by Jennie Lucas
* * *
An hour later, Tina buried her head in her hands and wished herself back on the family farm working sixteen-hour days. Wished herself anywhere that wasn’t here, facing up to the nightmare that was her mother’s accounts.
For a moment she considered going through the documents again, just one more time, just to check she wasn’t wrong, that she hadn’t miscalculated and overestimated the extent of her mother’s debt, but she’d been through everything twice already now. Been through endless bank and credit card statements. Pored over loan document after loan document, all the time struggling with a dictionary alongside to make sense of the complex legal terms written in a language not her first.
She had made no mistake.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose and sighed. From the very start, when she’d seen the mass of paperwork her mother kept hidden away in an ancient ship’s chest—almost as if she’d convinced herself that out of sight really was out of mind—the signs had been ominous, but she’d kept hope alive as she’d worked to organise and sort the mess into some kind of order—hope that somewhere amidst it all would be the key to rescuing her mother from financial ruin.
She was no accountant, it was true, but doing the farm’s meagre accounts had meant she’d had to learn the hard way about balancing books, and as she’d slowly pieced the puzzle together, it was clear that there was no key, just as there would be no rescue.
Her mother’s outgoings were ten times what was being earned on the small estate Eduardo had left her, and Luca Barbarigo was apparently happily funding the difference.
But where was Lily spending all the money when she was no longer paying salaries? She’d sorted through and found a handful of accounts from the local grocer, another batch from a clutch of boutiques and while her mother hadn’t stinted on her own wardrobe, there was nowhere near enough to put her this deep into financial trouble. Unless...
She looked around the room, the space so cluttered with ornaments that they seemed to suck up the very oxygen. Next to her desk a lamp burned, but not just any lamp. This was a tree, with a gnarled twisted trunk that sprouted two dozen pink flowers and topped with a dozen curved branches fringed with green leaves that ended in more pink flowers but this time boasting light globes, and the entire thing made of glass.
It was hideous.
And that was only one of several lamps, she realised, dotted around the corners of the room and perched over chairs like triffids.
Were they new?
The chandelier she remembered because it was such a fantastical confection of yellow daffodils, pink peonies and some blue flower she had never been able to put a name to, and all set amidst a flurry of cascading ivory glass stems. There was no way she could have forgotten that, and she was sure she would have remembered the lamps if they had been here the last time she had visited.
Likewise, the fish bowls dotted around the room on every available flat surface. There was even one parked on the corner of the desk where she was working. She’d actually believed it was a fish bowl at first, complete with goldfish and bubbles and coral, rocks and weed. Until she’d looked up ten minutes into her work and realised the goldfish hadn’t moved. Nothing had moved, because it was solid glass.
They were all solid glass.
Oh God. She rested her head on the heel of one hand. Surely this wasn’t where her mother’s funds had disappeared?
‘Are you tired, Valentina?’ asked Lily, edging into the room, picking up one glass ornament after another in the cluttered room, polishing away some nonexistent speck of dust before moving on. ‘Should I call Carmela to bring more coffee?’
Tina shook her head as she sat back in her chair. No amount of coffee was going to fix this problem. Because it wasn’t tiredness she was feeling right now. It was utter—downright—despair.
And a horrible sinking feeling that she knew where the money had all gone...
‘What are all these amounts in the bank statements, Lily? The ones that seem to go out every month—there are no invoices that I can find to match them.’
Lily shrugged. ‘Just household expenses. This and that. You know how it is.’
‘No. I need you to tell me how it is. What kind of household expenses?’
‘Just things for the house! I’m allowed to buy things for the house, aren’t I?’
‘Not if it’s bankrupting you in the process! Where is the money going, Lily? Why is there no record of it?’
‘Oh—’ she tried to laugh, flapping her hands around as if Tina’s questions were nothing but nuisance value ‘—I don’t bother with the details. Luca keeps track of all that. His cousin owns the factory.’
‘What factory? The glass factory, Lily? Is that where all your money is going as quickly as Luca Barbarigo tops you up? You’re spending it all on glass?’
‘It’s not like that!’
‘No?’
‘No! Because he gives me a twenty per cent discount, so I’m not paying full price for anything. I’ve saved a fortune.’
Tina surveyed her mother with disbelief. So very beautiful and so very stupid. ‘So every time you get a loan top-up from Luca Barbarigo, you go shopping at his cousin’s factory.’
Her mother had the sheer audacity to shrug. Tina wanted to shake her. ‘He sends a water taxi. It doesn’t cost me a thing.’
‘No, Lily,’ she said, pushing back her chair to stand. There was no point in searching for an answer any longer. Not when there wasn’t one. ‘It’s cost you everything! I just don’t believe how you could be so selfish. Carmela is working down there for a pittance you sometimes neglect to pay. You can barely afford to pay her, and yet you fill up this crumbling palazzo with so much weight of useless glass, it’s a wonder it hasn’t collapsed into the canal under the weight of it all!’
‘Carmela gets her board!’
‘While you get deeper and deeper into debt! What will happen to her, do you think, when Luca Barbarigo throws you both out on the street? Who will look after her then?’
Her mother blinked, her lips tightly pursed, and for a moment Tina thought she almost looked vulnerable.
‘You won’t let that happen, will you?’ she said meekly. ‘You’ll talk to him?’
‘For all the good it will do, yes, I’ll talk to him. But I don’t see why it will make a shred of difference. He’s got you so tightly stitched up financially, why should he relax the stranglehold now?’
‘Because he’s Eduardo’s nephew.’
‘So?’
‘And Eduardo loved me.’
Indulged you, more like it, Tina thought, cursing the stupid pride of the man for letting his wife think his fortune was bottomless and not bothering to curb her spending while he was alive, and not caring what might happen to his estate when he was gone.
‘Besides,’ her mother continued, ‘you’ll make him see reason. He’ll listen to you.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘But you were friends—’
‘We were never friends! And if you knew the things he said about you, you would know he was never your friend either, no matter how much money he is so happy to lend you.’
‘What did he say? Tell me!’
Tina shook her head. She’d said too much. She didn’t want to remember the ugly things he’d said before she’d slapped his smug face. Instead she pulled her jacket from the back of her chair. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I need to get some fresh air.’
‘Valentina!’
She fled the veritable glass museum with the sound of her mother’s voice still ringing in her ears, running down the marble steps and out past the five-hundred-year-old well with no idea where she was going, simply that she had to get away.
Away from the lamps that looked like trees and the goldfish frozen in glass and the tons of chandeliers that threatened to sink
the building under their weight.
Ran from her mother’s sheer naivety and her unbelievable inability to read the terms of an agreement and then to blithely disregard them as unimportant when she did.
Fleeing from her own fear that there was no way she could sort out her mother’s problems and be home in a mere three days. Her mother was drowning in debt, just as the ancient palazzo itself was threatening to collapse into the canal and drown under the weight of tons of expensive but ultimately useless glass.
And there was not one thing she could do about it. This trip was a complete waste of time and money. It was pointless. There was nothing she could do.
She turned left out of the gate, heading back down the narrow calle towards the canal and a vaporetto that would take her somewhere—anywhere—her mother was not. And at the next corner she turned tight left again, too suddenly to see anyone coming, too consumed with her thoughts to remember she should be walking on the other side of the path. And much too suddenly to stop until his big hands were at her shoulders, braking her before she could collide headlong into his chest, punching the air from her lungs in the process. Air that had already conveyed the unmistakable news to her brain.
Luca.
CHAPTER FOUR
HIS eyes were shuttered behind dark glasses, and still she caught a glint of something behind the lenses as he recognised her, some flash of recognition that was mirrored in the upwards tweak of his lips, and she hated him all the more for it. Just as she hated the sizzle where his long fingers burned into her skin.
‘Valentina?’ he said, in a voice that must have been a gift from the gods at his birth, stroking like a pure dark velvet assault on her senses. ‘Is it you?’
She tugged fruitlessly against his steel grip to be free. He was too close, so close that the air was flavoured with the very essence of him, one hundred per cent male with just a hint of Bulgari, a scent that worked to lure her closer even as she struggled to keep her distance. A scent that was like a key opening up the lid on memories she’d rather forget and sending fragments from the past hurtling through her brain, fragments that contained the memory of that scent—of taking his nipple between her teeth and breathing him in; of the rasp of his whiskered chin against her throat making her gasp; and the feel of him driving into her with the taste of his name in her mouth.
And she cursed the combination of a velvet voice and an evocative scent; cursed that she remembered in way too much detail and the fact that he still looked as good as he always had and hadn’t put on twenty kilos and lost his hair since she had last seen him.
Cursed the fact that there was clearly no justice in this world.
For instead he was as beautiful as she remembered, a linen jacket over a white shirt that clung to his lean muscled chest as if it were a second skin, and camel-coloured linen trousers bound low over his hips by a wide leather belt.
He looked every bit the urbane Italian male, as polished and sleek as the streamlined water taxis that prowled the canals, the powerful aristocrats of this watery world. And she was suddenly aware of the disparity between them, with her raw-faced from her shower and dressed in faded jeans and a chain-store jade-coloured vest that was perfectly at home on the farm or even in town but here and now in his presence felt tired and cheap.
‘But of course it is you. My apologies, I almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’
And a velvet voice turned to sandpaper, to scrape across senses already reeling from the shock of their meeting and leaving them raw and stinging.
‘Luca,’ she managed in an ice-laden voice designed to slice straight through his smugness, ‘I’d like to say it’s good to see you again, but right now I just want you to let me go.’
His smile only widened, but he did let her go then, even if his hands lingered at her shoulders just a fraction longer than necessary, the shudder as his thumbs swept an arc across her skin as they departed and left her shivery just as unwelcome. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry? I understood you had only now arrived.’
There was no point being surprised or asking how he knew. Her mother had been making calls when she’d arrived. One of them was to her father, her mother had said, but was another to Luca Barbarigo, sorting out the next instalment of her loan so she could purchase a new bargeful of glassware? She wouldn’t be surprised. For all her mother’s protests about the unfair actions of the man, she needed him for her supply of funds like a drug addict needed their supply of crack cocaine. She didn’t waste time being polite. ‘What’s it to you where I am going?’
‘Only that I might have missed you. I was coming to pay my respects.’
‘Why? So you could gloat to my face about my mother’s pathetic money management skills? Don’t bother, I’ve known about them for ever. It’s hardly news to me. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time but I’ll be heading back to Australia the first flight I can get. And now, if you’ll excuse me...’ She made to move past him but it wasn’t easy. In the busy calle he was too tall, too broad across the shoulders. His very presence seemed to absorb what little space there was. But as soon as this next group of tourists passed...
He shifted to the right, blocking her escape. ‘You’re leaving Venice so soon?’
She tried to ignore what his presence was doing to her blood pressure. Tried to pretend it was anger with her mother that was setting her skin to burn and her senses to overload. ‘What would be the point of staying? I’m sure you’re not as naive as my mother, Signore Barbarigo. You must know there is nothing I can do to save her from financial ruin. Not after the way you’ve so neatly stitched her up.’
His eyes glinted in the thin light, and Tina had no doubt the heated spark came not from what was left of the sun, but from a place deep inside.
‘So combatative, Valentina? Surely we can talk like reasonable people.’
‘But that would require you to be a reasonable person, Signore Barbarigo and, having met you in the past, and having examined my mother’s accounts, I would hazard the opinion that you have not one reasonable bone in your body.’
He laughed out loud, a sound that reverberated between the brick walls and bounced all the way up to the fading sky, grinding on her senses. ‘Perhaps you are right, Valentina. But that does not stop your mother from believing that you will rescue her from the brink of ruin.’
‘Then she is more of a fool than I thought. You have no intention of letting her off the hook, do you? You won’t be happy until you have thrown her out of the palazzo!’
Heads turned in their direction, ears of passing tourists pricking up at her raised voice, eager to happen upon a possible conflict to add colour and local spice to their Venetian experience.
‘Please, Valentina,’ he said, pushing her back towards the wall and leaning in close, as if they were having no more than a lovers’ tiff. ‘Do you wish to discuss your mother’s financial affairs in a public street as if it is fodder for so many tourists’ ears? What will they think of us Venetians? That we are not civilised enough to conduct our affairs in private?’
Once again he was too close—so close that she could feel his warm breath fanning her face—too close to be able to ignore his scent or not feel the heat emanating from his firm chest or to be able to think rationally, other than to rebut the obvious.
‘I am no Venetian.’
‘No. You are Australian and very forthright. I admire that in you. But now, perhaps it is time to take this conversation somewhere more private.’ He indicated back in the direction she had come. ‘Please. We can discuss this in your mother’s house. Or, if you prefer, you can come with me to mine. I assure you, it is only a short walk.’
And meet him on his territory? No way in the world. She might have been trying to escape her mother’s house, but it was still the lesser of two evils. Besides, if there were going to be some home truths flying around, ma
ybe it was better her mother was there to hear them. ‘Then the palazzo. But only because I have a few more things I want to tell you before I leave.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ she heard him mutter as she wheeled around and headed back in the direction she had come. So smug, she thought, wishing there was something she could do or say to wipe the expression from his face. Was he so sure of Lily’s hopelessness that he had known her trip here was futile from the start? Was he laughing at her—at the pointlessness of it all?
She almost growled as she headed back down the calle, her senses prickling with the knowledge he was right behind her, prickling with the sensation of his eyes burning into her back. She had to fight the impulse to turn and stare him down but then he would know that she felt his heated gaze and his smugness would escalate from unbearable to insufferable, so she kept her eyes rigidly ahead and tried to pretend she didn’t care.
Carmela met them at the palazzo door, smiling uncertainly as she looked from one to the other. But then Luca smiled and turned on the charm as he greeted her in their own language and even though Carmela knew that her future in this place was held by little more than a gossamer thread this man could sever at any time, Tina would swear the older woman actually blushed. She hated him all the more for it in that moment, hated him for this power to make women melt under the sheer onslaught of his smile.
‘Your mother has taken to her bed,’ Carmela said, apologising for her absence. ‘She said she has a headache.’
Luca arched an eyebrow in Tina’s direction. She ignored him as Carmela showed them upstairs to the main reception room, promising to bring coffee and refreshments. It was a massive room with high ceilings and pastel-decorated walls that should have been airy and bright but was rendered small by the countless cabinets and tables piled high with glass ornaments, figurines and crystal goblets and lamps of every shape and description, glass that now glinted ruby-red as the setting sunlight streamed in through the wide four-door windows.
It was almost pretty, she thought, a glittering world of glass and illusion, if you could forget about what it had cost.
