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Had it all been a mirage? A lie? It must have been. Or perhaps she was remembering the moment differently, rose-tinted with the innocence of childhood, the longing of grief. Perhaps her father hadn’t been as doting as she remembered; perhaps he’d taken a call moments after the toast, left her alone. How could she ever know? She couldn’t even trust her memories.
‘Are you going to drink?’ Rafael asked, and Allegra blinked, startled out of her thoughts.
‘Yes, of course.’ She took a sip, and the taste was as crisp and delicious as she remembered. She blinked rapidly, wanting to clear the cobwebs of memory from her already overloaded mind. She didn’t want to get emotional in front of a near-stranger.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said when she trusted herself to sound normal. ‘What do you do?’
‘I run my own company.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘What kind of company?’
‘Property. Mainly commercial property, hotels, resorts, that sort of thing.’
He was rich, then, probably very rich. She should have guessed, based simply on his presence, his confidence. Even his cologne, with the dark, sensual notes of saffron, smelled expensive. Privileged. She’d been privileged once too, before her parents’ divorce. More privileged and even spoiled than she’d ever realised, until it had all been taken away.
Not that she’d been focused on her father’s money. Although her mother complained bitterly that after the divorce she’d got nothing, that she’d had to scrounge and beg and pawn what jewellery she’d managed to keep, Allegra hadn’t really cared about any of it. Yes, it had been a huge step down—from an enormous villa to a two-bedroom apartment too far uptown to be trendy, public school, no holidays, often living off the generosity of her mother’s occasional boyfriends, a parade of suited men who came in and out of her mother’s life, men Allegra had tried her best to avoid.
All of it had made her mother bitter and angry, but Allegra had missed her father’s love more than any riches or luxuries. And at the same time she’d become determined never to rely on anyone for love or anything else ever again. People let you down, even, especially, the people closest to you. That was a lesson she didn’t need to learn twice.
‘And you enjoy what you do?’ she asked Rafael. She felt the need to keep the conversation going, to avoid the look of blatant, sensual intent in his eyes. She wasn’t ready to follow that look and see where it led, not yet, and Rafael seemed content to simply sip and watch her with a sleepy, heavy-lidded gaze.
‘Very much so.’ He put his half-full glass on a table and moved towards the complicated and expensive-looking sound system by the marble fireplace. ‘Why don’t we listen to your music? Shostakovich, you said, the third movement of the cello sonata?’
‘Yes...’ She was touched he’d remembered. ‘But surely you don’t have it on CD?’
He laughed softly. ‘No, I’m afraid not. But the sound system is connected to the Internet.’
‘Oh, right.’ She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Like I said, I’m not good with technology.’
‘You can leave that to me. I can find it easily enough.’ And he did, for within seconds the first melancholy strains of the music were floating through the room. Rafael turned to her, one hand outstretched, just as it had been before. ‘Come.’
The music was already working its way into her soul, the soft strains winding around her, touching a place inside her no person ever accessed. Music was her friend, her father, her lover. She’d given it the place meant for people, for relationships, and she’d done that deliberately. Music didn’t hurt you. It didn’t walk away.
She took Rafael’s hand, the sorrowful emotion of the cello resonating deep within her. Rafael drew her down onto the sumptuous leather sofa, wrapping one arm around her shoulders so she was leaning into him, breathing in his scent, her body nestled against his.
It was the closest she’d ever been to a man, and yet bizarrely the intimacy felt right, a natural extension of the music, the moment, both of them silent as the cello and piano built in sound and power.
