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He watched her smile fade.
‘What is it?’
‘I want to be a good mother.’ Her eyes flickered wide in dismay. Standing in front of a TV camera and confessing she was afraid she wasn’t up to it would have been only slightly less embarrassing than revealing her insecurities this way.
‘Then you will be.’
‘You really think so?’
Before Dante could respond to her equally mortifying appeal for reassurance—her tongue seemed to have developed a will of its own—an attendant appeared.
Dante watched as the male attendant predictably went red and started stuttering when he spoke to Beatrice. He looked as if he was going to faint when she smiled encouragement.
Dante spoke sharply and the guy made an obvious effort to pull himself together, though his glance did keep straying to Beatrice.
While the young man waited, he turned to Beatrice. ‘I ordered coffee and sandwiches, do you want some?’
Beatrice’s smile held a hint of teasing triumph that he didn’t understand until she turned to the young man and asked for tea and biscuits in halting but pretty good Italian.
Dante waited until the young man had vanished. ‘So, when did that happen?’
She shrugged, and tried not to look complacent. ‘I had a grounding. Even a not very good student can pick up quite a bit in ten months, so I carried on after I left. There are a lot of really great online courses available and some night classes at our local college. A second language is a useful skill.’
‘That’s a change of tune.’
‘I’m doing the lessons now out of choice, not—’
His long fingers curled around his coffee cup as he raised it. ‘You make it sound as though you were forced,’ he said, looking at her over the rim.
‘Forced? Maybe not,’ she conceded. ‘But I was definitely not consulted. Nobody asked if I wanted to have lessons.’ It was only after she’d left and she’d found herself in an Italian restaurant that she had realised how much of what she had learnt had stuck. It was actually a shock to realise that she had learnt anything at all!
‘And Maya has joined me, so we practise our conversational skills on each other…though Maya is much better than me. She’s so much quicker than I am at picking up languages.’
He made a non-committal grunt that had her hackles rising. ‘So now you don’t believe me?’ she challenged.
‘Your sister has a gift for languages, fine, if you say so.’ He put down his coffee and leaned back, planting his interlaced fingers on the tabletop.
‘I do say so.’ She fixed him with a dangerous, narrow-eyed stare. ‘Just what is your problem with my sister?’
‘I don’t have a problem…’ he began and then stopped. ‘All right, do you realise how much you sing her praises? It’s constant. Maya is brilliant, Maya is beautiful, Maya says, Maya thinks,’he bit out. ‘From what I understand Maya had all the same advantages as you but left school with virtually no qualifications, squeezed onto a degree course and then dropped out, worked for a charity, was it…? And yes…walked away…’ He could feel his antagonism building. It was always Maya’s birthday that deserved the special celebration, her crossing a road seemed to rate a hashtag, but it was Beatrice who was the powerhouse, the real talent!
‘That was because…’ Beatrice flared, then bit her lip. Maya was a private person and she respected that, even though she wanted to throw his assumptions in his face.
‘Maya quits—you are the one with the exams, the degree, the successful career. Why do you defer to her?’
She reeled back, her hands gripping the armrests, shocked by the sheer vehemence of his attack. ‘I don’t…’ She stopped, her fluttering lashes framing the realisation that dawned in her deep blue eyes as she saw how her relationship with her sister might appear to him. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
Her desire to defend her sister outweighed her reluctance to confide details. ‘I say those things…’ She cleared the constriction in her throat. Her fists clenched, but so was everything inside too. ‘I say those things, because for a long time nobody else did.’
His dark brows flattened into a line of confusion above his deep-set eyes as he shook his head. ‘You’re talking as if your sister is some sort of victim.’ The petite brunette he knew had a core of steel under the delicate exterior. She was quiet, yes, but no shrinking violet. He judged it would take a very brave man to cross her or for that matter pierce the shell under the deceptively placid exterior.
‘Not a victim, a survivor,’ she bit back fiercely. Self-pity was not one of her sister’s traits. ‘You know our father died?’ Beatrice had known then that their lives had changed, that nothing would be the same as it had been without his big warm presence, but she hadn’t known how much it would change.
He nodded, wondering where this was going.
‘And Mum made a second marriage.’
