Carol Marinelli – Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain (страница 4)

‘You truly are an angel, Francesca,’ Bianca said in relief. ‘Unlike your wretched friend!’

The phone call ended. Francesca continued to sit there wondering what the heck had got into today. It had begun so well. She’d been happy—everything had been perfect!

Then Carlo Carlucci had happened, she recalled with a small shiver. Since her run-in with him nothing had gone right. She’d had phone calls that irritated, ill winds blowing chills across her skin and a tiring trudge through Rome’s finest fashion boutiques, looking for a dress she still wasn’t sure about even though she’d bought it. Now Sonya had gone missing and it was just beginning to dawn on her that, true to her flatmate’s nature, she had rung her this morning to ask if she would cover for her at work. Only she’d then chickened out when they’d got into an argument over Angelo.

And now she had discovered that Sonya had been lying to her! Or keeping secrets was probably a fairer way of putting it.

But she didn’t want to be fair. She didn’t want to be an angel or have her best friend sniping at Angelo and then likening her to her mother because she happened to lose her patience.

More irritation struck, slicing right down her backbone and bringing her to her feet. She bent to pick up the used coffee-cups then stopped herself. Tidying up after Sonya was something her mother would do. So was tutting and sighing all over the place, as she’d been about to do.

‘Oh, damn it!’ she shouted at the tiny apartment. And she never swore!

Because her mother would have been appalled.

‘Damn it,’ she said again out of sheer black cussedness and went to put her purchases away.

Then she went still, listening to herself and not liking what she heard. Her mother was gone now and she did not want to think ill of her. She didn’t want to be sniping at her inside her head! There had been too much ill feeling in Maria Bernard’s life while she had been alive, she thought bleakly as she went to unpack and hang up her dress.

Her mother had once been the beautiful Maria Gianni—only child of Rinaldo Gianni, a man who ran his household with a rod of iron. He’d woven plans around his only daughter that had mapped out her entire future from the day she had been born. Then Maria had thwarted those plans by falling in love with a thankless English rake called Vincent Bernard, who had his eye firmly fixed on Maria’s inheritance. It had taken a month for him to make her pregnant and another month to get her father’s permission to marry her—before Rinaldo Gianni threw them out. Vincent had taken her mother to England. He’d been so sure that his father-in-law would relent and forgive once Maria produced the grandson the old man wanted so much that he was prepared to wait the whole nine months for the event to take place. A girl had not fitted either man’s criteria. Vincent Bernard had cut his losses and left Maria holding a baby girl that nobody wanted by then. A year after that Vincent had divorced her to marry his next rich fool of a wife. Divorce had been the ultimate humiliation and sin in her mother’s eyes. She’d never acknowledged that legal slip of paper ending her Roman Catholic marriage. She’d never forgiven her father for refusing to forgive her for going against his wishes. All three had never spoken again.

Rinaldo Gianni had died when Francesca was ten years old, having never acknowledged that he had a granddaughter. She’d never met him, just as she had never met her own father, who—and here was the irony—died around the same time. It wasn’t until a year after her mother’s death that she’d given in to a long-suppressed yearning to come to Rome and meet with her only surviving blood relative. And even as she’d taken that first step onto Italian soil she had still been struggling with her conscience because she’d known her mother would not approve. But it was lonely being on her own yet knowing she had a great-uncle living here who might—just might—be prepared to welcome Maria’s child.

She’d wanted nothing else from Bruno Gianni. Not his money or even his love. She hadn’t got them either, she mused with a wry little smile as she dried herself after a quick shower. Her great-uncle Bruno, she’d discovered, was a very old man living the life of a near recluse in his draughty old palazzo tucked away in the Albany Hills south of Rome. He did not receive visitors. He did not have a great-niece, she was informed by return letter when she’d made her first tentative approach. It had taken determined persistence on her part before the old man eventually gave in and reluctantly granted her an audience.

It was a strange meeting, she recalled, pausing for a moment to look back to that one and only time she’d met Bruno Gianni. He was nice. She’d liked him on sight even though he had told her straight off that if she was after his money then there was none to be had. The crumbling palazzo belonged to the bank, he’d said, and what bit of money he had left would go to the tax collector when he was dead.

But she’d been able to see her mother’s eyes in his eyes—her own hazel eyes looking curiously at her even as he’d labelled her a fortune-hunter. She recalled how badly she’d wanted to touch him but didn’t dare, how his skin wasn’t at all wrinkly despite his great age and he might live in a near ruin but his grooming had been immaculate. Quite dapper.

She smiled as she began dressing again, slipping into her uniform red dress with its flashes of bright yellow and green.

She’d told him about her life and her mother’s life in London, the schools she’d attended and her university degree. She’d told him that she was working as a tour guide in Rome and that she was sharing an apartment with a friend she’d met in university. He’d listened without attempting to put a stop on her eager flow. When she’d finally slithered to a stop, he’d nodded as if in approval then rung the bell. When the housekeeper arrived to see her out all he’d said was, ‘Enjoy the rest of your life, signorina,’ and she’d nodded, knowing by those words that he had no wish to see her again.

That didn’t mean she’d stopped corresponding though. She’d continued to send him little notes every week, letting him know what she was doing. When she’d met and fallen in love with Angelo, besides Sonya, Great-Uncle Bruno was the first person to know. He’d never replied to a single letter and she hadn’t a clue if he even bothered to read her silly, light, chatty notes. When she confided in Angelo about him he was shocked and disbelieving at first, then he’d laughed and called their first meeting fate because Bruno Gianni lived only a couple of miles away from his parents’ country house.

‘If your mama had been allowed to live there with you, we would have grown up together—been childhood sweethearts maybe.’

She liked that idea. It gave their love a sense of inevitability and belonging that her unforgiving grandfather could not beat.

On the few occasions she had been invited to spend the weekend at the Villa Batiste in the Frascati area of Castelli Romani she always made a point of walking the few miles to her great-uncle’s palazzo to leave a note to let him know where she was staying—just in case he might relent and asked her to visit him while she was there. It had never happened. He hadn’t even bothered to reply to the formal invitation to her betrothal party this weekend, she reminded herself.

Did that hurt? A little, she confessed. But—as Angelo said—persistence could often win in the end. ‘Maybe he will relent and come to our wedding.’

And maybe he would, she thought hopefully as she shut up the apartment and stepped back out into the sunlit street.

However disappointed she was with her great-uncle, she had never regretted coming to Rome. Her Italian was fluent, her knowledge of the city’s history something she’d drenched herself in from the time she had been able to read. She loved her job, loved her life and she loved—loved Angelo.

The ride down the Corso was a mad, bad bustle this time around. Francesca skimmed deftly between tight lines of traffic. The afternoon was a long one. The city was beginning to throb with people now the tourist season was in full flow—not that it eased by a huge amount at any time of the year. By the time she arrived back at the apartment she was so tired all she wanted to do was dive beneath the shower then put up her aching feet.

The first thing she noticed was the tidied apartment, the next was Sonya, curled up on the sofa wrapped in her bathrobe, looking very defiant.

‘Before you start, it was the toothache,’ she jumped in before Francesca could say anything. ‘It flared up after I spoke to you this morning and I just had to find a dentist to do something about it.’

‘Makes house-calls, does he?’ Francesca didn’t believe her. It took only a flick of her eyes to the empty coffee-table for Sonya to know what she meant.

‘Of course not,’ she snapped then winced, pushing a hand up to cover the side of her face. ‘God, it’s hurting more now that the anaesthetic’s worn off than it did before I let him touch it!’ she groaned.