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‘I should be angry with you,’ he said slowly. ‘For letting precious time elapse after she left the castle.’
Angie seized on the one positive word in his statement. ‘Should be?’ she questioned.
He gave a ragged sigh. ‘But I thought about what you’d said—about Floriana needing to make her own mistakes—and realised that Romano and I might have taken our roles as surrogate father just a little too far.’
‘You’ve found her?’ she demanded.
‘Yes. She’s in England.’ His mouth quirked in an odd kind of smile. ‘She is getting married after all.’
‘Married? But…but…how?’ Angie frowned at him in confusion. ‘She told me she didn’t love Aldo—and I believed her.’
‘It isn’t Aldo.’
‘What?’
‘She is planning on marrying the Englishman—Max—the one she was involved with all those years ago. It seemed that back then he did what he thought was the decent thing by ending it, having decided they were both too young. But it seemed that the very possibility of her marrying another man was enough to bring him to his knees and back into her life—and for Floriana to realise what it was she really wanted.’
Angie stared at him cautiously. ‘And how have your family taken it?’
Riccardo shrugged. ‘The reaction, as you can imagine—has been mixed.’
All he knew was that his sister was ecstatic, his brother and Aldo were livid and his mother was—oddly—quietly contented. She had pointedly told him and Romano that love was the only reason why a couple should marry! Something which had startled Riccardo out of his complacency zone. And here he had been—all these years—labouring under the illusion that, just because his own father had been two decades older, his parents had simply worked hard at a marriage of convenience. It seemed that he had been very wrong indeed.
‘I’m very pleased that it’s all worked out so well for her,’ said Angie.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. No one should enter a marriage with that degree of dread,’ she said quietly, and then started coughing.
Black eyes narrowed as they scanned her face and he noticed that her nose was red, in contrast to the almost translucent paleness of her skin. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m all right. I’ve just got a…a…ah-ah-shoo!’
He frowned. ‘You shouldn’t be at work.’
‘It’s only a cold.’
‘You shouldn’t be at work,’ he repeated obdurately.
Her eyes met his in a mocking challenge. ‘I thought that absenting myself from your office wasn’t an option, Riccardo. I thought I was to work out every second of my notice or risk legal action. I thought—’
‘Angie,’ he cut into her words roughly. ‘I said those things in anger and when I had time to think about them, I realised I shouldn’t have done. In fact, I realised a lot of things, the main one being that I don’t want you to leave.’
Wasn’t it ironic how words you once would have taken to your heart and cherished could no longer have the power to thrill you when they were spoken too late? Life, thought Angie bitterly, was all a question of timing.
‘I was unreasonable,’ he continued, when still she didn’t speak.
From somewhere Angie mustered up a smile. ‘So no change there.’
‘Can we forget it ever happened?’
She looked at him. For a highly intelligent man he could be so dense. Or maybe it was just that innate arrogance of his, which he sensed would always carry him through. He just didn’t realise, did he? ‘We can try,’ she said gamely.
Riccardo slanted her a slow smile. ‘So you’ll stay, after all?’
There was a pause. Once she would have been unable to resist the power of that look. ‘Riccardo, I can’t do that.’
Suddenly, the smile left him. ‘Why not?’
