“My boss was sick. She asked me to cover for her.” Kate shook her head. “If she hadn’t …”
“We never would have met,” he concluded grimly. “I was a fool to believe I could do anything that would remove the pain of injustice. Nothing I could ever do to your father would bring my father back, nor change the fact that he lived out his last years in such awful circumstances.”
“No,” she agreed, grief making her feel hollow down to her toes.
“I knew you were starting to care for me, Kate. I did not want that.” He shook his head. “I knew that we could never be more than this. That one day it would all implode.” He added a tea bag to a mug, then filled it with water.
Kate nodded. His words were calm, measured and accurate. And yet her heart was splintering at his bald admission that this was the end of the road for them. Did she still want him? Love him? Despite what he’d done?
He placed the tea cup on the bench beside her. “I want you to stay with me.”
Her huge eyes flicked to his face and something seared into her when their eyes clashed. An invisible force of emotion; a wave that she couldn’t fight. Her feelings for him were a tsunami, swamping her with their intensity.
“Don’t you see, Ben? Of all the things I fear in life, of all the dangers I see before me, being here with you is by far the worst.” She stood without touching the tea and moved gingerly through the kitchen.
“You cannot seriously be afraid of me?”
Her expression was one of profound sadness. “Benedetto, I love you. Or I love the man I thought I knew.” She swallowed. “I hate what you’ve done. I hate that you did this to me. And I know there can never be a future for us.” She squeezed her eyes shut because she couldn’t bear to look at him. “You would never be able to love me, would you? You would never want to marry me. To agree in front of all of our friends to spend the rest of our lives together?” Her voice shook. “You would never want to have children with me, knowing that my father’s blood would be in their bodies?”
“No.” It was a completely instant revulsion to the very idea, and he regretted the biting word as soon as he’d uttered it. It was a pile of blackened roses, thrown to her feet.
He shook his head. “I cannot say that would have happened for us in any event. I am not interested in marriage, nor love. I am not looking for a person to travel by my side.”
His words were perfectly aimed darts and her heart the bull’s-eye. She nodded but she wondered how she could still be standing.
“I hate that I hurt you. I hate that you’re crying.”
Was she? Kate hadn’t realized.
“I hate that you are standing there, afraid and in pain, and wanting to leave my house and my protection.”
“Your protection?” She whispered thickly. “You did this to me. It’s because of you that he found me.” She squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “I can’t stay here.”
She thought of her apartment, and wondered if her father knew where she lived? Was it safe?
It was better than being here with Benedetto.
With a decisive nod, she moved away from him.
“Kate.” The word was torn from his chest; the sight of her walking bravely towards the door was filling him with an electric shock of feelings. He stared at her and waited for her to turn, to stop walking, but she didn’t. She pulled the front door inward and walked out of his home without a backwards glance. It took several minutes for him to realize that she hadn’t been wearing a coat and that it was freezing cold outside. He paced quickly to the door and pulled it inwards. “Kate!” He looked left, then right, and then left again, but Kate had vanished.
She was nowhere to be seen.
It was over.
CHAPTER TEN
Three months later.
The coffee was bitter. In the several weeks she’d been frequenting this little bar, she’d never had a coffee that wasn’t exceptional. Kate was strict about drinking only one a day, and so it was an insult beyond bearing to have it wasted on one as unpalatable as this, but she was desperate. She’d been kept up all night by the revelers in the downstairs apartment. She had been on the cusp of going downstairs to complain when they’d begun calling loudly,Buon Anni!
Was it really the first day of the year? Kate threw back the last of hermacchiatoand placed the delicate cup on the bar.
“Grazie, ciao.”
“A domain, singorina,”the handsome young man called after her.
She waved and pushed out of the door. It was bitingly cold. Kate pulled her jacket more tightly around her shoulders and began the walk through the winding streets ofFirenzeback to her small apartment. She passed the florist and admired the beautiful flowers, as she always did.
