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‘Oh, come on, Nico, don’t take me for a fool. Since when did a boy from Silibri leave school at sixteen and go on to own hotels and his own helicopter?’
‘You really are good at assuming the worst, aren’t you, Aurora?’
‘What else is there to think?’ She stopped walking then and looked at him. ‘Nico, be careful.’
‘Of what?’
‘Whatever it is you’re mixed up in.’
‘You think I’m in the mafia?’ Nico said. ‘Or moving drugs?’ He loathed that she thought that of him. ‘I’m not involved in anything like that.’
‘Come off it, Nico,’ Aurora said, and tried to walk off. ‘Don’t lie to me.’
He caught her arm. ‘I’m not,’ Nico said, he was angry. ‘Please don’t take me for some corrupt mafia gangster.’
‘I don’t,’ Aurora said. ‘Or I’m trying not to.’
‘Aurora, ask and I’ll tell you—but only you.’
She stood in the rain and it still felt like a relationship. She should walk away now, not draw herself in closer to a man who would never want her completely.
She asked, ‘How?’
‘You know when I left here that I went to my grandfather’s?’
Aurora nodded. ‘On your mother’s side?’
‘Sì. They are very modest people, who never cared much for my father. They thought my mother had made a poor choice, but she ran off and married him anyway. My grandfather suggested that I cut all ties with my father, but I could not. I got a job there and I sent half my wage home to him. I knew that he was not well and could no longer work the vines—’
‘He could have,’ Aurora interrupted. ‘He chose not to.’
‘Perhaps,’ Nico conceded. ‘Anyway, I made my own way. I worked in a bar, and then I took a loan, and then I bought a small stake in the bar and put in more hours.’
‘That does not buy you a five-star hotel in Rome and three others.’
‘I don’t own four hotels, Aurora. I have stakes in them.’
She shook her head, disbelieving. No, a Sicilian woman could not be beguiled.
‘What I do own,’ Nico said, ‘is land.’
He looked to the misty grey waters and the cliffs shining from the rain.
‘This will go no further?’ he checked.
‘Of course.’
‘Even when you sit on the hill drinking wine with Antonietta?’
‘She won’t be hearing about last night, Nico.’
‘This might be a more difficult secret to keep.’
He smiled at her slight eyebrow-raise, and the fact was he wanted to tell her. Nico wanted her take on the decision he was about to make.
‘My father married my mother not for love, but for what he thought he would get.’
‘Which was…?’
