Hot-Blooded Italians. Sharon Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ yet it hurt to think that he might still own a luxurious tower block in the capital. To realise that he might have spent long and regular amounts of time in the same country as her and not once—not once—bothered to come and look her up, not even for old times’ sake.

      Well, of course he wouldn’t, she scolded herself. He doesn’t love you any more, he doesn’t even like you—he made that quite plain. Remember his last words for you—delivered in that deadly cold, Sicilian drawl of his.

      ‘Get out of here, Emma and do not come back—for you are no wife of mine.’

      But hadn’t she tried to ring him before, not once, but twice—and both times hadn’t he humiliatingly refused to speak to her? What was to say that this time would be any different?

      Yet she knew she owed it to her son to keep trying. She owed him the right to know something of the basic comfort which should be every child’s entitlement and which his father’s money could guarantee. Wasn’t that more important than anything else? She needed to do this for Gino’s sake.

      Emma shivered, pulling her sweater closer to her slim frame. These days her clothes seemed to swallow her up. She generally wore layers and kept on the move in this chilly autumn weather to keep herself warm. But soon her son would be awake and then she would have to put the heating on and more of her precious pennies would be eaten up by the ever-hungry gas fire.

      There was, she realised heavily, no choice other than to ring Vincenzo. Running her tongue around her suddenly parched lips, she lifted up the phone and punched out the number with a shaky finger, her accelerated heart rate making her feel dizzy with expectation.

      ‘Hello?’ The voice of the woman who answered was smooth and with only a trace of an accent, probably bilingual.

      But Vincenzo only employed people who could speak Italian, as well as English, Emma remembered. He even preferred it if his employees also spoke the very particular Sicilian dialect—which was a mystery to so many. Because Sicilians looked out for one another, he had once told her. They were members of a unique club of which they were fiercely proud. In fact, the more Emma thought about it, the more surprising she found it that he had ever chosen to marry her at all—she who spoke nothing more than a smattering of anything other than her native tongue.

      He married you because he felt obliged to, she reminded herself. And didn’t he tell you that enough times? Just as the marriage broke down because you were unable to keep your part of the bargain.

      ‘Hello?’ said the woman’s voice again.

      ‘Would it be…?’ Emma cleared her throat. ‘Er, could you tell me how I could get hold of Signor Cardini, please?’

      There was a short silence—as if the telephonist was shocked that a faltering unknown should dare to ask to be put through to the great man himself.

      ‘May I ask who is calling?’

      Emma took a deep breath. Here we go. ‘My name is…Emma Cardini.’

      There was another pause. ‘And your call is in connection with…?’

      So there was no recognition of her name and no knowledge of her status. No respect, either—and something deep inside Emma bristled with hurt and rejection.

      ‘I’m his wife,’ she said baldly.

      The woman had clearly been wrong-footed and Emma could almost hear her thinking—What the hell do I tell her?

      ‘Please hold the line,’ she said crisply.

      Emma was forced to wait for what seemed like an eternity, while pinpricks of sweat beaded her forehead despite the chilly atmosphere in the cottage. She was just silently practising saying Hello, Vincenzo over and over in her head to make it sound as emotionless as possible, when the telephonist’s voice broke into her thoughts.

      ‘Signor Cardini says to tell you that he is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed.’

      The humiliation hit her like a blow to the solar plexus and Emma found herself gripping on to the receiver as if she wanted to crush it in her clammy palm. She was just about to drop it back down onto the cradle when she realised the woman was still speaking to her.

      ‘But he says if you would care to leave a number where you can be contacted, he will endeavour to ring you when he has a moment.’

      Pride made Emma want to pass on the message that he could go to hell if he couldn’t even be bothered to speak to the woman he had married.

      But she could not afford the luxury of pride. ‘Yes, here’s my number,’ she said quietly. ‘Do you have a pen?’

      ‘Of course,’ said the woman in an amused voice.

      After she had put the phone down, Emma went to make a cup of tea, cupping the steaming mug around her cold fingers as she looked out of the kitchen window at the little garden she had grown to love.

      Shiny brown conkers from a large tree on Andrew’s huge adjoining estate had fallen over the flint wall and all over her tiny lawn and path. She had planned to put one of those mini sandpits in an unused corner of the plot and to grow a fragrant white jasmine to scent the long summer evenings—but all those dreams seemed to be fast evaporating.

      Because that was another downside she hadn’t even considered until now. If she was forced to move from this rural idyll—where would her little boy play when he eventually started to toddle and then to walk? Very few cheap lets came with their own garden.

      The ringing of the telephone shattered her troubled thoughts and Emma snapped it up before it could wake the baby.

      ‘Hello?’

      ‘Ciao, Emma.’

      The words hit her like a bucket of ice-water. He said her name like no one else—but then, nothing that Vincenzo did or said was remotely like anyone else. He was unique—like a rare black glittering gem with dark danger at its very core.

      Remember the way you’ve been practising saying his name in that bland and neutral way? Well, now is the time to put it into practice. ‘Vincenzo.’ She swallowed. ‘It was good of you to call back.’

      At the other end of the phone, Vincenzo’s hard lips twisted into a cruel parody of a smile. She spoke as if she were about to purchase a computer from him! In that soft English voice which used to drive him crazy—both in and out of bed. And despite the still-raw hostility of his feelings for her—even now he could feel the slow coil of awareness beginning to unfurl in his groin.

      ‘I found a brief window in my schedule,’ he said carelessly, flicking his dark gaze in the direction of the crammed diary which lay open on his desk. ‘What do you want?’

      In spite of having told herself that she didn’t care what he thought of her any more, Emma was woman enough to know a painful pang of regret. He spoke to her with less regard than he might use to someone who was removing the garbage from his house. How quickly the fires of passion could become cold grey embers which just left a dirty trace behind.

      So answer him in the same matter-of-fact way—keep this brisk and formal СКАЧАТЬ