‘We shall see.’ Matteo shrugged. ‘Why else would she lie and make out that she is wealthy?’
‘Perhaps she needed to feel some pride to look an ex-lover in the eye and ask for help,’ Bella said from behind her dark glasses.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘whatever game Sophie is playing, if what she was wearing last night was one of the dresses you made, then your work is amazing.’
‘It would take just one beautiful woman to make the headlines wearing one of my gowns.’ A smile finally came to her face. ‘Perhaps you could ask Shandy to wear one at one of the functions you attend...’
‘I don’t think so.’ Matteo’s own smile was wry. The waiter came and Bella glanced through the menu as he ordered a panino.
‘Brioche with a side of pistachio and cherry gelato,’ she said.
‘That sounds a lot like home,’ he commented.
‘I don’t eat out a lot,’ Bella said. ‘And so, when I do, I want something that I know for sure I’ll like.’
Her words hit him between the legs. She could make the water the waiter was pouring a reference to sex, he thought as Bella excused herself and walked into the restaurant.
There was no need to be shy now. As Matteo Santini’s breakfast date, the door was held open.
A machine in the wall offered various solutions and normally Bella wouldn’t even deign to give it a glance.
Today wasn’t a normal day, though, and so she fed some coins in.
Some splurge, Bella thought as half a milligram of lip gloss was delivered to her palm.
She painted her mouth, she rearranged her top, she tried to breathe through the images that her mind kept delivering.
Their first kiss, their one dance.
She took her time but felt better for it and as she walked back out the waiter was already returning with her order.
Matteo could have kicked himself for bringing her here. He could see a group of women look down at her shoes and then whisper something.
All he had thought since their eyes had met this morning was how amazing she looked. Now, thanks to others, he could see that her little black skirt was a little faded, that her shoes were scuffed and that her amazing black hair was split and could use a good cut. It had never been his intention to place her under public scrutiny and yet he had done just that.
Here, looks mattered, clothes mattered, down to the bag you carried and the sunglasses you wore.
She thanked the waiter as she sat down and he wished he could take her hand and tell her not a scrap of it mattered to him. She, above everyone he knew, must know his thoughts on all that.
Because that long-ago night he had told her.
Bella slit the bread open and scooped the gelato into it and closed her eyes as she took a bite, and when she saw Matteo watching her she sliced her bread into two and handed him half and they spoke a little of Bordo Del Cielo.
‘I hear it is busy now, that the tourists come to the hotel,’ Bella said. ‘Too many of them apparently, though the people are much happier now that Malvolio is dead.’
‘We will see for ourselves at the weekend,’ Matteo responded, and he watched as the bread paused by her mouth.
Bella didn’t even attempt a bite. Instead, she put the food down. ‘What do you mean—we’ll see for ourselves at the weekend?’
‘Sophie hasn’t spoken to you yet?’ Matteo checked.
‘No.’
‘I got a phone call this morning. She and Luka have booked their wedding for Sunday and I am to be the best man. I have heard that Sophie shall ask you to be bridesmaid.’
‘I’m working,’ Bella said quickly, her mind dancing with the news. Luka had been adamant that he would never marry Sophie and she wanted to hear from her friend exactly what was going on.
‘No,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re not working, remember.’
‘Is that why you said I couldn’t start back till Monday?’
Any hope that he wanted her there, that he had somehow arranged things so that she might be in Bordo Del Cielo for the wedding, were immediately removed by a rather adamant shake of his head.
‘I heard about the wedding after I spoke with your manager.’
‘So your efforts to keep me from Shandy will be in vain.’ Bella gave a hollow laugh. ‘She’ll get a surprise when she sees me at the wedding. Perhaps she will throw a bucket of water over us when we dance...’
Matteo didn’t correct Bella and tell her that Shandy wouldn’t be there. Instead, he outlined how it would be. ‘Ah, but we will be behaving,’ Matteo said, while knowing it was close to an impossible task.
He wondered if he should tell her not to worry about a dance that would possibly kill them both but he chose to leave it to Sophie to tell her that the wedding would not be going ahead.
They sat silent for a moment and then, aching to see her, Matteo reached over and took off the dark glasses that hid her eyes.
Bella let him.
‘You look tired,’ he commented.
‘Because I am tired,’ she said. ‘And I am uncomfortable here too. People keep looking at us.’
Matteo said nothing, he couldn’t deny that people were.
‘I don’t like the scrutiny,’ she said.
Matteo called for the bill.
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.’