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‘And he’s sick…’ Emma probed. ‘Your father?’
‘Very.’
‘And you don’t get on?’
He gave a tight shrug and clearly it was Luca now who didn’t want to talk about it!
‘Anything else I should know?’ she pressed.
‘Nothing.’ Luca shrugged. ‘As I said, my father was the village policeman, I went to boarding school from ten…’ He saw her frown at that. ‘That is usual where I come from, as the school in the village only goes up that age. It was all pretty normal really.’
‘Till their son became a billionaire.’ Emma smiled, but then she was serious. ‘Why, Luca? Why do you hate them so—?’
‘Not Daniela,’ he interrupted. ‘And not my mother…’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s just do what we have to, smile, enjoy, familia…’ He sneered the word. ‘Let’s just get through it.’
There was a bedroom at the rear of the plane, but for the relatively short flight to Italy he just tipped back his seat and stretched out and Emma did the same. Hoping her swollen eyes had settled, she took off her glasses and lay back.
‘I love these chairs,’ Emma commented. ‘I wish I had one at home.’
She squirmed in comfort as the attendant placed a soft warmed blanket over her.
‘If I ever have to bribe you I’ll remember that.’ Then he added, ‘Are you okay?’ when it took her a second too long to smile.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Because if you’re worried about what you told me yesterday—’ he was direct as always ‘—well, you don’t have to be—I’m not in anything for the long haul, and…’ he gave a slightly wistful smile ‘…if you’ve waited this long for it to be right, I do understand.’
‘I’m not upset about that,’ Emma said, because right now she wasn’t—Luca had wanted a fling and actually so now did she. She probably wasn’t very good fling material, but she’d deal with it. It really was good to just get away.
‘Then what are you so upset about?’ They were lying flat, facing each other. ‘You look as if you’ve been crying.’
‘Not about you,’ she retorted.
‘Good,’ Luca said, and he intended to keep it that way. ‘Here.’ He dug in his pocket and pulled out a black box and handed it to her as if it were a sweet. ‘You’d better put these on—if we were going out, I would have bought you nice gifts.’
‘Goodness!’ Emma gasped and held up two earrings, the huge teardrop diamonds sparkling. ‘They look so real.’
‘They are real,’ Luca said dryly.
‘I’d better not lose them then.’ She tried to sound as casual as him, but it felt strange to be holding his gift, strange to be lying beside him and very hard not to imagine that this was…
Real.
So she thought about other things instead. Silly things—like she used to when she was a child and couldn’t sleep, not the grown-up things that she thought of now.
The steward clipped belts loosely around them and on leaving them dimmed the lights. Luca closed his eyes, but smiled when she carried on talking.
‘It’s like being in an ambulance.’
‘Have you ever been in an ambulance?’
‘No,’ Emma admitted, but that didn’t deter her. ‘I’m in a coma, but I can hear, though no one knows it, and everyone I’ve ever fancied is going to dash to my bedside and beg me not to die, and say that they love me really.’
‘What are you talking about?’ He turned his head to face her again.
‘Don’t you do that?’ Emma blinked. ‘Make up stories before you go to sleep?’
‘No.’
‘What do you do?’ she asked curiously.
‘I close my eyes…’ he shrugged ‘…and I go to sleep.’
‘Just like that?’
‘So long as there is no one talking.’
He’d wondered what to expect—if she’d be miserable, angry, but instead she was just being Emma.
He was glad that she was there.
He could feel the familiar knot of tension tighten in his stomach as the plane sliced through the sky—the same knot he felt every time he came home, the same sick dread he had felt coming home from boarding school on the holidays.
The same sick dread he had felt every night as he had lain in bed as a child.
Luca breathed out, suddenly needing to swallow, sweat beading on his forehead as he willed sleep to come.
His father was old and weak and dying, there was surely nothing to dread now.
And then he saw it.
Like a dog dashing into the street, his mind swerved to avoid it, but his father’s fist was there, slamming into his mother’s face, the image so violent, so real it was as if his father’s fist had made contact with his own.
