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‘Soon.’
‘Now,’ Nico said, and stood so she slid off his lap.
He went towards the bathroom and she followed, but he closed the bathroom door in her face.
She stood there with the thick wood between them.
Geo was dead.
Panic thudded in her chest.
She opened the drapes, and although Rome looked the same, as she turned naked from the French windows the bedroom did not. There were rumpled sheets and discarded clothes and the scent of sex in the air.
Aurora saw the chaos she’d brought to him.
He had returned to this.
She dressed. It seemed wrong to be pulling on a red dress when Geo was dead, but she had a black one back at the hotel she could change into.
Aurora wanted to help, and so she thought about what Marianna would do—she would pack, of course, except Nico had not even unpacked.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked as he came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist to the sight of Aurora going through his wardrobe.
‘Finding a black suit…’
‘I can manage.’
‘And a black tie…’
‘Aurora, go back to work—get on with your job.’
‘Work?’ She swung around and looked at him aghast. ‘How selfish of you! Do you really think we can all carry on working now? We have lost someone too.’
‘Cut me some slack, Aurora. I’m not thinking straight.’
He was hanging on by his fingernails even as she turned away in that red dress with tears streaming down her face. It dizzied his mind.
Where the hell was the calm wife from their game? The one who’d pour him a drink and leave him to spend these first moments on earth without his father alone.
Where was the demure woman who would accept his silence and lack of outward grief?
He would like to take Aurora back to bed, right now. To close the drapes and to weep.
‘Oh, Nico…’
She was crying again and, frankly, he would have liked to join her.
‘Aurora, go back to the hotel. I am going to make some phone calls and then I will be flying back to Silibri.’
‘I’ll go and pack.’ Aurora nodded. Now her phone was ringing. She saw that it was Pino, but did not answer. ‘They will all have heard and be wondering what to do.’ She looked from her phone to Nico. ‘Shall I meet you back at the hotel?’
‘Sorry?’ He really was not thinking straight. ‘Why?’
‘Nico, we will be returning to Silibri with you, of course.’
‘Aurora, what you guys do is up to you—but I need to get back now.’
‘So do we scramble to get a flight and thecuccettewhile you fly in your big plush helicopter alone?’
