but don’t move. If the clasps pop open I’m not redoing them.’ She still had a dozen of the ruddy things left to hook together.
She strode to the suite’s dressing table, grabbed the phone, handed it to Aislin and then got back to work on the dress.
‘It’s a message from our dear mother.’ Aislin spoke in an unnaturally high voice.
A shiver ran up Orla’s spine and her fingers fumbled on the delicate clasp she’d only just gripped hold of. ‘What does she want?’
‘To wish me luck.’
She snorted. ‘How big of her.’
‘Now, now, don’t be like that. You know it isn’t easy to jump on a plane to be there for your youngest daughter’s wedding.’
‘True. It’s not as if her daughter’s fiancé is a billionaire who’d offered to pay for a private jet to fly her over or anything.’
‘And it’s not as if she hasn’t seen her daughters in, what? Seven years?’
‘Or never met her only grandchild.’ Finn, Orla’s precious three-year-old son, her miracle of life, currently napping in one of the suite’s bedrooms under the watchful gaze of a nurse, had never set eyes on his grandmother.
She met Aislin’s stare through the reflection of the mirror and they burst into peals of laughter.
The sisters had long ago learned that the best way to keep the anger and pain of their mother’s actions at bay was to laugh and treat it all as one big joke. If they didn’t laugh there was a good chance they would never stop crying.
‘I suppose you should be grateful she remembered,’ Orla pointed out dryly.
‘I’m brimming with gratitude.’
She sniggered before confiding, ‘I’m dreading meeting Dante’s mother.’ Orla’s conception had been the catalyst for Dante’s parents’ divorce twenty-seven years ago.
‘Don’t be. I told you, she has no animosity towards you.’
‘But she sounds terrifying.’
‘She’s hilarious. When Dante told her she was going to be a grandmother the first thing she said was that she didn’t want to be known as Nonna.’
‘What will she be called?’ Another two clasps were hooked in quick succession.
Aislin cackled wickedly. ‘Nonna!’
‘Is she here yet?’ ‘Here’ being the magnificent luxury hotel nestled on a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea that Dante had hired the entirety of for the weekend.
‘She’s going straight to the cathedral with Giuseppe.’ Giuseppe was Dante’s latest stepfather, Immacolata’s sixth husband. ‘Now stop whittling.’
Before Orla could make a cutting retort, there was a knock on the door. A moment later a member of the hotel’s staff walked into the suite carrying a huge bouquet of flowers in a vase.
‘Compliments of the owner,’ he said in careful English.
‘How lovely.’ Aislin clapped her hands in delight. ‘Please, put them on the windowsill and, please, thank Mr Valente for me.’
Valente?
For no reason she could imagine, the hairs on the nape of Orla’s neck lifted and her gaze flew to the door that concealed her napping child.
When they were alone again, Aislin met Orla’s eyes again in the reflection of the mirror. ‘Have you met the owner of the hotel yet?’
Now the hairs on her arms lifted too.
‘Should I have?’ she asked nonchalantly, even as she ground her bare feet into the soft, thick carpet and ice raced up her spine.
Orla had arrived the day before but Finn had been exhausted from the journey, so they’d dined in the suite together rather than join the other early arrivals for the evening meal. By the time Aislin had joined them, both she and Finn had been fast asleep. Her sister had crawled into the bed with her, just as she’d done throughout their childhood. It had been a bittersweet moment for Orla, waking to find her sister asleep beside her. Her baby sister would never share her bed again.
Aislin shrugged but there was a shrewdness in the reflecting stare that sent the ice already in Orla’s spine spreading through her limbs. ‘Tonino’s one of Dante’s ushers—they’re old friends. Their fathers were friends too.’
Orla’s fingers tightened reflexively. Her chest tightened. The room began to swim around her…
‘Ouch!’
Aislin’s squeal pulled her sharply back into focus and Orla suddenly became aware that her nails were digging into her sister’s back. She whipped her hand away…and pulled the clasp she’d had hold of away with it.
Tonino Valente stood by the huge entrance doors and waited for the last guests to file into the baroque cathedral.
The groom, Dante, was at the altar mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
He could laugh to see his old friend acting like this, but propriety forced him to bite his cheeks and smother it.
Who would have thought Dante Moncada, the biggest player of them all, would be standing at the altar sweating with nerves as he awaited his bride? Out of their gang, which decades before had ridden round Palermo on scooters desperately trying to look cool and impress the girls, Dante had always been the one who’d vowed never to settle down. Tonino had been the only one to assume he would one day marry and yet here he was, the last bachelor of their gang left on the shelf.
He’d almost married once. He’d even gone as far as to book this same cathedral before fate had stepped in in the form of an Irish temptress and turned his life inside out with one locking of eyes.
Strangely, Dante was himself marrying an Irishwoman. Tonino had only met her the once, fleetingly, a stunning redhead who had transformed his old friend into a smitten lovesick fool.
What was it with Irishwomen, he ruminated, that they could turn a Sicilian man’s head so completely?
His own Irishwoman… Well, that had been an extremely short romance. But intense. Incredibly intense. And then she’d left without saying goodbye. Not a word. Just packed her bags and left. When he’d called, he’d found himself unable to get through—she’d blocked his number.
Her cruelty in the manner she’d ended things had been breathtaking.
He could hardly believe that four years on he still thought about her.
A commotion outside the entrance had him striding outside to help a young couple struggling to manoeuvre a wheelchair-cum-pushchair that had a small child in it up the cathedral steps.
‘You’re with the bride?’ he asked in Sicilian
