Nat’s heart tripped in her chest as she gingerly unfolded the fabric to find the back of a photo frame staring at her. A pang of something she couldn’t identify squeezed through her belly.
Was she ready to come face to face with Camilla?
Her hand shook a little as she turned it over but she needn’t have worried. It was a photo of Juliano as a baby. He was sitting like a little chubby Buddha in a sailor suit with a little sailor hat plonked artfully on his head. He was grinning at the camera, one hand stroking a sleek black cat.
She smiled. She couldn’t help it. Juliano looked so happy. Loved, content, secure. Not a worry in the world – as it should be. So different to the boy she’d first met. How unfair was it that in only a few short years after this candid snap his whole world had turned upside down?
The resemblance to his father also struck her. Looking at Juliano, she had a glimpse of what a young Alessandro must have looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin and cherubic lips. She traced Juliano’s mouth with her finger, so like his father’s. And that sparkle in his eyes. One that she was seeing more and more of in Alessandro’s gaze these days.
He must have been a beautiful baby.
She dipped into the box, eager to see more, her hands finding the tell-tale signs of more frames wrapped in sheets. She pulled them out one by one, unwrapping them like Christmas presents, each one a moment captured in time, a window, an insight into Alessandro’s life.
Most of the frames held pictures of a solo Juliano at various stages of his life, chronicling his four years. Crawling. Walking. His first birthday party. But there were two with other people. One with an older Italian-looking woman holding Juliano in what appeared to be a christening gown. Alessandro’s mother? Or maybe his aunt? Valentino’s mother?
And the other with Alessandro on the London Eye, the magnificent Houses of Parliament forming an imposing backdrop. Juliano looked about two and both he and Alessandro were pointing at something outside the glass bubble and beyond the view of the camera. It was obviously a candid shot, father and son caught in fierce concentration, not smiling, their brows wrinkled, their faces frozen in serious contemplation.
It was strikingly similar to how they’d both looked when she’d first met them. Unsmiling, serious. But there was an ease in the older photograph that hadn’t been evident then. Their heads were almost touching, Alessandro’s hold was loose and comfortable and Juliano’s little arm around his father’s neck spoke volumes about his innate trust.
Nat dragged her gaze away from the photo and put it aside, delving for more. The next several frames were academicqualifications of Alessandro’s. She spent a few moments trying to decipher the formal Italian, practise her rusty command of the language. But it was too academic for her and she put them aside with a mental note to make sure this weekend they tackled Alessandro’s office.
The box was almost empty now, with just two folded sheets sitting on top of some plump cushions. Without looking, Nat knew these were the ones. Finally, she’d get to see the woman who had won Alessandro’s heart and for whom he still grieved.
Oddly, she hesitated. After weeks of internal speculation about Alessandro’s wife she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. What if she was simply the most gorgeous creature she’d ever seen?
Could her ego stand that?
And yet there was a part of her thatneededto know and she cursed it. Cursed her innate female curiosity. Her vanity. What had Camilla Lombardi looked like? Beautiful, no doubt. Glamorous too, she’d bet. She couldn’t see Alessandro, a breathtakingly handsome man who must have had his pick of women, marrying anyone less than stunning.
But had she been dark and exotic like Alessandro or pale and elfin or maybe a glamorous redhead with milky skin and green eyes?
She stared down at the sheets. Was she ready to come face to face with Alessandro’s dead wife? The woman who’d claimed his heart. She drew in a ragged breath at how disconcerting it was to think of him being loved by another woman. Think that even when he was buried deep inside her, pounding away, his heart belonged to someone else.
Goosebumps marched across her skin and she rubbed her arms. This was stupid! She had no right to such thoughts. She and Alessandro were no more than convenient lovers. And besides, his wife was dead.
Did it really matter what she looked like?
16
Reaching for the sheets, Nat pulled them out of the box, unwrapping the first one and refusing to pay any heed to the knot in her gut. She flipped the frame over briskly, businesslike, mentally chastising her hesitancy until her eyes instantly connected with an eerily familiar pair of blue ones and everything in that moment crashed to a halt.
Nat’s heart stopped in her chest. Her breath stilled in her lungs. The synapses in her brain ceased to function. The frame fell from suddenly nerveless fingers and slid off her lap. A loud rushing noise echoed in her head and she couldn’t hear anything above the roar.
A terrible, dreadful sense of déjà vu swept through her, paralysing her with its ferociousness.
It wasn’t until her lungs were burning, bursting for breath, and her vision started to blacken at the edges that her body kicked into survival mode and she took a noisy, desperate breath, her lips pursed into a tight pucker. She coughed and spluttered as it rushed in, abrading her oxygen-starved membranes.
Falling forward, Nat extended her arms to stop herself collapsing altogether. She hung her head, eyes squeezed tightly shut as the coarse white carpet pricked at her palms. She gripped it hard as she gasped for more breath.
Gasped for… sanity.
It felt like hours could have passed when she finally opened her eyes and the world slowly came back into focus. Camilla’s clear blue eyes looked calmly back at her from the frame on the floor. A small smile hovered on the other woman’s perfectly made-up lips, like she’d got everything she’d ever wanted in life and she knew it.
A splash of moisture fell on the frame and Nat blinked. She felt her cheeks, surprised to find tears running down her face. The same sort of face that looked back at her from the glass. Same blue wide-set eyes, same blonde ponytail, same high cheekbones, generous mouth and pointed chin with the cutesy-pie cleft.
Nat shook her head as her earlier thoughts came back to haunt her.Did it matter what she looked like?She couldn’t believe it had only been mere minutes ago that she’d been that naïve. That she’deverbeen that naïve.
Picking up the frame, Nat stared at the familiar contours of the other woman’s face. Their resemblance was uncanny and the knowledge punched her in the gut.
