The Italian Doctor’s Mistress Read online

  “So much for your theories about small-town living,” she said glumly to Carlo, when they were back in the car.

  “You have no copy of your mother’s photograph?”

  “I’ve got the negative, thank goodness.”

  “Then do not be so downcast, my lovely one,” he murmured, cupping her jaw tenderly. “The rest are just things, and can be replaced.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime, stand on the corner and beg? All I’ve got left are my clothes and a few other personal possessions at your house. Nothing else.”

  “You have me,” he said. “I will not let you starve.”

  “It’s not your job to provide for me. For heaven’s sake, Carlo, I’m supposed to be an adult! I don’t know what I was thinking, to be so stupid.”

  “You are most assuredly not stupid.”

  “Careless, then.” Frustration had her choking back tears. Despite occasional bright spots, the day just kept getting worse. What else did it have in store? she wondered.

  “Not careless, either,” Carlo said kindly. “You were preoccupied with your father, wondering how you could help him. And then, without warning, you were thrown into a crisis not of your own making. Do not blame yourself because, in putting Anita’s safety before your own, misfortune befell you.”

  “It’s my fault the passport was stolen. The police officer was quite right. I should have left it in my room.”

  “Ah, the passport…!” He snapped his fingers dismissively. “So much fuss about a matter so easily resolved. On Wednesday, I work just half a day. In the afternoon, we will go to Milano, to the Consulate, and take care of the passport. As for the money, I will give you what you need for now, and—”

  “No, you won’t! I’ve accepted enough favors from you, as it is, and I’ll be damned if I’ll take money, as well. I’m not your mistress, Carlo.”

  He covered her mouth with his hand. “Hush, Danielle! I was about to say, I will give you what you need for now, and you will repay me when your affairs are again in order. Would you not do the same for me, if our situations were reversed?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “But of course you would. It is how friends do for friends, si? And we are very good friends, are we not?”

  “Yes,” she said again, shutting the door on the regret that they could never be more than that. He’d made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t looking for long-term involvement, and in agreeing to what he’d termed a mutually pleasant interlude, she’d accepted his terms. Now she’d have to find a way to live with them.

  “Then let us waste no more time arguing.” He shot back his cuff to check his watch. “If we leave here immediately, we’ll still be in time to pick up Anita after school.”

  They made it with only seconds to spare. Barely had Carlo parked the Lamborghini on the far side of the circular drive, than girls ranging in age from six to about ten came pouring down the front steps of the handsome building housing their school.

  “There she is!” His face lighting up in a blinding smile, Carlo climbed out of the car and held open his arms as Anita raced toward him.

  Again, envy clamped an unforgiving fist around Danielle’s heart. A person had only to look at the child to see the utter joy, the absolute faith, Carlo inspired in her. She was so completely cherished by her father that she’d survived the terrible loss of her mother with her spirit undimmed. She would never have reason to question his love; never wonder if he resented her for living, when his wife had died.

  “Danielle!” Squealing with delight, Anita detached herself from Carlo, and ran around the other side of the car to stick her head in the open passenger window. “Come to see my classroom, and my teacher, please! I tell her so much about you.”

  “Another time, tesoro,” Carlo said, tweaking one of her long, lustrous braids. “Remember Danielle’s not as far recovered as you are. Climbing in and out of the car is still painful for her.”

  “But when you are well again, you will come then?”

  How could she refuse this enchanting child? “I’d love to, sweetheart.”

  Anita gave a satisfied nod. “Then I will be a patient.”

  “I hope not,” her father said, his laughing gaze swinging to Danielle. “What you mean is, you will be patient.”

  “I do not understand the difference, Papà.”

  He hoisted her into the back seat of the car. “To be a patient means you are ill or hurt, and a doctor must look after you. To be patient is to wait without complaining, even though you would like to make time pass more quickly.”

  She reflected on that for a second or two, then asked, “But what if Danielle goes home before that time comes?”

  He climbed behind the wheel and again settled his gaze on Danielle, the difference being that, this time, it was not laughter she saw in his gray, beautiful eyes, but a hunger barely kept in check. “She will be here for quite some time yet,” he promised. “Her father still has a long way to go before he is well again.”

  Fire licked along Danielle’s veins. Left her stomach churning; her thighs quivering. And, sweet heaven, another embarrassing hot flood leaking between them to dampen her panties.

  “But what if she grows tired of waiting, Papà? What if she becomes bored?” Anita persisted.

  “We’ll have to find a way to keep that from happening. Come up with a diversion of some kind.” He speared Danielle with another heated glance. “Is that not correct, signorina?”

  “If you say so,” she replied demurely. But inside, exuberant happiness sang through her blood and filled every last corner of her soul.

  The sky had never seemed bluer, the grass never more lushly green. The most handsome man in the world was looking at her as if she were a treasure beyond price. Before long, they would come together, perhaps in the shadow of moonlight, perhaps in some secret, sun-filled place. They would lie naked beside each other. He would possess her, and she would soar like a caged bird at last set free. She would fly with him, all the way to the stars and back…

  Good God, what was wrong with her? Her father lay in a coma from which he might never fully recover. She was thousands of miles from home and friends. She had sore ribs and a sore ankle, and someone had stolen her purse. She had no money, no credit cards, and no passport. And all she could think about was Carlo Rossi’s beautiful hands touching her, and his mouth doing unmentionable, heavenly things to her. Things she’d only read about but never dreamt she might one day experience firsthand.

  She was nuts. Definitely.

  Or else, she was in love.

  Her thoughts screeched to a halt. Left her heart palpitating, and her palms damp with shock.

  “Is there something wrong?” Carlo inquired.

  “Of course not. Why do you ask?”

  “You are flushed, suddenly, and you regard me with deep anxiety. You’re surely not afraid of me, Danielle?”

  “No,” she replied breathlessly. “I’m afraid of myself.”

  “Because she might fall and hurt herself again,” Anita piped up from the back seat.

  Carlo pressed his lips together to contain a smile and rolled his eyes. “I’d forgotten we had a chaperone. We’ll finish this conversation later.” Then, clearing his throat, he glanced through the rearview mirror at his daughter. “Tell us about your day, Anita. Which part was the best?”

  “To come out of school and see you and Danielle waiting for me,” she promptly said. “I felt like my friends. Sometimes, their parents meet them when it’s time to go home, but I only ever have Calandria to look for me.”

  “I know, tesoro,” he said. “But you understand that I have to be at the hospital, looking after people who need my help.”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied sunnily. “But today it was nice for it to be different.”

  Totally sympathetic to what the child was really trying to express, Danielle said, “Soon I’ll be able to walk farther. When that happens, I could come through the park to meet you after school. Woul
d you like that, sweetheart?”

  “Si!” Anita bounced up and down in glee. “Oh, yes, Danielle! I would like that very much.”

  “But only for as long as Danielle remains in Galanio, of course,” Carlo remarked casually. “You must not forget she’ll eventually have to leave us.”

  Though ostensibly directing his reminder at his daughter, Danielle had the feeling he was sending a similar message to her, one that ran along the lines of, Don’t make yourself too indispensable, my dear. Because you and I have agreed to a little romantic fling doesn’t change the fact that you’re just passing through our lives.

  After that, even though the sky remained cloudless, the afternoon somehow didn’t seem quite as sunny.

  She was unusually quiet during the drive home, which he put down to her having endured a stressful afternoon. When she spoke barely a dozen words to him throughout dinner, he assumed it was because she and Anita were engaged in lively conversation.

  He didn’t object. Seeing his daughter’s animated face, hearing her infectious giggle, gave him untold satisfaction. As for Danielle, watching her always brought him pleasure, even when she acted as if he weren’t at the table.

  But when he had to leave for the clinic just as the meal ended, and came home no more than an hour later to find she’d retired for the night, he went to investigate, afraid she might not be feeling well.

  “Oh,” she said, opening the door to his knock. “You’re back already.”

  “You sound surprised,” he teased. “Who else were you expecting?”

  “Definitely not you, Carlo,” she answered, rather stiffly he thought. “I thought we agreed there’d be no hanky-panky here at the house.”

  “Hanky-panky?” Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he leaned against the door frame and studied her. She’d changed into a loose, silky robe that fell to her ankles, and had scrubbed her face clean of all make-up. But although she appeared well enough in terms of her health, something was definitely amiss with her mood. “I’m not familiar with this word ‘hanky-panky.”’

  “Funny stuff,” she elaborated, studiously avoiding his gaze. “Messing around.”

  “Being intimate, you mean?”

  “You could call it that, I suppose.”

  Becoming annoyed, he said sharply, “I suppose I could. Certainly I find it vastly preferable to the terms you’re using. But to answer your question, no, I’m not here to press you into ‘funny stuff’ or ‘messing around,’ and definitely not any ‘hanky-panky.’ I was surprised that you’d retired so early, that’s all, and I wanted to make sure everything was as it should be.”

  She did look at him then, and he realized her eyes were bright with unshed tears and that when she tried to stammer an apology, her chin quivered uncontrollably.

  At once remorseful, he pushed away from the door frame, and cupping her elbows, drew her closer. “There is something wrong! Confide in me, cara. Let me help.”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. I just…let my imagination run away with me.”

  “In what way did you do such a thing?”

  She shifted restlessly in his hold, and cast about for an answer. “I was worried. About my father. I thought, when you were called to the hospital, that it was for him…and the news was bad…and you didn’t want to tell me.”

  She was lying. Although a plausible enough excuse, it didn’t account for her distant behavior before that. But she was so visibly overwrought that he decided not to press the point. Perhaps she was merely hormonal, in the way that women were.

  “Danielle, if that call had been about your father, not only would I have said so immediately, I’d have taken you with me to the clinic,” he said firmly. “I have neither the right nor the will to do otherwise.”

  She lifted one slender shoulder in a faint shrug. “But now that we’re sort of involved, you might—”

  “Want to spare your feelings? Cara mia, did we not establish, just this afternoon, that one has nothing to do with the other?”

  “A lot happened this afternoon. It’s taking some getting used to.”

  “For me, also.” He tipped her face up to his. “You know, if you continue to look so desolate, I’m going to break the house rules and kiss you. And with your bed not more than a few meters away, that could lead us into all kinds of trouble.”

  The ghost of a smile flickered over her mouth. “That kind of threat begs to be put to the test.”

  “All in good time, cara. For now, join me in the library for a respectable after-dinner brandy.”

  She chewed her lip, considering. “All right. Give me five minutes to change.”

  “Not necessary,” he said. “Calandria has laid a fire to ward off the evening chill. You’ll find the room very cosy.”

  “But I’m wearing only my bedroom slippers, and this caftan isn’t much better than a nightgown.”

  He twirled an imaginary mustache. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, la mia bella!”

  Until then, she’d seen only a limited part of the main floor of his home. She knew that the sweeping staircase led upstairs to five bedrooms, had visited Calandria for mid-morning coffee once, and seen the conservatory beyond the kitchen. But now, as Carlo ushered Danielle through double doors at the back of the foyer, she saw there was another wing attached to the villa, and recognized at once that it was much older than the rest of the house.

  Tiles painted in varying shades of rich burgundy, dark blue and muted gold covered the floor of the long corridor. Oil paintings which, even to her untutored eye, were obviously originals, lined whitewashed, rough plaster walls. The glass in the windows was thick and wavy with age. Black iron light fixtures, which once had held candles but now were fitted with electric chandelier bulbs, hung from the raftered ceiling.

  “Watch your step,” Carlo cautioned, taking her arm more firmly. “The floor is uneven in places.”

  “But very beautiful,” she said. “Is it hand-painted?”

  “Si. The monks who once lived here built everything themselves. They fired the tiles, carved the ceiling beams, plastered the walls. Sadly, most of the monastery burned down in the late eighteenth century, but this section was saved. For years after that, it was put to a variety of uses—a church school, the local priest’s house, a museum, and even, for a short time, a prison.”

  Danielle shivered. “A good thing the walls can’t talk. They’d have some gory tales to tell.”

  “More than you can begin to guess, cara. During the Second World War, local partisans hid out here. When the fighting was over, the place stood empty for almost twenty years, and fell into such disrepair that the city fathers decided restoring it would be too costly.”

  They’d reached the end of the corridor by then, and he pushed open another door. The architectural details of the room he now used as a library matched those in the corridor, but a carpet the color of whipped cream, sitting squarely in the middle of the floor, softened the hard tiles, and glass-fronted bookcases of a much later vintage lined the walls.

  “This used to be the monks’ communal dining hall, if the historical records are accurate,” Carlo said. “Now, it’s my retreat from the world, and the place where I catch up on my paperwork.” He indicated the manila folders stacked on a large library desk. “There’s never time to keep abreast of it during the day.”

  “You need an administrative assistant.”

  “I already have one. You met Beatrice, the day you came to my office to inquire about your father. She transcribes to disk the final copy of my case histories, but this is where I organize the data.”

  “So when do you find time to enjoy these?” Danielle sank into the corner of one of the two leather sofas flanking the massive fireplace. The cushions were so deep and soft, she didn’t know how she’d pull herself out again.

  “Whenever I can steal an hour to catch up on the latest medical research.” He poured grappa into tall, bell-shaped crystal glasses, and came to sit next to her. “Or whenever I lur
e a beautiful woman into my private lair.”

  “You do that often?” He was teasing her, she knew, and despite her earlier doubts about the wisdom of embarking on an affair with him, she found her spirits lifting.

  “Not often at all.” He clinked his glass lightly against hers. “You’re the first.”

  But probably not the last. “Tell me more about this retreat of yours,” she said quickly, before her lurking insecurity could gain a foothold and spoil the mood. “If the city didn’t restore it, who did?”

  “Karina’s grandparents bought it, not because they had any particular interest in what was left of the monastery, but for the two acres of lakefront land it sat on. When she was a girl, she and her friends used to play here. The ruined section made for wonderful games of hide-and-seek.” He took a sip of his brandy and rolled it slowly over his palate before adding, “She loved this place.”

  Karina…Karina…! Her ghost was everywhere, even in a building well over three hundred years old. Was there no place free of her memory?

  Ashamed that she could think so unkindly of a woman cut down in her prime, Danielle said, “Is that how you came to live here?”

  “Indirectly, only. Eventually her grandfather sold the land. By then the masonry on the building was crumbling, the exposed beams in danger of falling without notice. So the new owner had the worst of it demolished, and left the rest standing, but sealed off. It made for a picturesque curiosity, with its bell tower rising from ancient walls overgrown with vines. Tourists were so intrigued by it that, until quite recently, it was featured on postcards of the region.”

  He lapsed into silence and Danielle steeled herself to patience, knowing from the faraway look on his face that although he sat beside her in body, in heart and mind he was years removed from the moment.

  At length, he said, “When I decided Galanio was where I wanted Anita to grow up, the land was again for sale, and it seemed like a sign—as if Karina were giving her seal of approval to the move. I bought the property, and while the hospital was being built not fifteen minutes away, the villa was taking shape here. When both were completed, I hired experts to restore this wing and incorporate it into the main house.”