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Stolen his heart.
‘Well?’ Luca’s voice rose. ‘What do you want?’
Francesco looked at the two brothers. His old friends. He looked at Pepe, the man whose girlfriend he’d stolen all those years ago. He hadn’t known she was still seeing him, but he’d known damn well Pepe had been serious about her.
No wonder Pepe hated him.
He looked back at Luca. His oldest friend. A man who’d found that rare kind of love he would do anything to keep.
The rare kind of love he could have with Hannah.
Could have had if he hadn’t abandoned her on the one day she needed him.
He’d known the second she’d asked him to go to the wedding with her that she’d fallen for him.
And he, stupid fool that he was, had thrown it back in her face so cruelly, and for what?
Vengeance against a man who was already rotting in hell.
His heart beat so loudly a drum could have been in his ear.
Hannah wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t a young, suggestible girl. She was a professional woman with more backbone than anyone he knew.
More important, he wasn’t his father, something she’d known from the off.
Only two people in his entire life had looked at him and seen him, Francesco, and not just Salvatore’s son. One of those had given birth to him. The other was at that very moment bleeding with pain for her dead twin who couldn’t be there to celebrate their sister’s marriage.
What had he done?
He took a step back and raised his hands. ‘It’s yours.’ At their identical furrowed brows, he allowed the tiniest of smiles to form on his lips. ‘The casino. If you want it so badly, you can have it.’
They exchanged glances, their bodies straightening.
‘I’m serious. It’s all yours. I’ll call Godfrey and withdraw my offer.’ When he reached the door he looked straight at Pepe. ‘I was very sorry to hear about the loss of your baby.’
Pepe’s eyes flickered.
Turning back to Luca, Francesco continued, ‘Send my regards to Grace. She’s far too good for you, but I think you already know that.’
He turned the handle of the door.
‘Calvetti.’ It was Luca’s voice.
Francesco turned one last time.
‘The casino’s yours. Not ours.’
‘Sorry?’
A rueful grin spread over Luca’s face. ‘Grace and Cara were already furious at us for looking at buying a casino, and they’re just about ready to kill us for instigating a war with you. We’ve already told Godfrey to accept your offer.’
In spite of the agonies going on within him, Francesco managed a grin. ‘See? I said Grace was too good for you.’
Just as Hannah was too good for him.
He looked at his watch again. At any moment the bridal party would start their slow walk down the aisle.
‘I need to be somewhere.’
* * *
Hannah followed Melanie up the aisle, trying very hard to keep a straight face, a hard job considering the train of Melanie’s dress was streaked with grass and mud.
Beth was buried in the cemetery attached to this very church, and the pair had left the rest of the bridal party to say a few words to her and leave the bouquet by her headstone.
All those years when she’d refused to visit Beth’s grave with anyone... How selfish she’d been.
How glad she was that Melanie had found a man who put her first, who loved her enough to compensate for all the neglect she had suffered at the hands of her big sister. Not that Melanie saw it as neglect. Bless her heart, Melanie understood. It hadn’t been said, not in so many words, but it didn’t need to be.
In all the years Hannah had been grieving the loss of her twin, she had neglected to recognise there was another person in her life grieving, too—a young woman who was a part of her, just as Beth was. Sure, it wasn’t exactly the same—how could it be? But then, what two relationships were ever the same? Their parents loved them equally but the relationships between them all were different. Hannah’s relationship with them couldn’t be any more different.
She looked at her father, walking with Melanie’s arm tucked inside his. She might not be able to see his face but she could perfectly imagine the radiant smile on his face. And there was her mother, on her feet in a front pew, still a beautiful woman, looking from her beloved husband to her two surviving daughters, tears already leaking down her cheeks.
And there was the groom, his legs bouncing, his nerves and excitement palpable. When he knelt before the priest by the side of his fiancée, titters echoed throughout the church at the HE written in white on the sole of his left shoe, and the LP on the right.
