Rival Attractions & Innocent Secretary

Except Luca noticed her anguish.

‘Time for bed…’ he announced, and there was an endless round of kissing and goodnights so that rather than being nervous of being led to his bedroom, by the time they got there she was actually relieved.

Relieved when he closed the door and it was just the two of them.

‘What’s going on, Emma?’ He meant it this time, wasn’t going to be fobbed off again, only she couldn’t tell him, just couldn’t go there with Luca—not with a man who didn’t really want to get involved with her.

And then her phone rang

‘Happy birthday, darling!’

‘Dad?’ She couldn’t believe it—she had rung the home before dinner just to say goodnight and had been told that he was resting. Not for a minute had she expected him to remember it was her birthday. ‘I couldn’t sleep, Em. They let me come to the nurse’s office and ring you…’ Not once growing up had he made a fuss of her. Everything had been dismissed with words like, ‘Oh, you’re just like your mother,’ and only now was she starting to get it, only now did she understand that maybe he had been terrified of losing her too.

‘I love you, baby girl.’ And those stars flickered brighter then as she recalled words used by him before her mother had gone, the love for her that had always been there in him but which had taken illness to help it reemerge. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘That was Dad.’ She tried to make light of it to Luca. ‘Heaven knows what the nursing home will charge for a mobile call to Italy…’

He frowned at her pale face. ‘Worth it, though?’

‘Yes.’ She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, and then put her head in her hands.

‘I found something out,’ Emma finally admitted. ‘About her.’

‘Your mother?’ And she couldn’t speak. Tears that she had always, always pushed back were trickling down her cheeks. ‘I always thought that she’d been living at home when she died, that she didn’t want to leave us.’

He knew better than to ask a question now.

‘Dad said something last night, and I asked my brother about it. It shouldn’t really matter…’ She attempted Rory’s dismissive take, only it didn’t work. ‘She walked out on us—a month before the accident. She’d gone to find herself, apparently!’ Her eyes turned to him for answers. ‘I don’t know how to feel any more—I don’t know who she was. She walked out on us….’

‘Emma, you can still mourn her, still love her. Who knows what would have happened had she lived? She could have come back, or come to get you…’

Oh, what was the point explaining it to him? Instead, she headed for the bathroom, brushed her teeth and slipped on her candy-striped pyjamas, and when she came out of the bedroom she looked so young, so vulnerable and just so lovely that for Luca there was no question.

Sex was off the agenda.

She was just too raw, too vulnerable right now. He did have some moral guidelines and to have her fall in love with him, only for him to then break it off, well, he didn’t think he could do it to her.

He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, as she climbed into bed beside him.

Every laugh, every word, every chink of glass had him on edge—hell, he hated this house at night.

What did she have to be a virgin for?

He wanted to lose himself in sex, wanted to block everything out except the smell and feel and taste of her. He could hear her crying quietly beside him; he hated tears more than anything, resisted tenderness at all costs, and yet there was no avoiding her tears, nowhere to escape to tonight.

‘Emma.’ He spoke gently into the darkness. ‘Do you want to talk?’

‘No!’ She was sick of talking, of thinking, and now she had started she couldn’t stop crying.

God, he was used to women’s tears, but usually when he was ending an affair. He chose women carefully. Yes, Emma had been a gamble, yes, he was attracted to her—to her fiery independence, to the humour, to the fire—and yet she lay beside him, suddenly fragile, and it unnerved him.

He put a hand on her shoulder—was that what he should do? He sort of patted it and she even managed a small smile at his strange attempt at comfort, realising he was exquisitely uncomfortable with her display of emotion.

So was she usually—yet tonight it came in waves, waves that had been building for nearly twenty years.

That first day of school when all the mums had stood at the gates and she had walked in with her brothers.

Her first period, when it had been the school nurse that had explained this terrible thing that had happened and had told her too late that it was all completely normal.