She had an apron on over her clothes and there was a swipe of flour across her left cheek. She looked up as he came in. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m cooking dinner,’ she said. ‘I thought I should start to pull my weight around here since I can’t leave right now.’
He hitched up one brow. ‘Can you cook?’
She gave him a quelling look. ‘I’ve been taking lessons from one of my flatmates,’ she said. ‘She’s a sous chef in a restaurant in Soho.’
‘The one your ex-boyfriend owned?’
She gave a little sigh as she looked at the ingredients in front of her. ‘I only went out with him a couple of times,’ she said. ‘The press made it out to be much more than it was. They always do that.’
‘I guess everyone wants to know what Britain’s most eligible girl is up to,’ he said.
‘I sometimes wish I didn’t come from such a wealthy background,’ she said with a little frown.
Edoardo leaned against the counter. ‘You don’t mean that, surely?’ he said. ‘You lap it up. You always have. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you didn’t have loads of money.’
‘My friends’ mothers give them money or buy them stuff or take them shopping,’ she said, still frowning. ‘I’m tired of feeling responsible for my mother’s bills.’
‘You gave her the money?’
‘Yes, and she hasn’t even sent a text or called me to thank me.’ She let out a dispirited sigh. ‘She’s probably spent it all by now.’
‘I’ve been thinking about what I said earlier,’ he said. ‘It’s really none of my business who you give your money to. She’s your mother. I guess you can’t turn your back on her.’
After a little silence she looked up at him with those big brown eyes of hers. ‘I wish I could be sure people liked me for me. How can I know if they like me because of who I am as a person? I don’t even know if my mother loves me or simply sees me as a meal ticket.’
He reached forwards to brush the flour off her cheek with the end of his index finger. ‘Sorting out the friends from the hangers-on is always a challenge, even for a person without wealth. You just have to trust your gut feeling, I suppose.’
Her shoulders went down as she sighed again. ‘I think what you said before was right: I want to be loved so much that it clouds my judgement.’
‘It’s not wrong to want to be loved,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.’
She looked up at him again, her eyes soft and luminous. ‘Do you want to be loved?’
Edoardo gave an off-hand shrug. Loving was something he didn’t do any more. He suspected he had forgotten how. He certainly wasn’t booking in any time soon for a refresher course either. ‘I can take it or leave it.’
A little frown creased her forehead. ‘You can’t really mean that,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want to be let down again or abandoned.’
He curled his lip, threatened by how close to the truth she was. He refused to let anyone close to him. Godfrey had been an exception, but it had taken years, and even then he hadn’t told him everything about his past. ‘Got me all figured out, have you, Bella?’
‘I think you push people away because you’re frightened of becoming too attached,’ she said. ‘You like to be in total control of your life. If you had feelings for someone else, they could take advantage of you. They could leave you just like your parents did.’
Edoardo felt a ridge of steel ripple through his jaw until his teeth were locked so tightly together he wondered if he’d be left with nothing but powder.
He thought of the first home he had been sent to after the authorities had stepped in when he’d been ten years old. He had already had five years of his stepfather’s capricious and cruel treatment. Five years of living in dread, quaking with fear night and day in case things turned nasty.
The hands that had fed and clothed him, and at times even been kind to him, could turn within a blink of an eye into vicious weapons. It didn’t matter how well-behaved he was. Sometimes the anticipation of the brutality was so torturous he would deliberately play up just to get it over with. But even then he could never prepare himself. He’d had no way of knowing when his stepfather would strike. His body had run solely on adrenalin. The ‘flight or fight’ mode had been jammed on.
He hadn’t stood a hope of settling in anywhere.
Looking back now, he could see the foster parents he had been sent to had done their best. Some had been better than others; they had tried to offer him shelter and support but he had sabotaged their every attempt to get close to him. Then Godfrey Haverton had taken him in and, in his quiet and unobtrusive way, shown him that it was up to him to make something of his life. Under Godfrey’s steady but sure tutelage, he had learned how to become a man, a man with self-control and self-respect—a man who was the agent of his own destiny, not at the mercy of others.
But he wasn’t going to parade his past to Bella, of all people. He had locked it away and it was staying there.
‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘I think I do,’ she said in a quiet and assured voice that was far more threatening than if she had shouted the words at him. ‘I think you want what everyone else wants. But deep down you feel you don’t deserve it.’
He gave her a mocking look. ‘Did you read that in a self-help book, or is it something you just made up on the spot?’
She drew in a breath and slowly released it. ‘I didn’t read it anywhere,’ she said. ‘I just sense it—the same way my father sensed it. I think he understood you from the word go. He didn’t push you or force affection on you. He waited for you to come to him when you trusted him enough to do so.’
Edoardo gave a disparaging laugh but the sound grated even on his own ears. ‘You’re making me sound like an ill-treated dog,’ he said.
Her eyes meshed with his, soft and yet all-seeing—knowing.
The silence stretched and stretched.
He felt every beat of it like a hammer blow inside his head.
‘What happened to you, Edoardo?’ she asked.
The memories tapped him on the shoulder with their long, craggy fingers: Come here, they taunted. Remember the time he hit you with the belt until you were bleeding? Remember the icy-cold showers? Remember the gnawing hunger? Remember the raging thirst?
He pushed them away but one more crept up behind him and caught him off-guard.
Remember the cigarettes?
‘Stop it, Bella,’ he said tightly. ‘I have no interest in dredging up stuff I’ve forgotten long ago.’
‘You haven’t forgotten it, though, have you?’ she asked.
He clenched and unclenched his fists,
