“And what’s that?” she asked, hearing the tenderness in his voice, but afraid to read more into his actual words than he intended.
“That we belong together,” he said. “That I’ve been in love with you from the beginning, and neither time nor distance has changed that.”
She’d thought her heart would shatter with joy, and if the niggling voice of conscience had tried to spoil the moment by warning her that nothing was sacred or perfect as long as deception was part of the mix, she’d shut it out. Tonight belonged to her and Matteo, and only them. There’d be time enough later to deal with the rest.
She just hadn’t planned on “later” happening quite so soon or with such unnerving brutality.
Eyes streaming, she turned again to Corinna, “Let me have just one perfect weekend with him,” she implored. “Please, Corinna, don’t take that away from me. Matteo and I need to cement our relationship. It’s too new to withstand such a shock so soon.”
“Do you really think you’ll be able to hide from him the fact that you’re deeply troubled by what’s waiting for you, when you come back? Will you be able to lie in his arms and return his kisses without flinching? Or will guilt make you turn away from the candor you find in his eyes? Will it paralyze you to the point that you cannot respond to his lovemaking? And if all those things come to pass, what kind of memories will either of you bring away, when your ‘perfect’ weekend is over?”
The truth battered Stephanie on every side. She wanted to hate this beautiful widow who touched her arm with such compassion. Wanted to shut out that kind, wise voice. Wished she could attribute Corinna’s advice to self-interest, a malicious tearing down of another woman’s idyll because her own had gone unfulfilled.
She could do none of those things. Instead, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud. She might have deceived Matteo, but there was a limit to how much she could deceive herself.
“Stephanie, cara!” Corinna folded her in her arms. “Come, this must stop. You’ll make yourself ill.”
Ill? It felt more like dying—the death of the one dream she’d never thought would come true but which, for too brief a time, had hung within reach.
Corinna stood, pulled Stephanie to her feet also, and said firmly, “I’m taking you home.”
“No!” Simon couldn’t see her like this. No one could.
“To my house. To give you time to compose yourself before you face your family again. Don’t worry that we’ll meet Matteo. He’s gone to Ischia Porto to finalize arrangements for your trip to Tuscany.”
Barely conscious of the sun blazing down, filling the air with the thick, sweet scent of flowers and turning the sea into a blinding sheet of diamond-flecked blue silk, Stephanie allowed herself to be led away. Even Guido the parrot’s raucous welcome seemed to echo from a great distance.
“Come!” Slipping an arm around her waist, Corinna steered her across the terrace and into the villa, to a powder room at the end of a long central hall. “Wash your face, cara, and I will order us some refreshment,” she said, before quietly closing the door.
Stephanie sagged against the marble vanity and stared in horror at the ravaged image confronting her in the mirror. Eyes swollen half shut and tinted red to match her nose, she looked more like a deranged pig than a human being. It would take more than a splash of cold water to repair this much damage.
Corinna was obviously of the same opinion. “You need help,” she determined, observing Stephanie critically when they two of them were seated in a salon shaded from the outside heat by louvered blinds. “It’s as well I had Baptiste prepare cucumber slices. They are good for reducing swelling around the eyes. Rest your head against the cushions, and let’s get to work.”
Aware of the irony implicit in the scene, Stephanie asked, “Why are you being so good to me?”
“Because you are a good person who made a mistake,” Corinna said, patting the cucumber in place. “And because Matteo loves you.”
Stephanie’s heart fluttered with feeble hope. That he’d said as much to her the night before, in the afterglow of passion, didn’t carry nearly the same weight as if he’d admitted it to Corinna when he was at his most rational. “Did he tell you that?”
“Not in so many words. But I know him well, and I see how he looks at you.”
A consoling enough remark but, like the wafer-thin cucumber slices soothing her eyes, it offered brief respite only. “I doubt he’ll look at me quite the same way, after I tell him about Simon.”
“Do you intend bringing your son with you tomorrow?”
“I considered it, but my mother gets to spend time with him so seldom that she asked me to leave him with her, and I’m glad, now, that I agreed. I don’t think it’d help any, having to worry about him overhearing Matteo tearing strips off me.”
“Matteo might surprise you. He’s made his share of mistakes, too, you know.”
“I suppose so. But never one as grievous as mine.” She sighed at the gloomy uncertainty awaiting her. This morning, she’d hardly been able to wait for tomorrow to come. Now she dreaded its arrival. If only she could glean some insight to how he might react, how best to broach the subject. “Tell me about the years since I first met him, Corinna,” she begged. “Help me understand what’s made him the man he is today.”
Corinna’s answer was guarded and long in coming. “I can’t fill in the lost years, Stephanie. That’s for you and Matteo to do, together. I can tell you that he’s a complicated man, that he’s proud and stubborn. But I think you know these things already.
“As for what you don’t know…my best advice is, make the most of these four days and three nights. Don’t waste a single moment of the opportunity they bring. Above all, don’t wait until the last minute to tell him about his son. Get it out of the way early, and give yourselves the rest of the time to deal with the repercussions.”
CHAPTER NINE
SHE’D thought they’d probably fly to Tuscany, given that Matteo had told her their destination lay a good three hundred miles north of Ischia, but not for a minute had Stephanie expected they’d travel by private helicopter or that he’d pilot it himself. How many more surprises did he have in store?
“Nervous?” he inquired, adjusting his headset and smiling at her white-knuckled grip on the padded arms of her seat as the craft lifted off.
“A little.”
“Never flown in one of these before?”
She shook her head, and clenched her teeth on a hissed intake of breath as the Bell JetRanger tilted away from the island and headed north over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
He reached across and covered her knee. “Relax, Stephanie. You’re in safe hands.”
“I’m sure,” she said, “but while we’re in the air, I’d feel a whole lot better if you kept them both on the controls.”
He laughed. “I’ve been flying for seven years and never come close to an accident. I know enough not to take chances. And this is a top-of-the-line helicopter. Corinna’s late husband bought it, just before he died, and he never settled for anything but the best. Sit back and enjoy the scenery, tesoro. I promise we’ll be landing safe and sound in less than two hours, just in time for sunset.”
“Landing where, exactly?” She ventured a glance below. As far as the eye could see, the Italian coastline unwound, ribbon-like, along the edge of the cobalt-blue water. “Tuscany covers a pretty wide area, and you’ve never mentioned a precise location. Are we going to Florence?”
“You’d like that?”
Her blood quickened. Florence, rich in art treasures, appealed to the romantic in her and was one of the cities on her must-see list, once Simon was a little older. “Very much. I’ve read so much about it.”
“Then I’m sorry to disappoint you, because I’m taking you instead to Lucca, where I was born. It’s a little mediaeval town, not as fashionably popular with tourists as Firenze, but a real gem with wonderful architecture, and hardly any traffic to speak of within its walls. We can walk or
cycle everywhere, and when I’ve shown you all there is to see of the town itself, I’ll drive you into the hills to the wineries and olive oil mills.”
“It sounds heavenly.”
“It is. If we were staying longer, I’d take you to Firenze also, but it’s an hour’s drive away and deserves to be explored at leisure, so we’ll save it for the next time.”
She didn’t tell him there likely wouldn’t be a next time, because that would have begged the question why not? And despite Corinna’s advice to tell Matteo as soon as possible that he was Simon’s father, conveying such life-altering secrets to a man at the controls of a helicopter, flying several hundred feet over open sea, didn’t strike Stephanie as the most propitious time in which to do so.
Instead, gesturing at the well-appointed interior of the machine, she said, “Is flying this thing job-related, or do you do it for pleasure?”
“Mostly for work. It enables me to get from Carrara to Ischia quickly.”
“And Corinna doesn’t mind?”
“Why would she?”
“Well, you live in her gardener’s cottage, so I assume that means you work for her part of the time. And since this is her helicopter….”
His laughter this time was underscored with something she couldn’t quite identify—irony, perhaps, or mockery? “You really don’t know much about me, do you, Stephanie?”
“No,” she said, wishing she could see the expression in his eyes. But even when he flung her a glance, the only thing looking back at her was her own twin reflection in his aviator sunglasses. “And at the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, I’ve been trying to make that point with you, ever since we…hooked up again. Outside the bedroom, we’re virtual strangers. It’s not just that we’ve lived distant lives, this past ten years, which is a long time by anyone’s standards—”
“Then what is it?”
She shrugged, the enormous task of bridging those lost years in four short days, of expecting him to understand the choices she’d made, seeming suddenly hopeless. “It’s that we never really got to know anything about each other to begin with.”
“We knew enough not to be able to keep our hands off one another!”
“And that’s about all. We never scratched below the surface.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “You showed up out of the blue, one day, and it never once occurred to me to ask why or how.”
“You know why. I came to find out if your grandfather’s invention could work at the manufacturing level.”
“Yes, but considering Carrara’s half a world removed from Bramley Point, Ontario, there had to be more to it than that. Yet I never asked you what it might be. Never asked anything about you personally, or the kind of life you led. All I could think about was the next time I could sneak out of the house to meet you and make love.” She eyed him curiously. “How did you come to hear about his design? My grandfather was a geologist widely respected in his field, but he never published his research in professional magazines, or anything like that.”
“I know, and that’s something I’ve never quite understood. He’d be a millionaire several times over, if he’d patented his ideas.”
“He already had money, and didn’t care about making more. It was the creative tinkering he enjoyed. So how did news of what he’d done manage to find its way to Italy?”
“Your grandfather and mine met there at the end of World War Two, and struck up a friendship. Although they came from different worlds, they shared a lot in common. Not only were they peaceable men, entirely opposed to the kind of violence war inflicts, they were both in the quarry business, both full of innovative ideas, and just plain liked each other. So they kept in touch, and when my grandfather heard your grandfather had come up with something which could revolutionize the way granite had always been cut, he sent me over to investigate adapting it for use in the marble industry.”
“If they were such good friends, why didn’t your grandfather come over himself, instead of sending you?”
“He wasn’t up to the travel by then. War wounds and failing health kept him close to home.” He angled another glance at her, one so loaded with sexual innuendo that even the sunglasses weren’t enough to deflect it. “Lucky for me, sì? Otherwise, I wouldn’t have met you until this summer.”
And what a difference it would have made, had that been the case! She’d have wept at such a cruel twist of fate, except how could she regret a past which had given her Simon?
“You haven’t mentioned your grandmother,” she said, aware she was venturing onto dangerous ground, but so oppressed by her shameful deceit that she couldn’t help herself. “Is she still alive?”
“Sì.”
Her heart leaped so violently, she was sure it had flopped loose from its moorings. The aftershock left her quivering all over and every instinct told her to drop the subject now, for fear that it land her in trouble she wasn’t yet prepared to deal with. But the demons driving her wouldn’t allow it. “What’s she like?” she asked, in a small voice.
“An older version of my mother.”
“Your mother?” She stared at him, openmouthed, caught so totally off-guard that she hadn’t a hope of hiding her astonishment.
“Sì!” His amusement rippled through her headset. “Why does that surprise you?”
As relieved as a convicted murderer being granted a reprieve, she said, “I just assumed you were talking about your father’s side of the family.”
“Ah, capisco! No, my father’s mother died when I was six, so I don’t remember her all that well. She and my grandfather moved to Ischia after the war, so they were never as big a factor in my life as my mother’s parents. I’d visit the island every summer, right up until my grandfather died eight years ago, but I didn’t see much of them in between.”
“And your mother’s father—the one my grandfather knew?”
Matteo’s mouth curved in sudden sorrow. “We lost him just last winter.”
She ached to touch him; to let him know with a kiss and a caress that she felt his bereavement as if it were her own. “You were very close, I can tell.”
“Sì,” he said. “He was more my father than my grandfather, and I very much wish you could have met him. He would have died a happier man knowing that I’d finally found such a woman to love.”
He was ripping out her heart, with no idea that his every word left her bleeding with regret and misery. “You weren’t as close to your real father?”
“During his lifetime, yes. But he was killed on the job when I was just eleven—a bad time in any boy’s life to be without a man’s guiding influence. And I was a handful, as they say in English. Without my grandfather to keep me in line, I’d have grown up to be nothing but trouble.” He laughed ruefully. “Some might say I did, anyway!”
“I don’t think so, Matteo. You might have been a hellion in your youth, but you’ve come a long way since then. Your grandfather must have been proud of you.”
“I hope so. I owe him a great deal.” His gaze swept the empty sky above and around them, and flicked to the instrument panel. He made some small adjustment to the controls, then settled back in his seat before continuing, “Your Simon will need just such guidance, Stephanie. The teen years are dangerous for any boy, but especially so in these difficult times.”
She stared fixedly ahead, less because she cared about the view than because she didn’t want him to see the sudden surge of tension she was sure must show on her face at the mention of Simon’s name. “I’m fully aware of that,” she said stiffly
Attributing her chilly response to continued nervousness, Matteo pressed a switch on the control panel, and said, “A little music might make it easier for you to relax. What’s your preference? We’ve got Great Opera Choruses, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the soundtrack from—”
“Chopin,” she interrupted, grateful for any legitimate excuse to terminate the conversation. And just to make sure he got the message, she leaned against the back of the club seat’s padded headre
st, and closed her eyes.
Not for a second did she expect she’d really relax. How could she, knowing what she had to face before the weekend was over? But they weren’t called Nocturnes for nothing. As the soothing piano recital worked its magic, she felt herself drifting away, if not into a truly deep sleep, then at least into a state of pleasant, dreamlike drowsiness. Even the rhythmic whoomf, whoomf, whoomf, of the helicopter blades assumed a lulling cadence. Perhaps the fact that she’d barely slept a wink the night before had something to do with it, too. In any event, when she next became fully conscious of her surroundings, the JetRanger was hovering above a landing pad in the middle of a grassy field bathed in early evening sunshine and swept by the artificial gale created by the machine’s whirling rotors.
A moment later, the craft touched down so gently she wouldn’t have known they’d landed had Matteo not killed the engine, removed his headphones and sunglasses, and said, “Welcome to Lucca, Stephanie. Didn’t I promise to get you here in one piece?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I ever doubted it.”
“I make it a point always to keep my promises.” He laid his hand against her cheek. “Especially to you, mi innamorata.”
He plucked at her heartstrings with such tenderness. Please don’t be so nice to me! she begged inwardly, turning her face aside and scrunching her eyes shut against the restrained passion she saw in his. I’m not nearly deserving enough.
Sensing her distress, he hung up her headset and forced her to look at him. “What is it, Stephanie?” he asked, his voice rough with concern. “Having second thoughts about spending the weekend with me?”
“No,” she said, reaching a sudden decision. Morally bound to tell him about his connection to Simon she might be, but why taint their entire time together, as she surely would if she spoke too soon? Didn’t it make more sense to lay down a rich tapestry of intimate, special memories first, and hope they’d cushion the inevitable shock of her confession? “Regardless of what happens later, this weekend with you is something I’ll neither regret nor forget.”
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