A/N: A very emotional piece. I got the idea just a month ago and had been so looking forward to writing this…and then got it done in four days. Geez, all the good ones go by too fast. (LOL!) I look forward to your comments, and as always, my gratitude to those who take time out not only to read but to review.
§ § § - December 17, 2001 – near Grottaminarda, Italy
He paced the floor, as was his habit, his expensive hand-tooled-leather shoes clacking on the centuries-old flagstones of his open piazza. As usual, he was fuming: he always fumed after a visit from his daughter and son-in-law. He had never understood what she saw in that boy. Well, all right, they made a pretty pair; but he was a nobody, a lackwit, who tried hard but to little avail. They were church-mouse poor, and he was always bailing them out of some financial difficulty. The two of them seemed to be about a step and a half ahead of some bill collector or another at any given moment. If the girl had been like her sister and had some talent for growing things…but no, she seemed to want no part of the business, and was especially repulsed by her sister's end of it.
It had been so good for a few years. He could brag from one end of Grottaminarda to the other that his cherished little girl was a princess. No matter that she and the prince she'd been wed to didn't love each other: she had the title, and that was the only thing that mattered. And he had been the only grower of the spice on earth, quite conveniently trapping Lilla Jordsö's royal family into the deal; there had been no way in the world anyone could ever take his social status from him. The father of a princess! Now there'd been something to get him the respect he deserved.
But almost a year ago his world had crashed around him. From out of nowhere, a new grower of amakarna had turned up, with a better-quality spice and a lower selling price, and King Arnulf had arbitrarily broken their contract and signed on with this upstart. It had been a huge shock to him. He'd ranted and screamed at his representative in that frigid little northern country, but it had been pointed out to him that the king had the power to do as he would. Not only that, but the contract had been open-ended and non-binding. There was no stipulation that demanded the contract be honored till a certain date, no clause specifying that there would be consequences for breach. Foolishly, he had believed that there was no way for the king or his hapless younger brother to get out of the deal, and had left those loose ends untied, allowing both of them to slip out of the noose when the new grower had presented the king with his superior spice and his contract—a contract that, he'd heard, actually required Arnulf to dissolve the marriage between his brother and Marina! The prince had wasted little time fleeing halfway around the world to some woman he had apparently been in love with since just before being married to Marina. Even worse, his little girl had come home trumpeting to all and sundry that she was at last marrying the only man she had ever loved—Giuseppe Ognissanti's talentless youngest son. Within three days of her return, they'd been wed and now lived in a tiny three-room flat over a pub in Grottaminarda, perpetually in debt and scrambling to make their meager living, but oddly happy with each other. They were sickeningly in love, and it drove him mad.
But he had never seen Marina as happy as she was with Giancarlo. He could still remember her trying to explain things to him a couple of weeks after the wedding, the day he'd seen the popular magazines in the little market in town and been confronted with the sight of his daughter's prince and the woman he had married gazing blissfully out at the world from the covers of all of them. When he'd gone to tell Marina she'd lost the prince, she had shaken her head at him. "Papa, you know he was never really mine at all," she said. "I didn't want Christian and he didn't want me. You know I've always loved Giancarlo."
"How can you fail to love a prince, Marina mia?" he demanded incredulously. "Think of the things he could have given you—all the clothes and jewels he must have showered you with! All the influential people he must have known! All the sophisticated parties at which you could be seen with him! You would have known all the very best people…you would have been a woman of class and status!"
"What good is that when you're not happy, Papa?" Marina asked. "Has it been so long since Mama died that you've forgotten the wonder of being truly in love with a special person? That's what I feel for Giancarlo. I don't care about sparkling jewels and influential people, and my clothes were paid for by the royal treasury, not by Christian. When happiness is missing, even the best life can make you prefer death. I may be poor and struggling now, but I have my Giancarlo, and I am the happiest woman in all Italy." She had patted his cheek. "Papa, be happy for us, please. And please understand that I'm very glad for Christian and Leslie as well. They deserve to be happy together just as Giancarlo and I do. I have no grudge against Christian. We both knew from the beginning that our marriage was only in name. Why, we never even consummated it, didn't you know that? Don't try to force something that just isn't there, Papa. This is my life now and I'm so very happy."
"I can't understand it, Marina mia, I just can't," he said sadly. But he had accepted it, because he knew he had no choice. And in the end, he really couldn't begrudge Marina and Giancarlo their happiness. Giancarlo was truly in love with Marina and would have died for her without question, and he had to admit to himself that the boy's devotion to his little girl was admirable. Had this not been the case, he would have seen to it that some manner of harm came to Giancarlo, his longtime friendship with Giuseppe notwithstanding.
But that damned ungrateful prince…he should have seen what a treasure he had in Marina. It hadn't taken the count and Prince Christian very long to learn to hate each other. From the moment they had met, Christian had been hostile in the face of his smugness over having a prince for a son-in-law. The count had the upper hand, and Christian had known it all too well, which had always put him in a slow boil for the duration of the few visits he'd made with Marina before she'd started coming back alone. Christian would silently simmer, and he himself would pretend magnanimity, knowing there was no escape for the prince and feeling quite pleasantly drunk on the power he held over the young man.
But that didn't stop him from loathing the prince because the man stubbornly refused to fall in love with Marina. For some reason he loved some stray orphan girl on the other side of the world. Now, he'd heard of Roarke…who hadn't? As a matter of fact, a couple of generations back, his clan and the Roarke clan had been close friends before politics and wars and simple life choices had caused them to drift apart and lose touch. Now he and Marina were all that was left of the LiSciola clan, especially since Paola's death, and as far as he knew there had been only Roarke himself, the last of his own clan.
Well, that is, till that accursed Rogan Callaghan showed up. He supposed it was likely he ought to blame Callaghan for all this, or King Arnulf, but logic had no place in his loathing and it was Prince Christian on whom he focused his fury. He might as well: since Arnulf had died almost six months before, there was certainly no extracting restitution from him. And Callaghan, it had turned out, was a member of the Roarke clan. One way or the other, he had to get some kind of retaliation for the situation he was in now. He was the village laughingstock; people snickered behind his back, eyed him with open amusement whenever he showed his face in town, pointed and whispered and shook their heads. It was time for payback.
He stopped pacing finally and peered across the hills, an idea beginning to bloom in his mind. He was going to need outside help, and he knew of no one better to give him what he most wanted. He took a deep breath and spoke in the Latin he remembered from his childhood, during the heyday of the Roman Empire—a time he still missed. "I summon you, my old friend…I beg thee, heed me…"
After several minutes of repeated calls, he heard a deep sigh from behind and turned around with a welcoming smile. "Count LiSciola," his visitor said. "I should have known it was you. No one else calls me that way, and it's been ages since you did it. Is there some pressing emergency that requires my assistance?"
"Oh, that there is," Count LiSciola said with a deliberate nod. "I have a great dilemma; I want back what was mine. Of course, I can't have it…so I want revenge."
"Ah, revenge…such a lovely word. It makes me rejoice to hear it. So what, precisely, is the situation?"
"I'm sure you keep up with current affairs. My little girl was a princess for a few years, till some damned gardener appeared from the blue and made King Arnulf an offer he couldn't refuse. Now she's wed to a common laborer who can't get himself out of hock to everyone in the village, and her prince has married some nameless young woman he claims to be in love with. He was bound by the marriage contract his father and I drew up almost twenty-one years ago. I want him punished for breach—to understand that that contract was broken without proper authorization and to suffer the consequences! If you'll help me do that, Mephistopheles, my old friend, then you may have his immortal soul."
Mephistopheles eyed him, interest piqued slightly. It was an odd request. "A third-party sale?" he said thoughtfully. "Normally I don't get myself entangled in those. Far too many legal ramifications…and lawyers these days are absolute sharks. Give them a little leeway and they can get anyone out of trouble. They always find loopholes, and if there's one thing I simply loathe, it's loopholes. No, my friend, I think I'll pass on this one. Why don't you just learn to live with it? It's not as if you can't afford to support your daughter and her unsuccessful sweetheart, you know."
LiSciola drew himself up straight and gave Mephistopheles a small smile. "Ah, but there's more to it than you realize. I have a copy of the contract, properly signed, and I can present it for evidence. There's very little the prince can do in his own defense, you know. There can hardly be any problem with loopholes."
Mephistopheles shrugged skeptically. "Famous last words, my dear count, but I must admit you do have my curiosity stirred up. Where is the young prince now?"
"He rushed off to marry the woman he supposedly loves…some little child named Leslie. She's the adopted daughter of Roarke, of Fantasy Island."
Mephistopheles froze and stared at him; a slightly fanatical light leaped to life in his sharp brown eyes. "Roarke!" he breathed. "Roarke, indeed! That man knows how to find every loophole in existence, and he is forever slipping through even the most carefully constructed traps." His gaze sharpened then. "LiSciola, your contract had better be airtight and as legally valid as it's possible to get, for if it isn't, you will regret it—make no mistake. Very well, I'll help you, for I just can't resist trying one more time for Roarke's soul, no matter how twisted the path I must take to get it. Leave your daughter some money to get herself and her young fool through a week or so, and get ready for a trip to Fantasy Island. I'll meet you there." He grinned with anticipation and vanished in a huge red flame.
Count LiSciola, rubbing his hands, rushed off to pack and make plane reservations. He didn't much care what Mephistopheles did with Roarke, just so long as he made sure to do away with Prince Christian in the process. Only then would he find peace.
§ § § - December 22, 2001 – Fantasy Island
Roarke stood up quite straight when he recognized their next two guests. "Now that's a pair I never thought to see," he said.
Leslie scowled. "Well, well," she said. "So Mephistopheles is back. How ironic, since it's almost Christmas. Who's that with him?"
"One Count LiSciola," Roarke said slowly, glancing at Leslie, who curiously had no reaction. It occurred to him then that she didn't know or remember Marina's last name, and evidently Christian hadn't told her. "I am not certain what his part in all this may be."
"Well, it's pretty obvious that Mephistopheles wants your soul, as usual," Leslie said, "but how he expects to get it this time, I couldn't imagine. Didn't they tell you anything?"
Roarke shook his head. "You yourself have summarized things very nicely, my child," he said. "We will have to wait until their appointment at the main house before we learn anything more." His toast to their new guests was just perceptibly strained, and Leslie found herself squinting at the dark, pale-skinned man with Mephistopheles, trying to figure out what it was about him that was tickling her memory.