Chapter Fourteen
Jade, still wrapped in a thin robe, released the tongs from her hair. She’d created some loose, natural-looking waves at the front and after running her fingers through the strands to tease them into place, she chose the sparkly forget-me-not flower earrings she’d treated herself to with her last pay check from her job in London. She and Celeste had joked back then that it might be a while before they could afford to splurge again and so it had been a last hurrah, buying herself some decent jewellery.
Since Dario turned up Jade had spent the majority of her time in a daze, her sister holding the fort at the bakery as much as possible because even when Jade was there, her head was not. She’d made up a couple of customer orders wrong, she’d iced a batch of cupcakes for a christening with pale blue icing rather than pale yellow so they had to do the entire lot again, and she’d messed up a tray of jam doughnuts by dropping them all over the floor. Celeste had sent her home for an hour that day, told her to get it together before she came back.
Jade had tried to get a balance between giving herself time to think and spending time with the man who’d come all this way to see her. She and Dario had walked along the beach beyond the Cove together, somewhere they weren’t likely to bump into so many people. They’d headed into Cambridge for a few hours another day so he could see the sights and she could have a chance to breathe rather than focus on him and her and where they went to from here. All the while Dario had made his feelings abundantly clear, especially on the beach one day when he’d told her in no uncertain terms that he was here to convince her to try again.
They passed a young boy that day, standing on the sands to fly his kite, its sails lapping in the wind, its strings getting in a tangle. ‘You say you want me back,’ Jade told Dario, trying but failing to hook her hair behind her ear – the wind had other ideas – ‘but you’re forgetting we’re still faced with the same dilemma. My life is here, yours is there.’
He put a hand against her cheek and she let herself feel the warmth from his skin as the pad of his thumb gently moved near her bottom lip. ‘Everything you say is true. But if you won’t leave here, I will come to you.’
‘You’d move to England? For me?’
‘Si.’ He kissed her on the forehead and her eyes closed. It was as though he didn’t want to chance kissing her lips in case it made her say words he didn’t want to hear. He murmured in Italian, ‘I love you. I would do anything for you,’ his face so close to hers now that she could barely breathe.
‘But your restaurant, your family –’
‘They know how I feel about you.’
‘And I know how you feel about them and the restaurant. It was never an option for you to move here before – what’s changed?’
‘Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe I’m missing something.’
‘I have to go. I need to get back to the bakery.’ She couldn’t do this. It was too much, and too late.
She’d headed back to the bakery then but he’d begged her to talk for longer and so they’d walked around the bend to the Heritage Inn, where he was staying.
‘Please come inside,’ he said. ‘We can talk properly without anyone watching us.’ They’d already paused their conversation when Tracy emerged from the inside to water the hanging baskets and the flowers in the huge terracotta pot by the entrance.
‘We could go in the garden,’ she suggested instead and he seemed happy with that.
Going through the inn and out the back, via the kitchen to pick up a jug of water, they took the table at the far end of the garden where they were unlikely to be disturbed.
Dario poured two glasses of water and wasted no time asking, ‘Did you think about me much over the last few days?’
She began to laugh. ‘Dario, you’re all I’ve thought about. As well as cakes, bread, biscuits…although Celeste might well fire me from my own bakery if I don’t get my act together.’ At his look of confusion, she swished away the unspoken need for explanation; they weren’t here for idle chitchat and she needed to remember that.
He was sitting opposite her but his legs were long enough that their knees almost touched beneath the bistro table. He reached for her hands and she set down her glass, let him hold them, as though the closer the contact now, the more it might tell her what to do. ‘Remember how we said we wouldn’t forget one another.’ He repeated the phrase in Italian. The other language, the different time in her life he represented, only added to her confusion.
‘I think we were too wrapped up in each other back then to see the practicalities. It was all so romantic.’
‘And it still could be.’
‘You’re a wonderful man. I was so in love with you when I was in Venice, then for a long time afterwards. I wanted a future with you – you were everything I was looking for.’
‘You don’t want that anymore?’ He looked down briefly and up again, his ebony eyelashes casting a shadow on his upper cheek-bones the same way they had when she’d watched him sleep in the morning sunshine filtering through the window of his apartment in Venice.
‘Too much has happened between then and now.’ She’d been debating it for days. ‘It would be easy for me to say yes to being with you, but how do I know you won’t long for Venice and move back?’ She held up a hand before he could speak. ‘You might think you won’t but I know you, remember. I know your passion for the restaurant, for your home country, your little apartment with its unique position close to the Bridge of Sighs.’ Even to herself it sounded like a dream. ‘I would never want to be the person who took all that away from you.’
‘And I know I couldn’t take you away from this.’ He waved a hand around, meaning the village rather than the garden at the back of the inn with its pretty blooms in an array of colours from the yellow of the sun to the blue of the sky and rich purples you might find against whitewashed houses in Greece.
She shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t have come.’ She couldn’t help but let a little bit of resentment seep into her words. He’d made everything complicated again, just when she was starting to see clearly for the first time.
‘Is there someone else?’
‘No, nobody else.’ She shook her head. There wasn’t, but there was the thought of someone else. She liked Linc, more than she should. Nothing would happen if she wanted to go ahead with having a baby, but she was strangely OK with that. What she wasn’t OK with was saying yes to all of Dario’s dreams because it was the easy option. And, she had a feeling, their different worlds would always keep them apart even in a small way until the one who had compromised and moved to another country began to resent what they’d given up.
‘You seem settled, Jade. You have what you want. But you don’t have everything. Love is important, the most important thing of all.’
