Delucca's Marriage Contract by Abby Green

Author:Abby Green [Green, Abby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780373133116
Google: r1LPoQEACAAJ
Amazon: B00O92PR62
Barnesnoble: B00O92PR62
Goodreads: 23168415
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

KEELIN MIGHT HAVE agreed with Gianni if being abandoned wasn’t her particular pyschological demon. Sensations were rushing into limbs that had been locked tight for hours, giving her shooting pains and pins and needles. Her hand throbbed from where she’d hit him. His chest was like a steel wall.

And worse, emotion was rising. Just to see him again. He’d come back. Damn him.

‘You said nothing.’ Keelin was accusing. ‘You didn’t even leave a note.’

Gianni’s jaw tightened. ‘I thought Lucia would tell you.’

Keelin let out a short harsh laugh. ‘Via sign language? I don’t speak Italian and she doesn’t speak English.’

‘You could have phoned me.’

Keelin felt a kind of shame wash over her. She’d slowly become more and more paralysed as the day had gone on. How could she explain that when one was in the grip of something like a panic attack, the last thing you did was the logical one?

‘I couldn’t find your number, and my phone was dead,’ she supplied weakly. And then stronger, ‘There was no one here. Even Lucia disappeared after a while. I was all alone. Anything could have happened, did you think of that?’

Irritation crossed Gianni’s face. ‘For God’s sake, Keelin, it was only a day. You are in one of the most luxurious villas in Italy. There’s an indoor pool and an outdoor pool—’

Keelin whirled away from him and the suggestion she should have been happy to amuse herself, emotion reaching her eyes, making them sting. Making her chest hurt with the pressure it took to contain it. She’d not cried in years, learning that tears only caused her parents to look at her with bafflement. So rousing their ire had become her default position.

Gianni sounded exasperated. ‘Look—’

She kept her back to him and cut him off, saying with a low voice, ‘When I was fourteen I got a taxi home from the train station for my summer half-term holidays. The whole house was locked up. When I rang my father he was in Sao Paulo in Brazil and wouldn’t be home for days. My mother was in St Barts with friends. They’d given the staff a week off. They’d not even bothered to find out what I was doing.’

She turned around to face Gianni, arms folded tightly. ‘They had to send the housekeeper back to take care of me and she was not happy to have her holiday cut short but at least it wasn’t anything new so she wasn’t surprised.’

Gianni interjected in a tight-sounding voice, ‘This had happened before?’

Keelin lifted one shoulder in a gesture of assent. ‘It was a fairly regular occurrence except usually there’d be staff at home. When I was three they left me alone with my nanny for two and a half months while they went to America on business. When they came back I didn’t recognise them.‘Today...’ Emotion tightened her chest again but Keelin forced out, ‘Today, it just got to me. It’s isolated here. I don’t speak the language. I hate that it affected me.

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