A Wedding in Italy: A feel good summer holiday romance (From Italy with Love Book 2)

by Tilly Tennant

  Maria’s forehead creased into a frown. ‘That street is not nice. You had to go there? To sell a house? I hope they gave you a gun to protect yourself.’

  ‘Have you been there?’ Kate asked, wondering what possible reason Maria would have had to visit such a down-and-out neighbourhood, especially if she disapproved of it so strongly.

  ‘Only once – with Orazia. Her cousin owed her money.’

  ‘Orazia’s cousin lives on Via del Francese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kate went cold, her fingers on the coffee cup numb. She stared at Maria.

  Orazia’s cousin lived on Via del Francese! And what was the betting that Orazia’s cousin was a youth who lived in a scruffy apartment block and sat playing computer games all day?

  How could Kate have been so stupid? The truth had been staring her in the face the whole time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘We must be calm,’ Maria said as Kate paced the floor. ‘Tell Alessandro – he will know what to do.’

  Kate could hear the words, but she couldn’t process them. Maria was asking her to be calm, but calm was an alien concept right now. Every nerve, every sinew, every synapse, everything was taut, like a violin string tuned too tight, and at any moment it could snap. Calm was for people who didn’t have a vindictive, borderline psychotic bitch trying to ruin their life. Calm was for people who hadn’t almost had everything dear snatched away from them by someone who treated it as a game, who abused their position of authority, who wanted everything Kate had for no other reason than to see if she could get it.

  ‘Kate!’ Maria repeated. ‘Please, be calm.’

  ‘I should have known,’ she replied through gritted teeth. ‘All that time I was blaming poor Charles, who was guilty of nothing more than being a cocky little shit. I should have known it wouldn’t be anything more complicated than Orazia’s hatred for me.’

  ‘She is my friend – she would not do this.’

  ‘I know you want to think the best of your friend – we all would – but you have to be logical about this. We know Orazia hates me, and we know that I was fired from Piccolo Castelli after being accused by the client I went to see on Via del Francese, and we know that Orazia’s cousin lives in the very same apartment block there. I know you want to think the best, but all the evidence points to the very worst. I don’t see how we can think anything other than Orazia using her cousin to set me up is what’s going on here.’

  Maria’s gaze dropped to the floor. ‘I know it looks bad for her.’

  ‘It looks terrible for her! You can’t seriously keep defending her, friend or not.’ Kate stopped and held Maria in a frank gaze. Perhaps she was overstepping boundaries here, perhaps she was jeopardising a new and shaky understanding with Maria, but there was no other way to put it, and surely even Maria had to be able to see that.

  ‘It seems I have been wrong about many things, and many people,’ Maria said quietly.

  ‘We’ve all done that,’ Kate said, her tone softened all at once by the sight of Maria’s obvious distress. ‘People often show us a different face than their real one. I’ve been taken in plenty of times too.’

  ‘But Orazia,’ Maria began, clearly still unable to accept the only sensible conclusion available. ‘I know she can say bad things, and she wants Alessandro, but she would not do this.’

  ‘But she has!’

  ‘But you would discover the truth—’

  ‘Would I? Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t, because only you knew that her cousin lived there and she thought that you were still unfriendly with me, in which case I was highly unlikely to find out. Who knows?’ Kate threw her hands in the air and began to pace again. ‘Maybe she wanted me to find out! Perhaps it’s her way of taunting me, knowing that I can’t do a bloody thing about it. She might follow me around to every new job, sabotage it in the same way, until I’m forced to give in and leave Italy, and she’d enjoy the fact that I knew it was her.’

  Maria stood. ‘We will find the truth. Orazia will tell us.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Kate’s laugh was hollow. ‘We knock on her door and she says it wasn’t her and we smile sweetly and say thanks for being so honest?’

  ‘She is my friend; she will tell me the truth for the sake of our bond.’

  ‘She’s nobody’s friend, Maria! She’s her own friend and nobody else matters! Anyone who can behave in the way she has cares little for friendship. You’re supposed to be her friend, and yet she has no qualms about hurting Alessandro by hurting me, which in turn hurts your family and you, because you all care for him so deeply, no matter what you might think about me. Does that sound like friendship? Because it doesn’t where I’m from.’

  ‘Perhaps she does not understand how much Alessandro loves you. Perhaps she does not know how much she is hurting him when she hurts you.’

  ‘Of course she does!’ Kate wanted to shake Maria. She understood her stubborn defence of the woman she thought was her friend, but any fool could see the truth of this. ‘In England, we would call her behaviour stalking, and it’s a crime you can go to jail for. I’ve been told she’s done it before too, with other men – did you know that?’

  Maria looked uncomfortable but said nothing. If she did know something about it, Kate would be staggered that she’d let the woman anywhere near her brother. But perhaps Orazia had beguiled her, used their friendship to persuade Maria that this time things were different.

  ‘Because Alessandro has too much respect for her connection to your family,’ Kate continued, ‘and to you in particular, he does nothing except keep quiet and suffer it. She has to be brought to account, Maria. She has to be told and she has to stop; it’s gone too far now.’

  Maria looked pained. Kate supposed it was one betrayal too many for her to take in – first her husband and then her friend – but she was too agitated and angry to care as much as she normally would have. Besides, exposing Orazia for what she really was would do Maria a favour in the end. A woman like that was poison, and Kate could see, now that she had spent more time getting to know Maria, that her poison had already been infecting Alessandro’s sister. But then a horrible thought occurred to Kate, one she didn’t dare voice for fear of the answer she might get, but one she knew wouldn’t leave her alone until she had.

  ‘You didn’t know about any of this – did you?’

  As Maria looked up, Kate saw a flicker of something. Was it guilt? It had gone in an instant. There was a pause that seemed all the longer for the reply that would follow it, and then Maria took a deep breath.

  ‘I did not know it would be this.’

  ‘But something?’

  ‘That she would steal my brother from you.’

  ‘But she didn’t tell you how?’

  Maria’s gaze went to the floor. ‘I thought perhaps she would use her. . . woman’s charms. Do you understand?’

  ‘That’s about all I do understand. So she didn’t say she was planning anything like this?’

  ‘No.’

  Kate regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. She supposed that Maria wouldn’t have been here now, spilling the beans on Orazia’s cousin and blowing her cover if they’d been in collusion. She had no other choice but to believe that Maria really had wanted to extend an olive branch, that this new devious development had nothing to do with her and that she’d had no knowledge of it before now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It sounded as if I was accusing you just then, and I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘I understand. You are angry and hurt and I am Orazia’s friend. I would think the same.’ Maria made her way to the apartment door. ‘Come,’ she said, a new decisiveness in her voice. ‘There is one way to settle this. Orazia is at home, I think, and we should speak to her to find out the truth.’

  Kate had begun to wonder, as they made their way to Orazia’s house, whether it would have been wise to let Alessandro, or any other member of the Conti family, know where they were going and why. They could even have asked so
meone to accompany them, but perhaps it would have looked too confrontational if they had arrived at Orazia’s en masse, something that would have instantly had her on the defensive. Maria had expressed no anxieties about just the two of them visiting either, and so Kate had to assume that she felt she had the situation under control. Kate, on the other hand, had plenty of anxieties, not least her concern for the way Maria was driving. What was it about the Conti siblings that made them drive as if every road was the racetrack at Monaco? But Kate was spared abject terror by the distraction that turning her current situation over in her mind was providing. She had known Orazia to be devious, vindictive and just a little bit unhinged – but this? This was too far, surely? Even Kate was beginning to doubt her own conclusions as they travelled to her house to confront her. What if she’d got it very wrong? What if she was falsely accusing Orazia and all it did was piss her off even more? What if she made an official complaint, accused Kate of being the harasser? What if she treated the information of Kate’s sacking and the circumstances around it as evidence and brought a prosecution for it, even without Shauna’s say-so? Kate had no idea how the justice system worked in Italy, other than the few bits Alessandro had revealed when he talked about work, and she had no idea if that was even a thing that could happen, but she didn’t like the possibility. Worst of all, what if Alessandro himself did not approve of their current course of action? What if it made him angry that Kate and Maria hadn’t gone to him first? In vague terms, hardly able to express them perfectly herself, Kate had aired these doubts to Maria, who had waved them away and insisted that they were doing no wrong by simply going to talk to her. And then she would talk to Alessandro afterwards, if there was anything to tell. She wanted to get to the truth, didn’t she? Of course, Kate had said, but, she argued, what if the information of the visit got to him from Orazia first? She would twist it and he would hear a very different version from theirs. But he would believe them over Orazia, wouldn’t he, Maria had argued. And Kate had had no choice but to be content with that, because Maria had the bit between her teeth now, and it seemed that, whether Kate liked it or not, they were going.

  Orazia’s family lived in a suburb very much like the one Alessandro lived in. It was quiet, the pavements lined by evergreens and row upon row of balconies, like mini gardens, garlanding the terracotta apartment blocks.

  ‘What if her parents are home?’ Kate asked, casting a nervous glance up at the block as Maria pulled the handbrake on.

  ‘She does not live with them.’

  Kate couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not. ‘She lives alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  No mediation in the event of a row breaking out. No witnesses and no help. Great.

  ‘You will wait here and I will talk to her,’ Maria said, breaking into Kate’s thoughts.

  ‘I can’t let you do that; it’s not fair.’

  ‘It is the easiest way.’

  ‘But this isn’t your battle to fight! You’re as bad as Alessandro and Lucetta – always trying to shield me from everything, always trying to deal with everything for me. You’ve brought me here now and you can’t expect me to sit in the car and wait while you sort a problem that’s mine to sort.’

  ‘It is mine also. Orazia will speak freely in front of me but she will not if you are there.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  ‘I will ask her if she has been playing tricks on you.’

  Kate opened her mouth to reply. But they were spared further argument by the timely appearance of Orazia herself, stepping out of her apartment building, hair scraped back in a high ponytail, dressed for a run. As she stretched her legs on a low wall, the sight of her made all reason fly from Kate’s mind, and before Maria had time to stop her, she’d yanked on the lock of the door and was out of the car.

  ‘Kate!’ Maria clambered out the other side and rushed round, but too late. Kate and Orazia were already squared up.

  She’d tried being reasonable, and she’d tried being patient and understanding, and tolerant and diplomatic. She’d even tried ignoring the problem in the hope that, as her mother had always told her in the case of school bullies, it would go away. But nothing had worked, and instead Orazia had burrowed her way under Kate’s skin, inch by inch, filling her thoughts, stealing her life, until it began to feel as if there were three people in her relationship with Alessandro. More often than not these days, Kate felt breaking point was on the horizon, and the tiniest thing would crack her wide open. It looked like that day had come.

  ‘You,’ Orazia said with a sneer. But then she seemed to check herself when she realised that Maria was looking far from happy as she tried to step between the two women.

  ‘Is it true?’ Maria asked.

  ‘I do not know what you are talking about,’ Orazia said. But from the look on her face, Kate could see that she’d already guessed the game was up.

  ‘I think you do,’ Kate cut in. ‘So you can stop pretending.’

  Orazia turned to Maria and said something in Italian that Kate couldn’t catch. But then Maria frowned.

  ‘In English,’ she said. ‘Kate must hear it.’

  ‘Why should I speak English just for her?’ Orazia said, although she did it anyway. ‘She wants to live in Italy, she loves the Italian men then she can speak Italian too!’

  ‘One man!’ Kate cried. ‘One man who loves me too and none of your games will change that!’

  ‘I do not play games,’ Orazia said. ‘I am always serious.’ She jabbed a finger at Kate. ‘You do not belong here, and I will make you leave.’

  Despite the animosity of the situation, and Kate’s increasing sense of indignation and simmering anger, her mouth fell open. ‘I don’t belong here? What gives you the right to say who does and doesn’t belong here?’

  ‘You are English – go and live in England with the English men.’

  Kate held up a hand. ‘I’m confused now so let me get this straight. Your reasons for hating me – are they simply about me being British, or are they about Alessandro?’

  ‘Both!’ Orazia spat. ‘You are not welcome in my country and you have stolen my man.’

  ‘He does not love you!’ Maria cut in.

  ‘You did not say that once before.’ Orazia turned her venomous sneer on Maria now. ‘You said you would persuade him; you said you would help me to win him. The witch has changed you too.’

  ‘I saw that I was wrong about Kate. She has suffered, as I suffer now, and I saw that it was wrong to take away her happiness, to take away Alessandro’s too. I did not understand how much he loved Kate at first, and how much she loved him. They will marry one day, and she will be my family. You must stop trying to break them apart and find love of your own elsewhere.’

  ‘She has ruined everything!’ Orazia squealed impetuously, flinging a hand in Kate’s direction. ‘She has taken my man and she has even taken my friend from me now!’

  ‘I’ve done nothing!’ Kate fired back. ‘Everything you think you’ve lost was either not yours in the first place or lost through your own actions! Stop blaming everyone else for what you’ve brought on yourself! It makes no difference whether I’m here or not, because Alessandro is not yours and could never love you in a million years!’

  ‘He would love me if you were not here.’

  ‘If I wasn’t here he would love someone else! You’re not right for him so stop what you’re doing!’ Kate cried.

  ‘I will make you leave,’ Orazia growled.

  ‘And then what? You can’t make the whole female population of Italy leave, and even if you make me leave – which you won’t – someone else will take my place, but that won’t be you.’

  ‘I cannot make them all leave, but I will be the one to win.’

  ‘How? You sound ridiculous, and, frankly, mad!’

  ‘Kate is right,’ Maria put in. ‘You must stop this now and accept he will never be yours.’

  ‘No!’ Orazia said. She turned to Kate. ‘I will make you
leave and you will be happy you are not here to see Alessandro come to me.’

  Kate ground her teeth, her mouth set in a hard line. ‘So you’re going to do what? Follow me to every job I get and try to sabotage it so that I get fired? Make sure I never make enough money to stay in Rome?’

  ‘If I must.’

  Maria and Kate exchanged a brief glance. There was no surprise at the news of Kate’s sacking and no question of what Kate meant. It was an admission of guilt that was impossible to mistake for anything else.

  ‘So it was you!’ Kate said.

  ‘And I will do it again,’ Orazia said. ‘I will take Alessandro from you as you took him from me.’

  ‘I did not take him! He was never yours, you crazy bitch!’

  ‘When I have finished, he will want me, and he will hate you so much he will wish he had never found you lying drunken on the streets of Roma, and he will want to deposit you back with the trash where you belong.’

  There was a silence. It lasted perhaps two or three seconds, but it seemed to stretch out, like time had been distorted, and everything around her was foggy, apart from bizarrely small and unimportant details – like the patterns on the bark of a nearby tree, and the spread of shingle in a paving slab – which were preternaturally clear and sharp. There was no rational thought, only a gut reaction to the extreme hatred that engulfed Kate, a feeling she’d never experienced so overwhelmingly before. And before she knew what was happening, she heard Maria’s squeal echo in a street that was now strangely quiet and empty of the raised voices of only seconds before, and realised, with horror, that with her actions she had sealed her fate.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kate had never punched anyone. She didn’t even know she knew how to punch someone. But instinctively her hands had curled into fists, and from nowhere she’d swung a right hook that had caught Orazia squarely on the soft part of her cheek, knocking her off balance, a look of absolute shock on her face. Luckily for Kate she was a lot shorter than Orazia – a couple of inches higher and her fist would have connected with Orazia’s cheekbone and she’d have broken a finger or two. And there wasn’t enough force behind it to knock Orazia over, which meant she merely wobbled in an almost comical fashion, her eyes wide with the same disbelief that Kate herself was frozen to the spot by. She’d just punched someone!