The Mediterranean Husband by Catherine Spencer

Author:Catherine Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

She’d dined by candlelight in the world’s most famous restaurants, in the world’s most beautiful cities, as the guest of diplomats, minor royalty, and heads of state. Eaten meals prepared by chefs of international repute. And never had she been more thoroughly seduced than she was that night, with Demetrio, in the vast, ugly old kitchen, with a slab of plywood for a table and a simple pasta dish for a main course.

It was all his fault. If he’d left the naked lightbulb burning, she wouldn’t have found herself cocooned with him in a warm, golden circle of candle flame that shrank the rest of the room to a shifting palette of shadows. The wine wouldn’t have glimmered like priceless rubies, or tasted like nectar from heaven. His eyes wouldn’t have mated with hers in a flickering tango of advance and retreat. Their voices wouldn’t have fallen to husky whispers as they exchanged snippets of personal history.

“I loved school,” she told him.

“I hated it,” he said.

“Every day was full of promise,” she reminisced. “I fell asleep every night dreaming of tomorrow.”

“I never slept deeply enough to shut out the nightmares.”

She reached across the table. Wrapped her fingers around his. “What kind of nightmares?”

“The kind that don’t evaporate in the clear light of day.” His eyes grew anguished, his mouth grim. “One night in particular I remember as if it happened just yesterday. I was awakened by the hopeless cries of some poor young woman pleading with my grandfather for her husband’s life. I crept from my room and watched from the minstrel’s gallery.

“She was no more than twenty, on her knees at my grandfather’s feet, and hugely pregnant, although at the time I thought she was just fat. Her husband stood to one side, hands bound behind him, his face ashen. ‘I carry his baby,’she wept. ‘You have a family of your own, Don Bertoluzzi. You know what it is to love. How can you deny this unborn child the right to know his father? ’”

Natalie froze, the pain in his voice pebbling her skin with goose bumps. “What happened?”

He fetched a third bottle of wine from the pantry, uncorked it and poured them both another glass. “Her pleas fell on deaf ears. Unmoved, my grandfather nodded once, then stood by as, out of the shadows, his ‘aides’ appeared, dragged her husband outside, shoveled him into a waiting car and drove him away.”

He stared into his untouched wine and sank into a silence tormented by memories she could never, in her wildest dreams, begin to comprehend. She’d been surrounded by the safety and love and security of family her entire life. The kind of violence he’d witnessed had never even come close to touching her.

“I never knew what crime the man supposedly committed,” he finally went on, “but his face as he turned for one last look at his wife, the hopelessness in his eyes, the utter devastation in hers, haunted my dreams for months afterward.”

Unutterably moved, Natalie said, “Demetrio, I’m so sorry you had to witness something so frightful.

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