Rome is Where the Heart is: An uplifting romantic read, perfect to escape with (From Italy with Love Book 1)

by Tilly Tennant

  But what was the use of being angry? She was getting used to people letting her down and this was a valuable lesson. It was time to start relying on herself a lot more and others a lot less; that way the chances of being disappointed were a lot slimmer and if it happened she had only herself to blame. Jamie was just being Jamie, and she couldn’t expect him to be anything else. She took a deep breath and counted to ten. Anger was a waste of time and no good to anyone.

  The evening air was cooler now, and Kate shivered slightly. She pulled a feather-light cardigan from her bag and swung it around her shoulders as she began to walk away from the restaurant. It wasn’t a great deal better, but it was something at least. An ambulance flashed past on the road, its blue lights giving the buildings a fleeting eerie glow. It looked as if someone else’s night had been ruined too. She looked at her watch. It was gone ten, and it probably wasn’t the best idea to walk back to the hotel alone at this hour. Turning around, she had just made the decision to return to the restaurant and order a taxi when she heard her name being called.

  A man was striding towards her. He was wearing full police uniform, but it wasn’t Alessandro. This man was stockier, a little shorter; he had the sort of laughter lines earned from a life well lived, but he wasn’t laughing now.

  ‘You are Kate?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but how do you know. . .?’

  ‘No time to explain,’ he said. ‘I remember you from the questura when you came to report your robbery.’

  ‘Is it Alessandro?’ Kate said, suddenly gripped by a sense of panic. ‘Has something happened to him?’

  ‘He has gone to your hotel to find you.’

  ‘Have I done something wrong? I don’t understand. . .’

  ‘Do not be scared when I tell you this. It is bad news for your friend.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The man led her to a waiting police car. She had not asked for his ID, had no idea whether he was a real policeman and hadn’t even asked his name, but she got in anyway, too distracted to think about the danger she might be in. Anna and Lily would have been horrified to see it, but there wasn’t time to think about that now. All she could think about was Jamie, and how she had harshly misjudged him. If anything happened to him she would never be able to forgive herself. If only she’d gone to look sooner, insisted she went with him to meet Pietro in the first place, done something. . . anything. But wishing was not fixing, and there was no magic time-travelling box to take her back.

  There was another officer in the car when they got there, and Kate sat in the back while the first one contacted someone on his radio. Then he turned and spoke to Kate.

  ‘I will take you to your hotel now.’

  ‘OK.’

  She sat in silence as the lights of Rome sped by, the tourists and revellers a blur on the pavements. The roads were still busy, but clearer than during the day, meaning the snail’s pace she’d travelled at before had been swapped for a brisker journey and they were back at her hotel surprisingly quickly. When the car pulled up, she thanked the officers and turned to the hotel. Through the vast windows she could already see Alessandro in his uniform at reception. He looked strained and solemn, and her heart sank at the sight. But there was no point in delaying. She pushed open the doors and went inside.

  ‘Kate. . .’ Alessandro’s tone was brisk as he strode towards her. She wanted to bury herself in his arms, but this wasn’t the time or place. He kept his distance and his tone was guarded. She understood: he was on duty and he had to maintain a professional manner. But it still stung. ‘Has my colleague told you what happened?’

  ‘Not everything. Only that Jamie is injured. Is it bad?’

  ‘I do not think it is too bad, but he was attacked, which is a very serious thing. A tourist found him. . . lying on the street. . . eyes closed. . . sleeping. . .’ He paused, frowned, reaching for the English.

  ‘Unconscious?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Yes. The doctor is looking at him now. I need you to tell me what happened, all that you know. Can you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know that much,’ Kate began, but Alessandro put a gentle hand to her elbow and guided her to a chair in the lobby where it was quieter. He pulled out a tablet and began to type.

  ‘Your friend woke in the ambulance. He said he did not know who attacked him, but I do not think that is true. He wants to protect someone?’

  ‘I don’t know. . .’ Kate paused. What could she tell him? How much would Jamie want her to tell him? He might not appreciate her potentially complicating an already difficult situation. Was Alessandro acting now in the capacity of law enforcement or as a concerned friend? And did it matter which? ‘We were having dinner together, and then he had a message. . . on his phone. He went outside to talk to someone and said he’d be right back, but he didn’t come back. I paid the bill and started to walk to my hotel. I thought. . .’

  ‘What did you think, Kate? Who did he meet? This is very serious.’

  ‘I don’t know him. A sort of friend. Can I see Jamie? Can I speak to him?’

  Alessandro shook his head. ‘Not now. Tomorrow.’

  Kate’s gaze went to the floor. She hated this Alessandro. Not because he was horrible, but because she felt like a terrible person keeping secrets from him. He was doing his job to the best of his ability and she was making it a hundred times more difficult. But until she had spoken to Jamie she didn’t want to tell him anything at all. The more she turned things over in her mind, the more confused she was. Pietro didn’t seem like the type of man to attack someone, especially a man he considered a friend, a man he claimed to be in love with. But the evidence all pointed that way. Pietro had sent Jamie a text asking him to come outside, and then Jamie had been knocked unconscious. Kate just didn’t want to believe it could be true. Was this a crime of passion? She had always considered that term rather melodramatic, and she had never met anyone who was victim or perpetrator before, but she supposed that didn’t mean crimes of passion didn’t exist. Or had something else happened?

  She didn’t want to, but she began to cry. Silently, holding onto her tears as hard as she could, but still they fell. She couldn’t look at Alessandro.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘Jamie will get well. He is young and strong.’

  ‘I’m not crying because of that,’ she said. But she couldn’t say why she was crying, and when she dared glance up she could see that he looked pained at her distress. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You have not done anything wrong.’

  ‘But I. . .’ Her attention was caught by the sight of another policeman coming into the hotel lobby and making his way towards them.

  Alessandro followed her gaze and stood to greet his colleague, talking rapidly in low tones. But whereas he usually spoke English in her presence as a courtesy, this time he used Italian. It made her feel even more wretched. What was he saying? Didn’t he trust her now? Did he suspect her of keeping information from him? She was, of course, although she didn’t want to, and it was only out of loyalty to Jamie and to give Pietro, who didn’t strike her as the criminal type, the benefit of the doubt until she knew more. How could she make Alessandro understand that without actually telling him the whole story?

  ‘I must go,’ he said, turning to her.

  Kate stared dolefully at him. Was that it? Would he come back to take an official statement? Was he done with her as a witness? Letting her off the hook? Or was he just done with her full stop? She’d blown it, hadn’t she? He didn’t trust her now, and he didn’t think she was a good person for being so awkward, and he knew that she was holding back for sure. She was no trained officer but even she’d recognise it if the tables had been turned.

  ‘Go to bed,’ he added, his tone softer now. ‘Bad things will look better with the new day.’

  There was no promise to meet her again, no offers of days out, no invites to his house. There was barely an acknowledgement of the time they had shared at all. He didn’t even tell her what to do about Jamie or
how she’d be able to find him in the morning. He simply stowed the tablet he had been working on into a wallet on his belt and followed his colleague out of the hotel. She glanced across at the reception desk, where the two members of staff on duty were watching her with some curiosity. Beyond that she could see the sleek glass and chrome of the hotel bar. They were still serving, and she could go and get a stiff drink. God knew she needed one right now. But what was the point? It wouldn’t help anyone to get more pissed and she’d need a clear head in the morning. She didn’t know what she was going to do about Jamie, but she was going to have to try and contact him, if only to reassure herself that he was alright. As for Alessandro, it looked as though that ship had sailed.

  Out of habit, she checked her mobile. There was a text from Anna asking how things were and a missed call from Lily. Shit! She’d promised to phone Lily, hadn’t she? And while Lily would probably let the oversight slide, Anna would be fuming at what she would perceive as a selfish lack of consideration for how they might be worrying about her being alone in a foreign country, and would think they were owed a check-in once in a while. She’d be bang on too, of course, but no matter how much Kate wanted to put it right, she wasn’t sure now was the time for that either. Emotional turmoil and a calm demeanour didn’t go well together, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep it together if she heard either of their voices. It would have to go on the list of things to do in the morning, which was growing bigger and more complicated by the second.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Dear God, Kate, why didn’t you tell us any of this before!’ Anna cried.

  Kate held the phone away from her ear as she sat on the bed in her hotel room, daylight streaming through the windows and warming her back. Anna was doing that thing she did when she got worked up, where her voice gradually got higher and louder until it became a sound that humans ought not to be able to make, and Kate rather liked her eardrums in one piece.

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you. . . besides, there wasn’t that much to tell before. I didn’t know it was going to end up in a punch-up, did I? As far as I knew Jamie was just offering a friendly shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘Typical you, though,’ Anna shot back. ‘Can’t wait to go wading into the danger zone, always hooking up with the losers, the waifs and strays, the people who will bring trouble to your door. It’s like they can sniff you out.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Kate said, straining to keep her tone civil. ‘Jamie went out alone and left me in the restaurant because he received a text from someone asking him to. I wouldn’t call that the behaviour of someone who will bring trouble to my door and, actually, he went out of his way to make sure I stayed out of it by leaving me inside.’

  ‘But you could have been with him. If he’d been attacked on the way to the restaurant, you could have got caught up in it.’

  ‘I didn’t and I’m safe.’

  ‘Use your brain. . .’ Anna gave an impatient sigh. ‘Whoever it was obviously knew where Jamie was going to be and was lying in wait. That’s the only explanation. If they’d been less than kindly disposed to you, they might have attacked you both. There might have been more than one attacker for all you know, and you’d have been in hospital with your friend. . . maybe even dead.’

  Kate flinched at her sister’s melodramatic assessment of the situation. Anna had a way of bringing out the worst in her and usually managed to drag her into an argument, but she refused to be drawn this time. ‘But how would they know?’ she insisted. ‘Jamie was with me and he had no reason to tell anyone else where we would be eating.’

  ‘Then it was an unprovoked attack, which is worse.’

  ‘But he went outside because of a text from someone he knew. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would that lead to an unprovoked attack? How could it?’

  ‘That’s a question you need to ask Jamie. Have you had any sort of explanation from him yet?’

  ‘I phoned you first,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t want you to be annoyed with me,’ she added, with obvious sarcastic emphasis on the fact that Anna was being unreasonably irritated. Kate was a grown woman, after all, and she was beginning to wish she hadn’t come clean with her sister about the events of the previous night. But she’d needed a good excuse for not calling her or Lily, and she was sick of lying, or withholding the truth, or whatever you wanted to call it. Eventually it would trip her up and that would make things worse. Besides, they weren’t a family that kept secrets, and she had kept far too many already this week. ‘I don’t even know if he’s out of the hospital yet. Come to think of it, I don’t even know which hospital he’s in.’

  ‘Didn’t the police tell you?’

  Kate was thoughtful for a moment. She hadn’t told Anna that Alessandro had been the one to come and see her about Jamie, and she wasn’t sure why not. But he hadn’t volunteered the information about where Jamie was, and now that she thought about the way they’d parted last night, she was certain it was because he’d lost all respect for her. The thought made her squirm with shame, her heart heavy, but there was nothing she could do now. ‘I suppose because I’m not really family they couldn’t tell me. But I would imagine they’ve informed his family back home.’

  ‘That’s hardly useful to you, is it? That won’t get you an explanation for what the hell he was playing at.’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest, Anna. He didn’t ask to get beaten up, did he? I’m sure he wasn’t playing at anything.’

  ‘Sounds like he was poking his nose – or something else – where it wasn’t wanted.’

  ‘I just don’t believe it was Pietro who hit him. He doesn’t seem like that sort of person at all.’

  ‘I suppose if he was in love with him it does seem quite a strange thing to do,’ Anna conceded, her voice more level now. ‘Perhaps he was jealous because he thought you were having it away with Jamie too?’

  ‘I doubt it!’ Kate couldn’t help a little laugh. ‘I don’t think there’s any confusion that Jamie is exclusively about the men. He’s engaged to be married to a man for a start.’

  ‘But he could be bisexual. It’s not impossible, you know.’

  Kate had never actually considered this possibility before, and Jamie had never volunteered any information about his relationships other than his current boyfriend. Had Anna struck on the reason Pietro may have lost it? But that was ridiculous, surely? They didn’t look one bit like a couple, did they? Jamie didn’t have a thing for her, did he? A secret thing that Pietro had guessed? If he had, he’d done a bloody good job of hiding it from her. Either that or she’d been ridiculously short-sighted about the whole thing. But then she’d been so wrapped up in Alessandro that maybe. . .

  She shook herself. ‘No chance. Jamie is in love with Brad and that’s it.’

  ‘So in love he’s having an affair with an Italian waiter whenever he hits Rome?’

  ‘I don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘Sounds like you do to me. It sounds very much like you’re backtracking now to defend him. It doesn’t matter how much you like him, Kate, but the man is what he is, even if he’s nice with it.’

  ‘I’ll admit that’s how it looks. But I need to talk to him first.’

  There was a pause. ‘I’ll be glad when you’re home,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t like all this going on while you’re so far away from us that we can’t help and we can’t look out for you.’

  ‘You can’t always look out for me,’ Kate said. ‘I’m thirty, not thirteen. I love that you care so much but it’s time I stood on my own two feet.’ At any other time, this would have been the moment to tell Anna about her plans to move to Rome, which, despite what had happened overnight, were still very much at the fore of her mind. After the Jamie incident, however, Anna would go nuts at the idea. It was lucky that Kate hadn’t told her about a lot of the other things that had happened to her or Anna would be chartering a private jet to drag her back to England even if she had to lasso her and put a sack over her head to do it. ‘I’ll be home before yo
u know it, and there’s no need to worry about me. How’s Lily?’

  ‘She’s fine. Actually she had a bit of a funny turn yesterday, but she seems herself again now.’

  ‘What sort of turn?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just felt off and a bit odd. Weepy. Hormones probably. Not that I’d know.’

  ‘Not that I’m likely to ever know,’ Kate said.

  ‘So this bloke you had a date with. . .’

  ‘Alessandro.’

  ‘Him. Have you seen him since?’

  ‘Yes. . .’ Kate said carefully, sensing a new topic for Anna to lose her cool over. ‘I met his family actually. They’re lovely.’

  ‘You met his family! Is this serious then? Are you a thing?’

  ‘Of course not. He’s just being friendly.’

  ‘Very friendly if you ask me. Taking you home to meet mother – that sounds serious in my book.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m from England and he’s from Italy. We live in different worlds. I’m not even Catholic.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it impossible. I don’t think non-Catholic fraternising is totally forbidden you know.’

  ‘I know. It’s just. . . well, it doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Kate. . .’ Anna began, but then she stopped.

  ‘What is it?’

  There was another pause. ‘I don’t know if this will make any difference to your thinking, but I might as well tell you because you’ll find out soon enough anyway. . . Matt is moving in with someone. And she’s pregnant.’

  Kate blinked. Was she hearing this right?

  ‘Kate?’ Anna said. ‘Are you still there?’