Hospital.
Palazzo d’Calvetti was still his home, but these days he preferred the simple solitude of this villa he’d had constructed after Gianetta’s death. His mother understood, but she didn’t like it.
Marco dined with her regularly, which mollified her somewhat. And dutiful son that he was, he made the requisite appearances at her numerous charity and social events, including the big New Year’s Eve gala. That reminded him…
“If Ms. Russo is still in Italy on the Feast of St. Silvestro, I’d like to bring her to your ball.”
The request produced a startled silence. Marco understood his mother’s surprise. He hadn’t escorted any woman to the ball since Gianetta. With good reason.
The media had gone into a feeding frenzy after Gianetta’s death. Even now the paparazzi hounded him mercilessly, and one disgusting rag insisted on trumpeting him as Italy’s most eligible bachelor. He preferred to keep his private life private and was careful to avoid the appearance of anything more than casual friendship with the women he dated. Until now, that had meant not escorting any of them to the ball so steeped in his family’s history and tradition.
Marco could rationalize the break with his longstanding policy without much difficulty. Sabrina would be in Italy for a short time. Her life and her business interests were on the other side of the Atlantic. At best, the attraction sizzling between them could spark only a brief affair.
But spark it would.
He’d already decided that.
He’d gone to bed last night hungry for this long-limbed American with the sun-kissed blonde hair and laughing eyes. The hunger hadn’t abated after a restless night’s sleep. Just the sight of her limping into the library this morning had given him an unexpected jolt.
She wanted him, as well. He’d seen it in her flushed cheeks and heard it in the flutter of her breath after their kiss in the elevator last night.
The memory of that urgent fumbling made him shake his head. He would handle her with more finesse next time, with more care for her injured ankle. He was plotting his moves when his mother recovered from her surprise.
“Yes, of course you may bring her. I’ll have my secretary add her to the guest list. What is her name again?”
“Russo. Sabrina Russo.”
“Russo.” His mother sniffed again. “Her ancestors must have come from northern Italy. In the south, she would be Rossi.”
“I don’t know where her ancestors came from.”
In fact, Marco realized, he knew very little about her other than she was in business with her two friends and in Italy to scout locations for a conference.
“Bring her to dinner,” the duchess ordered. “Tomorrow. I want to meet her.”
He returned a noncommittal reply. “I’ll see if she’s available and get back to you. Ciao, Mama.”
“Tomorrow,” his loving mama repeated sternly before hanging up.
He had to smile at the autocratic command. Maria di Chivari had married into her title more than forty years ago. Since then it had become as much a part of her nature as her generous heart and fierce loyalty to those she loved.
He reentered the library some moments later with a cold compress. Sabrina was lying on the sofa as ordered, her foot elevated, humming offkey to the mournful solo coming from the iPod. Mr. Mistoffelees, Marco identified absently, from the hit show Cats.
“The car is on the way,” he said as he draped the compress over her ankle, “but I’m afraid I may have opened a Pandora’s box. My mother wants to me to bring you to dinner tomorrow night.”
“Is that bad?”
He answered with a rueful smile. “Only if you object to someone probing for every detail of your life, past and present. She has an insatiable curiosity about people.”
“People in general? Or the women you invite to stay at your villa?”
Marco hesitated a few seconds before replying. “Other than a professional colleague or two, you’re the first woman I’ve invited to stay.”
He could see that surprised her. Shrugging, he offered an explanation.
“This place is my escape. My refuge. I had it constructed after my wife died. Unfortunately, I don’t get down here often, and then only for short stays.”
Her expression altered, and Marco kicked himself for mentioning Gianetta.
His guest didn’t use the reference as a springboard to probe, but the question was there, in her eyes. He could hardly refuse to answer it, given the heat that had flared between him and this woman last night. He moved a little away from the sofa and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Before we moved to Rome, Gianetta and I lived in Naples. We kept a boat at the marina there. A twenty-four-foot sloop. She took it out one afternoon and a storm blew up.”
His gaze went to the library’s tall windows. The bright sky and sparkling sunshine outside seemed to mock his dark memories.
“Searchers found pieces of the wreckage, but her body was never recovered.”
“Oh, no!”
The soft exclamation eased some of tension holding Marco in its iron grip. He’d heard so many platitudes, so many heartfelt expressions of sympathy, that they’d lost their meaning. Sabrina’s soft cry was all the more genuine for being so restrained.
Inexplicably, he felt himself responding to it. With the haunting strains of Mr. Mistoffelees’s lament in the background, he forced the memories.
“Gianetta loved to sail. Her family had made their living from the sea for generations. I used to joke she had more salt than water in her blood. She was—she was almost insatiable in her need to feel the wind on her face and hear the sails snap above her.”
She had craved other thrills, as well. Downhill skiing on some of the Alps’s most treacherous slopes. Fast cars. The drugs she’d flatly denied taking even after Marco discovered her stash.
At his insistence she’d gone through rehab. Twice. She swore she was clean, swore she’d kicked her habit. Yet he knew in his heart she’d driven down from Rome that last, fatal weekend to escape his vigilance. To escape him.
“I had a difficult surgery scheduled that week. A two-year-old child with a brain tumor several other neurosurgeons had deemed inoperable.”
He’d been exhausted after the long surgery, mentally and physically, and wanted only to fall into bed. Gianetta flatly refused to cancel her planned trip to the coast. She’d been cooped up in the city too long. She needed the wind, the sea, the salt spray.
“I stayed in Rome until the boy was out of danger and in recovery, then drove down to join my wife for the weekend.”
To this day Marco blamed himself for what followed. If he’d postponed the surgery…If he’d paid as much attention to his wife as he had his patients…
“I could see the storm clouds piling up when I hit the coast. I called Gianetta on my cell phone and begged her not to take the boat out.”
Begged, cajoled, ordered, pleaded…and sweated blood when he arrived to find she’d disregarded his pleas and launched the sloop.
“As soon as I reached the marina, I contacted her by radio. By then she was battling twenty-four-foot swells and the boat was taking on water.”
He could still hear her shrill panic, still remember the utter desperation and helplessness that had ripped through him. He could save the life of a two-year-old, but he couldn’t save his wife.
“The last time I heard her voice was when she sent out an urgent S.O.S. The radio went dead in midbroadcast.”
“How