‘Cesare gave me the confidence to believe in myself and the business,’ he had said quietly. ‘And now I do.’
Bully for Cesare, thought Sorcha sourly.
She went through the mechanics of living—presenting to the world a close approximation of what Sorcha Whittaker was like. But inside it was like having something gnawing away at her and leaving a great, gaping hole. Had she once wondered if it was possible to feel as deeply as she had done as a teenager? Now she knew the answer certainly to be yes—but what she had not banked on was the level of pain, the aching deep inside her that she couldn’t seem to fill with anything.
And then an invitation dropped through the letterbox—a stiff cream card, heavily embossed with gold, inviting Sorcha to a retrospective of Maceo di Ciccio’s work in a prestigious gallery situated on the Thames in London.
‘Are you going?’ asked Emma, who was almost unbearable to be with—her ‘loved-upness’ so tangible that it seemed to be emanating from her in waves, even all these weeks after her honeymoon.
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘Oh, do go, Sorcha—he might have included a photo of you, in your famous gingham apron!’
‘Very funny.’
‘And anyway,’ Emma added mischievously, ‘Cesare might be there.’
‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Sorcha crossly.
But he might be, mightn’t he?
Was that why Sorcha took such inordinate care about her appearance—even going to the rather devious lengths of wearing a floaty skirt.
Just so he can put his hand up it? mocked the voice of her conscience and she drew herself up short—because, yes, that was the truth of it. Cesare liked women wearing skirts and dresses—he had said so—and here she was, conforming to his idea of what a woman should be. Wasn’t that disgraceful?
But she didn’t change. Instead she drove into London with a fast-beating heart, and had to park miles away from her eventual destination.
It was a windy day, and the river was all silver as a pale, ineffectual sun struggled to make itself seen.
The gallery was beautiful—vast, with huge windows, and lit with the double dose of light which bounced off the restless water.
There were photos from every phase of Maceo’s development as a photographer. Moody black and white shots of the backstreets of a city she took to be Rome, and countless pictures of the world’s most beautiful women. He was good, thought Sorcha wryly.
In fact, he was more than good, she thought as she came across some of the tougher themes he’d handled: war and famine, natural and man-made disasters—photos which made you want to rail at the injustices in life.
And then—nerve-rackingly and unexpectedly—she came across a photo of herself. It was not, as Emma had teased, an advertising shot taken in the ghastly gingham apron, but a close-up taken when she hadn’t realised that the camera had been trained on her.
She had been looking up, a look of consternation on her face, her eyes big and lost—as if something had just been wrenched away from her. And she knew just when it had been taken. When she had heard the door slam. When Cesare had jealously stormed out of the studio because Maceo had been getting her to pout and flirt outrageously.
She stared at the picture she made—a picture of longing and uncertainty, of a woman who was on the brink of falling in love again. But Cesare would not have seen that. He would only have caught the split-second before, when her face had assumed a seductive mask to sell a product. Yet here she was without the mask—and, oh, Maceo had managed to penetrate right through to the raw emotions beneath. Cesare was right—his friend had a real talent for seeing what was really there.
‘Do you like it?’ asked a velvety voice at her side, and Sorcha turned her head to see Maceo standing there, studying his own photo intently and then turning his head to look at her with his hard, brilliant eyes.
‘It’s…’
‘Revealing?’ he murmured.
‘Possibly.’
She thought how edgy he seemed today, in his trademark black, with none of the flamboyant behaviour he’d displayed in the studio. Or was that because she no longer had the protective presence of Cesare in the background?
Suddenly she felt a little out of place. It struck Sorcha that Maceo had his own mask which he donned whenever he needed to. Everyone did. She just wondered what lay behind Cesare’s. She looked around. Was there the slightest chance that he might be here?
Maceo raised his dark brows. ‘Have you seen him?’ he asked coolly.
If it had been anyone else she might have said, Who?—but it wasn’t just Maceo’s camera lens which stripped away the artifice, Sorcha realised, as those black eyes pierced through her.
‘You mean he’s here?’ she questioned, her heart leaping with painful hope in her breast.
His mouth curved into an odd kind of smile. ‘No. He isn’t here. I meant his photo.’
Sorcha shook her head. ‘No. No, I haven’t.’
His eyes had narrowed and he seemed to be subjecting her to some kind of silent assessment. ‘Come with me,’ he said softly.
Sorcha followed him across the silent polished floor of the gallery, aware from the glances and the little buzz of the spectators that he had been recognised, but a small phalanx of assistants walking at a discreet distance kept any fans at bay.
He took her into a room that she hadn’t noticed, a smaller one, with family photos—obviously his—and Sorcha had to bite back a gasp as she saw the terrible poverty in which he had grown up.
And then her gaze alighted on a group shot of some teenage boys in singlets and jeans, all with their arms folded, gazing with suspicion at the camera.
She saw Cesare immediately—to her prejudiced eye he looked the fittest and the strongest, and of course the most stunningly handsome of the lot. But how young he looked—extraordinarily young. And something else, too…
‘How old was he when this was taken?’ she questioned slowly.
‘Eighteen.’
Eighteen. The age she had been that summer, when he had come to the house, when she’d felt so mixed and jumbled up inside, so frightened of the future and all the consequences of her choices.
Yet here on Cesare’s face was the similar uncertainty of youth—the sense of standing on a precipice and not knowing whether you should step back to safety or take that leap of faith into the unknown. Had she imagined that he had never known a moment’s uncertainty or doubt—even as a teenager?
Yes, of course she had. When she had met him he had been in his mid-twenties—polished and sexy and supremely confident. But that was just the external packaging.
What lay beneath?
When she’d turned down Cesare’s proposal of marriage she had known that his pride had been wounded—but what about his heart? She hadn’t even considered that, because she had only thought about how she felt. Why had she never credited him with having feelings like she did—of pain and hurt and fear of loneliness?
Just because he behaved in a shuttered way and didn’t show his emotions, it didn’t mean he didn’t have them, did it? Why, she had never even stopped for a moment to wonder just why he behaved that way. She had never dared try to explore the substance of the man under the brilliant patina of charisma and success.
She had never allowed herself to consider that there was a chance that somehow they could be happy. And would she ever forgive herself if she didn’t find out?
She stared at the photo of the teenage boy, knowing that she had to be willing to put her feelings on the line and run the risk that she might be rejected. The risk which Cesare had talked of didn’t just apply to businesses, but to relationships, too. It was part of life. But this time a rejection would be final. A clean break. A sharp and terrible hurt, but one from which she could allow herself to heal properly and rid herself at last of the terrible ache of regret.
She turned to the photographer. ‘Thanks, Maceo,’ she said, a little shakily.
He shrugged. ‘Ciao, bella,’ h
e said coolly.
He doesn’t approve of me, thought Sorcha suddenly, and wondered what it was she was supposed to have done. But she wasn’t going to let Maceo’s opinion of her distract her from what she knew she had to do.
She rang the airline from her mobile and learned that there was a flight to Rome later that afternoon. Grateful to a college lecturer who had once told her to always carry her passport with her ‘just in case’, she booked it. Well, why not? she asked herself. What was the point in delaying?
She drove to Heathrow and parked, and there was time before the flight to buy some underwear, toiletries and a phrasebook—it wasn’t until she was mid-air that Sorcha began to realise that this was pretty rash. But it felt better just doing something instead of moping around at home. Regrets were terrible things. They ate away at you and eroded your chances of finding peace and contentment.
But by the time she found a delighted taxi driver who was willing to take her out to Panicale, she was seriously beginning to question the wisdom of her actions.
Was she mad?
The motorway cut through huge patchwork mountains where toffee-coloured cows grazed and fields of sunflowers became more muted as the sun set and nighttime began to fall.
The driver was obviously labouring under the illusion that his cab was a sports car, and Sorcha tried to distract herself by staring out at the cloudy sky and wondering if she should have phoned Cesare to tell him she was on her way.
No.
She needed to see his face, his first instinctive reaction to her. Some heated things had been said in their conversation before he’d left—words which he might or might not have meant—just like some of the things she’d said.
And how was she going to explain her sudden bizarre appearance? She would be guided by him—if he scooped her up into his arms and told her that there hadn’t been a moment when he’d stopped thinking about her…
She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. Oh, please. They would hold each other tight, and she would have to show him that she did have a heart that loved and yearned and beat like a drum only for him.
And if he didn’t?
That was the risk she ran—and anyway, it was too late to back out now, because the car was squeezing through a narrow stone arch over a track which seemed to bump upwards for ages. But there were the lights of habitation in the distance, and Sorcha’s heart was in her mouth as the cab drew to a halt.
‘Quanto e esso, per favore?’ she asked.
The driver gave her a price, and it was expensive—but then the journey had taken close to two hours.
Sorcha remembered the other word she had learned on the plane. ‘Per favore…attesa?’ Because she needed him to wait in case Cesare wasn’t there—or in case the unthinkable happened and he didn’t want to see her. Or he was with another woman.
‘Si, signorina.’
The air was heavy and close, and Sorcha thought she heard the distant rumble of thunder. Tiny beads of sweat sprang up on her forehead and her hands were literally shaking as she walked across the soft grass towards the villa, where she could make out splashes of light which shone through an abundance of trees.
What was she going to say?
The door was open, and she stepped inside and heard voices and laughter and chatter and, incongruously, a baby crying. Her eyes opened in alarm.
What had she done? For a moment she almost imagined that Cesare had been living some kind of bizarre double life—that he had been conducting an affair with her while secretly flying back here to see his wife and child.
But she knew that he would never do that—in her heart she knew that Cesare was a man of principle and integrity, and that such a double betrayal would be alien to his nature.
So did this mean he was having some kind of party?
It certainly sounded like it.
She felt like someone in a film as she walked silently along the long corridor towards the sounds of merriment. As if she would find…
What?
The sound was coming from outside, on the far side of the house, and Sorcha walked through a vast kitchen and open-plan dining room to where she could see candles guttering on a table on the terrace.
Ignoring the small shout of consternation from a chef who was swirling flames around in a frying pan, Sorcha stepped onto the terrace to see a table set for dinner and four adults seated around it, plus a small child.
Five faces turned towards her, and the conversation dried up as if some celestial director had muted the sound. Only the child gurgled.
Sorcha barely registered the faces of the others—only distantly noting that one was male and two were female. How neat. How tidy.
Cesare was staring at her with an expression she didn’t recognise. There was no smile. No word of welcome. Nothing but the cold glitter of disbelief in his black eyes.
‘Madre di Dio!’ he ground out beneath his breath, and rose to his feet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CESARE stared at her and felt the great slam of his heart against his ribcage, its sudden powerful pounding as it leapt into life. ‘Sorcha?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
It was the greeting from hell—or at least from her very worst nightmare. Keep calm, Sorcha, she told herself as she felt herself sway a little. You have a get-out clause for just this eventuality—remember?
‘There’s a taxi waiting for me,’ she said calmly, as if women just arrived from England at any old time and then turned straight back again. ‘I’ll…I’ll go back to the airport.’
‘Don’t be so absurd,’ said Cesare, but the coolness in his voice remained. ‘I will go and dismiss him. Sit down—you look terrible. Luca will pour you some wine. This is Sorcha, everyone.’
He spoke in rapid Italian and the other man immediately stood up to pull out an available chair for her—at the end of the table, naturally, as far from Cesare as it was possible to be.
Sorcha didn’t want to sit down. She wanted some giant hand to magic her away from here, from the bemused and frankly unwelcoming expressions of the people around the table. But she was feeling distinctly shaky, and she also recognised that it would look utterly ridiculous if she just disappeared again.
‘Here.’ Luca pressed a glass of red wine into her hand and Sorcha sipped it gratefully, nodding a kind of greeting at their collective faces, as if trying to resurrect a little bit of social grace in a situation which certainly didn’t feature in any etiquette book.
They were all Italian—and why would they be anything else?
One of the women said, ‘You have travelled far?’
‘From…England, actually.’ How bizarre it sounded.
It seemed difficult to follow that, and no one else said a word. They all sat there in an awkward silence and waited for Cesare to return from dismissing the taxi. He seemed to take for ever, but when he did, he was holding aloft a plastic carrier bag which was filled with shampoo, conditioner and knickers. In the darkness, Sorcha blushed.
‘Your luggage, I believe?’ he drawled, and deposited it by her chair. Then he said something in Italian and some of the frost in the atmosphere seemed to evaporate—but only by a fraction.
He shot her a look. She had taken him by surprise, and it was not a familiar role for him to be cast in—especially in front of other people. She was on his territory, and she must understand that they did things differently here. If she was expecting him to drop everything and leave the table in order to…what? Why was she here?
A smile curved his lips. ‘My friends were concerned that you might be some kind of stalker—some disgruntled ex-girlfriend—but I reassured them that I was unlikely to offer a glass of wine to anyone who posed a threat.’
She knew that he was trying to salvage a fairly impossible situation, but Sorcha could have curled up and died. Yet how else must it look to these sophisticated people?
Because sophisticated they certainly were.
‘Let me introduce you,’ Cesare said wryly. ‘Luca
you’ve met—and this is his wife, Pia, with Gino, my godson.’ His black eyes softened as he glanced at the toddler, and then his gaze travelled to the other guest—a woman in black silk, with a blunt-cut raven bob and shiny lips the colour of claret. ‘And this is Letizia…’
How easy it was to notice the absence of a wedding ring on the woman’s finger, the way she looked up at Cesare and then at Sorcha, the unmistakable body language which said, He’s already taken! Sorcha met her bright, hard dark eyes.
‘Hello,’ said Sorcha.
‘Do you speak Italian, Sorcha?’ asked Letizia guilelessly.
‘Unfortunately, no—I don’t.’
‘Oh, well. Then you will have to suffer our English.’ Letizia gave a tinkling little laugh. ‘It will be good for us to practise—si, Cesare?’
‘Effettivamente,’ Cesare murmured, his gaze capturing Sorcha’s as he lanced her with an impenetrable look. ‘I’m fascinated to know what has prompted this unexpected visit—and at such an extraordinary time.’ He glanced over to the doorway, where a chef was standing with his hands on his hips, looking as if he was about to do battle. ‘But, like all great chefs, Stephan is a little temperamental—and as he is just about to serve the entrée it will have to wait until afterwards.’
He raised his eyebrows in imperious query, as if daring her to do anything other than sit there and be guided by him. ‘Unless it is so urgent that it cannot wait, Sorcha?’
Oh, yes—sure she was going to blurt it all out now.
I think I love you, Cesare. I know how stupidly I’ve acted, and so I’ve rushed over here to see if our relationship has any future.
The answer was glaring her in the face as clearly as if he’d spelt it out for her. He was having dinner with a cluster of his mates, which may or may not be part of a packed social calendar. But whether it was or it wasn’t didn’t really matter—far from sitting around the place moping about her, or even thinking about her, Cesare was living his life.
He had moved on.
‘No, that’s fine,’ she said lightly.
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