The Bride's Baby of Shame by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

SOPHIE SPENT THE next week exploring the village, but not because she wanted to one day give her baby a tour of the place. She was looking for a way out.

“There is only one bus in my village,” Renzo had told her on the drive from the airfield, down near the sea, the day they’d arrived in Sicily. “It leaves very early in the morning on market days and returns after dark, and that is only when the driver remembers to come all the way up the mountain. You should also know that the driver and his large family live in a house I own.”

Sophie had been staring out her window at the sun-drenched landscape, unable to fully process the fact that she’d woken up that morning in Hampshire, prepared to marry Dal, and was now on the far side of Europe with a man she kept sleeping with, who was not Dal. At all.

“Why would I need to know any of that?” she’d asked.

“Because, cara,” he’d said in that way of his, as if he was creating intimacy every time he looked at her. “One day you will wake up and decide you wish to escape my hospitality. On that day, it will save us all a lot of trouble if you remember these small facts. There is one sporadic bus. Everyone on it will be loyal to me, especially the driver. You will get nowhere.”

She’d looked at him then, across the expanse of the backseat they shared, and had wondered how he managed to be awful at every turn and yet her heart still flipped inside her chest whenever she looked at him. What was wrong with her?

Had she really thrown away her whole life for...this?

“Thank you,” she’d said stiffly. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. While walking.”

Renzo had smiled, looking something like benevolent, which had been her warning.

“The village is perched on a little stretch of land propped up between many steep ravines,” he’d told her. “People fall down them all the time and die, especially in the ice and snow of winter, but they are in many ways more treacherous in the summer. The road is narrow and very curvy. Pedestrians are forever walking on that road and getting struck by vehicles taking the turns too fast. It’s also a solid, steep hour’s walk to the next little town, assuming you aren’t hit by a car on the way. I can’t say I recommend it.”

Sophie spent her second week in Sicily discovering that nothing Renzo had said to her that day was an exaggeration. The road out of town was terrifying. It shot down from the lowest part of the village in a steep, near-vertical drop, then began to curve this way and that. No matter how many times Sophie girded her loins and determined she would walk it anyway, she stopped the moment she saw a car careen up or down, promising certain death.

She wanted to get away from Renzo. But she certainly didn’t want to die.

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