The Italian Doctor’s Mistress Read online

  “Not far, at all. We passed it several minutes ago.”

  “But I thought—?”

  “I’m taking you to lunch first.”

  “No!”

  “Why not? We both have to eat, si?”

  “You can’t spare the time.”

  “In fact, I can. Things are remarkably quiet at the clinic today. In the event that an emergency arises and I’m needed, I can be reached easily enough, and be back there in a matter of minutes.”

  They’d arrived at the far side of town by then, where the land flattened out a little. Turning the car along a quiet back street, he parked it in the shade of a stucco wall covered in a flowering vine whose blossoms had begun to fall already. They lay in soft, creamy drifts on the ground, as pale and lovely as Danielle’s skin.

  “Come,” he said, assisting her out of the car. “For the next hour or so, I am not your father’s doctor, and you are not his daughter. We are merely a man and a woman enjoying each other’s company and sharing a pleasant meal together.”

  “I don’t see a restaurant,” she said, glancing around. “Is this the latest trend of the smart set, to picnic in a back alley?”

  “No, cara mia. I’m too fond of my creature comforts for that.” He pushed aside a low hanging tangle of vine to reveal a door set in the wall, and tugged on the old-fashioned iron bell hanging next to it. “But through here lies one of the best-kept secrets in town, one the tourists never find and only the most discriminating locals frequent.”

  The door swung open. Lorenzo, the maître d’, stood on the other side. Recognizing Carlo, he immediately ushered them into the enclosed courtyard, his face wreathed in smiles. “Buon giorno, signor e signorina. Come state?” Then, noticing that Danielle limped badly, he hurried to take her other arm and escort her to a table in a sunny corner. “Ah, signorina! Dove le fa male?”

  “La sua caviglia,” Carlo supplied. “It is her ankle. Danielle, allow me to introduce Lorenzo. He owns this ristorante with his brother, Lamberto, who does the cooking and whom you’ll probably meet before we leave.”

  It had cost her to walk even such a short distance. She had turned pale from the effort, and sank with visible relief into the cushioned chair Lorenzo drew out for her. But despite her discomfort, she managed a smile that lit up her face. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Lorenzo. What a delightful place you have here.”

  “Grazie, grazie! It is my great pleasure to welcome you as my guest. You are here on holiday?”

  “No,” Danielle explained. “I came to be with my father, who is in the hospital.”

  “But Signorina Blake ended up as my patient, also,” Carlo said. “Not a happy coincidence, would you say, mio amico?”

  “Indeed not.” Gallantly, Lorenzo raised her hand to his lips, a gesture as natural to him as breathing, but one which sent another flush riding up Danielle’s throat to stain her cheeks a delicate pink.

  “You blush like a schoolgirl,” Carlo told her, once they were alone. “I find that unusual in a woman your age, and rather beguiling.”

  “A woman my age?” A smile touched her mouth. “I don’t know whether to feel flattered or insulted by that. What does it mean, exactly?”

  “That you’re in the early years of your prime, cara,” he said soberly. “At the stage where a man forgets what he is saying, and turns his head to watch as you walk into a room, or pass him by on the street.”

  “You don’t really know how old I am, though.”

  “But yes, I do,” he said. “You forget, you are my patient, and I have examined your medical chart. You will be thirty in August.”

  “Next, you’ll be telling me how much I weigh.”

  He cast an appraising glance over her fine-boned frame. “Between fifty-three and fifty-four kilos, I’d guess—about a hundred and nineteen pounds.”

  She laughed ruefully. “That’s not fair! A woman’s age and weight are supposed to be her secrets.”

  “Yours are safe with me.” He continued watching the different expressions playing over her face, the graceful way she used her hands to illustrate her mood, the lovely line of her neck when she turned her head, the shining fall of her pale gold hair. “Shall I tell you something else?” he said, wondering if she heard the undercurrent of desire threading through his words.

  “If I said ‘no,’ would you listen?”

  “Probably not. Some things are better out in the open.”

  “Fire away, then. I daresay I’ll survive.”

  “At forty, you will be irresistible…at fifty, still in your prime but carrying it with more ease. At sixty, men half your age will wish they’d known you when you were twenty. At seventy, your golden hair will have turned silver, but your eyes will continue to mesmerize all who gaze into their green depths. At eighty, you will be beautiful beyond compare, a fragile lady of maturity, with a wealth of wisdom written on her lovely features.”

  “What a nice way of saying I’ll be all wrinkled up, like an old prune!”

  Abruptly leaning across the table, he grabbed her hands and gave them a shake. “Stop it, Danielle! Learn to accept compliments honestly given and well deserved. It is the mark of true grace in a woman.”

  Abashed, she pulled her hands free and hid them in her lap. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not very good at doing that.”

  “Perhaps because you haven’t had much practice, which says little for the man you once expected to marry.”

  “He wasn’t much given to poetry.”

  “Nor am I,” Carlo said. “But I do believe in the truth.”

  Lorenzo reappeared then, and set before them a dish of olives, a basket of bread warm from the oven, and a shallow bowl of olive oil into which he swirled a stream of balsamic vinegar.

  “What would you like to drink, signor e signorina? A carafe of white wine, perhaps, to accompany the very excellent zuppa di cozze Lamberto prepares today?”

  “No wine for me, thank you,” Danielle said.

  Carlo tapped the phone hooked to his belt. “None for me, either, Lorenzo, grazie. I’m playing hooky, as they say in America, but I could be called back to the hospital at any time. We’ll have a bottle of San Pellegrino, instead.”

  “What’s zuppa di cozze?” Danielle asked, when they’d been served their water.

  “Mussel soup,” he told her. “Will that be a problem for you?”

  She shook her head. “Not at all. I love seafood. It just struck me as a little odd that we weren’t given menus.”

  “There are no menus at this restaurant. Every day at dawn, Lorenzo drives to the markets of Milano and buys whatever looks most fresh and appetizing. Sometimes, it is fish, sometimes meat, and always fine cheeses, items for salads, and fruits for the desserts.”

  “I thought his brother was the chef.”

  “That is correct. While Lorenzo is gone, Lamberto makes pasta and puts the bread dough to rise. When his brother returns, they decide together what surprises they will offer their guests that day. At lunchtime, the food is simple but good. It is in the evening that the brothers shine. Their dinners are perfection. When you’re feeling better and I am not on call at the hospital, we’ll come here again so that you may enjoy the experience for yourself.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Carlo.”

  “Of course I don’t. But if I choose to extend the invitation, I hope you will accept.”

  “When you put it like that, how can I refuse?”

  He smiled into her eyes. “You see, you are learning already. Yesterday, you would have turned me down with some absurd excuse. Today, you allow yourself to be open to the idea.”

  “Well, I take to heart what you tell me.” She hesitated, as though unsure she should say everything that was on her mind, then took a deep breath and plunged on, “I might not always like what you have to say, but I’m beginning to think I can trust you to be honest with me.”

  “You say that as if trust is as foreign to you as being complimented. Do we have your ex-fiancé
to thank for that, also?”

  “I can’t lay all the blame on him. I was betrayed by my best friend Maureen, too. She was the one Tom married, a month after he ended our engagement.”

  “Then she was never your friend in the first place, cara.”

  “Obviously not, but by the time I realized that, the damage was done. We’d been together since high school. We knew everything about each other.” She rested her chin in her hand and stared across the courtyard, seeing not the miniature potted palms or tubs of flowers clustered about, but back through time to places and people he hoped never to meet.

  “I confided my fears to her, when I began to suspect Tom was falling out of love with me,” she said, her lovely green eyes dark with hurt. “She told me I was imagining things, that it was just pre-wedding jitters. And all the time, she was sleeping with him.”

  Carlo wanted to scoop her onto his lap and kiss her so thoroughly that she forgot everyone but him. Instead he said, “Then I wish them the joy of each other, because that sort of deceit exacts a heavy price. People who cheat once are people who’ll cheat again. Sooner or later, this Tom and Maureen will each recognize that, and every time one of them doesn’t show up when he says he will, or doesn’t phone, the other will wonder, and the insecurity will start to spread like poison.”

  “Did you ever feel insecure with Karina?”

  “Never,” he said. “Even though we often spent time apart, I never once worried that she might deceive me, or become involved with another man, and I never once looked at another woman.”

  Danielle made a face, one that said she had a hard time believing him. “Never?”

  “Well, okay, I looked,” he admitted with a laugh. “I wouldn’t be Italian if I didn’t appreciate a beautiful woman when I see one. But I never came close to betraying my covenant with Karina. She was my wife, my love, the mother of my child, and our marriage was forever.”

  “Yet despite all that, it didn’t last very long.”

  “But not because either of us opted to end it. Destiny took us down a different path, one whose stakes were higher than anything we anticipated or wanted.”

  “And one you couldn’t change.”

  “No. In the end, the choice wasn’t ours to make. If I learned anything as a result of that, it is to make the most of the time we have, and wring every last drop of joy from life, so that if, in the end, we must depend on our memories to sustain us, they’ll be up to the task.”

  “Is that your prescription for living, Doctor?”

  “I’d also add integrity to the mix. I hope, when I die, that I can look back on my time here without shame. From the little I’ve learned about you, I’m quite certain you’ll have no trouble doing that, although I doubt the same can be said of your one-time friend Maureen, or her husband.”

  Lost in thought, she helped herself to the last piece of bread. With a delicate flick of her tongue, she licked a drop of oil from her finger. He watched her, enchanted by everything about her: the shape of her mouth; the way her hair swung softly when she moved her head, its gold shot through with sparkling sunlight; how the gravity with which she appeared to weigh his words reflected in her lovely eyes; the sudden smile that lit up her face when she saw him watching her.

  “What?” she said, holding the bread just out of his reach. “Did you want this?”

  “No,” he said gravely. “I want you.” And without regard for the fact that they were in a public place, he half-rose from his seat, leaned across the table, and kissed her full on the lips.

  He’d meant to make it brief, a taste only, enough to satisfy him until they could be alone again. But her mouth was too delicious, and the way it bloomed under his, too seductive. So he drew out the moment. Made it last until he and she both were left breathless.

  It was unlike him to be so impulsive; to give in to such a public display of affection. Shaken by her effect on him, he sat down again and said, “Did I surprise you as much as I just surprised myself?”

  “Not only me,” she muttered, rosy with embarrassment, “but everyone else here, as well. There’s a young man over there with an older couple who look like his parents…” She nodded at a table somewhere behind him. “Carlo, his eyes are almost falling out of his head!”

  He didn’t bother to turn around. He didn’t care who had seen, or what they thought. “That’s because he’s jealous,” he said. “He wishes he was in my place.”

  Lorenzo arrived with their lunch just then, an interruption that brought about a swift change in the conversation. As though to keep him at a respectable distance, Danielle latched on to the mundane topic of the weather, when Carlo would have preferred to talk about her.

  “How can it be so warm here, when there is snow not more than half an hour’s drive away?” she wanted to know, tackling the side salad served with the soup.

  “We’re part of the Italian Lake District, and there are many such lakes in this part of the country,” he explained. “Some are small and relatively undiscovered, others like Como are large and famous, worldwide. But regardless of their international reputation, they all enjoy a unique microclimate. In the winter, it is milder here than elsewhere in Italy, and in the summer, pleasantly cooler.”

  “A kind of Mediterranean climate, then.”

  “Exactly. You’re seeing us at our best. May is perfection—predictably warm and clear, and brilliant with sun. In another few days, when you’re in better shape to enjoy it, I’ll take you on a sightseeing tour. The scenery here is among the most spectacular in Europe.”

  She shifted uneasily in her seat. “Perhaps,” she said evasively. “We’ll see how things go.”

  If he had his way, there was little doubt about how “things” would go. The attraction between them was as flammable as gasoline, they were both consenting adults and he didn’t understand her ambivalence.

  One minute she was…not exactly throwing herself at him, as she’d suggested on Saturday, but certainly eager and receptive to his advances. The next, she was pulling away, shutting him out. And he wanted to know the reason. What made her so mercurial, so afraid?

  His train of thought jerked to a sudden stop as a possibility he hadn’t even considered occurred to him. “Are you still a virgin, Danielle?” he inquired abruptly.

  She was so indignant, she almost choked on her salad. “What makes you ask a question like that?”

  “Curiosity,” he said. “On the one hand, your actions tell me you recognize the spark between us. On the other, I sense a fear in you that prevents you from enjoying what could be a mutually pleasurable association.”

  “An affair, you mean.” She curled her lip in distaste.

  It was his turn to shrug. “I would call it una relazione, un’ amorosa. Either way, you have not answered my question.”

  “Mostly because you had no right to ask it in the first place.”

  “Then I apologize. It was not my intent to offend you.”

  She pushed aside her salad and poked moodily at the mussels floating in her soup. At last, defiantly, she said, “Well, I’m not—a virgin, that is. Does that make me shop-soiled goods in your eyes?”

  “Of course not. Dio, Danielle, don’t be absurd! But when a man receives mixed messages from the woman in whom he expresses interest, he is left to wonder if there is a reason for them.”

  This time, she reduced her bread to crumbs before answering, “If you must know, I’m not very good at…sex.”

  She looked as if she feared that merely uttering the word would condemn her to everlasting hell. Unaccountably moved by the vulnerability he saw behind the torment, he said gently, “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. Tom told me so.”

  “And who was Tom, to make so harsh a judgment?”

  “Someone who brought a lot more experience to our relationship than I did. He is the only man I gave myself to, and then only because I thought we were going to be married.”

  “Then all I can say, cara mia, is that he d
id you a great favor when he let you go. To spend a lifetime with a man so inept that he could not pleasure his wife, is a punishment no woman deserves, least of all one as sensitive as you.”

  Of course, she blushed. “Are all Italian men born with a silver tongue, or are you unique?”

  “I speak not to flatter you, Danielle, but to reassure you. Perhaps we will one day make love, perhaps not. But if we do not, it will have nothing to do with your perceived inadequacies as a partner.”

  “My, my!” she said, covering her discomposure with a sarcasm he would have resented had he not known what prompted it. “Shall I add ‘sex therapist’ to your list of credits?”

  “No,” he replied. “You should finish your soup and stop trying to make me dislike you. It’s a waste of time, cara. I’ve already made up my mind that I like you very much, and find you very desirable.”

  “Stop that!” she whispered, with a furtive glance around the courtyard. “What if someone should hear you?”

  “Then they are eavesdropping on a private conversation, and should be ashamed of themselves.”

  The muted ringing of his phone spared her having to respond to that, and by the time the call was over, she was preparing to leave.

  “You’re needed at the hospital, after all,” she declared, struggling to her feet. “And I can see from the look on your face that it’s something serious.”

  He wondered if he should tell her the call had to do with her father; that Alan Blake had briefly opened his eyes. But such occurrences were not uncommon in comatose patients, and didn’t necessarily denote improvement. Carlo would not raise her hopes, only to dash them again. She’d already weathered enough disappointments in her life.

  “It could be,” he hedged. “I won’t know until I examine the patient.”

  “Then let’s get going. Time is of the essence, surely?”

  He thought not, but again refrained from saying so. Instead, he tried to deflect her. “There’s no need for you to cut short your lunch. Why not stay here and let me order you an espresso, and a taste of Lamberto’s famous gelato di limone alla amaretti? Then when you’re ready to leave, Lorenzo will arrange a taxi for you.”