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I felt reckless with wine and attention, daring in a way I almost never was. I couldn’t decide if I was flirting or fighting or something in between. I was caught between caution and desire, common sense and a heady recklessness. This was so much fun—and yet it was also more than a little frightening. Matteo was a sexy, charming, devastating man...in so many ways. I couldn’t let myself forget that.
‘Ah, online...’ Matteo gave a small smile of acknowledgement. ‘Hardly an episode of cyberstalking. I simply did an internet search of your name in Kentucky, and I came upon a former address for you and your grandmother.’
‘Easy enough, I suppose.’
‘Yet it told me very little—only that you lived with your grandmother rather than with your parents.’
And yet he’d still been able to surmise so much—the loss of my family and my longing for a child, as if a baby would finally fill that yawning vacuum inside me. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t, but I didn’t know whether I liked Matteo knowing about it. Knowing about me.
I looked away, unsure how to feel about any of this. It was raw and real and nerve-racking to be so vulnerable—especially in front of a man like Matteo, who was still mostly a stranger—but in an odd way it also felt comforting, to be so known.
‘So...?’ Matteo prompted, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs out in front of him. ‘Take your time...tell me everything. I’m not going anywhere.’
He acknowledged the full intent of his words with a lazy smile. No, he wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to stay on Amanos until he got what he wanted—which was what? Me in his bed, as a proper wife, but for how long? And why?
‘There’s not much to say, really,’ I answered as I took another sip of the delicious red wine. ‘My father was never in the picture and, as I’ve told you before, my mother died in a car crash when I was eighteen months old.’
She’d been coming home at four in the morning after the graveyard shift at a local diner. A truck driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into her lane. Over in an instant—one life ended, two others changed for ever.
‘Yes, you told me that. What I didn’t say was that I’m sorry.’
I shrugged. The pain was an old wound that I knew I would always have, but it didn’t hurt so much, as long as I didn’t probe it too deeply.
‘I don’t remember my mother, and it’s hard to miss someone you never knew.’
‘Is it?’ Matteo’s dark brows drew together as he frowned, a strangely haunted look coming over his face for a moment. ‘I’m not sure. I think it can be quite easy.’
Which was an incredibly intriguing statement, but he clearly wasn’t going to offer any more, and judging by the sudden closed look drawing his chiselled features together he seemed to regret admitting that much.
‘So you and your grandmother lived alone?’ he resumed.
‘Yes.’
‘Were you close?’
I pondered the question for a moment, recalling my evenings alone while my grandmother worked a second shift, or the Saturdays we’d spent together, cleaning someone else’s house, working in grim, silent solidarity.
‘Out of necessity, I suppose. My grandmother grew up poor and worked all the hours on God’s green earth to make ends meet—and then they did, only just. She didn’t have time or energy for much more than that.’
‘For you?’
His question was just a bit too piquant. ‘I didn’t feel neglected,’ I said, a bit defensively. ‘I understood. Of course I did.’
‘Even so, you were a child.’
I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like a child. From a young age I’d seen too much of the realities of poverty and hard work and injustice, even as I’d tried desperately not to let them shape me. To keep my optimism and hope even when everything in life insisted I surrender them—white flags to the grinding war of real life.
‘I grew up quickly in some ways,’ I said after a moment.
And yet in other ways I’d remained terribly naïve, completely inexperienced when it came to certain aspects of life. All I’d known how to do was work hard, and that hadn’t been enough to make it in Manhattan. Not by a long shot.
‘So, New York...’ Matteo said, as if he’d been able to follow my silent train of thought. ‘How did you end up there?’
‘My granny developed Alzheimer’s when I was nineteen. I took care of her until she died, when I was twenty-two.’
I dismissed those three agonising years in a single sentence, and was glad to do so. Who wanted to hear about how dispiriting, how devastating, they’d been? Certainly not Matteo.
‘When she was gone I realised there wasn’t much keeping me in Briar Valley.’
