‘Yes. It was…amazing.’ His heart was too full to find any more words to describe what had just happened.
Normally he’d start his leaving routine about now. Faking tiredness, faking a reason to go. Because staying the night, actually sleeping with a woman was a commitment too far that gave too many messages, meant too many things that he did not or could not feel. And, with his head swimming in and out of rationality, distance would have probably been a good thing right now.
Should he leave? How could he leave? A better man would leave when there was no possible future for them. No long-term promises doomed to fail. She was warm, so beautiful. Anchoring him in a place he wanted to stay a while.
An insane man would leave.
Her fingers tiptoed down his chest. ‘Oh. I just remembered, you were going to tell me about the scars.’
‘Not this again. They are nothing.’ His heart began to thud. Not from the memory of the operation—that had been like child’s play in comparison—but because of the associations, the ramifications of his time in hospital. But he never talked about this. Especially not after something so intimate that had made him off balance. ‘It is time to sleep.’
‘Matteo, it’s still early. I’m wired…’ She shifted over him and he could feel her heart beating against his stomach. Tender kisses across his abdomen.
He gave her backside a gentle tap and tried to play, to distract her from what felt like her only conversation choice. ‘You know, you have a peachy bum too, Miss Leigh. Maybe we could do his and hers calendars. That would raise a bit of money for the hospital.’
‘Matteo! That’s hysterical. It would raise a lot of eyebrows, and knowing the board it would probably lose me my job. If I don’t lose it anyway when I don’t turn up for work on Monday.’
A tremor of irritation rippled through him. It was supposed to have been a joke. ‘Always your job…it’s like it’s the only thing that matters.’ He got it. It was what he’d always prided himself on too. But now…?
No. Now it was still the same. Nothing had changed. He was still the same Matteo, she was still the hospital lawyer who he happened to be in bed with. Nothing more.
At least, that was what he was trying to convince himself.
She gave him a confused look. ‘It’s not the only thing that’s important. Surely you know that about me now? I’m here, aren’t I? I mean…here, for my mum, of course.’ Her eyes had flitted away from his face and he had no idea what she was thinking—perhaps, like him, she was surprised at how quickly things had moved from the pub to the bed. The intensity of emotions.
She ran fingertips across the top of his pubic bone. Her voice had been serious for a moment, but now it was lighter. ‘So, you have four laparoscopy scars and a longer one here, stretching across your abdomen. That looks…’ Levering herself up onto one elbow, she looked straight at him. ‘Wait a minute…am I right? Did you…no? Matteo? Did you donate one of your kidneys?’
That was so obvious he couldn’t lie. ‘Elementary, Miss Leigh. You can be my number-one student. So don’t ever ask me to give you a kidney, because now I don’t have any to spare.’
‘But why?’ Her eyes darkened. A stormy sea. ‘Who did you give it to? Wait…let me guess. Oh, my God. It was you. You gave the kidney to your sister?’
‘Very good.’
She jerked upright, grasping the sheet and wrapping it round her breasts. It looked like she was settling in for a long talk. ‘You donated your kidney. My God, when? How old were you?’
He didn’t need to lay his life out to her. But he knew she would not stop asking. And this one act he had done he was proud of. ‘Eighteen. It was one of the first laparoscopic transplants in Milan.’
‘You saved her life.’
Not wanting to see any more questions in Ivy’s eyes, he laid his head on her lap and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I gave her more time. Transplants can last for ten, twenty years. Sometimes up to forty—after that we just don’t know.’
‘Wow. You must have been such a hero to your family.’
‘It was the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make. Ever. No one else was such a close match.’ That time…those memories. Without being able to control it, the tension rose through him.
She must have sensed it too because her voice lowered, a hand went to his shoulder. ‘What? What happened?’
‘It is too long ago.’
‘Let me see…’ Drumming her fingers on his ribcage, she thought for a few minutes. ‘Your sister…and… It’s something to do with your father. Let’s examine the evidence.’
Per l’amor di Dio. It was so long ago and yet the pain still lingered—not overtly but under the surface. A stark reminder of why he never trusted his heart to anyone. Why he never could.
Ivy needed to know that, especially now. ‘Okay. Okay. I was engaged to be married. Elizabetta. She lived in the same village as me. Her family were like our family too. We grew up together. We fell in love at eight years old. Our lives were planned in the cradle.’
‘What has this got to do with these?’ She popped a finger into the dip of each of the faded round scars. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘We…we were always “we” from as far back as I can remember. We had plans—big plans—fuelled by my father, who saw the village as a tie and the restaurant as a failing burden with no future. He filled our heads with dreams, to go to Florence to study medicine, to conquer the world. So that was my life. Study. Working in the restaurant. Elizabetta. It was all leading up to us escaping the small closed-in village and exploring the world.’
Ivy looked at him as if she’d never had those kinds of dreams. Then he realised that escape for her had meant just getting out of hospital. Escape had meant being able to put one foot in front of the other. Escape was knowing there was someone who cared about her enough to help her fight the injustices she’d faced.
Maybe if he’d narrowed his world down to such singular things then he wouldn’t have run the risk he had. But he’d had no choice in the end.
‘Then my sister got sick. It was sudden and irreversible and she was going to die without a transplant. Dialysis could only help her for so long. We were all tested and I was the lucky one who went off to Milan with her and we had more tests and were away for a few weeks with sporadic contact with our families.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Who knows, if we’d had your fabulous social media back then, things might have been different.’
He felt Ivy’s quiet laugh against his chest.
If things had been different he wouldn’t be here, doing this. He wouldn’t have found her. A twist of fate that meant his life was more now, richer.
‘When we eventually came home Elizabetta had changed. She was quiet and distant—one minute she was loving, the next she couldn’t bear to look at me. Eventually she told me she was pregnant. That she had to stay in the village, that we had to change our plans. So I…what do you say?…sucked it up. I put my plans aside. I stopped studying. I missed the start of the medical school course. I started to build a life there, working for my father—who berated me every day for giving up on my dream so easily. For not escaping as he’d wanted to do. He laughed at me. Said I should go far away and take Elizabetta with me.’
‘Easy for him to say.’
But hard to watch his son throw his life away, Matteo guessed. Hindsight was a wonderful thing. How would he have reacted if he’d watched his son give up his dreams? ‘I had made the same mistake he had—got a girl pregnant—and he could see the same pattern happening. He was angry and disappointed. And so, deep down, was I. Everything started to crowd into my head. It was a dark time. I had no future that I wanted and a fiancée who hardly spoke to me. But I tried to make the best of it and grew to love the child inside the woman I wasn’t sure loved me any more. This was my problem and I was dealing with it.’
She had started to stroke his hair. It was comforting. Sweet. ‘Big decisions at such a young age.’
And he’d thought himself such a man.
How wrong he’d been. ‘One day I was out walking, trying to piece my life together, when I caught her and Rafaele together in the fields. Something they’d apparently been doing since I’d gone to Milan. And probably before.’
‘Rafaele?’
‘A friend.’ He could barely even say the word because it did not describe how Matteo felt about Rafaele. Not at all. ‘When I confronted them Elizabetta admitted she loved us both, that she was torn between us. And that she hadn’t known how to tell me. That the baby I’d given my future up for wasn’t even mine. Rafaele just stood there. Silent. He had nothing to say.’
‘What did you do?’
Matteo shrugged. ‘She’d lied to me. He’d lied to me, too, and there he was, not defending himself. Not saying anything. He had insulted me and any honour or pride I had. So I hit him. Then I told Elizabetta that I would make the decision easy for her and went to pack my things. Back at the house my father laughed in my face. Told me I’d been taken for a ride, that I’d given up my future for nothing. That I was worth nothing. Thank God I didn’t hit him too. But I wanted to. I so very nearly did. In the end I just walked away.’
It was the first time he’d ever spoken about this. It was at once cathartic and yet disturbing to relive it again. But the anger wasn’t as intense as it had been. It felt like the dark stain on his heart had finally begun to fade. Ivy’s soothing voice encouraged him to go on. ‘I don’t blame you. It sounds very messed up.’
‘They have four children now. They have the life I had been prepared to have, in the village where we all grew up.’
Ivy’s fingers massaged the tops of his shoulders now. ‘Which explains why you don’t want to go back. I understand now. And why you insist on honesty. Because you had your trust broken completely. I get that. But you have an amazing life now. Look at all the good you do.’
It was, he realised, an empty life that he filled with work. A life like Ivy’s. They were the same, the two of them. Trying to convince themselves that they were okay. That they were living just fine. Because that way they didn’t have to risk any part of themselves. They were scared, underneath it all. Scared.
‘But it stays with you. Even just a little bit, no matter how much you try to let it all go. Lies can ruin lives. But not as much as love does.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SCRATCH. SCRATCH. SCRATCH.
Ivy opened her eyes and tried to work out where the noise was coming from. For that matter, what the noise was. And where the hell she was.
Scratch. Meow.
Hugo. Of course. The spare room. With… Wriggling a foot to the other side of the bed, she tested the temperature. Cold. He was long gone. She was in the spare room and not with Matteo.
But his scent remained, and, with it the memories of a wonderful night of lovemaking. Of intense emotion. Of discovering that part of him that he held back. The reason he had his famous reputation of non-commitment. It wasn’t hard to see why. His history was punctuated with hurt and betrayal and she knew how that felt.
Like right now. When she wanted so much to believe in the fairy-tale ending, and yet he had already disappeared into the night like a guilty gigolo. It would have been nice if he’d had the decency to at least say goodbye. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known this would happen, especially after his words last night, but what surprised her was how much it hurt.
Getting out of bed, she pushed the negativity away. It had been a wonderful weekend, and she had begun to feel things she’d never thought possible. She’d laughed and worried and held onto him, exposed her inner fears and experienced such intense joy. He’d made her feel important and special and worthy.
And that, she realised, was the problem.
Downstairs in the kitchen Hugo wound around her feet as if she was the last person alive on earth. In danger of being knocked off balance between her dodgy foot and a starving, needy cat, she picked him up. ‘At least someone’s pleased to see me.’
Snuggling her face into his fur, she got some comfort from a warm, beating heart under her fingers and the purr that sounded, indeed, like a drill. So what if it was all cupboard love? She was under absolutely no pretences with the cat. Shame she couldn’t say the same about her own love life.
And there it was again. That feeling of panic. It wasn’t love. It had been one night, the only thing they could ever share. She knew that, they both did. It would be ludicrous to want otherwise.
Plopping Hugo back on the floor, she turned to the fridge. ‘Hold on, buster. Here’s some food—’
Whoa. A magnet with a pretty terrible amateurish painting of Scarborough beach held a handwritten note on the fridge door:
Ivy
Joey is sick. I have gone back to London in a hurry. I will phone you.
Matteo x
She was disappointed at how much her heart soared at those few words. At the hope she imbued into the one tiny letter at the end of the note. What was wrong with her? Instead of worrying about that poor boy, she’d been buoyed by the thought that Matteo had not run away but had left because of an emergency. She’d never been like this before—living in hope of a word, a caress. Been desperate for a man’s touch, a kiss. It was infusing everything she did. Infecting her thoughts. Making her feel anxious and excitable.
So being here helping her mum to recuperate had come at the right time. It meant she didn’t have to face Matteo right now, she could hunker down and get on top of her wayward emotions, work out a way of avoiding him when she got back, and then she’d back to her normal self.
Talking of which… Ivy glanced at the oven clock. Damn. She was late.
* * *
Two hours later she bundled her mum—and Richard, which was a strange turn of events, but, really, not so surprising after all—out of the taxi and back into the house. ‘Okay, sit down, Mum, and…er…Richard.’
‘Thank you, Ivy. Shoo. Shoo.’ Richard pushed Hugo roughly from the sofa, sat down and got a hiss in return. ‘Oh, and, please, you can call me—’
‘Right. Okay…so…’ Please, don’t do that you can call me dad routine. She’d been through too many dads all in all. And they had all turned out like her real one—absent. Picking up Hugo, she gave him a conciliatory stroke. ‘I’ll pop the kettle on, make a pot of tea and start on lunch.’
Angela gave her a weary smile that was irritated or exasperated or something that Ivy couldn’t put her finger on. But was all too familiar. ‘That’s very kind of you, darling, especially when I know how much you need to be getting back to your important job. Are you packed yet? What time’s the train? Should we call you a taxi?’
What? Train? Taxi? ‘I was going to stay a few days, make sure you’re okay. You know, like we agreed.’ Mum and daughter time. ‘I want to make sure you’re okay.’ That we’re okay.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Richard said he’d cook me dinner tonight, and he’s going to pop in every day to check up on me.’ Her mother reached out and gave Richard’s hand a squeeze, and then left her hand there, tight in his fist, and they looked comfortable and settled—how had they done that in such a short space of time? How had they given themselves up to this, whatever it was. For as long as it lasted. ‘Every day, he says. So I’ll be fine. Don’t feel like you have to stay on my account. We’ll be just fine.’
‘Oh. Of course, yes, I see.’ Ivy didn’t know what else to say as she turned away. But she could see very clearly that she wasn’t any use now. Richard was going to fill the hole in her mother’s life, Ivy could go back to her job, to her other life in London with no need to worry. Except she’d so wanted to fix things with her mum now she was here.
But she didn’t want to do it with an audience, and she knew it would need a lot more than the few precious minutes they had right now—and with a mother who had a focus on that and not on another potential husband.
It was yet another example of her mum’s erratic behaviour. Her short attention span where Ivy was concerned. And, yes, it hurt.
Damn it, don’t c
ry. She squeezed her eyelids shut and forced back any sign of distress. Maybe leaving was for the best.
She looked back over at her mum and had to admit she did look happy and relaxed, and the best she’d been since her heart scare. Ivy caught a smattering of her conversation with Richard. ‘Stay right there,’ he was saying in a quietly calm voice. ‘I’ll get a cushion for you. Wait…wait… I want to make sure you’re comfortable.’
The man was certainly attentive, even if he didn’t appear to like cats. And who was she to deprive her mum of some happiness? If she’d been suffering from depression for all those years and now she wasn’t—if this man made her happy and this was what Angela wanted, then she had to let it go. Regardless of her own misgivings.
‘I don’t know,’ her mother replied, looking up at her new man with a sort of adoration as he plumped a cushion and fussed around her. ‘You and your fussing ways, you’ll drive me crazy.’
‘You’ll get used to it. See that my way is best.’ Richard gave her mum a smile and Ivy’s heart lurched.
You drive me crazy.
They were only words. But she’d used them to Matteo and he’d used them right back. And it was the sentiment, it was the same—you drive me crazy, but that’s okay. What’s a bit of madness between friends? Losing sanity. It was two people becoming a little less of who they were for the sake of someone else. It was Ivy becoming Angela.
Her hand went to her mouth. Oh, my goodness. Of all the things she’d dreaded. She couldn’t let that happen.
But it was too late, Ivy was different. He had made her different, he’d made her yearn for more. For more in her life than just work. Which was impossible. Just downright impossible, if she was going to be true to her herself and her years of promises and grit.
If she went back to London tonight she would have to face Matteo again too soon and she didn’t know what she would say, or how to act, or how to be the same person she’d been before. Before she’d ever met him.
Truth was, she wasn’t sure of anything any more. Of where she fitted in her own life, or in other people’s. Fighting back the sting of more tears, she walked into the kitchen. At that same moment her phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, unable to see the number for the teary blur, which she scrubbed away as quickly as it arrived.
Tempted by Her Italian Surgeon Page 14
