looking at her directly, invoking a hundred memories.
When should she have told him? When they’d lain together in the closeness that was life and death in the same moment? When they’d walked in the dusk, arms entwined, their thoughts on the night ahead? When they’d awoken together in the mornings, sleepy and content?
He didn’t speak, but nor did he need to. The questions were there, unanswerable, like a knife twisting in her heart.
‘We didn’t have to talk about it,’ he said, more gently, ‘because it doesn’t matter. It can’t touch us.’
‘But it has to touch us.’
‘Why? I knew you were older—’
‘Just a little. Not that much older. And, darling, you can’t pretend it didn’t give you a shock. There was a moment back there when you were looking from Sol to me as if you were stunned.’
He stared at her, wondering how two people who loved each other so much could misunderstand each other so deeply. What she said was true. He had been totally stunned, reeling like a man who’d received a shattering blow.
But it wasn’t her age. It had been the moment when he’d seen her in Sol’s arms and thought she’d betrayed him. The extent of his pain had caught him off-guard, almost winding him. Nothing else had ever hurt so much. Nothing else would ever do so again.
It had confronted him with the full truth of his love, of the absolute necessity of his being with her and only her as long as they both lived. He’d thought himself already certain, but for a moment it had been as if she’d been snatched away from him, and he’d stared into a horrifying abyss.
And she thought he was worried about a trifle like her age.
‘It’s true,’ she urged. ‘You need to think about it.’
‘I’m not listening to this,’ he said impatiently. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’
‘All right.’ She made a placating gesture. ‘Let it go.’
His eyes flashed anger. ‘Don’t humour me.’
‘I just don’t want to waste time arguing.’
‘And I don’t want you brooding over it to yourself.’
‘But it’s not just going to vanish—not unless I suddenly lose seven years.’
‘Will you stop talking like that?’ he begged. ‘Thirty-seven is nothing these days. It doesn’t have to bother us unless we let it.’
‘Are you going to wish it away?’ she asked fondly.
He shook his head. ‘I’ll never wish you other than you are.’
‘But one day—you might.’
His response to that was to pull her close and kiss her. There were faint cheers from other customers in the little café, for lovers were always popular.
As they drew apart she smiled and sighed, letting it go at that. Now time must pass while he took in the full enormity of what he’d discovered. Already she guessed that he was beginning to understand, which was why he’d moved to silence her. Then he would realise that a permanent love was impossible, but together they would enjoy their time together while they worked on the series. It all made perfect sense, and one day perhaps it would no longer hurt so much.
The spent that evening, as they had spent others recently: dining in her room before going to bed. Over the food and wine he told her more about his family, preparing her for the next evening.
‘Justin and Evie won’t be there, because they live in England and Evie’s heavily pregnant with twins. But Primo and Olympia will be there, and so will Luke and Minnie, down from Rome for a couple of days.’
He tactfully forbore to mention that he’d had a call from Luke, his adopted brother, now living with Minnie ‘in a state of fatuous bliss’, according to his brother Primo. But since Primo himself had lowered his prickly defences for the sake of the divine Olympia, he was, as Ruggiero had tartly remarked, hardly in a position to talk.
‘The women are in cahoots,’ Luke had warned Carlo darkly. ‘So don’t say you haven’t been warned.’
Carlo had laughed. There was something about a family conspiracy to unite him with Della that filled him with pleasure. If only they knew how little need there was for them to nudge him into matrimony.
The thought of having Sol as a stepson made him pause, but only briefly. He would just have to put up with the young man whom he’d mentally stigmatised as ‘that selfish oaf’.
He found, though, that Della was stubbornly resistant to any suggestion that her darling might not be perfect.
‘What’s he going to do about getting a job?’ he asked mildly.
‘He’ll get one,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘But I’m not going to hound him when he’s only just left college.’
‘Well, having a degree will help.’
‘Actually, he doesn’t have a degree,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘He failed his finals.’
Carlo bit back a tart remark about that not coming as any surprise, and merely said mildly, ‘But he can sit them again.’
‘He doesn’t think it’s worth it. He says it’ll be more use to look around and see a bit of the world, find out what really suits him.’
Carlo had heard this argument from lazy dead-beats too often to argue with it now. He merely observed, ‘I had a job even when I was in college. There was a dig just outside town and during the vacations I slaved for hours every day, grubbing away in the earth.’
‘But that’s different,’ she objected. ‘You were doing a job you loved, making a step in your career, making contacts—’
‘At the time it just felt like breaking my back so that the whole financial burden didn’t fall on my parents.’
‘Well, maybe that’s why he won’t go back to college—to save me another year’s fees.’
Her face had a mulish look he hadn’t seen before, and a sudden sense of danger made him pull back. Sol could lead them into discord, and he wouldn’t let that happen.
There was a new intensity in his lovemaking that night, as though he were reminding her of how good it could be between them. He had always been a patient lover, giving her all the time she needed to reach her moment. Now his consideration for her was endless, and the gentleness of his kisses as he lay with her, teasing her to fulfilment, almost made her weep.
‘My love…’ he murmured. ‘My love for ever…’
How could she refuse a man who could make her feel like this? How could she break his heart and her own?
‘Look at me,’ he urged.
He had said it before. He always wanted to meet her eyes when the pleasure overtook them. But tonight
