by Maggie Cox
‘I won’t be long,’ she said softly, then quickly escaped before her desire to stay within the safety and warmth of this wonderful apartment with this equally wonderful man became far too appealing to resist.
‘I am taking you and my niece out to lunch today,’ Dante told her the next morning after breakfast. In the middle of cleaning Renata’s sticky face with a washcloth, Bliss glanced at him across the table, everything inside her tightening almost unbearably at the idea of going out in public with this surprising man.
‘You don’t have to—’
‘Tatiana is having a visit from a family friend—a priest from my father’s home in Varese. I am hoping he will be able to offer her some much-needed consolation. So we will wait until he comes, then we will go out. I have already booked us a table.’
There was clearly no arguing with him this morning, Bliss decided with resignation. His handsome face appeared strained and preoccupied, as if he was wrestling with problems that were testing his patience and ingenuity to the maximum. She didn’t doubt they were. Tatiana still kept to her bed with no apparent sign of wanting to move out of it. The doctor who had attended her yesterday when Bliss had returned to her flat to get her things had told Dante that he couldn’t predict how long it would take his sister to recover from shock and grief. It was different with everybody, he said, although the phases the body and mind went through were the same. The family were clearly just going to have to bide their time and wait to see what happened.
Half an hour later, Tatiana’s home help, a plump, smiling Italian woman named Sophia, arrived to see to the domestic chores that needed doing. As Bliss carried Renata back into the living room Dante followed her thoughtfully. ‘You are feeling better today?’ he wanted to know.
‘Feeling better?’ Frowning, Bliss pondered what he meant. Then she realised he was referring to her confession last night about her home life. Sensing her spine crawl with embarrassed heat, she put Renata down on the floor amongst her toys and glanced distractedly out of the window as if to gain some time to collect herself. ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks. Please don’t think any more of what I said. It was late and I was tired.’
But it hadn’t been that late, Dante recalled, and he guessed that the tiredness Bliss referred to had come more from enduring what she called her ‘cross to bear’ rather than physical fatigue.
‘Mmm.’ He wouldn’t ignore her plea not to think any more about it…not right now. But he couldn’t deny that, along with his primary concern for Tatiana and his niece, he had become intrigued with the young woman who had so readily come to the aid of his family. Later, perhaps, when Renata was in bed and they were alone, Dante would make a point of finding out some more of Bliss’s story. Perhaps like him she had become too used to concealing her true self from those around her, particularly those who were close to her. Perhaps she needed to tell the truth to someone she didn’t have a history with. Dante would wait and see. While he spent precious time with his sister and her little daughter—for the first time in a life that defined the word ‘busy’—he would have plenty of time to reflect on his relationships. So why not include this latest one that had manifested with Bliss Maguire? After all…in his business he made a point of encouraging open and honest relationships with all his employees wherever he could…
‘Who would have believed that twirling spaghetti round a fork could be as challenging as finding a water-hole in the Sahara?’ Her features composed into a frustrated frown, Bliss glanced deliberately away as Dante focused his calm, measured gaze upon her across the table. With Renata seated in a high chair between them, her cute bow-shaped mouth liberally coated in tomato sauce, Dante knew that to the well-dressed onlookers in this up-market, bustling Italian restaurant owned by a family friend, the three of them must appear like a real family. Mamma, papà, e bella bambina. A possessive glint stole unknowingly into his eyes as he silently appraised the enchanting face of the pretty woman sitting opposite him. In her candy-pink blouse and smart black trousers, her make-up simple and understated, it was hard to notice any other woman in the room.
‘Here. It is not so very difficult. Let me show you.’
But he didn’t just show her. While Bliss stared in silent trepidation, like an awed observer watching a tightrope walker do impossible things on a high wire, he deftly wound some long spaghetti strands around his own fork and leant across the table to feed it into her startled mouth. With her heartbeat racing nineteen to the dozen, she tried to chew the delicious pasta with a modicum of grace, but the fact that Dante still sat, fork poised, staring at her with heat in his eyes, made the task almost impossible. Every emotion inside Bliss seemed to reach a crescendo of intensity, culminating in a silent yet desperate appeal to the heavens for help. It was a scary thing feeling so powerless to resist this man’s undeniable charms and the roller-coaster sensation she experienced in the pit of her stomach every time Dante di Andrea glanced her way was becoming too much of an unsettling habit. As honourable as he undoubtedly was—clearly illustrated by the fact that he felt duty-bound to immediately step in and help his sister when she was in need—Bliss had no doubt in her mind that Dante was merely playing with her. Turning on that irresistible Latin charm just because he could. The biggest mistake she could make, Bliss decided, would be fooling herself into believing she was somehow special just because his heated gaze seemed to promise that, if she were in a line-up of beauty queens, it would be she he would choose above all else.
‘I didn’t know that eating spaghetti was such an art,’ she quipped, patting her lips with her linen napkin, more to conceal her confusion than because it was strictly necessary.
‘Neither did I,’ Dante replied seriously. ‘But you have made it one.’
‘Ciao, my friend! It is good to see you…è stato un molto tempo.’
‘Yes,’ Dante agreed, rising briefly to his feet as an elegantly attired silver-haired man with smiling eyes enthusiastically captured his hand. ‘It has been a long time, Raphael. Too long.’
‘And this is your beautiful family? Why did I not know that you had married and produced this charming little bambina?’
Before Dante or Bliss could say anything, Raphael bent down to a bemused Renata and kissed her soundly on both cheeks, apparently totally uncaring that he was in real danger of being covered in spaghetti sauce. The gesture was so unaffected and natural that Bliss found herself warming to the man. Glancing across the table at Dante, she wondered why his handsome face was set in a frown.
‘Renata is my niece, Raphael. Bliss is a friend and I am still lamentably single.’
‘What?’ As Raphael straightened to his full height once more he cast a long appraising glance towards Bliss, then spoke to Dante in a flood of expressive Italian. When Dante merely smiled and shrugged in answer to this long, impassioned utterance, Raphael moved round the table to Bliss and soundly kissed her on both cheeks as well.
‘Bellissima! You must not listen to my friend Dante when he tells you that you are just “friends”. When I saw you just now, you both had eyes for nobody else but each other! It is clear to me that you must be together, no?’
Feeling her face suffuse with hot colour, Bliss didn’t know what to say. Lifting her gaze to Dante’s, she was shocked to find him apparently amused and in no immediate hurry to correct the completely wrong impression that his friend had gleaned of their situation. Why didn’t he say something, for goodness sake?
‘I am sorry, but you’re wrong. I’m just…working for Mr di Andrea. That’s all.’
Raphael clearly didn’t accept this notion one little bit. Shaking his head and smiling at the same time, he regarded Bliss like a fond and doting papà. ‘But you are perfect for each other. I, Raphael Destrieri, know this! You are beautiful and you are Italian, no?’
Unable to suppress a smile of her own, Bliss was genuinely regretful at having to deny yet another wrong assumption. ‘No. I’m not Italian. My mother was English and my father Irish.’
Transfixed b
y the tiny dimple at the side of her mouth as she smiled at his friend, Dante sensed his interest deepening. She was half Irish? With a name like Maguire, he should have guessed. In discovering a similar connection to himself, Dante was strangely exhilarated. His father Antonio had told him many times that his mother had been bewitchingly beautiful. Dante had an old black-and-white photo his father had kept in his wallet, as proof. She too had been dark like Bliss, but, instead of ravishing violet eyes, his mother’s eyes had been green, as green as the Emerald Isle she had come from.
‘You have traced your family tree, no?’ His lined brow puckering into a frown, Raphael pondered this new information as though working out a conundrum that intrigued him. Pausing to spoon a mouthful of food into Renny’s mouth, Bliss shifted uncomfortably at the coil of deep unease that unravelled inside her at the mention of her family. Here we go again, she thought resignedly, pushing away the desolation that threatened. No matter how much or how often she told herself she’d come to terms with her troubled past and her own profound unhappiness at losing both her parents, she was still deeply affected by the turbulence of her years growing up with them.
‘No. I haven’t.’
‘Then your mamma or papà have traced theirs? If not, there must be some Italian blood somewhere. I know just by looking at you.’
‘Raphael…Bliss is clearly not comfortable with your questioning, my friend. What does it matter where she is from? Perhaps we make too much of these things, huh?’ It was not just Bliss who was ill at ease with Raphael’s persistence in discovering her antecedents. Dante deliberately infused his voice with command.
‘How can you say this? Of course where we come from is important! You and I are not family, but we are united by the common bond of our ancestors, no? Your father and my father came from the same small town in Italy. That counts for something, sì?’
‘I did not say it was not important,’ Dante said quietly, his own blood simmering with the complexity of feeling that the other man’s words ignited inside him—feelings about belonging and identity that had plagued him all his thirty-three years. ‘I am simply saying that other people may not be as passionate about it as you are.’
Having been made aware that the rest of the company was not warming to his subject as much as he was, Raphael sighed, threw his hands up in the air and smiled at its closure with easy and good-humoured acceptance. Turning to Bliss, he inclined his head slightly in a bow.
‘Please forgive me if I have offended you, mia cara. I did not mean any harm by it.’
‘You have not offended me at all, Signor Destrieri. Please think nothing of it,’ Bliss quickly replied. When Renata held out her arms to be picked up, Bliss didn’t think twice about lifting the little girl out of her high chair and into her arms. Diverted by the scene, both men fell into silence as they watched the child snuggle up against the fulsome curves beneath Bliss’s candy-pink blouse and Bliss’s fingers absently stroke her charge’s soft silky hair as naturally as any devoted mother. Taken aback by the acute sense of longing that crowded his chest at the sight, Dante spoke to Raphael in his native tongue conveying to him that he and Bliss had things to discuss and promising to be in touch soon. They would meet for dinner or a drink together, Dante suggested, when he would gladly bring his friend up to date on all the family news. Placated by the suggestion, Raphael said a very charming goodbye to Bliss, fondly ruffled the little girl’s hair, then firmly shook Dante’s hand and heartily patted his back before leaving.
‘What a nice man,’ Bliss commented lightly, wondering at the same time at the slightly brooding expression that had stolen across Dante’s face.
‘He is a top connoisseur of art,’ he told her, his gaze gravitating immediately towards her. ‘And he recognises exceptional beauty when he sees it.’
Finding herself tongue-tied and overwhelmed by the meaning he so outrageously hinted at, Bliss dipped her eyes and softly kissed the top of Renata’s head.
’Tatiana! What are you doing out of bed? Has Father Chinelli gone?’
The fragile-looking brunette dressed in a peach-coloured satin robe, her long hair curling around her shoulders, immediately rose to her feet from the couch she’d been curled up on, at their entrance. There was something about the expression in her sapphire eyes that made Bliss suddenly cling more tightly to Renata. The man to the side of her seemed to sense it too and his gaze briefly pulled away from his sister to touch her with a concerned, strangely possessive glance.
‘Yes, Father Chinelli has gone. It was good to talk with him, Dante. Thank you for arranging it.’
‘Your talk together must have made you feel better if you are up on your feet again, Ana.’
‘It was not just Father Chinelli that has effected this change in me,’ Tatiana replied, her generous mouth curving into an almost joyful smile. ‘Mamma has been on the phone to me, Dante. She has found Papà a wonderful nurse and is coming to stay with me tomorrow! What do you think about that?’
What did he think? For a moment Dante’s thoughts were completely frozen. If his mother was coming tomorrow, then that would mean that they would no longer need Bliss’s help with Renata. It would also mean that he would not have a reason to see her again. There was an almost painful emptiness inside him when he realised that—an emptiness that made no sense to him. How could it when he had known this woman barely any time at all? Yet he couldn’t deny there was a connection between them—the atmosphere was as if the very air around them were holding its breath when they were together. And today in the restaurant at lunch—when he had fed her spaghetti and those bewitching violet eyes of hers had turned sultry and dark as they gazed back at him…Mamma mia! It had been all Dante could do to hold onto his reason! Desire for her had been swift and hot, like a Chinook wind in the Rocky Mountains where the temperature could increase dramatically in a matter of minutes. His friend Raphael’s appearance had been timely to say the least…
‘That is good news, Ana. When is she arriving? I will send a car to meet her at the airport.’
There was very little emotion in that deeply attractive voice of his, Bliss noticed with curiosity. Wasn’t he pleased that his sister was clearly feeling so much better and that his mother was coming from Italy to help her? Even if it did mean that Bliss’s services would no longer be required. Her heart stalled at the thought, then picked up its beat again, like a train chugging its way out of the station. Today at the restaurant something very strange had happened. For the first time ever in her life she had fallen hard for a man. So hard that it left her feeling stunned and scared. But what was there to be scared about when after she left here she would probably never see him again? There would be no need. Except maybe Bliss’s own heartfelt need to know that all was right in his world and that no harm had come to him.
Nothing could possibly come of her brief association with Dante di Andrea. He had his world and she had hers. And now both of them had to return to those worlds—the known and the familiar—and forget that they’d ever met…like strangers on a train whose gazes had briefly and passionately connected before they’d had to disembark at different stops.
‘She will be arriving at three o’clock. Bliss, I am sorry that I will not need your help after tomorrow, but perhaps you will be kind enough to take care of Renata for me for one more night? I would like to take a bath and prepare things for my mother’s visit. I would be most grateful for your help.’
‘Of course. I am so glad you’re feeling so much better, Tatiana.’
‘Grazie. Oh, and Dante? Mamma says that there is some business problem back at the hotel in Milan. They need you back there, pronto.’ Crossing the smooth maple wood floor to where Bliss stood with her daughter, Tatiana bestowed a warm kiss on her baby’s cheek before returning to her bedroom and firmly closing the door.
Neither of the two remaining people in the room moved. For several moments the ensuing silence was so tangible that a blade could have cut straight through it. Then, slowly, Dante turned to stud
y Bliss, a muscle throbbing slightly beneath the smooth surface of his tanned cheek, his emerald eyes narrowed as if he was having great trouble in maintaining a controlled façade.
‘This is a surprise, no? I did not expect my mother to be able to arrange things for my father so soon. My sister is very close to her and you can see the difference in her already.’
‘It’s wonderful news, Dante. I’m sure having her mother here will help Tatiana enormously.’
‘But you will go tomorrow? Back to your job at the store?’
What else could she do but agree? She was miserable at the very idea of going back to her job behind the beauty counter, but right now she didn’t have an alternative. They had agreed to let her have a week’s unpaid leave and so at least she would have a few days to herself to maybe think about finding other more suitable work before she had to go back. Thank heaven for small mercies. Raising her troubled gaze to his, Bliss adjusted Renata’s weight more comfortably against her hip and forced her frozen lips into a reluctant smile.
‘I have a few days before I absolutely have to go back so I’m going to make the most of them. My flat is long overdue for a tidy-up for a start, so I’ll have plenty to do.’
‘But you really do not want to go back?’ Dante enquired softly.
Finding it almost impossible to meet his eyes, Bliss shrugged. ‘There must be more to life than spraying expensive perfume on rich, pampered women who probably already have a bathroom full of the stuff! It’s not exactly helping the world, is it?’
There was a glimmer of amusement amidst the tantalising green in Dante’s gaze. ‘And you like to help people…is that not so, Bliss?’
‘Where I can, yes.’
‘Then you are indeed wasted behind the beauty counter. Although I am certain you must help them sell a great many beauty products if the women who buy them aspire to look like you.’