Lightning Strikes Twice

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Would her fiancé find out what the best man already knew? Would she stand at the altar - between two lovers? While in Rome, young Cressida fell madly in love with Dominic, a handsome carefree artist. Though she knew his reputation, she thought their love affair would be different--right up until the day he disappeared. Now she had Sam, a kind man who offered her a new love--one that could make her forget Dominic. But a week before the wedding, Dominic suddenly showed up --as Sam's best man! The vision of standing at the altar, between two lovers, was too much to bear. And she knew the wild Dominic would never allow her to belong to another man.

Release date: June 26, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

ALL day it had been raining in Rome.

Cold, fine rain that changed to sleet. It was growing colder. Everybody thought there would be snow for Christmas which was only another two weeks ahead.

The young girl who was walking across the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo shivered although she wore a warm, polo-necked jersey under her black, shiny mackintosh. A yellow silk scarf anchored her hair against the wind, but her face was soon drenched. She had to pull out a handkerchief and wipe her eyes as she walked quickly past the deep arched gate of the Orso.

It was then that the rain seemed to stop with miraculous speed and from the rift in the darkness of the sky there came a shaft of sunlight. Against this sudden translucent goldenness which was so much a feature of Rome, the frowning walls of the old castle looked wonderful. Magnificent, the girl thought and smiled. It was as though a storm within her heart had also passed and the world became suddenly brighter.

There were crowds on the bridge, and along the busy brightly lit thoroughfare as she passed down into the Via di Tordimona. The air was rich with the sonorous sound of the bells tolling the hour from the great churches.

It was the hour she loved. The hour that for so long now she had been able to call her own; to get away from the big palazzo where she had been living as an au-pair girl since June. When she could forget her two exacting little pupils, Francesca and Tullia. The hour when she could be herself, and go to him.

It was a never-failing joy to her—this afternoon walk to his studio. It had, in fact, become her whole life. She had learned that the emotions of a lifetime are easily piled into a few short moments. It had been like this ever since she met him. It seemed impossible now that she could ever have heard his name with equanimity; that just before she first met him she had helped her pupils get into their party dresses and combed their shiny black curls, and prepared them to be sketched by the Duchessa’s latest protégé—a young English painter whom they called Dominic—and felt indifferent when she heard the name.

‘The Duchessa had prattled a lot about the Englishman. She praised his genius as a portrait painter and seemed amazed that the English girl now living under her roof had never heard of him. The girl excused herself on the basis that she did not move in artist’s circles in England, and knew little about pictures although she appreciated good art, and had learned much more about it since she came to Rome, with all its endless store of art treasures in museums and galleries.

She had also felt that she was justified in not knowing Dominic’s name, because he had, apparently, been travelling for the last three years. His mother was Brazilian and his father English. He had been educated in England but later studied art in Paris.

He had money of his own and was by no means the struggling artist type; neither was he in any real need of the Duchessa’s patronage. But she was a friend of his mother’s and was a worldly, busy socialite—one of the leading hostesses in Rome who liked to produce ‘lions’ at her parties. Dominic was her latest lion. Dominic had agreed to do some quick sketches of her two daughters who were certainly beautiful little girls, with enormous eyes and that particular type of Italian beauty which the children lose quickly once they grow older.

The English girl hurrying through the damp and now sunny afternoon thought of her first meeting with the artist.

She could visualise him coming into the salon, portfolio under one arm; slight, not very tall, rather pale, but with an impressive head and bright challenging eyes. He looked, as the Duchessa said, as though he himself might be an Italian because of the darkness of his eyes, the olive of his skin and that mass of thick black waving hair.

It had been a warm September afternoon when he first came to the Del Farice Palazzo. He wore light blue linen slacks, a blue shirt open at the neck and had an old linen coat flung over his shoulders. There was nothing formal about Dominic. He had struck the English girl at once as being entirely indifferent to public opinion, absorbed in himself and his art. He cared for nothing and nobody—which was, of course, what made him different and so interesting.

He had interested her from the start. She sat without moving watching him draw the heads of the little Del Farice sisters. He worked with astonishing speed. He made an exact portrait of the two children and when he finished the frown that sat on his face while he worked changed into a sudden brilliant smile. He handed the work to the au-pair girl and said:

“There you are! Aren’t they an angelic pair!”

She had looked down at the beautifully drawn heads and sighed deeply.

“How marvellous! You have made them look like two of Raphael’s angels.”

He had laughed.

“I’m no Raphael—I assure you.”

“What are you?” she had asked.

“Just myself,” he had answered rather haughtily. He had a supreme vanity which somehow took the wind out of one’s sails. He fascinated her. He had fascinated her right from the start. What was more he behaved to her in a curiously insolent way which had made her at times angry, then amused, and finally gripped her imagination to such an extent that she could not think about anything or anybody but him. Nor could she do anything without wanting him to know about it.

He took entire control of her artistic education. She had re-visited the Sistine Chapel and seen all the wonderful art collections in Rome with Dominic as her guide and teacher. She had once thought she had a mind of her own. At home (the little ordinary English home that now seemed so many thousands of miles away) she used to be criticised because she refused to listen to other people or change any of her views. But for Dominic she changed most of them.

It had all started when he had asked her to go to his studio in the Via di Tordimona and allow him to paint her portrait.

She had gasped: “You can’t want to paint me!”

“I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t wanted it,” he had snapped back.

He had looked quite angry. She had learned that Dominic could look very angry if his wishes were crossed. She had never met a man more spoiled—he was disgracefully egotistical. Yet whereas one might resent it in most men, one didn’t resent it in Dominic. He was a law unto himself—different from anybody else and because he had so much charm when he chose to exert it—a positively devilish charm. Even the Duchessa who was married to one of the most handsome and wealthy titled men in Italy and supposed to be in love with her husband, had felt Dominic’s magic. To the English girl, he had many wonderful qualities apart from his brilliance as a painter. He was moody, of course, but in the right mood he could be generous and kind. He also seemed to enjoy a certain reputation which he had of making love to the pretty women who sat for him. But the Duchessa had no intention of going as far as that, and she very soon got tired of lionising Dominic; so Dominic came no more to the Del Farice Palazzo. But the English girl went on seeing him.

To her absolute astonishment—and she hadn’t yet got accustomed to it—he seemed to want to see her—a lot of her. She attracted him. He said so. He cut her short every time she tried to protest that she was ordinary.

“You are not, my dear. You’re quite unusual. So small yet you have a natural dignity and aloofness which I find disarming. Glorious eyes too. Green as emeralds. One doesn’t often see that shade of green. You have what I call a ‘kitten face’. That flat little nose, your big mouth and those long-shaped eyes—very kitten-like, and endearing. But unlike kittens you don’t scratch. You’re gentle. You also have a damn good brain. I can talk to you and you understand and make intelligent conversation which is more than I can say of my girlfriends. All those beautiful spoiled girls in my mother’s set out in Brazilia or here in Rome. Girls who are like your Duchessa—shallow, empty-headed and trying frantically to get one up over someone else all the time with their new clothes, new cars or new jewels. My little au-pair girl has nothing. Only her sweet self. I find it delightful.”

He said many such things when she was with him. She alternated between being immensely flattered and rather cross—the latter because she felt there was a touch of patronage about his flattery. Yet she was staggered to find that she didn’t want to stop him flattering her. For the first time in her life, and she was twenty-two, she had met a man with whom she could—and did—fall hopelessly in love.

‘Hopeless’ seemed the keynote to the whole affair. She knew that, but shut her mind to the future. He had warned her that he was not a marrying man (not that she ever imagined for a moment that Dominic would propose marriage to her). He had impressed it upon her that he was only a bird of passage in Italy and never stayed anywhere for long. He travelled from country to country, always able to enjoy the best that life could offer. He had plenty of money and need not rely on selling his pictures. Painting to him was a glorious hobby. He could paint when, where and who and what he wished; which was so much better, he told her than having to paint for a living. For then it became an inglorious profession—a prostitution of art—then one had to paint to please the public rather than one’s self and one’s soul.

Dominic talked a lot about his soul. He was interested in metaphysics, philosophy, all kinds of religions, almost anything but politics. He couldn’t bear political discussions. He had little use for the minor problems, as he called them, of the average Englishman. Dominic had been born and brought up an Englishman. His father had once taken an active part in the political field, but Dominic was his mother’s rather than his father’s son—something of a dilettante. He had accepted an English education only because it had been forced upon him. He hated discipline in any shape or form.

He was the sort of person that seemed to the girl, who fell so completely under his spell, larger than life. A character out of a book. The type she had never expected to meet. Certainly not one she had expected to admire. But it was as though Dominic had put a potion into the first glass of wine she ever drank with him in that big luxurious studio of his at the top of a tall narrow house with great windows looking over the roof-tops across Rome.

She could not stop thinking about him—or longing for the next moment when she could see him. She would sit motionless while he painted or sketched her in a hundred different attitudes. She had become, so he told her, his favourite model. She soon grew used to seeing those paintings or sketches of her head and shoulders (and soon her whole body) in a dozen different poses.

Already one small painting of her in a scarlet woollen dress holding a black cat in her arms, had been bought by a well-known Italian director of a local art gallery. It had amused Dominic to make the green eyes of the cat and of the girl almost synonymous. When he had finished the work he had said to her:

“Actually those eyes of yours are extraordinarily incongruous. There’s only a very small amount of ‘cat’ in yours, my darling. It’s just the way you have of curling up and keeping warm and when you are happy I can almost hear you purr. But cats are sly and treacherous. You could never be either.”

“But cats are very independent and I have always been accused of wanting to walk alone,” she argued.

“I think the way our parents and friends at home see us differs entirely from the way we are regarded by the outside world,” he had said.

Certainly that was true of herself. Since she first fell in love with Dominic, all of her old spirit of independence seemed to have vanished. All that desire to be left alone or to enjoy introspection. Now she depended on another human being. Body and soul belonged to him.

This afternoon as she hurried towards his studio in the brief dying light of the December sun—she felt that same constriction of the heart—the same tightening in her throat—that she always experienced when she was on her way to Dominic.

How long would this continue? When would it all end? It mustn’t end. In the beginning when he used to tell her that she must never fall in love with him, she had accepted it. She had assured him that she would conduct this affair in a practical modern spirit. Heaps of young people enjoyed intimate associations which were purely temporary. The ‘love me for ever’ theme was old-fashioned—outdated. Sensual love was wonderful while it lasted, but it was not deathless.

She had agreed with all these theories, and never let Dominic think her possessive. She knew quite well that other models came to his studio and that not only had there been other loves in his life but there were likely to be many more. If he preferred her company to the rest even for a little while, she should be grateful and content.

But she wasn’t.

Her feelings suddenly underwent a change—a considerable change—a short time after she first fell in love with Dominic. Of course all her visits to Dominic’s studio were secret. Her Italian employer knew nothing about them; nobody at home knew. She had never so much as mentioned Dominic’s name either to her parents or her dearest friends. It was rather warm and exciting to have a secret love-affair. It made her feel in tune with her old ideas about independence. Why should she have to account to anybody for what she did? She was over-age. She had a right to a life and a love of her own.

But the secrecy and the excitement and the intense pleasure of loving and being loved by Dominic were gradually lost in a dark cloud of doubts and anxieties. She began to feel very unhappy. Panic tore at her every time she left him, wondering when she was going to see him again. She had learned that when walking to the studio she could feel like a person bewitched and float on magical wings—the wings of anticipation and desire. But when she walked away, she moved slowly and fearfully as though in a fog, crushed by a terrible sensation of insecurity that spoiled everything for her.

She could no longer feel happy in this love; no longer accept the fact that the day would come when it must all end.

Her terror of losing Dominic became a nightmare. She slept badly. She ate so little that she lost half a stone in weight and had to take in the bands of her skirts, and put up the hem of her dresses because they suddenly hung down far below her knees—she had grown so thin. Fortunately her mother was not there to take note of the change in her and the Duchessa was much too busy to notice whether the au-pair girl was thin or fat, rosy or pale. She was good with the children and taught them excellent English and that was all that mattered to the Duchessa.

Nobody, least of all Dominic, was aware of how the girl suffered. Even a man less egotistical than Dominic might find it difficult to realise what anguish such an affair could cause a woman. Men do not feel the same way about things; and this girl who until now had reached the age of twenty-two without having had her emotions stirred, suffered in particular.

The intensity of her own feelings frightened her. She did not want to love any man so much. It would have been all right if he had felt the same way, but she knew that he didn’t. She was also frightened that he would guess and become irritated by her slavish devotion. So far she had managed to conceal it. He didn’t like jealous and exacting women. He had told her so. So she showed neither jealousy nor the wish to pin him down. But she wanted with all her heart to chain him to her. She needed to know that he would never leave her—needed it until she reached the pitch of despair.

Why, why, she asked herself on this December day did she love Dominic so much? She knew all his faults. She was not so stupid as to be blinded by his immense charm, his fascinating personality—his talents. There were so many other qualities that she admired and which attracted her. His extraordinary generosity. For instance, he was surprisingly kind and thoughtful to those less fortunate than himself.

He filled his studio with impoverished artists—many of whom he financed. She knew that. She had met some of them. He was equally kind to the old and infirm. There was a caretaker in the block of flats where he rented his studio whose wife had been taken ill and died suddenly leaving the man with six small motherless children. It had been Dominic who paid for a splendid funeral because the family wanted it, with all the Italian love of ceremony and morbid interest in the trappings of burial. He supplied the man with enough money to engage a foster-mother, and sent the whole family into the country. He was always paying bills for the poor and there were many really poor people in Italy. The girl who saw this side of him loved him for it. Other rich men couldn’t be bothered, but Dominic—so critical of the wealthy members of his own class and often so insolent and chilling to them—seemed to have boundless sympathy for the underdog.

He had, the girl often told herself, a golden heart. Yet that goodness in him did not extend to the women in his life. She knew that, too. He frequently loved and rode away. He couldn’t be bothered with his lovers once he grew tired of them. Then he became ruthless.

It was that knowledge that frightened her so much; the certainty that the day of reckoning must come for her.

For the moment it did not seem that the day was at hand because he seemed still to be deeply interested in her. Any time that she could get away from the Del Farice, she was invited to spend with him. They went out together constantly. They had been to every café or restaurant in Rome worth going to. He introduced her to the gay night-life as well as to Rome’s intellectual delights. He had, in fact, educated her—mentally and physically.

There had even come a day—a night—when he had held her in his arms up in the warmth of his studio which she loved so much with its smell of paint and turps and all the trappings of Dominic’s art—and told her that he really loved her.

“I really do,” he had sa. . .