AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Of course,” he conceded, fully aware he was asking her to enter into idle gossip now. “What of her husband?”
Agnes pressed the mop into the stainless steel bucket then took great pains to wring her hands on the soft linen of her apron. “Such a sad story. Lord Sanderson. Alastair was his name. A kind man. I met him myself a few times.”
“Was?”
“Sir?”
“You said it was his name?” Antonio probed impatiently.
Agnes tutted wistfully. “Yes. I suppose he would have passed several years ago now. Amazing how that time has gone.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes. Cancer. Dreadful sudden, it was. His poor parents were so heartbroken they couldn’t stay in the area. They moved
to the Lakes just afterwards.”
Antonio focussed on a point in the wall behind Agnes’s bony shoulder. An odd sensation, something akin to remorse, frothed in his gut. He’d thought she was just a bored society wife, and he’d been wrong. For one thing, she was no longer married. Which meant she was available.
He made a sound of angry frustration, at his own insensitive desire for the woman. How had he gone from hearing she had been widowed to deciding that made her available in the space of three seconds flat? Had he no morals? Apparently not.
With a short nod of dismissal, he moved back into his office and closed the door, so that he didn’t hear Agnes ask if she should continue mopping the floor or not.
Antonio hadn’t felt like himself since learning of his mother’s deceit.
His reaction to Elizabeth was just another example of how off-base he was at the moment.
There was only one course of action to clear his mind.
He needed to open his Ferrari up on the track.
But even the feel of the powerful beast of an engine throttling beneath him, moments later, didn’t shake the strange sense of regret at having been so quick to judge the woman. He revved the car, as always feeling a spike of heavenly adrenalin as it tore through a corner and wound around the inside leg of the custom designed course. The engine sounded like a hungry lion on the prowl as he sped past the starting line and began the second lap.
It was a passion that should have become a career. But his father, or the man he had believed to be his father, had staunchly disapproved. While Antonio didn’t cow tow to many, he had always sought Umberto’s approval, and actively run from his disapproval. So he’d agreed to keep the pursuit as a part-time hobby. But it was his life’s passion, and it wasn’t a conceit to admit that he could have become a champion, had he pursued it fully.
Instead, he’d bought a team, and contented himself with the business machinations of a racing group, instead of the actual victory on the track.
Days later, when the gnawing sense of regret hadn’t eased, he ran his fingers over the business card she’d given him. It was a flatter rectangle than most, lending it an elegance that was appropriate for a woman such as Elizabeth Sanderson. The card itself was a good quality cream, recycled, he’d guess, with silver and turquoise print. There was something beautiful about the card, though he wondered if it was simply that it reminded him of her.
He punched her number into his phone, hard, then switched the speaker phone on and reclined in his chair. To an onlooker, he seemed relaxed and nonchalant, but there was an odd sense of excitement inside of him. It forced him to acknowledge, to himself at least, that he wanted her. Really wanted her.
