His Wedding Ring Of Revenge. Julia James

face. Once so beautiful, so perfect, now gaunt with pain and disease.

      And alongside the rawness of her grief came the bitterness of guilt.

      In the years following that hideous debacle in Rome, when she was eighteen and Vito Farneste had coldly, callously used her as a weapon against his mother’s hated rival, she had withdrawn almost completely from her mother.

      Arlene had been vehement in her demand that Enrico force Vito to marry her—as though, Rachel thought, gall rising in her throat, she had been some kind of deflowered and disgraced Victorian maiden, ‘ruined’ for the rest of eternity without the saving sanctity of a wedding ring on her finger.

      Of course Enrico had refused—refused to listen to his mistress’s rantings—and Vito’s scornful, mocking laughter had been even worse. Neither of them had given a toss, Rachel knew, that Arlene’s bastard daughter had lost her virginity. And to Rachel her mother’s ranting had been even more mortifying than Vito’s treatment of her. Hadn’t Arlene seen that?

      But she’d been obsessed by her determination that Vito should marry the girl he’d seduced, however hopeless, however mortifying that determination had been to Rachel.

      In the end she had bolted back to England—but not to school. She had gone to her aunt, whom her mother seldom contacted any more, finding her humble lifestyle grating, and got herself a job waiting tables in a Brighton café. From now on, she had vowed, she would be financially independent of Arlene—and that meant independent of Enrico Farneste.

      And besides, she’d had one more impelling reason to sever links with Arlene…

      Her mind sheered away from the memory. Too much grief on grief.

      She had enough to keep her going now. And the guilt that went hand in hand with it.

      Dully, she poked at the teabag with a teaspoon, watching the dark brown colour stain out through the hot water. She reached inside the tiny fridge, with its half-broken seal around the door, and extracted a carton of milk, pouring it into the mug and continuing stirring. Still running on automatic. Her mind a clouded turmoil of thoughts and feelings.

      Guilt. Such a powerful, corrosive emotion. Eating like acid through her life. Accentuating and exacerbating her grief until the combination was unbearable—making her do the wildest, most insane things.

      Like trying to force Vito Farneste to marry her.

      Just to ease her mother’s dying.

      She lifted the teabag from the mug and dropped it into the sink, the teaspoon with it. Then, cradling the mug, she wandered back out into the centre of the room, crossing to the window. The net curtains veiled the back alley below, with its rubbish bins and flybown, flapping posters, scrumpled litter.

      She had not felt guilty about cutting Arlene out of her life. Why should she have? She had swanned off with Enrico Farneste to live in elegant prostitution. With all the puritanical certainty of a teenager Rachel had known that there was no romance, nor remorse, to soften the brutal fact of Enrico’s and Arlene’s adultery—neither one of them had cared tuppence that Enrico still had a wife living, nor that Arlene was living her lavish existence as the kept mistress of another woman’s rich husband.

      She raised the mug to her mouth and sipped the hot tea, not even tasting it.

      How wrong, how totally and completely wrong she had been about Arlene.

      But she had not known that until too late.

      Until her mother had become ill.

      Then and only then had Rachel seen her mother in a quite different light.

      ‘I did it all for you, my darling girl,’ her mother had whispered, powerful painkillers making her mind wander and at the same time releasing, at last, the emotional detachment she had layered over herself all through Rachel’s life.

      ‘I wanted you to have something more than I ever had! Your father disowned you—despised me! Thought me some little council house tart, good enough for sex but nothing more! I hated him for that! Hated him! So I wanted you to grow up to be the kind of person he and his precious family could never despise! You were to have the best education, the best upbringing, mixing with the kind of people your father and his family were! And that’s why I gave you his name—even though I couldn’t put it down on the birth certificate. He knew I would never make a claim on him, or his precious estate. He disowned us both. When he smashed himself up in that car of his I was glad! He’d had his punishment for what he’d done to you. To me. Refusing to be your father. Laughing at me for not being good enough to marry him!’