that he was making a genuine request but it did not remove her astonishment. ‘You can’t have thought this through. Me? Have you any idea what people would think and say about me doing the arrangements for the party again?’
Vito raised an incredulous brow. ‘I have never in my life stopped to worry about what other people think,’ he countered with resounding assurance. ‘It strikes me as the perfect solution. You will recreate Christmas in the same spirit as Olly did. The two of you revelled in all that traditional nonsense.’
Ava dragged in a ragged breath and had to literally swallow down the unnecessary reminder that Olly was gone. Nonsense, yes, she recalled helplessly, Vito had always believed the seasonal festivities were nonsense, only excepting those of a religious persuasion from his censure. Even so, he had tolerated her and Olly’s efforts to capture the magic of Christmas with the same long-suffering indulgence that an adult awarded childish passions.
‘I suggest you stay at AeroCarlton for what remains of the week and move into the castle at the weekend.’
‘M-move into the castle?’ Ava stammered, shaken at the suggestion.
‘You can hardly do the work from here,’ Vito pointed out, his measured drawl as cool as ice on her skin.
Christmas at Bolderwood, the stuff of dreams, Ava conceded abstractedly and familiar images washed through her mind: gathering holly and ivy from the forest, choosing the tree and dressing it, eating mince pies by the fire in the Great Hall. Even as she felt sick with longing at the recollection of happier times something snapped shut as tight as a padlock inside her brain. Christmas without Olly in what had once been Olly’s happy home: it was unthinkable. She didn’t deserve it, couldn’t even consider such an undertaking when she had for ever destroyed Christmas for Vito.
‘I couldn’t do it. It would be a frightful mistake to use me. It would offend people.’
‘If it does not offend me, why should it offend anyone else?’ Vito enquired with arrogant conviction. ‘You’re over-sensitive, Ava. You can’t live in the past for ever.’
‘You can’t forgive me!’ Ava suddenly cried in jagged protest. ‘How do you expect me to forgive myself?’
Vito cursed her emotional turbulence. Everything he controlled she expressed, but he saw her attitude as another sign that he was taking the right path. ‘It’s three years. It might feel like it only happened yesterday but it’s been three years,’ he pointed out harshly. ‘Life has to go on. Make this Christmas a proper tribute to Olly’s memory.’
Ava was struggling to suppress such a giant surge of emotion that her legs trembled under her and she braced her hand on the back of a chair, her eyes stinging with a rush of tears. Olly’s memory. It always hurt too much to examine her memories of him and then be forced to accept the reality of his death again.
‘Do you really think that my brother would have wanted to see you living like this?’ Face taut, eyes ablaze with impatience, Vito lifted both arms in an unusually dramatic gesture of derision.
Ava’s chin came up at that question and her spine straightened. ‘No, I know he wouldn’t have wanted this,’ she admitted grudgingly, blinking back the tears that had almost shamed her. ‘But I can’t help it.’
‘Che cosa hai! What’s the matter with you?’ Vito reproved, his dark deep voice growling over the vowel sounds. ‘You’re a fighter—I expected more from you.’
Mortified colour sprang up over her cheekbones, flooding her porcelain pale skin like the dawn on his Tuscan estate. That stray thought, far too colourful for a man who considered himself imaginative only in business, set his even white teeth on edge. He looked at her, grimly appraising her appearance in shabby clothes. Hair like molten copper in an unflattering ponytail, face dominated by bright blue eyes and that luscious mouth, garments too shapeless and poorly fitting to compliment even her slender figure. Nothing there to fascinate or titillate, he reasoned impatiently, but his attention roamed back to her delicate features and lingered. A split second later he was hard as a rock, his blood drumming through the most sensitive part of his body as he imagined that succulent mouth pleasuring him.
‘Yes, I’m a fighter,’ Ava breathed shakily, gazing back at him, feeling the change in the atmosphere and finding it quite impossible to ignore it. How could he make her feel this way without even trying? All right, he was very good-looking but surely she should have outgrown her teenaged sensitivity to his attraction? The pulse low in her pelvis was a nagging ache and she spun away restively, determined to get a grip on her physical reactions. After all, he had just challenged her pride, her belief in herself, and she could not let that stand unanswered. She might be afraid of other people’s reactions to her, but she was not prepared to admit the fact that rejection still hurt her way more than it should have done. ‘If you really want me to, I’ll do it … Christmas for you but don’t blame me if people think you’re crazy.’
Vito had fixed his brilliant eyes to Harvey, who had practically merged with the hearth rug in his relaxation. ‘I’ve already told you how much I care about that.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I prefer women who agree with me.’
‘No, you do not!’ Ava snapped back. ‘You just get bored and walk all over them!’
Vito felt that even walking over her might be fun and his black lashes dropped low on his reflective eyes. He was still in an odd mood, he acknowledged in exasperation, a mood of unease where random thoughts clouded his usually crystal-clear brain. He wondered if it was the season or talking about Olly that had disturbed him and settled for that obvious explanation with relief. ‘Staying at the castle may give you the opportunity to see your family again.’
‘It will shock them, annoy them, as they’ve made it quite clear they don’t want me back in their lives,’ she pointed out heavily. ‘But that’s their right and I have to accept it.’
Vito made no comment, still taken aback by what he had done. A spur of the moment idea had fired him up with an almost missionary zeal to make changes. Putting Ava in charge of Christmas was as much for her benefit as his own. It would toughen him up, banish the atrocious vulnerability that afflicted and destabilised him whenever he thought about his little brother. That was a weakness that Vito could not accept and he could no longer live with it and the necessity of constantly suppressing negative responses. He thought of all the people who had recommended therapy to deal with his grief and his beautifully moulded mouth took on a derisive slant. Therapy wasn’t his style. He didn’t discuss such things with strangers, nor would he ever have sought professional help for a loss he deemed to be a perfectly normal, if traumatic, life experience. He was totally capable of dealing with his own problem and by the end of the Christmas party, when Ava Fitzgerald departed from his life again, he would have finally made an important step in the recovery process. Avoiding her, acting all touchy-feely sensitive as he saw it, would have been the wrong thing to do, he acknowledged fiercely. He would deal with her in the present and move on, all the stronger for the experience.
‘Can I bring Harvey with me to the castle?’ Ava asked abruptly, realising that that would remove the dog from Marge’s small overcrowded house.
Dark brows drawing together, Vito frowned, for his antipathy to indoor animals had only allowed him to stretch as far as a guinea pig and goldfish even for Olly.
‘Honestly he won’t be any trouble!’ Ava promised feverishly, eager to persuade Vito round to her point of view. ‘It’s just Harvey will be put down if I can’t find a
