Angel of Darkness

‘I don’t think so,’ Angelo murmured silkily and parked the car.

She walked ahead of him into the restaurant, quickly espying her mother’s blonde head in a corner. Daisy was openly relieved at their arrival, Tomaso rising with alacrity to at first advance his hand and then smilingly give her a light kiss on the cheek. He was thinner and older-looking than she remembered and her eyes pricked with unexpected tears as she registered the extent of the happiness glowing in her mother’s face.

‘A bit of a coincidence, you both being in Italy at the same time,’ Tomaso observed heartily, ordering up a round of aperitifs.

‘Were you—?’ Kelda turned to Angelo with manufactured surprise.

‘You wouldn’t have run into each other,’ Tomaso assured her. ‘Angelo was in the south, inspecting a factory...isn’t that right?’ he added, addressing his son.

‘How terribly boring,’ Kelda sighed with mock sympathy, encountering a chilling black glance of warning from beneath Angelo’s long, luxuriant lashes. A slight darkening over his hard cheekbones told her that he was not wholly at ease lying to his trusting papa. She was bitterly amused by the discovery.

In other circumstances, it might have been a pleasant evening. Tomaso was on tremendously good form. He kept on patting her mother’s arm possessively, stealing little glances at her and smiling. It was clear that he too was very happy. The wedding was discussed. A date was already in the offing which suggested that Angelo’s belief that she had the power to prevent their remarriage by influencing her mother had been grossly exaggerated.

‘You really don’t mind?’ Daisy prompted in the cloakroom.

Kelda embraced her much smaller mother and murmured, ‘If Tomaso makes you happy, I’m happy.’

‘Good...so what’s going on between you and Angelo?’ Daisy enquired anxiously.

Kelda froze. ‘Going on?’

‘Don’t treat me as if I’m stupid or blind,’ Daisy breathed ruefully. ‘I’m neither. A week ago, you were furious at the idea of Tomaso’s and my getting back together again—’

‘I was being childish and selfish—’

‘When Angelo told me that he would bring you here tonight to dine with us, I told him he was aiming at the moon,’ her mother shared. ‘But here you are just like he promised and he keeps on watching you and you keep on touching him—’

‘Touching him?’ Kelda echoed blankly.

‘A couple of times, you’ve put your hand on his arm when you’ve been speaking—’

‘Really?’ Kelda said weakly because she couldn’t remember doing it.

‘And I know you,’ her mother persisted. ‘You’re not the sort of a person who touches others unless you’re very familiar with them, and Angelo of all people—’

‘Mum, don’t you think you’re—?’

‘And why is he looking at you all the time?’ Daisy demanded worriedly. ‘And you never looked at him once—’

‘Maybe I’m just not that comfortable with Angelo,’ Kelda suggested unsteadily, shaken by her mother’s unexpected perception.

‘He is very, very good-looking,’ Daisy remarked uneasily. ‘And very clever. He has a lot of charm when he wants to use it—’

‘You sound as if you don’t like him very much—’

‘I don’t want you to be hurt again,’ her mother whispered. ‘Angelo isn’t the settling down type and there’s something different about you, Kelda...’

Dear heaven, the mother with X-ray vision! Concealing her panic at Daisy’s persistence, Kelda forced a smile. ‘Being pleasant to Angelo takes a lot out of me.’

After the interrogation about a couple of gestures she hadn’t even been aware of making, it was a relief when the evening came to an end. Angelo slid silently into the Ferrari.

‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ Kelda muttered, massaging her temples which were starting to ache with the onset of a tension headache.

‘What did you tell Daisy?’ Angelo shot at her without warning.

‘Nothing! And you can stop treating me like your partner in crime,’ Kelda told him flatly, bitterly. ‘I am not in the habit of lying to my mother and I didn’t enjoy doing it.’

‘You told her something,’ Angelo repeated darkly.