Hot Nights with...the Italian: The Santangeli Marriage / The Italian’s Ruthless Marriage Command / Veretti's Dark Vengeance

On the other hand, going out to a restaurant appeared marginally more tempting than spending another solitary night in front of the television.

Yet solitary, she thought with a faint sigh, is what I seem to do best.

Up to now, having her own place for the first time in her life had felt a complete bonus. Admittedly, with only one bedroom, it wasn’t the biggest flat in the world—in fact, it could have been slipped inside the Santangeli house in Tuscany and lost—but it was light, bright, well furnished, with a well-fitted kitchen and shower room, and was sited in a smart, modern block of similar apartments in an upmarket area of London.

Best of all, living there, as she often reminded herself, she answered to no one.

There was, naturally, a downside. She had to accept that her independence had its limits, because she didn’t actually pay the rent. That was taken care of by a firm of lawyers, acting as agents for her husband.

After the divorce was finalised, she realised, she would no longer be able to afford anything like it.

Her life would also be subject to all kinds of other changes, not many of them negative. In spite of Julia’s dismissive words, her academic results had been perfectly respectable, and she hadn’t understood at the time why she’d received no encouragement to seek qualifications in some form of higher education, like her classmates.

How naive was it possible to get? she wondered, shaking her head in self-derision.

However, there was nothing to prevent her doing so in the future, with the help of a student loan. She could even look on the time she’d spent as Renzo’s wife as a kind of ‘gap year’, she told herself, her mouth twisting.

And now she had the immediate future to deal with, in the shape of this evening, which might also have its tricky moments unless she was vigilant. After all, the last thing she wanted was for Alan to think she was a lonely wife in need of consolation.

Because nothing could be further from the truth.

She picked out her clothes with care—a pale blue denim wrap-around skirt topped by a white silk shirt—hoping her choice wouldn’t look as if she was trying too hard. Then, proceeding along the same lines, she applied a simple dusting of powder to her face, and the lightest touch of colour on her mouth.

Lastly, and with reluctance, she retrieved her wedding ring from the box hidden in her dressing table and slid it on to her finger. She hadn’t planned to wear it again, but its presence on her hand would be a tacit reminder to her companion that the evening was a one-off and she was certainly not available—by any stretch of the imagination.

Two hours later, she was ruefully aware that Alan’s thinking had not grown any more elastic during his absence, and that, in spite of the romantic ambience that Chez Dominique had always cultivated, she was having a pretty dull evening.

A faintly baffling one, too, because he seemed to be in a nostalgic mood, talking about their past relationship as if it had been altogether deeper and more meaningful than she remembered.

Get a grip, she thought, irritated. You may have been a few years older than I was, but we were still hardly more than boy and girl. I was certainly a virgin, and I suspect you probably were too, although that’s almost certainly no longer true for either of us.

He had far more confidence these days, smartly dressed in a light suit, with a blue shirt that matched his eyes. And he seemed to have had his slightly crooked front teeth fixed too.

All in all, she decided, he was a nice guy. But that was definitely as far as it went.

However, the food at Chez Dominique was still excellent, and when she managed to steer him away from personal issues and on to his life in Hong Kong she became rather more interested in what he had to say, and was able to feel glad that he was doing well.

But even so, the fact that he had not gone there through choice clearly still rankled with him, and although he’d probably bypassed a rung or two on the corporate ladder as a result of his transfer, she detected that there was a note of resentment never far from the surface.

As the waiter brought his cheese and her crème brûlée, Alan said, ‘Are you staying with your cousin while you’re in London?’

‘Oh, no,’ Marisa returned, without thinking. ‘Julia lives near Tonbridge Wells these days.’

‘You mean you’ve actually been allowed off the leash without a minder?’ His tone was barbed. ‘Amazing.’

‘Not particularly.’ She ate some of her dessert. ‘Perhaps—Lorenzo—’ she stumbled slightly over the name ‘—trusts me.’ Or he simply doesn’t care what I do …

‘So I suppose you must have a suite at the Ritz, or some other five-star palace?’ He gave a small bitter laugh. ‘How the other half live.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ Marisa said tersely. ‘I’m actually using someone’s flat.’ Which was, she thought, an approximation of the truth, and also a reminder of how very much she wanted to get back there and avoid answering any more of the questions that he was obviously formulating over his Port Salut.

She glanced at her watch and gave a controlled start. ‘Heavens, is that really the time? I should be going.’

‘Expecting a phone call from the absent husband?’ There was a faintly petulant note in his voice.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have an early appointment tomorrow.’ At my desk in the Estrello, at nine o’clock sharp.

At the same time she was aware that his remark had made her freeze inwardly. Because there’d been a time, she thought, when Renzo had called her nearly every day, coming up each time against the deliberate barrier of her answering machine, and leaving increasingly brief and stilted messages, which she had deleted as quickly as she’d torn up his unread letters.

Until the night when he’d said abruptly, an odd almost raw note in his voice, ‘Tomorrow, Marisa, when I call you, please pick up the phone. There are things that need to be said.’ He’d paused, then added, ‘I beg you to do this.’

And when the phone had rung the following night she’d been shocked to find that she’d almost had to sit on her hands to prevent herself from lifting the receiver. That she’d had to repeat silently to herself over and over again, There is nothing he can say that I could possibly want to hear.

Then, in the silence of all the evenings that followed, she had come to realise that he was not going to call again, and that her intransigence had finally achieved the victory she wanted. And she had found she was wondering why her triumph suddenly seemed so sterile.

Something, she thought, she had still not managed to work out to her own satisfaction.

She had a polite tussle with Alan over her share of the bill, which he won, and walked out into the street with a feeling of release. She turned to say goodnight and found him at the kerb, hailing a taxi, which was thoughtful.

But she hadn’t bargained for him clambering in after her.

She said coolly, ‘Oh—may I drop you somewhere?’

He smiled at her. ‘I was hoping you might offer me some coffee—or a nightcap.’

Her heart sank like a stone. ‘It is getting late …’

‘Not too late, surely—for old times’ sake?’

He was over-fond of that phrase, Marisa decided irritably. And his ‘old times’ agenda clearly differed substantially from hers.

She said, not bothering to hide her reluctance, ‘Well—a quick coffee, perhaps, and then you must go,’ and watched with foreboding as his smile deepened into satisfaction.

She didn’t doubt her ability to keep him at bay. She had, after all, done it before, with someone else, even though it had rebounded on her later in a way that still had the power to turn her cold all over at the memory.

But she told herself grimly, Alan was a totally different proposition. She’d make sure that when he’d drunk his coffee he would go away and stay away. There’d be no more meetings during this leave or any other.

As they went up in the lift to the second floor of the apartment block she was aware he’d moved marginally closer. She stepped back, deliberately distancing herself and hoping he’d take the hint.

But as she turned the key in the lock he was standing so close behind her that his breath was stirring her hair, and she flung the door open, almost jumping across the narrow hallway into the living room.

Where, she realised with shock, the light was on.

Also—the room was occupied.

She stopped so abruptly that Alan nearly cannoned into her as she saw with horror exactly who was waiting for her.

Lorenzo Santangeli was lounging full-length on the sofa, totally at ease, jacket and tie removed, with his white shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist, its sleeves turned back over his bronze forearms.