New York,' his brother said gruffly.

‘But you had no reason to lie. I saw the worst with my own eyes!' Gianni shot back at him.

‘There's no way you'd ever have forgiven me for what I did!' Stefano burst out with sudden rawness. ‘You'd have thought I was some sort of pervert. I
had
to lie! It was me or her, surely you can see that?'

Gianni was now the colour of ash beneath his bronzed skin, his hard facial bones fiercely prominent. ‘Milly said you assaulted her…'

The silence hung like a giant sheet of glass, ready to crash.

Milly cleared her throat and spoke up. ‘Stefano told me he loved me. He was drunk. I was feeling sick and I told him to go home,' she explained. ‘I heard the front door slam while I was in the bathroom. I thought he'd left…'

‘I opened the door and then I changed my mind,' the younger man mumbled.

‘So I got into bed and went to sleep.'

Gianni scrutinised her taut face and then focused with mounting incredulity on his brother.

‘I saw her sleeping. I just wanted to kiss her. That's all. I
swear
!' Stefano protested, weak as water now beneath the appalled look of menace and disgust flaring in Gianni's diamond-hard eyes.

‘I think maybe you thought that if you kissed me, you'd be able to prove that I could respond to you,' Milly countered with contempt. ‘You were angry with me. I'd dented your ego, and just for that you frightened the life out of me!'

‘I was drunk as a skunk…I hardly knew what I was doing!'

Gianni's hands coiled into powerful punitive fists, and as he absorbed his kid brother's mute terror a look of very masculine revulsion crossed his lean, strong face. ‘
Accidenti
…I wonder how many sex offenders say that.'

Milly sprang upright again, her fine features flushed with turbulent emotion, and suddenly she was erupting like a volcano. ‘
You
needn't sound so blasted pious!' she fired bitterly at Gianni. ‘If Stefano
had
been a rapist, you'd have given him open house. You just walked out and
left
me with him!'

Beneath the bite of that derisive attack Gianni froze, to stare back at Milly with stricken eyes.

Stefano's shoulders slumped as he too looked at Milly. ‘I didn't mean to terrify you, but when you woke up you went crazy, like you were being attacked—'

‘She
was
being attacked,' Gianni slotted in from between clenched teeth, his Sicilian accent thick as molasses as he visibly struggled to control his own rising fury. ‘When you touch a woman without her consent, it's an assault.'

‘I panicked! When you saw us, I was only trying to hold her still until she calmed down—'

‘How the bloody hell do you expect me to believe that?' Gianni roared at the younger man in savage interruption. ‘You are one sick bastard!
Per meraviglia
, you came to me that night in tears, sobbing out your penitence, telling me how you couldn't resist her, insinuating that she had led you on. It wasn't
enough
that you had assaulted a pregnant woman; you then chose to destroy our relationship to save your own useless hide!'

Stefano stumbled back against the desk for support. ‘I didn't know she was pregnant then, Gianni. I'd never, ever have touched her if I'd known that!
Dio mio
…I pulled a
crazy stunt and I frightened her, but I honestly didn't mean to!'

Milly studied the younger man with unconcealed scorn. ‘I might be impressed by that defence if you'd thought better of your lies once you'd had time to appreciate what you'd done. But even weeks after that night in New York, you were still determined to keep on lying!'

Gianni's winged brows pleated. ‘Are you saying that you saw Stefano
after
that night?' Gianni looked dazed.

‘Gianni, once you asked me what I was doing in Cornwall three years ago. I'll tell you now. I went there to confront Stefano,' Milly stated crisply. ‘I took a lot of trouble to find him. In the end I had to contact his girlfriend's mother and pretend to be a friend of hers to find out where they were staying.'

Stefano was now staring fixedly at the rug.

‘You went to Cornwall to see him?
Why?
' Gianni's open bewilderment told her that shock had deprived him of his usual ability to add two and two.

‘Milly wanted me to tell you the truth.' Stefano spoke up again in a sudden rush. ‘She tried to shame me into it by telling me that she was pregnant, but I already knew that by then because you'd told me. I was furious she had tracked me down. I didn't want anything to do with her in case you found out. You might've started doubting my story, maybe thinking that we'd been having an affair…'

‘Per amor di Dio…'
Gianni gazed with incredulous dark eyes at his trembling kid brother, and then he simply turned his back.

‘When I arrived at the cottage, Stefano had been drowning his sorrows again,' Milly revealed ruefully. ‘He'd had a row with his girlfriend and she'd taken their hire car and driven back to London to fly home, leaving him stranded.'

‘It was too
late
to tell the truth! I was in too deep by then. There was nothing else to do but face it out!' Stefano protested weakly.

Gianni's dark, haunted eyes were fixed to Milly. ‘Tell me
that the night you're referring to was
not
the same night that you were hit by that car!' he urged, almost pleadingly.

‘It
was
that night.' Milly shrugged fatalistically. ‘I'd gone to the cottage in a taxi and then let it go.'

As Gianni rounded on Stefano, the younger man backed away, looking sick as a dog. ‘Until I read about the hit-and-run in the papers last week, I didn't
know
what had happened to Milly that night! How
could
I have known? She just walked out on me. For all I knew she had a car parked further up the road—'

‘You didn't give a damn either way,' Milly condemned helplessly. ‘In a twisted way, you had started to blame
me
for the mess you were in with Gianni!'

‘I called a cab the next morning and flew back to New York,' Stefano continued woodenly, as if she hadn't spoken. ‘I had no idea that Milly had been injured after leaving the cottage.'

‘But within days you were well aware that I was frantically trying to find her.' Gianni's tone was one of savage disbelief. ‘Yet not one word did you breathe! You could have told me you'd seen her in Cornwall but you didn't. I spent months searching France for her. By then she had been wrongly identified as another woman.'

‘I knew nothing about any of that,' Stefano reiterated, perspiration beading his strained face. ‘And if I'm here now, it's because I couldn't stand all this on my conscience any more.'

‘No, you're here now because Milly's my wife,' Gianni delivered with chillingly soft exactitude. ‘Because you assumed I might already know all this, and the idea of confessing all and throwing yourself on my mercy seemed like the only option you had left.'

‘That's not how it was, Gianni.' Stefano had turned a ghastly colour.

‘Your conscience got to you too late. You hurt Milly not once, but twice. You also cost me the first years of my son's life,' Gianni condemned with lethal menace. ‘But what I can
never, ever forgive is my
own
mistake, Stefano. I put family loyalty first. And here you are, our father all over again. Weak, dishonest, unscrupulous. It's a just reward for my stupidity, isn't it?'

Looking at Gianni, Stefano seemed to crumple entirely. ‘I'm not like that. I'm not. I've changed a whole lot since then. I
had
to lie… I was so scared—'

Gianni said something cold in Italian.

Stefano was openly begging now. ‘How was I supposed to admit the truth, knowing that you'd kill me? Do you think I didn't realise that
she
came first with you when I saw how you reacted at the apartment? It was her or me…you've
got
to see that!'

Milly did not feel sorry for Stefano, but she was squirming for him. His best quality had always been the depth of his attachment to Gianni. He had always been measuring himself up against Gianni. He had probably developed a crush on her for the same reason. But alcohol, arrogance and sheer stupidity had combined to tear Stefano's privileged little world apart. He
had
been terrified that night in New York after Gianni had walked out on them both, terrified that Gianni, who had been more father than brother to him, would disown him.

‘Go home, Stefano,' Milly suggested wearily.

Gianni said nothing. It was as if Stefano had become invisible. His brother slung him one last pleading glance and then hurried out of the room.

A hollow laugh that startled Milly was wrenched from Gianni then. ‘
Porca miseria!
To think I was jealous of that pathetic little punk!'

‘Jealous?' Milly parroted in astonishment. ‘Of
Stefano
?'

Gianni half spread expressive brown hands and then clenched them tight into defensive fists, his strong profile rigid as steel. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes. Long before that night I saw you together at the apartment, I was
very
jealous,' he bit out raggedly.

Milly was stunned by that revelation. ‘I can't believe that… I mean, why on earth—?'

‘You had a bond with him. You talked about things I was totally out of touch with…
house
music, clubs. You used the same street dialect, shared the same
in
jokes,' Gianni enumerated with harsh emphasis. ‘You were the same generation. I introduced you to dinner dates, antiques and art galleries, and occasionally you were bored out of your skull and I knew it.'

Milly was savaged by that shattering outpouring of feelings she would never have dreamt Gianni could experience. Insecurity, vulnerability concerning the age-gap between them. ‘You couldn't expect us to share every taste, every interest…'

‘I didn't feel that way until Stefano came into the picture.'

‘I thought you were pleased we got on so well.'

‘Sure I was pleased.' Gianni's agreement was raw with self-contempt. ‘I'd ring you from the other side of the world and in the background my kid brother would be cracking jokes and making you laugh. I was
eaten
with jealousy and there was nothing I could do about it.' He moved restively about the room like a trapped animal, forced to pace round a too small cage. ‘But until that night I saw you with him I
knew
it was all in my own mind; I
knew
I was being unreasonable!'

Suddenly Milly was grasping why Gianni had been so quick to believe her capable of betraying him. Jealousy rigidly suppressed—a fertile and dangerous breeding ground for distrust and suspicion. Yet she had never suspected that Gianni was jealous. Once he had even told her that he was grateful she had Stefano for company. His ferocious pride had ensured he went to great lengths to conceal his own weakness.

‘I was planning to surprise you that night. I was in a really good mood. But I went haywire when I saw you on our bed with Stefano. That was my every worst fear come true. If I had stayed one second longer I would've torn him apart with
my bare hands!' Gianni asserted in a smouldering undertone, ashen pale. ‘I couldn't stand to even look at you. So I didn't.'

So I didn't.
He always protected himself from what he didn't want to deal with emotionally.