‘All for you?’
‘All for me,’ he agreed, with the ghost of a smile. ‘I like my personal space.’
‘Yet you live in a city?’
‘Oh, believe me.’ His eyes glittered. ‘It’s easy to be anonymous in a city.’
‘Okay, I get it, Vito. I’ll try not to impinge on your personal spacetoomuch.’
‘Good.’
She insisted on him giving her ‘the tour’ because she wanted to see it through his eyes as well as to get her bearings and, although he seemed somewhat taken aback by her request, he complied, taking her through room after glamorous room. But Flora couldn’t help thinking that Vito’s apartment looked more like pictures from a glossy magazine, than a place where real people lived. The ceilings were high and the decor achingly modern. Spectacular chandeliers glittered their light onto large velvet sofas and sumptuous drapes framed the cityscape, but the atmosphere felt almostantiseptic. As if he’d given a very expensive interior designer carte blanche to do as they pleased. Only his study provided a glimpse of the man behind the shiny patina of success, although initially he tried to steer her past it.
‘You’re saying it’s out of bounds?’ she dared to tease.
‘No, I’m not saying that at all,’ he growled reluctantly, throwing open the door for her to step inside.
Flora prowled around the room with interest, studying the various industry awards which littered his desk. The statuette which proclaimed him a clean-energy titan. A framed front cover ofTimemagazine on the wall, with his coldly beautiful face regarding the camera with more than a little mocking defiance. Behind his desk was a photo of a much younger Vito in the University of Bologna football team and a framed MBA from Harvard.
‘I didn’t know you’d been to America,’ she observed.
‘That’s where I started my tech business.’ His ice-blue eyes were hooded and he nodded as he registered her surprise. ‘I was successful in my own right, long before my father died. I bought this place with my own money,’ he added brusquely, as if this mattered.
‘Right,’ said Flora, absorbing this piece of information as she scanned the contents of his bookshelves and there, pushed into the background and almost swallowed up by the volume of books surrounding them, were some photos.
Three photos, to be precise. Flora bent down to peer at the first. A man of around seventy—his lined and handsome face so like Vito’s own. Next to it was a portrait of a beautiful woman in her prime—her shoulders bare, with just the hint of white fur beneath and, wrapped around her slender neck, was a collar of sparkling aquamarines which matched her ice-blue eyes exactly.
‘Your mum and dad?’ Flora verified.
‘Si,’ he agreed brusquely. ‘Come, Flora. That’s enough. I have a busy schedule.’
‘In a minute.’ Refusing to be rushed, she bent to study the final photo of a man younger than Vito but just as beautiful, though his eyes were dark, not blue. Yet this wasn’t a happy snap, she thought suddenly. His face was bleak and unsmiling, his hair untidily long and there was something awfullyemptyabout his eyes. ‘Is this your brother?’
‘Si.’
She’d noticed before that he automatically lapsed into Italian when he was tense and although he used this particular word forbiddingly, Flora took no notice—and not just because she was curious to know more about her baby’s ancestors. It was because he’d told her his brother was dead and she knew the worst thing you could do was to pretend that a person had never existed. Hadn’t that been what had happened when Mum had died? People had literally crossed over to the other side of the road because they hadn’t known what to say to her or Amy. And even though it was often painful to recall the person you’d lost—that didn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
‘You don’t look very alike,’ she offered truthfully.
‘We weren’t alike. Not in any way.’ His voice was abrasive as he pulled open the study door and now there was no mistaking his determination to get her out of there. ‘Come on now, Flora. I have a call to the States I need to make before dinner and I can’t waste any more time talking to you.’
‘Well, since you ask so nicely,’ she said sarcastically as she followed him into one of the vast reception rooms and he rang a bell to summon his staff.
A housekeeper called Marisa and a smiley cook called Mafalda trooped in, accompanied by two of Mafalda’s daughters, who came in on a daily basis to keep the enormous place clean. They all shook Flora’s hand and looked her up and down with friendly interest.
‘They all speak excellent English,’ Vito informed her, once the small deputation had filed out. ‘So you shouldn’t have any problem making yourself understood.’
‘So the only communication problem I’m going to have is with you, is it, Vito?’
‘What are you talking about?’
She sighed. ‘Well, you and I speak the same language but that didn’t stop you riding roughshod over my desire to stay in England, did it?’ Or from effectively refusing to talk about his family.
‘Please don’t make me out to be the big, bad wolf just because it suits your narrative, Flora,’ he retorted, his eyes glittering. ‘If you really hadn’t wanted to come, then you wouldn’t be here. It isn’t as if I kidnapped you and transported you here rolled up in a carpet, is it?’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘Yet you’re laughing,’ he observed dryly.
