is there to tell?’ Her voice came out too high, too strained. Allegra took a breath and let it out slowly. She even managed a laugh. ‘I came to London and I lived at my uncle’s house for … a little while. Then I got my own digs, my own job, and when I’d saved enough money I started taking night classes. Eventually I realized I enjoyed art and I specialised in art therapy. I received my preliminary qualification two years ago.’
Stefano nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’ve done well for yourself,’ he finally said. ‘It must have been very difficult, starting out on your own.’
‘No more difficult than the alternative,’ Allegra retorted, and then felt a hectic flush sweep across her face and crawl up her throat as she realized the implication of what she’d said.
‘The alternative,’ Stefano replied musingly. He smiled wryly, but Allegra saw something flicker in his eyes. She didn’t know what it was—hidden, shadowy—but it made her uneasy.
It made her wonder.
‘By the alternative,’ he continued, rotating his wineglass between lean brown fingers, ‘you mean marrying me.’
Allegra took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Stefano, marrying you would have destroyed me back then. My mother saved me that night she helped me run away.’
‘And saved herself as well.’
Allegra bit her lip. ‘Yes, I realize now she did it for her own ends, to shame my father. She used me as much as my father intended to use me.’
A month after her arrival in England, she’d heard of her mother’s flagrant affair with Alfonso, the driver who had spirited Allegra away. Allegra had lost enough of her naïveté then to realize how her mother had manipulated her daughter’s confused and frightened state for her own ends—the ultimate shaming of the man she despised, the man who had arranged Allegra’s marriage.
Her husband.
And what had it gained her?
By the time Isabel had left, Roberto Avesti was bankrupt and his business, Avesti International, ruined. Isabel hadn’t realized the depth of her husband’s disgrace, or the fact that it would mean she would be, if not broken-hearted, then at least broke.
Allegra bit her lip, her mind and heart sliding away from that line of conversation, those memories, the cost her own freedom had demanded from everyone involved.
‘Even so,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s the truth. I was nineteen, a child, I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted.’
Stefano’s face was expressionless, his eyes blank, steady on hers. ‘I could have helped you with that.’
‘No, you couldn’t. Wouldn’t.’ Allegra shook her head. ‘What you wanted in a wife wasn’t—isn’t—the person I was meant to become. I had to discover that for myself. Back then I didn’t even know I was missing anything. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.’ Her voice rang out bitterly.
‘And something made you realize you weren’t,’ Stefano finished lightly. ‘I know it shocked you to realize our marriage was arranged, Allegra, as a matter of business between your father and me.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘it did. But it wasn’t just that, you know.’
Stefano cocked his head, his eyes alert. ‘No? What was it, then?’ His voice was bland and mildly curious yet Allegra still felt a strange frisson of fear. Unease.
Suspicion.
‘You didn’t love me,’ Allegra said, striving to keep her voice steady. ‘Not the way I wanted to be loved, anyway.’ She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she said, trying to keep her voice light. ‘It’s all past, as you said.’
‘Indeed.’ Stefano’s voice was chilly, the expression in his eyes remote at best. ‘Still,’ he continued, his voice thawing, turning mild, ‘it must have been difficult for you to set up a new life here, leave your family, your home.’ He paused. ‘You’ve never been back really, have you?’
‘I’ve been to Milan, for professional reasons,’ Allegra replied, hearing the defensive edge to her voice.
Stefano shrugged in dismissal. ‘But you have not been home.’
‘And where’s home, exactly?’ Allegra asked. ‘My family’s villa was auctioned off when my father declared bankruptcy. My mother lives mostly in Milan. I don’t have a home, Stefano.’ Her voice rang out clear and sharp, and she looked down, wanting to recover her composure, wishing it hadn’t been lost.
She didn’t want to talk about her family, her home, all the things she’d lost in that desperate flight. She didn’t want to remember.
‘Is London your home?’ Stefano asked curiously, when the tense silence between them had gone on too long. Too long for Allegra’s comfort, at any rate.
She shrugged. ‘It’s a place, as good as any, and I enjoy my job.’
‘This art therapy.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what of friends?’ He paused, his fingers tightening imperceptibly on his wineglass. ‘Lovers?’
Allegra felt a frisson of pure feeling shiver up her spine. ‘That’s not your business,’ she said stiffly and he smiled.
‘I only meant to ask, do you have a social life?’
She thought of her handful of work acquaintances and shrugged again. ‘Enough.’ Then, since she wasn’t enjoying this endless scrutiny, she asked, ‘And what of you?’
Stefano raised his eyebrows. ‘What of me?’
Suddenly she wished she hadn’t asked. Wasn’t sure she wanted to know. ‘Friends?’ she forced out. ‘Lovers?’
‘Enough,’ Stefano replied, a faint feral smile stealing over his features. ‘Although no lovers.’
This admission both startled and pleased her. Stefano was so virile, so potent, so utterly and unalterably male that she would have assumed he had lovers. Loads.
Probably he only meant he had no lovers currently, Allegra thought cynically. No arm candy for the moment, none for this evening.
Except her.
He was with her tonight.
‘Does that please you?’ Stefano asked, breaking into her thoughts and making her gaze jerk upwards in surprise.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she countered swiftly.
‘No, of course not, and why should it?’ Stefano’s smile turned twisted, cynical. ‘Just as it doesn’t matter to me.’
Allegra nodded, uncertain. Of course, the words were right, yet the tone wasn’t. The feeling wasn’t.
She saw something spark in Stefano’s eyes, something alive and angry, and she set her wineglass on
