The Veranchetti Marriage. LYNNE GRAHAM

tarmac. She hunched deeper into her electric-blue cord duffle coat and quickened her pace to the blue van parked close to the fence. By the time she had got the case stowed in the rear and had settled in behind the wheel, she was beginning to notice how quiet Nicky was. Normally he was bubbling over with disjointed stories of where he had been, who he had been with and what a fantastic time he had had. For some reason his usual buoyancy was missing.

      “Did you have a good time?”

      “Oh, yes.” He shot her a rather apprehensive smile as she reversed out of the space.

      “So what did you do?” she encouraged.

      “We went fishing ’n’ swimming…and we went up in the jet plane. Nuffin’ special,” he muttered, turning his small, serious face away.

      No, she guessed it really wasn’t anything special to Nicky. From no age at all he had been flying round the globe to rendezvous with his tycoon father. When he had been a baby, Alex had flown to London and a nanny had arrived in a chauffeur-driven car to collect Nicky and ferry him away for the day. But, as Nicky became less dependent on his mother and more familiar with his father, the day trips had gradually become weekends.

      He was almost four now, an extremely bright and self-assured little boy. There was no nanny in attendance these days, and a phone call or a letter from Alex’s London lawyer heralded arrangements for Nicky’s sojourns abroad. Alex had unlimited access to Nicky. When Nicky had been a baby that hadn’t bothered her. It had soon become clear that Alex did not intend to encroach too much then. The situation had changed quite rapidly over the past year, as Nicky left the toddler stage behind.

      In infuriating addition, Nicky openly adored Alex. She had never been able to fathom that astonishing fact. Alex, so cold, so remote, so capable of sustaining implacable hatred for his child’s mother…how could he inspire such trust and affection in Nicky? She could not imagine Alex bending to meet a three-year-old on his level. But it seemed that he did.

      “Mummy, Daddy wants me to live with him.”

      Kerry’s eyes were in the mirror, dazedly glued to the sight of the silver limousine nosing dexterously in behind the van. Her foot almost hit the brake as Nicky’s statement penetrated. “What did you say?” she whispered sickly. “Say that again.”

      “He asked me if I’d like that,” Nicky volunteered less abruptly.

      Kerry let oxygen into her lungs again. What a sneaky, manipulative swine Alex was to ask that of a child Nicky’s age! Just a conversation, though. Possibly the sort of conversation she might have had with Nicky had she been in Alex’s shoes—;the parent who got visits rather than round-the-clock privileges. It didn’t mean that she had anything to worry about. After all, Alex hadn’t put up a fight for custody when Nicky was born. Why should he now?

      “What did you tell him?” she prompted carefully.

      “Only if you come too. You see, I thought and thought and thought about it,” Nicky assured her with subdued Latin melodrama. “And that’s what I’d like the best of all, an’ then I wouldn’t have to miss you or Daddy.”

      Nicky’s solution was touchingly innocent and hair-raisingly practical. He didn’t understand divorce. How could he? He didn’t even understand marriage. He had yet to see his parents in the same room together. Mummy and Daddy were entirely dissimilar people, who lived vastly divergent lives and with whom he did very different things. Her eyes stung with rueful tears, and she wished the limousine containing Enzio and Marco would stop crawling up her bumper. The van did not go at great speed up hills.

      “And what did Daddy say?” she couldn’t help demanding.

      “Nothing. He looked cross,” Nicky recalled unhappily.

      Cross would have been an understatement, she envisaged with bitter humour. Was he trying to take Nicky away from her, or was she being paranoid?

      “You still haven’t told me what you did in Rome,” she flipped the subject smoothly. “Did you go sailing?”

      “Helena came too. She’s nice. She’s got lots of yellow hair.”

      “Oh.” Kerry tried and failed to resist the bait. “Is she pretty?”

      “Spectacular. Giuseppe says that. Does that mean pretty?”

      She didn’t ask who Giuseppe was. Alex had an enormous family of sisters and brothers and nephews and nieces with whom Nicky played when he was abroad. Veranchettis dotted the world. Milan, Rome, Athens, New York. So Alex had another ladyfriend…so what?

      Alex had had one affair after another since their divorce. Vicky was very good about keeping Kerry up to date. Her sister had once been an international model. Although she had now retired and opened her own modelling agency, she still had a passport into high society circles, and in Europe Alex was pretty hot news. Helena…the name didn’t ring a bell. She stifled the knifelike pain scything through her. It was bitterness and bile, not jealousy. Jealousy was what you suffered when you loved somebody, and Kerry had stopped loving Alex a long time ago.

      She feared him and she hated him in equal parts. He had almost destroyed her. Alex didn’t have a forgiving bone in his body. She might as well have beseeched compassion from a granite monolith! Her love had been beaten out of her soul, crushed just as he had crushed her with his distaste and his contempt.

      The only good thing to come out of their marriage was Nicky, but she had never doubted that Alex looked on Nicky’s conception in a very different light because she was his mother. The fairy-tale marriage had turned into an unmitigated disaster. The dreams had finally turned to ashes, however, in her own clumsy hands. She attempted to dredge herself from her despondent thoughts and listen to Nicky’s chatter. He had relaxed now that he had got Alex’s question off his chest. He liked his world just the way it was. But would it always be like that?

      “Daddy took me to the office and showed me Nonno’s picture,” Nicky rattled off importantly.

      Kerry grimaced. Dear God, JR had nothing on Alex. Start ’em off young. Show him the empire. Show him the desk. She was darned if she wanted Nicky to become an industrialist like Alex. A sort of superior loanshark with a calculator for a brain and a heart which only beat a little faster in the direction of a balance sheet.

      “That was nice,” she said diplomatically.

      “I’m going to be a fisherman when I grow up, like Guiseppe.”

      Not with Alex around, darling. Alex was a lethal mix of Greek and Italian genes, but they all had pedigreed beginnings. His mother had been a Greek shipping heiress, his father the son of an Italian tycoon. It was an explosive mixture, but not on the surface. Outwardly, Alex was twenty-two-carat gold sleek sophistication. Calm, concise, superbly controlled. Sometimes she wondered how she had ever been dumb enough to see other things in Alex. But eighteen-year-olds thought with their hearts and their bodies, not with their heads. They saw what they wanted to see. In her case, that had been a perfect world whose axis centred solely upon Alex. She hadn’t seen to either side. She hadn’t seen a single flaw. An amount of love which had bordered on obsession had blinded her.

      It was starting to snow and she was getting angry about the persistent limousine still purring effortlessly along in her wake. Such nonsense! They had their orders, and like programmed robots they would go to ridiculous lengths to follow Alex’s instructions to the last letter. Her shoulders ached with the tension of careful driving, and that monster rolling along on her trail was an added irritant.

      It was a lengthy drive to the Hampshire village where she now lived. She owned a half-share in an antiques showroom there. Business had never exactly boomed, but she was within convenient distance of her parents’ home. Nicky was very attached to his grandparents. He had strong ties here in England. Alex wouldn’t find it that easy to sever those ties, she reflected tautly.

      She rounded a twisting corner, still mentally enumerating all the advantages she had over Alex in the parent competition, and there it was. A big black and white cow stuck squarely stationary, dead centre of the