The Dutiful Wife Read Online Free

they were inside their house, an eighteenth-century mansion, Saul dropped the guard he had been maintaining whilst they had been in public and paced the floor of their elegant drawing room, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and shock.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ Giselle told him, going to him and placing her hand on his arm, bringing a halt to his pacing. ‘I know how much Aldo meant to you.’
    ‘He was younger than me—my younger cousin—but more like a brother than a cousin to me in many ways. Especially after our parents died and we were one another’s only blood relatives. I should have protected him better, Giselle.’
    ‘How could you have?’
    ‘I knew what Natasha’s father was. I should have—’
    ‘What? Forbidden Aldo from ever sharing a car with his father-in-law? You couldn’t know that Natasha’s father would be assassinated.’ Giselle’s voice softened. ‘I do understand how you feel, though.’ Of course she did. She had suffered dreadfully through the guilt and sense of responsibility she had felt after the deaths of her mother and baby brother. ‘But you are not to blame, Saul—just like I wasn’t to blame for what happened with my family.’
    Saul placed his hand over Giselle’s where it rested on his arm.
    No one would be able to understand how he felt better than Giselle. He knew that. But the situation with Aldo was very different from her situation. She had been a six-year-oldchild. He was a man, and he had always known how vulnerable his gentle cousin was—to Natasha and all the pain he would suffer through loving her. But not this—not his death as an accident, a nothing, the fallout from the actions of someone whose target was not Aldo himself.
    ‘This should never have happened. Aldo had so much to give—especially to his country and its people.’
    ‘He wanted greater democracy for them,’ Giselle reminded Saul gently, not wanting to say outright at such a sensitive time that Aldo’s death had opened the door to the country taking charge of its own future, electing a government rather than being ruled by a member of its royal family. Talking about the future of the country without Aldo was bound to be painful for Saul.
    ‘I’m going to have to go to Russia—and the sooner the better,’ Saul told her abruptly, and explained when she frowned, ‘Distasteful though it is to have to speak of such matters, the fact remains that Aldo survived both Natasha and her father. Since the rule of law when there is more than one death in a family at the same time is that the youngest member of that family is deemed to have survived the longest, it means that by that Natasha, as her father’s only child, will have inherited his assets at the moment of their deaths. And that in turn means that Aldo, as Natasha’s husband, will have inherited those assets from her by virtue of the fact that he survived her.’
    ‘Does that mean that as Aldo’s only living relative those assets will now pass to you?’ Giselle asked. ‘I don’t like the thought of that, Saul. Not just because ofthe circumstances of Aldo’s death, and the fact that he has died so young. It’s the nature of the assets, the way they were accumulated. I feel that they are…’
    ‘Tainted?’ Saul suggested, and Giselle nodded her head. ‘I share your feelings, and certainly the last thing I want or intend to allow to happen is for me to have any personal benefit from that money. However, I have a duty to Aldo and to the country—to do what is right for them. It was thanks to Ivan Petranovachov’s bad advice that Aldo invested so heavily and unwisely in ventures that led to him losing a great deal of money. I know that I helped him out by clearing his personal debts, but the country itself is still heavily burdened with loans that Aldo took out, intending to use the money for the benefit of his people. Unfortunately most of that money ended up in schemes that benefited those who proposed them—many of them business