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‘Can’t you give me even the smallest victory, Nico?’
He couldn’t.
Instead he sat on the edge of the bed and checked his damned phone.
What was she supposed to do? Get showered and dressed and head back to work?
Sit in her hotel room biting her nails and wondering if Nico would take her out on her last night in Rome?
She was far too easy where Nico was concerned. The sum total of their dating history was having a drink together.
‘Nico,’ she said. ‘Tonight, I would like—’
‘Aurora, stop.’
Just stop.
He looked at the endless missed calls and the frantic texts, and knew that if he had been able to choose he really would have preferred to be alone for this moment.
‘Pronto?’ he said into his phone.
Aurora heard for the first time a slight shake in his strong voice as Nico asked when. And if anyone had been with him. And if his father had been in pain when he passed.
She started to cry.
When he’d ended the call Nico did not speak. Aurora went up on her knees and pressed herself into his back, wrapping her arms around him and crying and kissing his neck. Not in a sensual way. This time she was the tender one. But though she held him, it was Aurora who shed the tears.
Nico did not know how to.
‘Your mother took him lunch,’ Nico said. ‘Then called for the doctor to come quickly. It was peaceful, the doctor said.’
She moved around him so she sat facing him, on his lap, her legs wrapped around his body. She tried to read his face, to measure his pain, but it was blank.
‘I shouldn’t have come away this week,’ Aurora cried. ‘I knew he was weak…’
Her tears were genuine, for she had both loved and hated the old bastard. Loved his wit and his humour and his proud ways. Hated that his hands had put bruises on her beautiful Nico, and she detested the insults that had been hurled from his mouth.
‘I need to get back,’ Nico said.
He prised himself out of her arms, but they sprang back.
‘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.
