may I sit with you at dinner?’ he asked.
She spread her hands. ‘Do what you like.’
Ironic. That was precisely what he couldn’t do, from next month. He had expectations to fulfil. Schedules to meet. A country to run. Doing what he liked simply wasn’t on the agenda. He would do what was expected of him. His duty.
WHEN THEY WERE called to dinner, Lorenzo switched the place settings so he was seated next to Indigo.
‘Nicely finessed, Mr Torelli,’ she said as he held her chair out for her.
Actually, he wasn’t a Mr, but he had no intention of correcting her. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Your name’s very appropriate for a stained-glass restorer.’ Not to mention pretty. And memorable.
‘Thank you.’ She accepted the compliment gracefully.
‘So how long have you been working with glass?’
‘Since I was sixteen. I took some evening classes along with my A levels, and then I went to art college,’ she explained.
Very focused for someone in her mid-teens. And hadn’t Lottie said something about Indigo leaving their school at the age of fourteen? ‘So you always knew what you wanted to do?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s a dreadfully pathetic story.’
‘Tell me anyway,’ he invited. ‘It’ll make me feel better when you savage me in one of your cartoons.’
‘I was sent away to boarding school at the age of six.’
Lorenzo had been five years older than that when he’d been sent away, but he remembered the feeling. Leaving home, the place where you’d grown up and every centimetre was familiar, to live among strangers. In his case, it had been in a different country, too. With a child’s perception, at the time he’d thought maybe he was being sent away as a punishment—that somehow he’d been to blame for his parents’ fatal accident. Now he knew the whole truth, and realised it had been his grandparents’ way of giving him some stability and protecting him from the potential fallout if the press had found out what had really happened. But it had still hurt back then to be torn away from his home.
‘I hated it,’ she said softly.
So had he.
‘I cried myself to sleep every night.’
He would’ve done that, except boys weren’t allowed to cry. They were supposed to keep a stiff upper lip. Even if they weren’t English.
‘The only thing that made school bearable was the chapel,’ she said. ‘It had these amazing stained-glass windows, and I loved the patterns that the light made on the floor when it shone through. I could just lose myself in that.’
For him, it had been music. The piano in one of the practice rooms in the music department. Where he could close his eyes and pretend he was playing Bach at home in the library. ‘It helps if you can find something to get you through the hard times,’ he said softly.
‘I, um, tended to disappear a bit. One of my teachers found me in the chapel—they’d been looking for me for almost an hour. I thought she’d be angry with me, but she seemed to understand. She bought me some colouring pencils and a pad, and I found that I liked drawing. It made things better.’
He found himself wanting to give Indigo a hug. Not out of pity, but out of empathy. He’d been there, too. ‘Why did you decide to work with glass instead of being a satirical cartoonist?’ he asked.
‘Drawings are flat.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘But glass... It’s the way the colour works with the light. The way it can make you feel.’
Passion sparkled in her dark blue eyes; and Lorenzo suddenly wanted to see her eyes sparkle with passion for something else.
Which was crazy.
He wasn’t in the market for a relationship. He had more than enough going on in his life, right now. And, even if he had been thinking about starting a relationship, a glass artist with a penchant for skewering people in satirical cartoons would be very far from the most sensible person he could choose to date.
Besides, for all he knew, she could already be involved with someone. A woman as beautiful as Indigo Moran would have men queuing up to date her.
‘You really love your job, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Don’t you?’
‘I guess so,’ he prevaricated. He’d never known anything else. He’d always grown up knowing that one day he’d become king. There wasn’t an option not to love it. It was his duty. His destiny. No arguments.
‘So what do you do?’ she asked.
She really wasn’t teasing him, then; she actually didn’t know who he was. And he wasn’t going to make things awkward or embarrass her by telling her. ‘Family business,’ he said. ‘My grandfather’s retiring, next month, so I’m taking over running things.’ It was true. Just not the whole truth.
‘Workaholic, hmm?’
He would be. But that was fine. He’d accepted that a long time ago. ‘Yes.’ Not wanting her to get too close to the subject, he switched the topic back to her work with glass.
* * *
When he smiled, Lorenzo Torelli was completely different. He wasn’t the pompous idiot he’d been in the garden; he was beautiful, Indigo thought.
And she was seriously tempted to ask him to sit for her. He would be the perfect model for the window she was planning.
‘If you’re really interested in the glass,’ she said, ‘come and have a look at my temporary workshop after dinner.’
‘I’d like that,’ he said.
They continued chatting over dinner, and Indigo found her awareness of Lorenzo growing by the second. It wasn’t just that she wanted to sketch him and paint him into glass; she also wanted to touch him.
Which was crazy.
Lorenzo Torelli was a total stranger. Although he seemed to be here on his own, for all she knew he could be married. And her radar to warn her that a man was married or totally wrong for her hadn’t exactly worked in the past, had it? She’d made the biggest mistake of her life where Nigel was concerned.
Though at the same time she knew it wasn’t fair to think that all men were liars and cheats who just abandoned people, like her ex and her father. Her grandfather hadn’t been. Gus wasn’t. And, from what Lottie had told her, their father had been a total sweetheart and had never even as much as looked at another woman. Though Indigo still found it hard to trust. Which was why she hadn’t even flirted since Nigel, much less dated.
‘Penny for them?’ Lorenzo asked.
No way. She fell back on an old standby.
