Read Online Giselle's Choice by Penny Jordan - Free Book Online Page A

kissing it tenderly before saying, ‘You are everything I could ever want in the woman I love and I am truly blessed to have found you, Giselle. I know that right now you are disappointed in me. You feel that I’ve let you down, and I feel that too. Those are my errors and my responsibility, but you, my love, I hope will find the kindness and the magnanimity of spirit to overcome the difficulties I have created for us.’
    â€˜Because you think I love you too much not to, you mean?’ Giselle accused him wryly, adding before he could answer her. ‘Well, it is true, Saul. I do.’
    â€˜But you are not happy to love me to such an extent?’ he asked.
    â€˜I am not happy to think you would ride roughshod over my views,’ was all Giselle felt able to commit herself to saying.
    She simply couldn’t bring herself to tell him that between them, via her deceit and the keeping of a hiddensecret, and his denial of a promise he had made her because of his duty to Arezzio, they had both set in motion a situation that would rip apart the love that meant so much to them both.
    Hers was the greater blame, though. She had known when she married him that she was keeping something from him that in reality she should have told him. And risk losing his love? Have him turn from her in horror? He hadn’t wanted a child then. The secret she had kept from him had not mattered. But it mattered now.
    They had left the valley’s plain behind them now, and were travelling a winding road that circled the steep mountainsides, passing through small villages with stone buildings with exposed timbers, whose inhabitants looked as though they were lost in time. An ancient viaduct straddled two valleys up ahead of them.
    â€˜Roman,’ Saul told her briefly, following her gaze. ‘Aldo and I used to dig around its footings, hoping to find Roman artefacts. There are some in the palace. Maybe we should think about inviting specialists to come and do a dig? Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies marched through here, before him the Romans, and before them, so it’s said, Alexander the Great.’
    â€˜The people look so poor,’ was all Giselle could trust herself to say, as she watched an elderly woman walking through a dusty village alongside a heavily laden donkey.
    â€˜That’s because they are,’ Saul replied. ‘Aldo was acutely conscious of the poverty of the people, but sadly he focused on attempting to improve his own personal finances, so that he could put more money into theexchequer, rather than focusing on finding ways to help the people to help themselves.’
    â€˜And of course those of his financial ventures which were connected to his father-in-law failed disastrously.’ Giselle hesitated. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible to use some of Natasha’s father’s wealth to help the people?’
    â€˜That money is tainted,’ Saul reminded her. ‘I don’t want to build the future of the people on such foundations.’
    Giselle nodded her head. It was typical of everything she knew about Saul that he should feel like that. He was a man of strong principles, even if those principles sometimes made his judgement a little rigid. As it would be when he judged her?
    The pain that she now had to live with had her heart thudding into a flurry of anxious beats. Think about something else, she told herself. Think about the people and their problems. Think about anything other than the unhappiness that lies ahead.
    Although she had now seen the poverty in which this ordinary people of the country lived, nothing had prepared Giselle for what she saw when eventually they rounded the curve of one thickly wooded mountain and dropped down into a small town—the country’s largest town after the capital city, Saul told her grimly, after he had stopped the car. They were both able to see the devastation below them, where what looked like an entire hillside had