‘I said what I did about how different our worlds were, and how impossible it was for us to continue our affair, let alone anything else, because…’
He took a sharply indrawn breath, and she could see his grip on the crested silver cutlery tightening.
‘Because it seemed to me better that you should hate me than miss me.’
She stared. ‘I did both,’ she said. Her voice was bleak.
Her hand reached for her wine glass, a jerking movement, and she took a gulp, setting it back down on the coaster—that was silver and crested too, she noticed absently.
‘I loathed your guts—and I howled into my pillow every night!’ Her lips compressed. ‘But whilst it wasyourfault I loathed your guts, it was my fault I howled.’
She levelled her gaze at him, unflinchingly. Suddenly she was going to say what she felt she should. Seeing Luca’s ancestral pile, having it brought home to her just how great the differences between them had been six years ago, was—like itor not—giving her a different perspective on why he had ended things with her. Put bluntly, it would have seemed impossible to him to continue with her once he’d left London. To him, she had been an East London girl, fit only for an affair that belonged to his posting to the City. She might have had hopes that were actually delusions—he never had.
She held her gaze steady. ‘I can’t blame you for dumping me, Luca. I was an idiot to fall for you, and an idiot to think there was anything more between us than there was…to want there to be more. I should have accepted what it was—that we’d had a good time together and we were nothing more than a novelty act to each other. It was my fault I didn’t see that…my fault I got hurt.’
She went back to eating, not wanting to see his reaction. Her throat felt tight. For all her painful honesty in admitting he hadn’t been responsible for what she’d come to want from him, she didn’t want to see that bleak truth reflected in his face.
It would hurt too much.
Far, far too much.
And the fact that it would hurt at all was the most disquieting thought yet…
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘SO,HEREITIS. Thepalazzo’s very own Roman ruin, as promised!’
Luca paused at the far end of the path that had brought them here.
‘What you see is likely to be second century AD, but built over earlier foundations. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it from an archaeological perspective, but it’s picturesque. I enjoyed clambering around here when I was a kid, and the bubbling spring was always fun, though I’m not sure it’s ever healed anyone! It’s mineral water—but not sulphurous, thankfully. Nor is it geothermically hot either, which again is probably just as well. There’s enough restless geology in Italy for us to prefer it not too close!’
‘Do you get earthquakes in this vicinity?’ Bianca asked.
‘Blessedly not—sometimes tremors, but we’ve largely been spared. It’s in the mountains that they usually hit.’
‘The African plate moving north and squeezing the Med. Sad to think the Med will disappear in a few million years…’
Luca looked at her. It was still disconcerting, what Bianca had told him on the way here—that she now had a graduate-levelscience-based job. The Bianca he’d known wouldn’t have had a clue about plate tectonics, any more than eighteenth-century garden landscaping. Those kinds of subjects had never cropped up in their time together in London.
Not that he’d minded or cared—nor thought less of her for not knowing things he took for granted. Why should she? It wasn’t part of her world. Nor had it meant she was stupid, either. She’d had a sharp mind, was capable of holding her own in any conversation, and she’d asked questions—from asking who Titian was to what kind of work he did in international investment banking, where he’d been in the world on business and what those places were like.
He’d enjoyed telling her, he remembered. And enjoyed, too, her regaling him with what she knew about—celebrities, films, shows in London. Her opinions had been forthright and often pungent, always entertaining.
She could make me laugh. We had a good time together.
Then he’d ended it.
Because it needed to end. It had run its course and I was leaving London. Whatever she might have wanted, I didn’t.
His eyes followed her as she picked her way carefully into the ruined temple. Thoughts circled. He’d told her at lunch he hadn’t intended to hurt her—but what had he known, six years ago, of emotional pain? He’d learnt since then…
His expression changed. He’d come here, to the ruined temple, that bleak time three years ago, trying to come to terms with his parents’ tragic deaths. Sitting down on one of those broken walls, staring into space, feeling the pain, the cruel rawness of loss. Loss that was for ever.
That pain was there still, though muted by the passage of time—pain he knew he would feel again at Matteo’s passing when it came.
Loss was always hard.
His brow furrowed, eyes still on Bianca. She’d had to lose a man she hadn’t wanted to lose. And whether or not it had or hadn’t been his fault that he hadn’t wanted to continue their relationship, and even though he hadn’t intended to hurt her by severing it, hurt her he had.