by Penny Jordan
So many funerals.
So much grief.
Too much pain.
When the burial was over and the priest led the mourners into the castello for the wake, Matteo hung back to visit a grave on the next row.
The marble headstone had a simple etching.
Roberto Pellegrini
Beloved son
No mention of him being a beloved brother.
Generations of Pellegrinis and their descendants were buried here, going back six centuries. At twenty-eight Roberto was the youngest to have been buried in fifty years.
Matteo crouched down and touched the headstone. ‘Hello, Roberto. Sorry I haven’t visited you in a while. I’ve been busy.’ He laughed harshly. In the five years since his brother’s death he’d visited the grave only a handful of times. Not a day passed when he didn’t think of him. Not an hour passed when he didn’t feel the loss.
‘Listen to me justifying myself. Again. You know I hate to see you here. I love you and I miss you. I just wanted you to know that.’
Blinking back moistness from his eyes, his heart aching, his head pounding, Matteo dragged himself to the castello to join the others.
A huge bar had been set up in the state room for the wake. Matteo had booked himself into a hotel in Pisa for the next couple of days but figured one small glass of bourbon wouldn’t put him over the limit. His hotel room had a fully stocked mini-bar for him to drink dry when he got there. He would stay as long as was decent then leave.
He’d taken only a sip of his drink when Francesca appeared at his side.
He embraced her tightly. ‘How are you holding up?’ He’d been thirteen when his uncle Fabio and his wife Vanessa had taken him into their home. Francesca had been a baby. He’d been there when she’d taken her first steps, been in the audience for her first school music recital—she’d murdered the trumpet—and had beamed with the pride of a big brother only a few months ago at her graduation.
She shrugged and rubbed his arm. ‘I need you to come with me. There’s something we need to discuss.’
Following her up a cold corridor—the ancient castello needed a fortune’s worth of modernisation—they entered Fabio Pellegrini’s old office, which, from the musty smell, hadn’t been used since the motor neurone disease that eventually killed him had really taken its hold on him.
A moment later Daniele appeared at the door with Natasha right behind him.
Startled blue eyes found his and quickly looked away as Francesca closed the door and indicated they should all sit round the oval table.
Matteo inhaled deeply and swore to himself.
This was the last thing he needed, to be stuck in close confines with her, the woman who had played him like a violin, letting him believe she had genuine feelings for him and could see a future for them, when all along she’d been playing his cousin too.
It seemed she had been with him every minute of that day, always in the periphery of his vision even when he’d blinked her away. Now she sat opposite him, close enough that if he were to reach over the table he would be able to stroke her deceitful face.
She shouldn’t be wearing black. She should be wearing scarlet.
He despised that she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and that the years had only added to it.
He studied the vivid blue eyes that looked everywhere but at him. He studied the classically oval face with its creamy complexion, usually golden but today ashen, searching for flaws. Her nose was slightly too long, her lips too wide, but instead of being imperfections they added character to the face he’d once dreamed of waking up to.
And now?
Now he despised the very air she breathed.
* * *
‘To summarise, I’ll take care of the legal side, Daniele takes care of the construction and Matteo takes care of the medical side. What about you, Natasha? Do you want to handle publicity for it?’
Francesca’s words penetrated Natasha’s ears but it took a couple of beats longer for her brain to decipher them.
She’d struggled to pay attention throughout the meeting Francesca had called, the outbursts of temper between Daniele and Francesca being the only thing that had kept her even vaguely alert.
‘I can do that,’ she whispered, swallowing back the hysteria clamouring in her stomach.
Ignore Matteo and keep it together, she told herself in desperation.
God, she didn’t know anything about publicity.
She knew Francesca thought she was doing the right thing, inviting her to this meeting of siblings—and the Pellegrinis considered their cousin Matteo to be a sibling—and that Francesca assumed she would want to be involved.
Any decent, loving widow would want to be involved in building a memorial to their beloved husband.
And she did want to be involved. For all his terrible failings as a husband, Pieta had been a true, dedicated humanitarian. He’d formed his own foundation a decade ago to build in areas hit by natural disasters; schools, homes, hospitals, whatever was needed. The Caribbean island of Caballeros had been hit by the worst hurricane on record the week before he’d died, wrecking the majority of the island’s medical facilities. Pieta had immediately known he would build a hospital there but before his own plans for it had fully formed his own tragedy had struck and he’d been killed in a helicopter crash.
He deserved to have this memorial. The suffering people of Caballeros deserved to benefit from the hospital Francesca would steamroller into building for them.
So Natasha had striven to pay attention, not wanting to let down the loving Pellegrini siblings who’d been a part of her life for as long as she could remember, since her father and Fabio had been old school friends. She’d never had siblings of her own and as soon as it had been announced she’d be marrying into the family the closeness had grown, even during the six long years of their engagement.
If only Matteo weren’t there she’d have been better able to concentrate.
There had not been one occasion in his presence in the past seven years where she hadn’t felt the weight of his animosity. Polite and amiable enough that no one could see the depths of his loathing, whenever their eyes met it was akin to being stared at by Lucifer, her soul scorched by the burn of the hatred firing from green eyes that had once looked at her with only tenderness.
She could feel it now, digging into her skin like needles.
How could Francesca and Daniele not feel it too? How did it not infuse the whole atmosphere?
A part of her understood why he despised her as he did and, God knew, she’d tried to apologise for it, but it had been seven years. So much had changed in that time. She’d changed. He’d changed too, turning his back on the reconstructive surgery he’d worked so hard to specialise in and instead going the vanity surgery route. With his twenty-eight clinics worldwide and the patent on a skincare range he’d personally developed that actually worked in reducing scars and the signs of aging, he’d gone from being a dedicated professional surgeon to an entrepreneur who fitted surgery in when he had the time. Matteo had amassed a fortune that rivalled the entire Pellegrini estate and Pieta’s personally accrued wealth put together.
He’d even changed his surname.
He’d become famous with it. Tall with dark good looks, olive skin, strong jaw and black curly hair that he’d recently had cropped short, it had been inevitable. ‘Dr Dishy’ the tabloids called him. It seemed she could barely pass a newsagent or log onto the Internet without seeing his seductive face blazing out at her, normally with some identikit lingerie model or other draped on his arm.
Today his usual arrogance had deserted him. Even with the laser burn of his loathing infecting her, she could feel his anguish.
Pieta had been more than a cousin and surrogate sibling. He’d been Matteo’s closest friend.
Her heart wanted to weep for him.
Her heart wanted to weep for all of them.
* * *
Matteo pulled his car u
p by the kerb and turned off the engine. The grand town house he’d parked opposite stood in darkness.
Slumping forward over the wheel, he closed his eyes.
What was he even doing here?
He should be in his hotel room, drinking the mini-bar dry. He’d made that arrangement assuming Natasha would be staying in the castello with the rest of the family. He hadn’t slept under the same roof as her since she’d accepted Pieta’s proposal.
But she hadn’t stayed. A couple of hours after their meeting to discuss the memorial for Pieta she had made the rounds to embrace everyone goodbye. Everyone except him. By unspoken agreement—unspoken because he hadn’t exchanged more than a handful of words with her in seven years—he’d kept a great enough physical distance between them that no one would notice they failed to say goodbye to each other.
He put his head back and breathed deeply, willing his heart to stop this irregular rhythm.
What the hell was wrong with him? Why was it today of all days that he couldn’t shake her from his mind? Why today, when he was mourning his best friend and cousin, had the old memories returned to haunt him?
He could see it so vividly, leaving his room in the castello to head outside to join the rest of his family in the marquee for his aunt and uncle’s thirtieth wedding anniversary party. Natasha had left the room she’d been sharing with Francesca just a short way up the corridor from his at the same time. His heart had skipped to see her and he’d been ecstatic to see the necklace he’d sent for her eighteenth birthday there around her slender neck. He’d been disappointed not to make it to England for her party but he’d been a resident doctor at a hospital in Florida close to where he’d been to medical school. An emergency had cropped up at the end of his shift, a major car crash with multiple casualties that had resulted in all hands on deck. By the time they’d patched up the last casualty he’d missed his flight.
He’d been taking things slowly with her, waiting for her to turn eighteen before making a physical move. And then, in that cold castello corridor, Natasha in an electric-blue dress, the epitome of a chic, elegant woman, he’d realised he didn’t have to back off any more.
All the letters and late-night calls they’d been exchanging for months, the dreams and hopes for the future they’d shared, had all been leading to this, this moment, this time. It was time for their future to begin right then and he’d fingered that necklace before taking her face in his hands and kissing her for the very first time.
It had been the sweetest, headiest kiss he’d ever experienced in his then twenty-eight years, interrupted only by Francesca steamrolling from her room and clattering up the corridor to join them. If she’d been three seconds earlier she would have found them together.
Three seconds.
What would she have done, he wondered, if she had caught them in that clinch?
Because only two hours later Pieta had got to his feet and, in front of the three hundred guests, had asked Natasha to marry him. And she’d said yes.
Matteo rubbed his eyes as if the motion could rub the memories away.
He shouldn’t be thinking of all this now.
Why had he even come here, to the house she had shared with Pieta?
A light came on upstairs.
Had she just woken? Or had she been in the darkness all this time?
And was Francesca right to be worried about her?
Francesca had cornered him as he’d been making his own escape from the wake and asked him to keep an eye on Natasha while she, Francesca, was in Caballeros. She was worried about her, said she’d become a lost, mute ghost.
Although Natasha and Pieta had only been married for a year, they’d been together for seven years. She might be a gold-digging, heartless bitch but surely in that time she must have developed some feelings for him.
He’d wanted her feelings for Pieta to be genuine, for his cousin’s sake. But how could they have been when she’d been seeing them both behind each other’s backs?
Other than the few social family occasions he’d been unable to get out of, he’d cut her out of his life completely. He’d blocked her number, deleted every email and text message they’d exchanged and burned all her old-fashioned handwritten letters. The times he’d felt obliged to be in her presence he’d perfected the art of subtly blanking her in a way that didn’t draw attention to anyone but her.
He should have just said no to Francesca. Lied and said he was returning home to Miami earlier than planned.
Instead he’d nodded curtly and promised to drop round if he had five minutes over the next couple of days.
So why had he driven here when he’d left the castello fully intending to drive straight to the hotel?
* * *
Natasha pushed Pieta’s study door open and swallowed hard before stepping into it. After a moment she switched the light on. After going from room to room in complete darkness, in the house that had been her home for a year, her eyes took a few moments to adjust to the brightness.
She didn’t know what she was looking for or what she was doing. She didn’t know anything. She was lost. Alone.
She’d stayed at the wake as long as had been decently possible but all the consolation from the other mourners had become too much. Seeing Matteo everywhere she’d looked had been just as hard. Harder. Her mother pulling her to one side to ask if there was a chance she could be pregnant had been the final straw.
She’d had to get out before she’d screamed the castello down and her tongue ran away with itself before she could pull it back.
The rest of the Pellegrinis were staying at the castello and with sympathetic but concerned eyes had accepted her explanation that she wanted to be on her own.
At her insistence, the household staff had all stayed at the wake.
This was the first time she’d been alone in the house since she’d received the terrible news.
Feeling like an intruder in the room that had been her husband’s domain, she cast her gaze over the walls thick with the books he’d read. A stack of files he’d brought home to work on, either from his law firm or the foundation he’d been so proud of, lay on his desk. Next to it sat the thick leather-bound tome on Stanley and Livingstone she’d bought him for his recent birthday. A bookmark poked out a third of the way through it.
Her throat closing tightly, she picked the book up and hugged it to her chest then with a wail that seemed to come from nowhere sank to the floor and sobbed for the man who had lied to her and everyone else for years, but who had done so much good in the world.
Pieta would never finish this book. He would never see the hospital his siblings would build in his memory. He would never take delivery of the new car he’d ordered only the day before he’d died.
He would never have the chance to tell his family the truth about who he’d really been.
‘Oh, Pieta,’ she whispered between the tears. ‘Wherever you are, I hope you’re finally at peace with yourself.’
The sound of the doorbell rang out.
She rolled into a ball and covered her ears.
The caller was insistent, pressing the doorbell intermittently until she could ignore it no longer. Wiping the tears away, she dragged herself up from the study floor and went down the stairs, clinging to the bannister for support, mentally preparing what she would say to get rid of her unexpected visitor.
Please don’t be my parents. Don’t be my parents. Don’t be my parents.
Bracing herself, she unlocked the door and opened it a crack to peer through.
Certain she must be hallucinating, she pulled the door wider.
Her heart seemed to stop then kick back to life with a roar.
Matteo stood there, shining like an apparition under the brilliance of the moon.
He’d removed his black tie, his white shirt open at the throat, bleakness in his eyes, his jaw clenched, breathing heavily.
Their eyes met.
Neither of them spoke.
Something erupted in
her chest, gripping her so tightly her lungs closed.
Time came to a standstill.
There they stood for the longest time, speaking only with their eyes. She read a hundred things in his; variations of pain, misery, anger and something else, something she hadn’t seen since the beat before he’d taken her into his arms for the only kiss they had ever shared seven years ago.
This was the first time she’d seen him alone since that kiss.
She would never forget the look in his eyes from across the marquee when she had said yes to Pieta’s proposal only two hours later. That would be with her until the day she died. The regret at all that had been lost would live in her for ever.
Her foot moved of its own accord as she took the step to him and placed her palm on his warm cheek.
He didn’t react. Not the flicker of a muscle.
Matteo stared into eyes puffy from crying but that shone at him, almost pleading.
All the words he’d prepared melted away.
He couldn’t even remember getting out of his car.
Her trembling hand felt so gentle on his cheek, her warmth penetrating his skin, and all he could do was drink in the face he’d once dreamed of waking up to.
A force too powerful to fight took hold of him, like a fist grabbing his insides and squeezing tightly.
Suddenly he couldn’t remember why he hated her. All thoughts had evaporated. All he could see was her, Natasha, the woman he had taken one look at nearly eight years ago and known his life would never be the same again.
Copyright © 2017 by Michelle Smart
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