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‘Annah with an “h”,’ she’d said, smiling at him over the frothy rim of her hot chocolate.
He’d misunderstood. ‘Hannah?’
She’d laughed, shaking her head, then spelt it for him.
Luca thrust aside the memory and focused on the certificate. The father was listed as unknown. The kid’s birth date was October the thirty-first in the year—
He froze.
‘Signor Cavallari?’
He looked at Victor but didn’t see him. In his head, he swiftly calculated the number of months and weeks between February the seventeenth and October the thirty-first.
Victor spoke again, but the sudden rush of blood in Luca’s ears and the loud rasp of his breathing drowned out the older man’s words.
Wrong.
He had it all wrong.
The boy wasn’t Luca’s half-brother; he was his son.
* * *
‘Oh, don’t you dare,’ Annah muttered, throwing down her shears and lunging for the spool of silver ribbon rolling across her worktop.
She was fast, but the renegade ribbon was faster. Before her outstretched fingers could reach it, the reel had gathered momentum and shot off the counter.
Annah groaned, listened to the clatter of the cylinder hitting the floor, and imagined the hideously expensive organza ribbon unravelling beneath her workbench.
Excellent.
She pulled a face at the bunch of purple tulips in her hand. ‘Sorry, you lot. I’m afraid you’ll have to hang tight.’ She set the flowers on the bench and crouched down to search the floor.
No trail of ribbon.
No reel in sight, either.
Puffing a strand of hair out of her face, she got to her hands and knees and crawled beneath her work space.
Please don’t let a customer walk in right now.
She loved customers. Who didn’t when you ran your own business? But with Chloe—her friend and co-owner of their floral studio—in London visiting a sick friend, Annah was operating alone and stretched to capacity.
r /> She stuck her hand in a gap between some boxes of coloured binding wires stacked against the wall. ‘There you are,’ she said, closing her fingers around the spool—just as the vintage shopkeeper’s bell over the front door of the studio jangled.
Blast.
Hoping to see the scrawny bare legs of her delivery man, she peeped under the front of the counter.
Nope. Not Brian’s legs. He didn’t wear dark tailored trousers and expensive-looking leather shoes. Handmade shoes, by the look of them.
Her walk-in wasn’t a local, then. The men who lived in and around the small rural village of Hollyfield in South Devon typically wore wellies or work boots, not the kind of shoes that wouldn’t survive a muddy field or a half-decent snowfall.
‘I’ll be right with you,’ she called, backing out of the crawl space.
‘Please, do not rush on my account,’ replied a deep masculine voice.
An accented voice.
