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‘Then say nothing.’
‘That’s what you want?’ Dante checked. ‘Because that I can easily do. I’m more than happy to tell them it’s none of their business. I don’t need the board’s approval.’
‘They’re your family, though.’
Dante sighed.
Didn’t he just know it.
‘I should never have agreed to work with family. I knew it was a mistake to take it on. Hell, if Luigi hadn’t been my uncle when I found him gambling profits away I’d have fired him on the spot.’ He told her about his uncle’s penchant for casinos. ‘And bloody Ariana does nothing other than spend, spend, spend...’ He ticked them all off one by one, the work-shy cousins, the aunt who spent more time drinking the wine than selling it, the scandals and hidden affairs that further served to prove his point: marriage was completely pointless. ‘Yet, because I don’t hide my behaviour, they think it gives them licence to judge...’
‘Did your father?’
‘No.’ Dante gave a soft, regretful laugh, missing him. ‘He always had my back. I thought he knew I would always have his.’
‘He did know that.’
‘Then why couldn’t he tell me he was gay?’
Finding Mia so upset last night had blown the question straight out of his head. Then the bliss of sex had again chased it away, but he had lain the rest of the night, asking and asking himself why his father hadn’t told him.
‘I think he wanted to, Dante. In fact, I’m quite sure if he hadn’t become ill, he’d been about to come out, despite—’ She stopped herself.
Dante, though, finished what she’d been about to say. ‘Despite my mother’s wishes.’
Mia said nothing, blood being thicker than water and all that.
‘Mia,’ Dante said, in a rare admission, ‘I need your take on this.’
‘Yes,’ Mia reluctantly said. ‘I think he would have come out, despite your mother’s wishes, though we’re not all like you, Dante. We don’t all just shrug and carry on when our sex life gets hauled before an extraordinary general meeting.’
‘I guess.’
They spoke some more about his father and Roberto as they left Luctano far behind.
‘Was the orchid from him?’ Dante asked.
‘Yes, I collected it from Roberto on my ride that morning.’
‘Poor Roberto,’ Dante said.
‘Yes,’ Mia agreed, ‘but as I said to him, he got to spend fifteen years with the love of his life and there’s nothing poor about that.’
They chatted some more about his father and Roberto but inevitably the conversation turned back to them and the situation that Mia could not face. She didn’t want the slurs in the papers to be read by their child, and how Dante dealt with today would greatly affect that.
‘Dante, what are we going to do? If they find out about the baby the papers are going to be merciless.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well, I do. I hate how they keep saying that I’m your step—’
She could not even say it.
‘You know,’ Dante said, ‘I am quite sure you could get your marriage annulled.’ It was one of the many possibilities he was considering. An annulment would void the marriage and tell the world that it had all been a sham so that Mia would no longer be his stepmother.
‘I probably could,’ Mia agreed. ‘But I would never do that to your father and neither would you.’
‘No,’ Dante said. ‘It was just a thought.’
