Shadows of the Past Read Online Free

bad fit.’
    ‘Goodness, where was I living? I had to have some clothes, surely?’
    ‘You had been staying at a flat that belonged to some friends who are abroad travelling. You do not remember where it was.’
    She shivered again. She was not particularly cold, it was the way he had said that she would fake her illness that disturbed her more than anything else he said. That was the thing that stayed in her mind, teasing her. She hated the implication, yet she sensed, again from something deep inside her, that he would not be drawn on the matter. She would let it go, for now.
    ‘What is that dome?’ she pointed to a white dome peeping over the cypress trees.
    ‘It is a summerhouse. You can see it tomorrow. Come, Alva, I should not like you to take cold.’
    ‘All right.’ She stood slowly. She looked up at him, he was so good-looking, and it was incredible that this man, who had everything, had chosen her to be his wife. ‘I don’t know how I can thank you, Conte, I really am so grateful.’
    ‘It is the least I could do.’ His reply was stiff and formal.
    They turned to walk slowly back to the house. ‘Renata is here but I doubt you will see her.’
    ‘Renata?’ she queried.
    ‘My daughter.’
    She stopped in her tracks, gazing up at him, puzzlement clouding her eyes.
    He said at once. ‘Not your daughter, Alva. Renata is my daughter by my first wife.’
    ‘Oh, you had a previous wife? Before me I mean.’
    ‘Yes I did. She was killed in a road accident. Renata was with her and has somehow never forgiven herself for being the one that lived.’
    ‘How tragic,’ she murmured, her heart filling with sympathy. ‘The poor girl.’
    ‘Well, yes, Renata has quite a few problems. I may as well tell you Alva, that you two never did get on.’
    ‘Oh dear, we didn’t? Was she jealous that you married me?’
    He stiffened, pulling himself to his full height, his face set in haughty lines of barely concealed contempt. ‘My daughter had been through a very bad time, Alva. Perhaps if you had been less critical you would have earned her respect.’
    ‘I was critical of her to you?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh no, not to me. Alva, I do not think this is the time to discuss the pros and cons of anything.’
    ‘Oh, but I do.’ She stopped, standing looking up at him, not put off by his glacial expression. ‘You seem to imply that I am some kind of monster stepmother.’
    ‘I implied no such thing,’ he said.
    ‘I don’t think I should stay here,’ she whispered, a hand now folded against her throat. ‘Renata obviously has issues with me and I don’t want to cause her unhappiness.’
    ‘You won’t. She won’t be here; she’s going back to university in the morning.’
    ‘University? Then Renata is not a child?’
    ‘No, she is nineteen.’
    ‘So she was not a little child when I came here.’
    ‘She was fifteen.’
    ‘I see,’ Alva murmured. A troubled teenage girl, only eight years her junior, no wonder they had had problems. She had hardly been in a position to understand and help a girl who was suffering so many traumas. She could see how difficulties would have arisen. This lifestyle would have been new to her, she would have been finding her way and it would have been testing even without a resentful teenage girl on the scene.
    She looked up at the man she had married. His stare was cold and haughty; it seemed impossible to believe that they had been intimate with each other, that he had kissed her and trembled in her arms. Had he done that? Perhaps it had been a cold marriage, yet instinctively she knew it could not have been. She was not a cold person. As she tried to imagine what it would have been like, she felt a faint stirring of pleasure deep inside her. Hastily she looked away from him.
    ‘I think I need to rest,’ she murmured.
    ‘Of course, I’ll take you back to the house.’

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Alva wakened early. She sat up in bed, running her hands up to her temples and massaging