Quickly, she scanned the month’s schedule of vacations for the employees. They all had one week off in summer and one in winter. Belle was on summer break from college, where she went to night school. Her vacation would be coming up the third week of June, ten days away.
Without hesitation she booked a flight from New York City to Rimini, Italy, and made arrangements for a rental car. She chose the cheapest flight, with two stopovers, and made a reservation at a pension that charged only twenty-eight dollars a day. No phone, no TV. The coed bathroom was down the hall. Sounded like the orphanage. That was fine with her. A bed was all she needed.
Since she’d been saving her money, and roomed with two other girls, she’d managed to put away a modest nest egg. All these years she’d been guarding it for something important, never dreaming the money would ever help her to find her mother.
“Belle?”
She lifted her head and smiled politely at her colleague. “Yes, Mac?”
“How about going for pizza after we lock up tonight?”
“I’m sorry, but I have other plans.”
“You always say that. How can someone so gorgeous turn me down? Come on. How about it?”
Her new assistant manager, transferred in from another store, was good-looking and a real barracuda in sales, but he irritated her by continually trying to get her to go out with him.
“Mac? I’ve told you already that I’m not interested.”
“Some of the guys call you the Ice Queen.” He never gave up.
“Really. Anything else you want to say to me before you finish the inventory?”
She heard a smothered imprecation before the door closed. Good. Maybe she was an ice queen. Fine! So far she hadn’t seen examples of love in her personal life and didn’t expect to.
Her birth parents had given her away. Her adoptive parents had suffered through an unhappy marriage. Her adoptive brother was already divorced, and angry. He’d used her pretty mercilessly as an emotional punching bag. Belle always felt she was on the outside looking in, but never being part of a whole.
She thought about the single girls at the store, who all struggled to find good dates and were usually miserable with the ones they landed. Two of the four guys were married. One of them was having an affair. The other was considering divorce. The other two were players. Both spent their money on clothes and cars.
Her own roommates were still single and terrified they would end up alone. It was all they talked about when the three of them went running in the mornings.
Belle didn’t worry about being alone. That had been her state from the moment she was born. The few dates she’d accepted here and there outside the workplace had fizzled. It was probably her fault, because she didn’t feel very lovable and wasn’t as confident as she needed to be. Marriage wasn’t an option for her.
She didn’t trust any relationship to last, and cut it off early. Belle hadn’t met a man she’d cared enough about to imagine going to bed with. No doubt her mother had experimented, and gotten caught with no resources but the church orphanage to help her. Belle refused to get into that circumstance.
What she could depend on was her career, which gave her the stability she craved after being dependent on the orphanage and her adoptive parents. She was a free agent now. Her store had been number one in the region for two years. Soon she hoped to be promoted to upper-level management in the company.
But first she would take her precious vacation time to try to find her mother. If Cliff had gotten it wrong or misunderstood, then maybe the trip would be for nothing, but Belle had to think positive thoughts. Romantic Italy, the world of Michelangelo, gondolas and the famous tenor Pavarotti, had always sounded as delightful and as faraway as the moon. Incredible to believe she’d actually be flying there in ten days.
Tomorrow she’d see about equipping herself with a company GSM phone and SIM card, the kind with a quad-band. Once in Rimini, she’d find a local library and work from the latest city phone directory to do her research.
She was in the midst of making a mental list of things she’d need when Rod, one of the reps, suddenly burst in on her. “Hey, boss? Can you come out in front? An angry client just threw his cell phone at Sheila and is demanding satisfaction. He said it broke after he bought it.”
She smiled. “If it wasn’t broken, it is now. No problem.” No problem at all on the first red-letter day of her life. “I’ll be right there.”
* * *
It was seven in the morning when thirty-three-year-old Leonardo Rovere di Malatesta, the elder son of Count Sullisto Malatesta of Rimini, finally got his little six-month-old Concetta to sleep. The doctor said she’d caught a bug, and he’d prescribed medicine to bring down her temperature. It was now two degrees lower than it had been at midnight, and she hadn’t thrown up again, grazie a Dio!
After he’d walked the floor with her all night in an attempt to comfort her, he was exhausted. The dog ought to be exhausted, too. Rufo was a brown roan Spinone, a wedding gift from his wife’s father.
Rufo had been devoted to Benedetta and had transferred his allegiance to Concetta when Leon had returned from the hospital without his wife. Since that moment, their dog had never let the baby out of his sight. Leon was deeply moved by such a show of love, and patted the animal’s head.
There was no way he’d be going in to the bank today. Talia and Rufo would watch over his daughter while he slept. The forty-year-old nanny had been with him since Benedetta had died in childbirth, and was devoted to his precious child. If the baby’s fever spiked again, he could count on her to waken him immediately.
He kissed Concetta’s head with its fine, dark blond hair, and laid her in the crib on her back, out of habit. She never stayed in that position for long. Her lids hid brown eyes dark as poppy throats. She had Benedetta’s coloring and facial features. Leon loved this child in a way he hadn’t thought possible. Her presence and demanding needs filled the aching loneliness in his heart for the wife he’d lost.
After tiptoeing out of the nursery, he told Talia he was going to bed, then went to find his housekeeper, who’d always worked for his mother’s family. She and Talia were cousins, and he trusted them implicitly.
“Simona? I’ve turned off my cell phone. If someone needs me, knock on my door.”
The older woman nodded before Leon headed for his bedroom. He was so exhausted he didn’t remember his head touching the pillow. The relief of knowing the baby’s fever had broken helped him to fall into a deep sleep.
When he heard a tap on his door later, he checked his watch. He’d slept seven hours and couldn’t believe it was already midafternoon! He came awake immediately, fearing something was wrong.
“Simona? Is Concetta worse?” he called out.
“No, no. She has recovered. Talia is feeding her.” Relief swamped him a second time. “Your assistant at the bank asked if you would phone him at your convenience.”
“Grazie.” Leon levered himself off the bed and headed for the shower, surprised that Berto would call the villa. Normally he would leave a message on Leon’s cell.
