had deliberately placed herself on the same side of the table as him, and had made sure that her mother had taken the seat next to him. With Lisa Firenzi in the way, he had no hope of engaging Jackie in any kind of conversation. And she had known that.
Surely enough time had gone by that he and Jackie could put foolish youthful decisions behind them? Wasn’t the whole I’m-still-ignoring-you thing just a little juvenile? He wouldn’t have thought a polished woman like her would resort to such tactics.
And polished she was. Gone were the little shorts and cotton summer dresses, halter tops and flip-flops, replaced by excellent tailoring, effortless elegance that took a lot of hard work to get just right. And even if her reputation hadn’t preceded her, he’d have been able to tell that this was a woman who pushed herself hard. Every hint of the soft fifteen-year-old curves that had driven him wild had been sculptured into defined muscle. The toffee and caramel lights in her long hair were so well done that most people would have thought it natural. He’d preferred it dark, wavy, and spread out on the grass as he’d leaned in to kiss her.
Where had that thought come from? He’d seen it in his mind’s eye as if it had happened only that morning.
He blinked and returned his attention to his food, an amazing lobster ravioli that the chef here did particularly well. But now he’d thought about Jackie in that way, he couldn’t quite seem to switch the memory off.
The main course was finished and Lizzie’s fiancé appeared and whisked her away. Isabella disappeared off to the restaurant next door and when Lisa was approached by her restaurant manager and scuttled off with him, talking in low, hushed tones, that left him sitting at the table with just Jackie and Scarlett. He made a light-hearted comment, looking towards his right at Jackie, and saw her stiffen.
This was stupid. Although he didn’t do serious conversations and relationship-type stuff, there was obviously bad air between them that needed to be cleared. He was just going to have to do his best to show Jackie that there were no hard feelings, that he could behave like a grown-up in the here and now, whatever had happened in the past. Hopefully she would follow his lead.
He turned to face her, waited, all the time looking intently at her until she could bear it no longer and met his gaze.
He smiled at her. ‘It has been a long time, Jackie.’
Jackie’s mouth didn’t move; her eyes gave her reply: Not long enough.
He ignored the leaden vibes heading his way and persevered. ‘I thought the March issue of Gloss! was particularly good. The shoot at the botanical gardens was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.’
Jackie folded her arms. ‘It’s been seventeen years since we’ve had a conversation and you want to talk to me about work?’
He shrugged and pulled the corners of his mouth down. It had seemed like a safe starting point.
‘You don’t think that maybe there are other, more important issues to enquire after?’
Nothing floated into his head. He rested his arm across the back of Lisa’s empty chair and turned his body to face Jackie, ready to engage a little more fully in whatever was going on between them. ‘Communication is communication, Jackie. We have to start somewhere.’
‘Do we?’
‘It seemed like a good idea to me,’ he said, refusing to be cowed by the look she was giving him, a look that probably made her employees perspire so much they were in danger of dehydration.
Now she turned to face him too, forgetting her earlier stiff posture, her eyes smouldering. A familiar prickle of awareness crept up the back of his neck.
‘Don’t you dare take the high ground, Romano! You have no right. No right at all.’
He opened his mouth and shut it again. This conversation had too much high drama in it for him and, unfortunately, he and Jackie seemed to be, not only on different pages, but reading from totally different scripts. He looked across the table at Scarlett, to see if she was making sense of any of this, but her expression was just as puzzling as her sister’s. She looked pale and shaky, as if she was about to be sick, and then she suddenly shot to her feet and dashed out of the restaurant door. Romano just stared after her.
‘What was that all about?’ he said.
Jackie, who was obviously too surprised to remember she was steaming angry with him, just frowned after her disappearing sister. ‘I have no idea.’
He took the opportunity to climb through the chink in her defences. He reached over and placed his hand over hers on the table top. ‘Can’t we let the past be the past?’
Jackie removed her hand from under his so fast he thought he might have a friction burn.
‘It’s too late. We can’t go back, not after all that has happened.’ Instead of looking fierce and untouchable, she looked very, very sad as she said this, and he saw just a glimpse of the young, stubborn, vulnerable girl he’d once lost his heart to.
‘Why not?’
Suddenly he really wanted to know. And it wasn’t just about putting the past to rest.
She looked down at his hand on the tablecloth, still waiting in the same spot from where she’d snatched hers away. For a long time she didn’t move, didn’t speak.
‘You know why, Romano,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t push this, just…don’t.’
‘I don’t want to push this. I just want us to be able to be around each other without spitting and hissing or creating an atmosphere. That’s not what you want for Lizzie’s wedding, is it?’
She frowned and stared at him. ‘What on earth has this got to do with Lizzie’s wedding?’
Didn’t she know? Hadn’t Lizzie or Lisa told her yet?
‘The reception…Lizzie wanted to have it at the palazzo. She thought the lake would be so—’
‘No. That can’t be.’ She spoke quietly, with no hint of anger in her voice, and then she just stood up and walked away, her chin high and her eyes dull, leaving him alone at the table, drawing the glances of some of the other diners.
This was not how most of his evenings out ended—alone, with all the pretty women having left without him. Most definitely not.
Back at the villa, Jackie ignored the warm glow of lights spilling from the drawing-room windows and took the path round the side of the house that led into the terraced garden. She kept walking, past the fountains and clipped lawns, past the immaculately groomed shrubs, to the lowest part of the garden, an area slightly wilder and shadier than the rest.
Right near the boundary, overlooking Monta Correnti and the valley below, was an old, spreading fir tree. Many parts of its lower branches had been worn smooth by the seats and shoes of a couple of generations of climbers.
Without thinking about the consequences for her white linen trousers, Jackie put one foot on the stump of a branch at the base of the trunk and hoisted herself up onto one of the boughs. Her mind was elsewhere but her body remembered a series of movements—a hand here, a foot there—and within seconds she was sitting down, her toes dangling
