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Lily sipped her gin, looking thoughtful. ‘That was way before my time. Must be twenty years ago now. Maybe more. Some kind of boating accident here on the lagoon if I remember rightly. It was the reason Luca came to live with him and Agnetha, of course.’
Tina’s ears pricked up. ‘He lived with Eduardo? Here?’
‘He grew up with them. Of course he lived here, although he’d already moved on by the time we married. I’m sure Eduardo told me. Let me see...’ She hesitated a while, blinking into the distance. ‘From what I remember him saying, Matteo’s family offered to take him in but because Eduardo and Agnetha had no children of their own, it was decided he should go to them.’
Tina drank in the details, holes in her knowledge filling with new information. Holes filling with even more questions.
So this had been his home then.
Where he had lived with his uncle and aunt before his aunt had died and before Lily had come along...
Was that why he seemed to resent Lily so much? Because by marrying Eduardo she had stolen his inheritance out from underneath him?
Was that the reason he was so desperate to get it back?
* * *
Where the hell was she?
Luca stood at the balcony overlooking the Grand Canal wondering where she’d disappeared to. Sure, they’d had an argument, but they had a deal. One month she’d agreed to and she’d been the one to set the term. He’d checked her wardrobe. The clothes seemed untouched, her pack still there stowed in one corner. So she hadn’t just decided to take advantage of his absence and renege on their deal.
So where the hell was she?
Sightseeing?
Or just blowing off steam?
He looked out over the canal that was the lifeblood of Venice, feeling sick to his stomach and desperately scanning the faces on every passing vaporetto, searching for a glimpse of Australian sunshine in a size-eight package. She was out there somewhere. She had to be.
But where?
* * *
It wasn’t an excuse for the way he’d behaved, Tina thought, as she hurried along the shadowed calles, even if it helped explain his actions. But it still didn’t excuse them. To go the lengths he had gone to get back a house simply because in other circumstances it might one day have been his—it made no sense.
Lamps were coming on around her. She looked up at the darkening sky, thinking that she’d stayed much longer at her mother’s than she’d intended to, so arriving back at Luca’s palazzo much later than she’d expected, the tiny horse tucked safe and sound in a stiff shopping bag Carmela had found for her.
She buzzed the bell on the gate and it clicked open, and it wasn’t Aldo who greeted her at the door, but Luca.
She swallowed. After the bitter way they’d parted earlier, she wasn’t sure how happy he’d be to see her.
And after what she’d learned about him, she wasn’t sure she knew what to say. He saved her from having to decide.
‘Have you been shopping?’ he asked, looking at the bag in her hand, and after the way they’d parted she couldn’t help but notice a tense note in his voice; couldn’t help but feel a tinge of resentment that there would be something wrong if she had gone shopping. ‘Aldo said you’ve been gone for hours.’
‘No.’ She started working herself up into righteous indignation. ‘As it happens, I’ve been helping Lily pack some things. I didn’t realise I was expected to ask for permis—’
‘You were at your mother’s the whole time?’
She blinked up at him. ‘Do I know another Lily in Venice?’
He regarded her through eyes half-shuttered, assessing. ‘You surprise me, Valentina. You constantly surprise me. You seemed so vehemently opposed to meeting with your mother.’
‘I don’t know why you should be so surprised,’ she said, hitching up her chin as she made a move to walk past him. ‘We’re practically strangers. You don’t know the first thing about me.’
‘Don’t I?’ he asked, lashing out a hand to encircle her wrist, blocking off her path with the subtle shift of his body, a body built for sex, the subtle movement enough to remind her of all the heated moves it was capable of. ‘And yet I know how to make the lights in your eyes explode like fireworks. I know how to turn you molten with one flick of my tongue. I know what you like and I’m thinking that’s probably slightly more than the first thing about you, wouldn’t you agree, Valentina?’
He was so intense. Too intense, the way his words worked in concert with his eyes, getting under her skin and worming their way into her very bones. She could scarcely breathe in his presence, so focused was his gaze upon her, the fingers wrapped around her wrist so tightly clenched.
