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So, are you going to go through with all this? Are you going to marry Dexter even though you know he doesn't love you?

Isabella shuddered at the poisonous words her stepmother had just uttered. They were both in Isabella's bedroom, well, the one that had been until shortly after her father's death. After that, Elena had announced her decision to sell the beautiful house with a garden in which Isabella had grown up in order to buy an apartment in the small town where they lived.

"Dexter has asked me to see his clients," her stepmother had explained the day she'd told her of her plans to sell the house, which had perplexed Isabella. She says that when I took over dealing with clients, your father's company started to do much better. Unfortunately, your mother never understood how important it was to be nice to customers.

On that occasion, Isabella had tried not to be affected by her stepmother's words; she had simply responded by shrugging her shoulders in a gesture that was already characteristic of her every time Elena mentioned her late mother. She always felt the urge to defend her memory, but she had enough experience by now to know better than to. However, she had not been able to avoid making a brief comment:

"Mom was very sick. If that hadn't been the case, I'm pretty sure she would have treated Daddy's customers very kindly, and she would have been delighted to do so.

"Yes, we all know that you think your mother was a saint." Her eyes had filled with fury and hostility. And Dexter agrees with me that, all these years, you've been making things very difficult for your father with your way of trying to make him feel guilty for falling in love with me.

The way Elena was bragging about it had made Isabella's stomach churn, and the rest of the conversation hadn't exactly made her feel any better.

"Dexter thinks your father was very lucky to marry me. In fact... - he had stopped speaking to make a gesture of complicity, a complicity that certainly did not exist between the two of them. Isabella just wanted to stop listening to Elena talk about Dexter as if she had a very close relationship with him; it hurt even more because she was deeply in love with him.

Isabella had never been able to understand why her dear father had fallen in love with a cold and manipulative woman like Elena. She had to admit that she was also very beautiful: tall, blonde and with a very good figure. The complete opposite of Isabella, who had always been the spitting image of her mother: short, with black hair full of unruly curls and dark violet eyes that, in her mother's case, were permanently full of love and tenderness, whereas Elena's blue eyes conveyed nothing more than coldness

Yet he loved his father too much to tell him what he really thought. Her mother had died when she was seven, and when her father had decided to remarry at fourteen, Isabella had convinced herself to accept this woman who was to become her stepmother for her father's sake. In fact, he had a firm conviction to accept anyone who could make him happy.

But Elena had soon made it very clear that she wasn't that generous; she was thirty-two years old when she married her father and she never showed the slightest interest in the children, much less Isabella, whom she had always treated as an adversary, a rival with whom she had to deal. Compete for the love and attention of her husband. The most obvious display of how he felt about his stepdaughter had taken place three months after arriving at the house, when he had announced that he thought it's best to send Isabella to a boarding school, instead of continuing to live there with them and study. At the private school, he had chosen mother before succumbing to the terrible wasting disease that had ended up killing her. Then it had been Sophia who had intervened to remind her father of the trouble her first wife had gone to find a suitable school for her daughter. It had also been Sophia who had appeared one day at that very school with the terrible news of her father's accident; and she had comforted Isabella while she had been unable to control a desperate and helpless cry.

That had been almost twelve months before, when she was seventeen; she was now eighteen, and in less than an hour she would be marrying Dexter.

I felt like everything was happening too fast.

The car that was to take her to the same church where her parents had been married and where her mother was buried was waiting outside. In the next room from her was her father's old lawyer, who was going to walk her down the aisle. It was going to be a quiet wedding, as she had urged Dexter.

"Are you going to go through with all this? Are you going to marry Dexter even though you know he doesn't love you? His mind went back over the words her stepmother had spoken, aware of the pain they were going to cause him.

"Dexter says it's for my own good," he gasped, "...and that's what my father would have wanted.

"Dexter says," Elena repeated her words, mocking her openly. You are silly, Isabella. There's only one reason Dexter wants to marry you, and that's because he wants to take control of the company.

"That is not true! The young Ella protested loudly. He already runs the business," she reminded her stepmother. And he knows perfectly well that I would never want him to be any other way.

"Maybe not you, but what about the man you'd marry one day if Dexter didn't become your husband?" she asked more softly. Come on, Isabella, don't you really believe that Dexter is in love with you? His tone of hers bordered on mockery again. He's a man, to him, you're just a girl... Listen, he himself told me that if it weren't for the company, he would never marry you.

Though she tried to contain it, a gasp of pain escaped her, contrasting with Elena's triumphant smile. She hated herself for allowing this woman to get past all her defenses.

"Dexter never..." he began to say, trying to regain control that he had already lost.