No, best not go there.
He slewed his mind away, thought back to his visit to Matteo.
His words came back to Luca.
‘I must make the most of the time I have left to me. You understand that, don’t you, my boy? With my dear Luisa gone before me, she will not mind.’
He frowned. He hadn’t known what Matteo was talking about, but it hadn’t taken long in Matteo’s company for him to understand that it was not just his body that was being assailed by the cancer. It was assailing his mind as well. Or more likely, he acknowledged, it was the strong drugs he was on. He wascoherent, yes, but he was not the old Matteo. He was…frailer. In mind as well as body.
Troubled, saddened, he drove on. He would visit again soon. His eyes shadowed. After all, he too must make the most of this limited and fast-passing time he had with Matteo. For it would not last.
* * *
Bianca, smartly dressed as she always was these days, had taken the afternoon off work and now sat in front of a wide, leather tooled desk in a panelled room in a handsome brick terraced Georgian house in the Inns of Court. The offices of the firm of solicitors who had so mysteriously contacted her.
The elderly solicitor—a senior partner, or so she’d been given to understand—looked across at her, steepling his fingers.
‘Tell me, Miss Mason, how much do you know about your father’s family?’
Bianca stared.
‘Myfather?’
She took a breath and looked the solicitor squarely in the eye. Her old life—the one she’d walked away from because it had been as toxic as the man who’d been the cause of her walking away—was colliding with her new one.
‘I don’t even know who he was,’ she said. ‘My mother died when I was very young and I was raised by my aunt, who never talked of such matters.’
That was not strictly true. Her aunt—her mother’s sour, unmarried half-sister—had never flinched from informing Bianca that she should count herself lucky she wasn’t in a care home, that she was nothing but a burden, and that her mother had slept around since she was a teenager. Bianca hadn’tbelieved her, because some of the neighbours who remembered her mother—who had known her before she had been fatally knocked down by a car—had told her that, yes, the boys had always been keen on her, because she’d been so pretty, with her fair hair and blue eyes, but she should not believe what her aunt said about her because she was bitter and jealous.
‘And she’s collecting your childcare benefits—don’t you forget that, lovey!’they’d added.
Bianca was pretty sure that without that her aunt would have put into care without a qualm. As it was, her childhood had not been a walk in the park. She had been endlessly criticised by her carping aunt, endlessly complained about, endlessly warned that she’d come to no good, like her mother…
Maybe that’s why I grew up so rebellious, not bothering with school, always wanting something better for myself than a council flat on a run-down estate in the East End.
Had that been what had made her so eager to snap up what Luca had offered her?
Oh, she’d been hit on by males since she was a teenager—but she was as picky as she was choosy, and no way was she going to give her aunt any opportunity to repeat her slurs on her mother about herself. But when Luca had walked into that upmarket bar in Canary Wharf full of Hooray Henries, looking tall, cool, drop-dead gorgeous and totally lethal, every other man in the world had simply…disappeared.
The solicitor’s voice cut across her memories. Memories that did her no good…
‘Your mother was Shona Mason?’ he put to her.
He added the dates of her birth and death. Not a long span of time, Bianca thought sadly. Not even thirty…
She nodded.
The solicitor consulted the papers on his desk.
‘Then I have something to tell you that may be of interest to you,’ he said.
Bianca looked at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
The solicitor told her.
CHAPTER TWO
THEPLANEWAScoming in to land. Bianca’s gaze went out through the porthole to the approaching land. Italy. A country she’d never been to. Never been invited to. Not by Luca. She felt the familiar lick of acid on her skin. It had come to her repeatedly since she’d walked, dazed and disbelieving, out of the solicitor’s office three days ago. Two worlds were colliding. The world she’d made for herself, taking six years to do it. And the world she’d come from.
