Damn.
‘He is not here at 9.40, so he misses the van. I am not supposed to park here. If I stay longer, I get a ticket,’ said Gino, looking all stressed out again.
Well done, Aidan. Gino would be speeding again, now, wouldn’t he, wanting to make up for the thirty seconds lost hanging around here.
‘But we can’t just leave him,’ said Sophia, sounding put out.
She definitely fancied him.
Gino started huffing and puffing and pacing around. And then my phone pinged and I saw that Nick had finally texted.
So sorry!! We walked too far and couldn’t get back in time. Trying to organise a taxi out to you now.
I sighed, firing off a text.
hurry!
At least he was making some effort to get here, but if he hadn’t even left Florence, he was barely going to have any time. I was most certainly going to have to kick off the wine-tasting proceedings alone. I wondered how much you actually drank at these things. Was it a mouthful or a whole glass of each? Did you swill it around in your mouth and then spit it out afterwards? How many wines would we try? And would I feel drunk by the end of it? The way my day was going, I sort of hoped I would, even if I wasn’t usually a fan of daytime drinking.
‘Nick’s on his way,’ I called over my shoulder.
‘Yes, he texted me a little while ago,’ piped up Sophia.
Had he really contacted her before he messaged me?
‘Daisy dragged him to some trendy café on the other side of Florence and then, surprise, surprise, they couldn’t make it back in time,’ explained Sophia to a confused-looking Peter.
‘How ridiculous,’ he said.
‘Quite,’ said Sophia.
‘Never mind. He’ll be here at some point,’ reassured Rosamund.
I’d noticed how much she defended Nick. They were closer than I’d thought. Which perhaps made it even odder that he hadn’t thought to introduce me to her before. I had an uneasy feeling, which was possibly my own paranoia, but it felt real. I couldn’t get rid of the thought that maybe he was embarrassed by me. That if he waited until we were engaged, there’d be nothing she could do about it. And even if she did want to put him off, it would be too late. Although, of course, engagements were broken. All the time.
As I chucked my phone into my bag and looked up, I spotted Aidan legging it through the city gates. Great. Two minutes later and Gino would have been wheel-spinning away from the kerb without him.
‘There he is!’ called out Sophia.
Gino spun around, hands on hips, ready to unleash. After a brief (but amusingly harsh) scolding from Gino, Aidan leapt into the van.
‘Sorry, everyone,’ he said, ignoring me, as usual.
‘We thought you’d deserted us,’ simpered Sophia, leaning forward to touch him lightly on the shoulder.
Judging by the way Sophia looked momentarily thrown, I presumed he’d given her one of his dazzling smiles. I didn’t know whether it made me feel better or worse that he had that effect on other people, too. I supposed that, in a way, I’d imagined us having this secret connection. That it had only been me who found him devastatingly attractive. I’d thought about it quite a lot, and at the time we were dating, it had made me feel less insecure about whether I was specialenough to keep his attention. Which ultimately I hadn’t been, of course.
Aidan sat down, fumbling with his seat belt. ‘I confess, I had to go back for another ice cream,’ he said.
Everyone except me laughed.
‘Which flavour this time?’ asked Rosamund.
‘Grand Marnier Cream,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Oooh, delicious,’ purred Sophia practically in my ear.
He’d had a bottle of Grand Marnier in his drinks cabinet. When we’d been together, he’d lived in a one-bedroom flat in Putney and I’d been there maybe eight or nine times. We’d had a shot of it in our coffee one night after dinner. I could still remember the taste of it, how I’d laughed and told him it had gone straight to my head and he’d joked that that wasn’t a bad thing. I wondered if he remembered that, too. If, subconsciously, he’d chosen his gelato flavour because of that night. Or whether Grand Marnier was something he shared with all the women in his life, of which I could only imagine there must be many. He was a player, I supposed. And more fool me for falling for his charm in the first place.