Unlocking her Innocence

In answer, Vito sprang upright, hooked the chain onto his fingers and nudged her hair out of the way to place it round her neck. ‘You should have something to remember him by, cara mia,’ he said flatly.

‘Thank you …’ Ava said shakily as the cool metal settled against her skin. She was painfully touched by the gift. It could surely only mean that Vito had moved beyond thinking of her solely as his brother’s killer to recall instead her once close and loving friendship with his sibling. For that piece of undeserved good fortune she was eternally grateful.

‘It once belonged to my father and Olly cherished it. Come on,’ Vito urged hurriedly as her mouth trembled. ‘It’s time to pick the tree …?

??

Ava hastily swallowed back the thickness of tears clogging her vocal cords and clattered down the steps in his wake with Harvey to climb into the waiting four-wheel drive. Vito drove down rutted tracks to the conifer plantation at the back of the estate and vaulted out to retrieve a paint tin and brush with which to mark the chosen tree. The icy breeze stung her damp cheeks. Her hand stole up to brush the St Christopher at her throat. St Christopher, the patron saint of safe journeys. Olly hadn’t been wearing it the night of the crash because the chain had broken.

She trudged into the great stand of trees, banishing recollections of long-gone Christmases with rigorous self-discipline. In the mood she was in the last thing she needed to be doing was wallowing in the past, she conceded humbly. She paused in front of a fifteen-foot-tall conifer with a model shape and dense branches that skirted it almost to the ground. ‘That’s definitely the one.’

Vito marked it with the paint and set down the tin to ram his chilled hands into the pockets of his jacket, standing tall and braced into the wind clawing his black hair back from his darkly handsome features. ‘That was quick.’

‘It’s a classic … oh my goodness, it’s snowing!’ Ava carolled, hurrying into the clearing open to the sky to raise her hands to the fat white flakes floating slowly down.

Vito watched her chase snowflakes, her bright blue eyes intent against her breeze-stung complexion, her vibrant copper hair anchored below a cream woollen hat. She had no thought of what she might look like, no concern that he might laugh at her. She was as uninhibited in her enjoyment as a child, her enchantment etched in her face with an innocence she had yet to lose. Seeing that vulnerability disturbed him, put him in mind of the fact that even her family had rejected her. It was the belated acknowledgement that her family lived only down the road that prompted him to say, ‘I think it’s time you visited your family.’

Ava froze. ‘Been there, done that,’ she declared stiffly without looking at him as she stooped to lift up the paint tin. ‘I’m freezing … let’s get back to the car—’

‘When did you visit them?’

‘Yesterday,’ she extended reluctantly.

Vito frowned and made the connection, shrewd dark eyes bronzing with sudden intensity. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘I found out that I’m not Thomas Fitzgerald’s daughter, after all. I’m a bastard, father unknown,’ she confided doggedly between gritted teeth as she stalked ahead of him towards the car.

‘You’re … a what?’ Vito closed a strong hand round her slim shoulder to force her to turn her head to look back at him again.

Ava explained what she had learned in as few words as she could manage. ‘So, you see, you really couldn’t expect any of them to have visited me while I was in prison or to bother with me now—I’m not and never have been part of their family and they finally feel that they can be open about that.’

Appalled, Vito swore under his breath in Italian. ‘You should have been told a long time ago and never in such a cruel manner.’

‘Nobody was cruel!’ Ava interrupted in heated disagreement. ‘Thomas Fitzgerald was fed up with having to live a lie and you can’t blame him for that.’

‘I—’

Her eyes flashed with anger. ‘It’s none of your blasted business!’

Silenced by that forthright declaration, Vito drove back to the castle with a fiercely tense atmosphere between them. Ava breathed in slow and deep, fighting to control her distress. She hadn’t wanted to tell him but he had virtually forced her to speak. Now he had to be embarrassed for her but the last thing she wanted or needed was his pity. Every atom of her being reared up in a rage at that humiliating prospect.

Eleanor Dobbs was waiting for them in the big hall. The housekeeper’s expression was grave and anxiety infiltrated Ava as the older woman extended a folded newspaper to her employer.

Vito glanced at the headline, ‘Barbieri with bro’s slayer,’ and the accompanying photographs, one of Ava at the time of the accident, the other of her by his side in London the day before. His handsome mouth compressed into a tough line while Ava peered over his arm to study the same article and turned white as the snow beginning to lie on the ground outside.

CHAPTER NINE

PRESSED into the library, Ava filched the newspaper from Vito to get a proper look at the article. She spread it out on his desk and poured over it to read every word while he remained poised by the fire to defrost, his expression forbidding and stormy.

‘This is horrible,’ she muttered in disgust.

‘It is what it is,’ Vito responded stonily. ‘The truth we can’t change. I can’t sue anyone for telling the truth but I wish I’d chosen to be more discreet in your company yesterday. What I do want to know is where they got the tip-off from. I will be questioning my staff. Nobody else knew you were here.’

The truth we can’t change. That statement rang like the crack of doom in Ava’s ears and her heart sank to the soles of her feet. It was the truth, the elephant in the room whenever they were together. Serving a prison sentence hadn’t cleared her name, rehabilitated her reputation or made her one less jot guilty as charged of reckless endangerment of Olly’s life. She stilled on that thought, cold inside and outside, her skin turning clammy. Maybe this was the real punishment for what she had done, she conceded, never ever being able to forget for longer than a moment in time.

Vito strode to the door. ‘I’ll talk to the staff.’

‘Wait … at least one other person knew I was here,’ Ava volunteered abruptly. ‘I was visiting Olly’s grave and she recognised me. I thought I’d seen her before somewhere but I didn’t know her—Katrina Orpington?’