‘Not at all. What did you learn from Paola?’ she probed curiously as he thrust wide the door of their bedroom.
‘That my father kept a mistress throughout the whole of their marriage.’ Vitale raised a brow with expressive scorn. ‘He only married my mother to have children and he didn’t treat her well. It’s not surprising that the marriage broke down or that she was suffering from such low self-esteem that she went off the rails.’
‘But it was a tragedy for both you and her … and your sister as well,’ Zara completed. ‘How did your mother come back into your life again?’
‘I was first approached on her behalf by a social worker several years ago but at the time I refused to have anything to do with her,’ Vitale confided as he shrugged free of his jacket. ‘Then I met you and I began to realise that human beings are more complicated than I used to appreciate.’
‘What have I got to do with it?’ Zara prompted with a frown.
‘I used to be very black and white about situations. People, though, are rarely all good or all evil but often a mixture of both and we all make mistakes. After all, I made a big mistake targeting you to get at your father,’ Vitale volunteered grimly. ‘That was wrong.’
‘I never thought I’d hear you admit that.’ Zara curled up on the bed and looked at him expectantly. ‘When did you reach that conclusion?’
Vitale dealt her a sardonically amused appraisal. ‘There were quite a lot of helpful pointers after I met you, angelina mia. How about my discovery that you could get under my skin in the space of one weekend when I had already wrecked my chances with you? How about when you learned that you were pregnant and told me at the same time that you hated and distrusted me? Or even how about your need to impose a ridiculous three-month trial on our marriage so that you could get out of the commitment again if you had to? Do you think I’m so slow that I couldn’t learn from those experiences?’
‘It has never once crossed my mind that you might be slow—’
‘But I was when it came to recognising and understanding my emotions,’ Vitale interrupted, trailing his tie loose and tossing it aside. ‘When I was a kid, it was safer to squash my feelings and get by without them because anything I felt only made me more vulnerable.’
‘I can understand that,’ Zara conceded, picking up the tie he had dropped on the floor and frowning at him.
‘So I’m untidy,’ he conceded with a flourish of one dismissive hand, well into his stride now with his explanation. ‘As an adult I didn’t recognise emotions for what they were, the same way as I didn’t recognise what I felt for my mother until it was almost too late for me to get the chance to know her. By the time a priest who worked with Paola in rehab came to see me this year you were in my life and I was more willing to credit that I might not know everything there was to know and to listen to what he had to tell me.’
‘I don’t get my connection,’ she admitted freely, draping the tie over the back of a chair in a manner that she hoped he would learn to copy.
‘Well, once I fell in love with you it opened the flood
gates to the whole shebang!’ he pointed out mockingly. ‘I mean, I’ve even learned to be reasonably fond of Fluffy now. Going from loving you to trying to understand my mother’s need to make amends and be forgiven wasn’t that difficult …’
Zara blinked and stared at him in disbelief, lavender eyes huge. ‘You fell in love with me … when?’
A wicked grin flashed across his beautifully shaped mouth as he realised he had taken her by surprise. ‘Oh, I think it probably happened that first weekend when I was playing at being the evil seducer and setting you up with the paparazzi. In fact, as I later appreciated, I was setting myself up for a fall. I didn’t know I was in love back then, I just felt like you had taken over my brain because I couldn’t get you out of my head, nor could I stay away from you.’
‘So when did you decide it was love?’
‘Slowly, painfully …’ Vitale stressed ruefully, his face serious. ‘When I’m with you I’m happy and secure. When I’ve been away from you and I’m coming home I’m downright ecstatic. Everything has more meaning when you’re with me. Loving you has taught me how to relax, except when I’m worrying about you.’
‘What have you got to worry about me for?’
‘It’s that naturally negative bent my thoughts suffer from,’ Vitale confided ruefully, shedding his shirt. ‘The more you mean to me, the more scared I am of losing you, and sometimes when I look at you I am terrified of what I feel—like when I came through the front door and saw you standing there with those purple things—’
‘The lavender,’ she slotted in.
‘Whatever, angelina mia.’ With a fluid shift of one hand he dismissed an irrelevant detail. ‘You were standing there looking so beautiful and pleased to see me and yet worried and I had this moment of panic that something had happened, that something was wrong—’
‘I was just worried that you would be annoyed at my having gone behind your back to see who was living in the villa.’
‘No, I was touched by your compassion. You spent time with Paola. You didn’t make her feel bad. You even invited her out—’
‘She needs company,’ Zara pointed out. ‘It’s no big deal.’
‘It would be a very big deal to some women. There will be gossip, even scandal if Paola becomes a part of our lives. Some people will approve, others will not.’
‘That doesn’t matter to me. Let’s see how things go,’ Zara suggested, knowing that the older woman still had a long way to go as part of her recovery process and that the continuing success of her rehabilitation could not be taken for granted.
‘She needs us to have faith in her—she’s got nobody else.’ Naked but for his boxer shorts, Vitale ran a knuckle gently down the side of Zara’s face. ‘But I’ve been hell to live with while this was going on, haven’t I?’
‘You were a little moody after seeing her.’ ‘And you don’t like moody guys,’ he reminded her with a grimace. ‘It was tough at first. But although seeing Paola roused bad memories it also made me view my past in a more even light.’