‘So why did you?’
‘A long story to be shared over a long lunch.’ He stretched his neck and pointed across the piazza. ‘That trattoria over there, next to that hotel, makes some of the best pasta in Rome. Shall we?’
‘Sure.’ She let him help her up and let him keep hold of her hand as they crossed the piazza to the trattoria that had been a staple of this district for the whole of Domenico’s life.
‘Was it because of your father that you chose law?’ Marnie asked as they walked.
‘For sure… Although there was a time when I wanted to be a professional footballer like pretty much every Italian boy grows up dreaming of being.’
She smiled. ‘It was the same where I lived. All the boys wanted to be footballers.’
‘And you? What did you want to be?’
She shrugged. ‘I never had any career aspirations.’
Having reached the trattoria, he let that go. But only for now. ‘Inside or outside?’
She tilted her face to the blue sky. ‘Outside.’
The outside space being cordoned off, they settled at a corner table where fresh water was poured for them and the day’s specials reeled off by the welcoming waiter.
Their orders taken, olives and breadsticks placed between them, Domenico relaxed back into his seat. Marnie’s stare, he noted, was flickering all around her in every direction but at him.
He liked the dress she was wearing. The colour of autumn leaves, it was short-sleeved with a smart collar and buttons running its length. There was an unfussy simplicity to its design that perfectly suited the unfussy simplicity of the woman wearing it. But even the most seemingly simple things had hidden depths, and Marnie was one of the most potent cases of still water running deep that he’d ever known.
‘So, my story for leaving Rome…’
Her stare snapped to him. Her eyes were now a deep blue. That morning, when they’d woken, they’d been a dark grey.
Dio, a man could lose himself in those eyes, whatever colour they happened to be shining.
‘By the time I graduated, my father was in his eighties and getting frailer by the day. He should have retired years earlier, but he’d been looking forward to me joining him. You have to understand, he was too old to be the kind of father my friends had. He had a heart condition and was riddled with arthritis, so he couldn’t play football with me or do the other physical stuff fathers do with their sons, and he felt great guilt for that. For him, us working together was the father-son thing he’d spent my life longing for, and it’s to my eternal sorrow that he became too ill and frail for it to last. He held on until I qualified and became a full partner in Cannavaro Law, and then he slipped away in his sleep.’
The blue eyes widened in sympathy.
He took a deep breath. ‘Two weeks after we buried him, my wife left me for my best friend.’
The wide eyes held steady. She obviously knew that part of it.
‘Carmela would tell you she was a victim of my neglect. That is a way to spin it that I don’t disagree with, but my neglect was never intentional, and given time, would have righted itself. I didn’t set out to be a workaholic, but between my studies and my father’s increased frailty, which meant I was doing as much of his work as my own, I didn’t have the time to devote to her. She is very temperamental and wanted to be the centre of my world and refused to accept that my father needed me too. She punished me by having an affair with Davide.’
Her eyes clouded, compassion mingling with the sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t imagine anything crueller.’
‘Neither could I.’ He dipped a breadstick in the balsamic vinegar. ‘My father’s death had destroyed me. I knew it was coming, but even so…’ He grimaced.
‘But it was still a sucker punch,’ she supplied softly. At his questioning stare, she lifted her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter if you know it’s coming; nothing prepares you for losing a parent.’
The weight that seemed to have taken permanent residence in Domenico’s chest pushed tighter against his ribs.
He knew Marnie’s mother had died before she started working for him and that her father wasn’t on the scene. He couldn’t remember how he knew about her father other than it was the kind of thing you picked up on when you spent as much time with someone as he had with her, but he knew about her mother because the first Christmas she’d worked for him he’d overheard one of the other staff asking something—he couldn’t remember what—Christmas related. What he’d never forgotten was Marnie’s quiet reply of, ‘My mum died some time ago.’
While he’d never forgotten those words, he’d never dwelled on them either, and when six years later he’d asked about close family she wanted to invite to their wedding, he’d accepted her, ‘There isn’t anyone,’ without pursuing it. She was such a dedicated worker that if he hadn’t known she’d been born by humans, he’d have considered it perfectly plausible that Marnie was born through a cloning technique specially designed to produce the perfect assistant for him. It sat increasingly uncomfortably in him that this was how he’d seen her and treated her.
All these years, first in work and then in marriage, he’d acted as if Marnie had been put on this earth specially for him. He’d never allowed himself to think of her as fully human in her own right. As fully woman.
But she was a human, and she was all woman. A startlingly pretty woman whose beauty grew the more you looked at her, and the more he looked at her now, the harder his heart pounded painfully and guilt curdled like acid in his guts as the magnitude of his attitude towards her made itself clear to him.
This beautiful woman hadn’t been beamed into his life from a laboratory but had lived a life he’d never cared to learn about because he was a selfish, narcissistic bastard who hadn’t wanted to see her as the flesh and blood woman she was. He’d been so intent on protecting his heart from further hurt that he hadn’t wanted to see that Marnie had a heart that also needed protecting. And cherishing.
