Читать книгу Modern Romance August Books 5-8 - Мишель Смарт, Julia James - Страница 13

CHAPTER FOUR

ROME WAS SO beautiful today, Bella thought as they stepped out into the sun.

There were tourists and lovers and all the scents of a city and how strange it felt to be here with Matteo and not to be holding hands.

Not to be pressed up against a wall this hot morning and kissing with all the promise of later falling into bed.

‘Not a cloud...’ Matteo looked up. ‘I thought your note said there would be storms.’

‘I’m the storm.’ Bella smiled and so did he.

‘I did some sightseeing last night,’ he said, and she gave him a sideways frown because she couldn’t really imagine Matteo doing such a thing. ‘I hired a moped and—’

‘I don’t want to hear about your night with Shandy.’

‘I wasn’t with her then,’ Matteo said. ‘I was with you.’

He stopped walking and so did she and they faced the other but stood apart.

‘We could do that together now,’ he said. ‘I could hire a moped, we could—’

‘No,’ Bella said.

‘But you told me that you love exploring.’

‘I do.’

‘So why not?’ Matteo pushed, but when she gave her answer he wished that he hadn’t.

‘Because then we’d be touching.’

They walked, not talking, just together, and then came to a grassy knoll where families sat and so too did couples.

Matteo bought two coffees and they sat there, watching the world go by. Tired from a night spent thinking of each other, they lay on the grass and Bella took off her glasses and let the warm sun bathe her.

If there was one place in the world where Bella felt she belonged, it was lying by his side. There, she could look up and see no one and feel no one watching or, if she looked to the side, she could see only him.

Matteo, still in dark glasses, was looking up at the sky as she turned to him and gazed at his perfect straight nose and strong profile.

‘I do miss home.’ He admitted to his lie in the restaurant. ‘Not the people, more...’ He hesitated.

‘I miss it too,’ she said. ‘Every day I tell myself that I love Rome and I do. I love the freedom, I love that I am no longer scared, yet I miss so many things about Bordo Del Cielo. I miss the beach,’ she admitted. ‘Sophie and I would go there every day. I miss the markets too and the food. I miss days spent exploring. If I lived there for ever there would still be more to discover...’

‘How was your mother about you leaving?’ Matteo asked.

Bella lay there.

Because she had so few people in her life, the question barely came up. She had only had to say perhaps a handful of times that her mother was dead, and she just didn’t know how to say it now and not break down.

She asked him a question instead.

‘What do you miss?’

‘I don’t know exactly. Just those last six months...’ Matteo answered. He took no offence that she hadn’t answered; he was the master at being evasive when people asked things about his past.

He thought for a moment and she watched, a little smile on his dark red lips as he thought of them. ‘I’ve never even told Luka, given he spent those months in prison, but during that time, running the hotel not having someone breathing down my neck, I felt I might get somewhere, I could see myself living there without wanting to get away...’

‘Do you really not miss your mother?’ Bella asked. She just couldn’t imagine he wrote his family off that easily.

‘There’s nothing to miss. She was barely there when I was growing up. She hated me,’ Matteo said, and Bella frowned.

‘I doubt she actually hated you...’

‘Oh, she told me so,’ he said. ‘And he didn’t have to tell me that, his fists did the talking. I never remember a time she wasn’t married to him...’ Even to this day Matteo would not call his stepfather by name.

‘Do you think she might have been scared to show him she loved you?’

‘Perhaps at first but then she became as cruel as him. I remember when I was about five and I sat there at the dinner table and, as always, she served him first. Then she served Dino, he would have been about three, then she served herself. I remember watching her. I was hungry, but then he said he wanted more sauce on his pasta and so she gave him more. Then Dino. Always. I knew the routine and only after they had had seconds would she serve me. But that time she didn’t. She served more for herself and I got not only the scraps, I got the message—I came nowhere.’

Bella could remember her own mother and how she would tell her she had already eaten, how she’d done everything she could to make sure that Bella didn’t go hungry.

To think that a mother would do that deliberately.

‘I would go to Luka’s. I didn’t like it much there either but there was always food. I was home less and less but then Luka went to boarding school so I had no choice but to go back. We had a row when I was fifteen and I haven’t spent a night there since.’

‘Was that when she told you she hated you?’

‘Yep,’ Matteo said. ‘Or rather, I asked her why she hated me and she said that I reminded her of my father. I didn’t really know much about him so I said, “What, did he treat you badly?” She said no, he had treated her well and that was why she could not stand to look at me. I was too painful a reminder of good times.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Malvolio said I could stay in one of the fisherman’s cottages on the beach. I told him I couldn’t pay rent and he said that was no problem. He would find some jobs for me.’ Behind his glasses Matteo rolled his eyes. ‘And of course he did. I used to resent Luka. He went and studied in London and I wanted to ask if I could go and join him but I was too proud. I made out that I loved the place... When he came back to end things with Sophie, I knew he was cutting all ties. We were going to meet up for a drink at the airport. I was going to ask him then to help me get out but, like you, he never showed. He had an excuse, though, given he’d been arrested...’

She didn’t take the opening.

‘What’s your excuse, Bella? Were you never intending to show, or did Maria talk you out of it?’

Still she did not answer him.

‘Tell me another truth, then,’ Matteo said, and he did not turn his head to hers. ‘This morning wasn’t an accident.’

‘No.’

‘Did you plan to throw the water?’

‘Do you really want the truth?’ Bella checked, and now their faces turned and Matteo removed his glasses and their eyes met. ‘I hoped you might be alone.’

‘To talk?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Bella said. ‘I find talking to you the hardest part...’ She thought back to last night and the little note she had written him. There had been this tiny kernel, a tiny dream that with Sophie and Luka together, even temporarily, Matteo might have been hoping to see her too.

‘So what would have happened if I had been alone?’ Matteo asked.

If you could be unfaithful with just your eyes, he was then.

And if you could be the other woman with just a look, then that was who she was.

They did not touch, their eyes did not assess each other’s bodies but, Bella knew, if he was hers and he shared this look with another woman, she would die.

He looked down at her mouth and there was such tension in her lips as they fought from meeting his and then he moved back to her gaze.

They made love.

Past love, perhaps, but together they watched the memory. He bathed her, washed her, tasted her, made love to her and they both lay, five years later, locked in recall.

It was such a dangerous game they played with their eyes.

‘We were so good,’ she murmured.

‘We were.’

And if they moved, even a fraction, they could not justify to anyone that they were mere friends.

‘But you have a nice life now...’ Bella tried to break the spell. ‘I see you in some of the magazines.’

‘They make a lot of stuff up.’

‘And they tell some truths,’ she said. ‘They found out about your scar. You never told me you were stabbed.’

‘I said to you that I was in a fight.’

‘And it was interesting to read that Shandy got suspended from school when she was sixteen for drinking.’

Matteo swallowed. His throat was suddenly dry; he knew what was coming.

‘They pay a lot of attention to your past, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it is just as well that we’re not together because they would have a field day with mine,’ she said. ‘I remember that you said, you would hate my past to bring you down.’

‘Bella—’

‘But aside from your embarrassment about me and my past and perhaps my mother, I could not stand to be discussed like that by the press, Matteo.’

‘I know.’

‘I would not want the scrutiny.’

Bella stood up then. It was easier to walk and keep her distance, to remind herself why she could never belong by his side.

They walked and then sat on the Spanish Steps, still not touching, back safe behind dark glasses, even though she knew the questions were going to come.

‘You said to your manager that you had worked at the hotel for five years...’ There was a slight huskiness to Matteo’s voice, a rare nervous edge as they approached the most difficult of subjects. ‘That would mean you came to Rome soon after...’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Nearly three months after...’ Bella said, not completing it either—they both knew they were discussing that night and the plans that had been made that morning. ‘My mother had a stroke that morning. I came home and found her on the floor. She died three months later.’ Bella could see the shock in his expression. After all, Maria had only been thirty-four when she’d died. ‘Did you never think to find out why I wasn’t there?’

‘I gave you money to leave...’ Matteo said, and then let out a tense breath as he looked back on the time. ‘I spoke with Dino a few weeks after I left. He never mentioned that your mother was sick. He said you were enjoying working in the bar, that he was enjoying...’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. Even now the thought of Dino with Bella made him feel ill.

‘Your brother is a liar,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you worked that out yet? I never set foot in the bar after that night with you. On the night before my mother’s funeral, just after Paulo’s sentencing, I ran away to Rome and because of that she lies in a pauper’s grave.’

‘Bella—’

‘I got to Rome. Sophie had found a flat and...’ She hesitated. As honest as she had been, she chose not to tell him that Sophie had been working at the hotel when she had arrived. That was for Sophie to share with Luka if ever she chose to. ‘I got a job as a chambermaid at Hotel Fiscella and I’ve been there ever since.’

‘So you haven’t...’ He didn’t quite know how to voice it and Bella got up then and walked away briskly. He came up behind her but she just kept right on walking till they stood at the Trevi Fountain. Tourists were jostling for position, throwing in coins in the hope they might one day return.

‘Sometimes I think of the baths back home,’ Bella said. ‘You know they say that a young girl led Roman soldiers to a source of pure water...’ She looked at the magnificent structure and still, magnificent as it was, the most famous fountain in the world, it wasn’t home.

She went into her bag and took out a coin and kissed it but then, instead of throwing it in the fountain, she handed it to him and closed his fingers around it.

‘Please put it in your pocket so that you don’t come back, Matteo. Let’s get through this wedding but, please, don’t come back because if you do, if you buy the hotel, I’ll leave and I will have to start my life over again when I’m tired of starting over.’

‘Bella?’

She could not avoid it, there could be no more changing the subject. It was here that she must face her past because Matteo was turning her to look at him as he addressed the painful topic of her other line of work. ‘Are you telling me that you never...’ It was still a sentence he could not finish. The thought of her with Dino had made him vomit in the past, the thought of her being used still made him feel ill and so, when words failed, he took her hand, but that just angered her.

‘Oh, I pass your test now, do I? I’m suddenly respectable because you were my only client?’ She was bitter, she was angry, but more than that she was so, so ashamed of the very hand that he had tried holding that it actually burnt as she took it back. ‘Well, before you get your hopes up, know that I don’t pass your test, Matteo. Sometimes you do what you have to to survive. It’s not always pretty.’

‘Bella...’

She didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t want to try and justify things.

She was here.

With her shame perhaps.

But she was here and alive.

Even if it had cost any chance for them.

Bella did a terribly cruel thing then.

To herself.

She reached up and took off his glasses and even if Matteo did his best to mask it, he didn’t quite and she saw not just the disappointment there but something else.

Bella took it to be his disgust.