by Lynne Graham
‘I’m not used to screwing up,’ Vito told her.
‘Then you’ll try harder not to make the same mistakes again,’ Holly riposted sleepily.
*
Holly slept in the following morning. She woke with a start, showered and pulled on jeans to pelt upstairs and spend some time with Angelo. In surprise she stilled in the doorway of the nursery bathroom when she saw Vito kneeling down by the side of the bath and engaged in dive-bombing plastic boats for Angelo’s amusement. She had simply assumed that Vito had gone into the bank as usual but it was clear that at some stage, even though he had dressed for work, he had changed his mind. His jacket and tie were hooked on the radiator, his shirtsleeves rolled up.
‘Vito…’
Raking damp, tousled black hair off his brow, Vito turned his head and flashed her a heart-stopping grin. ‘Angelo emptied his cereal bowl over his head at breakfast and I decided I should stay home.’
Holly moved forward. ‘I can see that…’
‘I’m very set in my ways but I believe I can adapt,’ he told her, laughing as Angelo smacked the water with a tiny fist and splashed both of them.
‘He’ll grow up so fast your head will spin. You won’t ever get this time back with him.’ She sighed. ‘I didn’t want you to miss out and then live to regret it.’
‘You spoke up and that was the right thing to do. I respect your honesty. Parenting is a whole new ball game and I still have to get my head around it,’ Vito confided, snatching down a towel and spreading it on the floor before lifting Angelo’s squirming little body out of the bath and laying him down.
‘How to get yourself soaked!’ Holly groaned.
‘I’m already drenched to the skin,’ Vito riposted with quiet pride. ‘Angelo and I have had a lot of fun.’
The nursery was empty and Holly rustled around gathering the necessities. ‘What have you done with the nanny posse?’ she asked curiously.
‘I told them to take a few hours off. Being so new to this I didn’t want an audience.’
Holly dried Angelo and deftly dressed him. Vito unbuttoned his wet shirt, the parted edges revealing a bronzed sliver of muscular torso. Together they walked downstairs.
‘Do you have any photographs of when you were pregnant?’ Vito asked, startling her into turning wide blue eyes onto his lean, dark face.
‘I don’t think so… I wasn’t feeling very photogenic at the time. Why?’
‘I’m sorry I missed all that. Something else I can’t get back,’ Vito conceded gravely. ‘I really would have liked to have seen you when you were carrying our child.’
Regret assailed her, for she would have loved to have had his support during those dark days of worry and exhaustion. She had struggled to stay employed and earning for as long as possible so as not to be a burden on Pixie.
‘As for that challenge you offered me,’ Vito mused, walking back to their bedroom to change. ‘Draw up a list of places you would like to go.’
‘No lists. I’m phobic about lists,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Let’s be relaxed about what we do and where we go. No itineraries laid out in stone. Are you taking time off?’
‘Of course. But I’ll catch up with my email in the evenings,’ he warned her. ‘I can’t completely switch off.’
‘That’s OK,’ she hastened to tell him. ‘But you may be bored.’
‘Not a chance, gioia mia,’ Vito riposted as he cast off his wet shirt. ‘You and Angelo will keep me fully occupied from dawn to dusk and beyond.’
‘And beyond’ was very much in Holly’s mind as she studied his muscular brown torso, a tiny burst of heat pulsing between her thighs. It was the desire she never really lost around Vito. Her colour heightened. She was so pleased, so relieved that he had listened to her, but there was a fear deep down inside her that she would not have enough to offer to satisfy him outside working hours.
*
‘When was the last time you saw your mother?’ Vito asked lazily as they lay in bed six weeks later.
Holly stretched somnolent limbs still heavy with pleasure and rolled her head round to face him, bright blue eyes troubled. ‘I was sixteen. It wasn’t the nicest experience.’
‘I can deal with not nice,’ Vito volunteered, closing an arm round her slight shoulders to draw her comfortingly close.
Holly felt gloriously relaxed and shockingly happy. With every day that passed she was increasingly convinced that Vito was the man of her dreams. He was everything she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamt of. But even better, he had proved that he was capable of change.
Six weeks ago, she had reminded Vito that he had to learn how to be part of a family instead of an independent operator seeing life only from a work-orientated point of view. He had started out wanting to make up lists and tick off boxes as if that were the only route to success. He had a maddening desire to know in advance exactly what he would be doing every hour of every day and had only slowly learned to take each day as it came.
Holly had spent several days creating a mood board of her ideas on how to redecorate their hideous bedroom. While she was doing that, Vito had learned how to entertain Angelo. Settling on a colour palate of soothing grey enlivened with spicy tangerine accents, Holly had ordered the required products and utilised a local company to do the actual work. Throughout the entire process, Vito had shown depressingly little curiosity, merely agreeing that it was many years since the castello had been decorated and that, as his mother had never had any interest in revitalising the interior, he was sure there was plenty of scope for Holly to express her talents.
Leaving the work team to handle the decorating project, Holly and Vito had taken their son to stay on the shores of Lake Lugano. Vito’s family had bought a Swiss villa because, like Zurich and Geneva, Lugano was a major financial centre. Over the generations the Zaffari bankers had found the shores of the lake a convenient business location to stash the family while they worked.
At the villa they had thrown open the shutters on the magnificent lake views and enjoyed long lazy meals on the sun-dappled loggia. By day they had explored the water in a private boat, stopping off to ramble around the picturesque little villages on the rugged shoreline. Some evenings they had sat on the lake terrace drinking garnet-coloured Brunello di Montalcino wine while they watched the boats sailing by with twinkling lights. Other nights they had strolled round the cobbled lanes in Lugano to pick a quiet restaurant for dinner, but none had yet lived up to the perfection on a plate offered by Vito’s personal chef.
They had visited the Zoo al Maglio, where Angelo had been enchanted by the antics of the monkeys and had struggled fiercely to copy them. They had caught the funicular railway to the top of Monte San Salvatore to enjoy the alpine scenery and on the way back they had stopped off at a chocolate factory, where a peckish Holly had eaten her weight in chocolate and had sworn never to eat it again while Vito teased her about how much he adored her curves.
There had been shopping trips as well, to the designer boutiques on the Via Nassa, where Holly had become bored because her new wardrobe was so expansive she saw no reason to add to it. She had much preferred the bustling liveliness of the farmers’ market in the Piazza Riforma, from which she had returned home carrying armfuls of the flowers she couldn’t resist. Discovering that arranging them was more of an art than a matter of simply stuffing them in a big vase, she had resolved to ask her motherin-law for some tips.
‘Your mother…’ Vito reminded her. ‘Are you going to sleep?’
‘No. It’s only two o’clock in the afternoon.’ But in truth she was already smothering a yawn because their post-lunch nap had turned into a sex-fest. ‘Mum…’ she reminded herself. ‘It was the last time I ever lived with her. I thought she wanted me back because I was no longer a child who needed looking after twenty-four-seven. I thought she finally wanted to get to know her daughter. But I got it all wrong—’
‘How…?’ Vito asked, long fingers inscribing a soothing pattern on her hip
bone.
‘Mum was living with a guy who owned a little supermarket. She asked me to help out in the shop…’ Holly’s voice trailed away ruefully. ‘It was a crucial school year with exams and I didn’t want to miss classes but she insisted she couldn’t cope and I fell for it—’
‘And…?’ Vito prompted when she fell silent again.
‘It turned out that she only wanted me working in the shop to save her having to do it and they weren’t even paying me minimum wage. I was just cheap labour to please her boyfriend and give her a break.’ Holly sighed. ‘I missed so much school that social services took me back into care. Of course I failed half my exams as well. I haven’t seen her since. I realised that she was never going to be the mother I wanted her to be and I had to accept that. She wasn’t the maternal type—’
‘And yet you’re so different with Angelo.’
‘And if you compare your relationship with your father, aren’t you different with Angelo too? We both want to give our son what we didn’t have ourselves,’ Holly murmured, rejoicing in the heat and strength of his long, lean length next to hers. ‘Why didn’t you invite your father to our wedding?’
‘I thought it would be too awkward for my mother and our guests, particularly when Ciccio is fighting for a bigger divorce settlement because he stands to lose a lot of things that he’s always taken for granted.’
‘Concetta seems quite happy…well, for someone going through a divorce, that is,’ Holly qualified ruefully.
‘With my father gone she has a lot less stress in her life and for the first time she has her independence without the restriction of either a father or a husband. She loves her new home and the freedom she has there.’
‘It’s a new life for her,’ Holly mused drowsily, thinking that her own new life was still in the honeymoon period and wouldn’t really officially start until they returned to the castello the following day and embarked on a more normal routine.
‘I didn’t realise that marrying you would be a new beginning for me as well,’ Vito admitted thoughtfully, acknowledging that he had not fully thought through the ramifications of marrying and becoming a parent. He had plunged into matrimony, dimly expecting life to go on as it always had only to learn that change was inevitable.
‘Do you have regrets?’ she whispered fearfully. ‘Do you sometimes wish you were still single and unencumbered? I suppose you must.’
‘I have no regrets when I’m in bed with you…not a single one.’ Vito gazed down at her with dancing dark golden eyes alive with wolfish amusement. ‘Sì, I knew you’d be annoyed by that point but, Dio mio…at least I’m honest!’
And as his eyes laughed down at her, her heart swelled inside her and she knew, just knew in her very soul that she loved Vito. She loved him the way she had tried not to love him. She had tried so hard to protect herself from feeling more for Vito than he felt for her because that was the hard lesson she had learned in loving her unresponsive mother. You couldn’t make a person care for you; you couldn’t force those feelings.
In any case, it had crossed her mind more than once that Vito’s emotions might be quite unavailable in the love category. Holly had met Vito on the rebound, shortly after his fiancée had ditched him. That Christmas theirs had been a classic rebound attraction. Was Vito still in love with Marzia? Had he tried to return to the beautiful blonde during the fourteen months he and Holly had been apart? Had he mourned the loss of Marzia once he’d decided that he had to marry Holly for his son’s sake? And how, when he never ever so much as mentioned the woman, could Holly possibly ask him to tell her honestly how he currently felt about Marzia?
She couldn’t ask because she didn’t think she could bear to live with the wrong answer.
CHAPTER TEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, Holly shuffled the messy pile of financial publications that Vito always left in his wake and lifted the other, more gossipy newspapers out to peruse. She flicked through the pages, thrilled when she was able to translate the occasional word of Italian.
Her knowledge of the language was slowly growing. She could manage simple interactions with their staff and greetings. Hopefully once she started proper Italian lessons with a local teacher later in the week her grasp of Italian would grow in leaps and bounds. After all, both her son and her husband would speak the language and she was determined not to be the odd one out. Vito’s desire that their son should grow up bilingual was more likely to be successful if she learned Italian as well.
Abandoning the papers, she selected a magazine, flipping through glossy photographs of Italian celebrities she mostly didn’t recognise until one picture in particular stopped her dead in her tracks. It was a photo of Marzia wearing the most fabulous sparkling ballgown with Vito by her side. She frowned and stared down at it with such intensity that she literally saw spots appear in front of her eyes. She struggled to translate the blurb beneath the picture. It appeared to be recent and it had been taken at some party. The previous week, Vito had spent two nights at his Florence apartment because he had said he was working late. Well, the first time he had been working late, the second time he had actually said that he had to attend a very boring dinner, which invariably would drag on into the early hours…
For dinner, read dinner dance, she reflected unhappily. Her entire attention was welded to the photo. Vito and Marzia had been captured at what appeared to be a formal dance with their arms in the air as if their hands had just parted from a clasp. Both of them were smiling. And my goodness, didn’t Marzia look ravishing? Not a blonde hair out of place. Holly’s fingers crept up to finger through her own tumbled mane. She studied Marzia’s perfectly made-up face and thought about her own careless beauty routine, which often consisted of little more than eyeliner, blush and lip gloss. Looking at that gorgeous dress, she glanced down at her own casual silky tee and skirt and low-heeled sandals. She was dressed very nicely indeed in expensive garments but there wasn’t even a hint of glamour or sequinned sparkle in her appearance.
Maybe it had only been one dance that Marzia and Vito had shared. And of course they had been photographed for such a potentially awkward moment between former partners was always of interest to others. And they were smiling and happy together. Why not? Her heart had shrunk into a tight, threatened lump inside her chest and her tummy felt as though it were filled with concrete. Vito had spent a couple of years with Marzia. They knew each other well and why should they be enemies? There was no reason why they shouldn’t dance together and treat each other like old friends, was there?
Vito hadn’t broken any rules. He hadn’t told her any lies. All right, he hadn’t mentioned the dancing or seeing Marzia, but then he never mentioned his ex, a reality that had made it very difficult for Holly to tackle the subject. Wasn’t Vito entitled to his privacy in relation to past relationships? In any case he was not the kind of man who would comfortably open up about previous lovers. Her eyes stung with tears because trying to be reasonable and take a sensible overview was such a challenge for her at that moment.
At the heart of her reaction, Holly registered, was Marzia’s sheer glamour and her own sense of inadequacy. Holly didn’t do glamour, had never even tried. The closest she had ever got to glamour was a Santa outfit. But what if that kind of gloss, Marzia’s gloss, was what Vito really liked and admired?
Obviously she had to confront him about the photo and there would probably be a perfectly reasonable explanation about why he had said nothing…
‘I knew you would make a fuss,’ Vito would be able to point out quite rightly.
She was a jealous cow and he probably sensed that. Although she had never been competitive with other women, having a rival that beautiful and sophisticated could only be hurtful and intimidating. She loved Vito so much and was painfully aware that he did not love her. In addition, she was always guiltily conscious that she had won her wedding ring purely by default. Vito had married her because she was the mother of his son.
Mother of his son, Holly repeated inw
ardly. Not a very sexy label, certainly not very glamorous. But it didn’t have to be that way, she reasoned ruefully. She could walk that extra mile, she could make the effort and dress up too. But she needed the excuse of an occasion, didn’t she? Well, at least to begin with… On her passage across the hall, she spoke to Silvestro and told him that she would like a special romantic meal to be served for dinner.
Silvestro positively glowed with approval and she went upstairs to go through her new wardrobe and select the fanciest dress she owned. In the oddest way she would have liked to put on a Santa outfit for Vito again but it wouldn’t work out of season. She would tackle Vito the moment he came home. She wouldn’t give him time to regroup and come up with evasions or excuses. What she wanted most of all was honesty. He needed to tell her how he truly felt about Marzia and they would proceed from that point.
Did he still have feelings for the beautiful blonde? How would she cope if he admitted that? Well, she would have to cope. Her life, Vito’s and Angelo’s were inextricably bound to the stability of their marriage. Would he want a separation? A divorce? Her brain was making giant leaps into disaster zones and she told herself off for the catastrophic effect that photo had had on her imagination and her confidence. Since when had she chosen to lie down and die rather than fight?
From the dressing room she extracted the hand-embroidered full-length dress, which glittered with sparkling beads below the lights. It definitely belonged in the glamour category.
*
Vito knew something strange was afoot the instant he walked into the hall of the castello and Silvestro gave him a huge smile. Silvestro had the face of a sad sheepdog and was not prone to smiling.
‘The signora is on the way downstairs…’ he was informed.
Vito blinked and then he saw Holly as he had only seen her on their wedding day, and quite naturally he stared. She drifted down the staircase in a fantastic dress that seemed to float airily round her hourglass curves. It was the sort of gown a woman wore to a ball and Vito suffered a stark instant of very male panic. Why was she all dressed up? What had he forgotten? Were they supposed to be going out somewhere? What special date had slipped past him unnoticed?
