by Liz Fielding
If there had been a boy next door, she’d have probably settled for him.
Even now, working in Rome, she wasn’t stepping out of her comfort zone.
Today, for the first time ever, she’d encountered something, someone, totally beyond her experience. Beyond her control.
She didn’t know what had happened when Matteo kissed her, when he’d offered her a grape, only that her world had shimmered, slipped out of focus. That for a brief moment she had seen something, felt something that wasn’t safe but exhilarating, intoxicating, terrifying.
That didn’t just make her heart beat faster, but made it race.
This was not her world turned right side up, but tipped upside down and shaken.
For a moment she’d stepped off the broad highway with the way clear ahead onto a narrow path that turned and twisted through dark woods. Not safe, but the kind of dangerous, no end in sight journey that she’d always run a mile from.
She was running now, but even as she was driven in total comfort along the highway towards her well organised and very safe life in Rome, she longed to be back on the path through the woods.
Quando …
When.
Longed to be lying on soft grass in the arms of a lover, for the courage to give life everything she had, even if it was for a single day.
*
Matteo watched the car take the long turn out of the estate. Disappearing as the ground dipped, reappearing briefly, no more than a gleam of sun on metal.
‘Your visitor has gone.’
He turned as Nonna appeared at his side. ‘I didn’t realise that you were home,’ he said, kissing her on both cheeks.
‘Graziella told me that you were having lunch with a young woman. I did not want to intrude,’ she said, as he took her arm to walk her back to the house.
‘It would not have been an intrusion. She would have enjoyed meeting you.’
‘I have no doubt that she would have been polite enough to make me think so,’ she said wryly. ‘May I ask who she is?’
‘Her name is Sarah Gratton. She’s an Englishwoman who was visiting the village.’
‘English?’ She frowned. ‘How did you meet her?’
‘She strayed onto the estate, whether by accident or design I cannot be sure.’
She lifted her head, sighed. ‘But you suspect the latter.’
‘Bella is going through a bad patch with Nico at the moment. The sharks scent blood in the water.’
‘I’m sorry, Matteo.’ She raised a hand in a helpless gesture. ‘I hoped you had found someone.’
Hoped that he had managed to put the past behind him. Was ready to move on.
Rosa Leone had cared for him since his mother had left and he knew she was impatient to see him settled. Wanted to see a new generation of children running through the house, filling it with laughter.
‘Bella and I are a sorry disappointment for you.’
‘No. Never. I only want to see you both happy.’ She caught his eye. ‘The house seems very empty these days.’ She paused, looked back across the vineyard to the distant road. ‘She came into the church earlier. Your Englishwoman.’
‘The church?’ Sarah hadn’t mentioned that, even when he’d told her about the memorial. Every time he began to think, hope, that she might be exactly what she said she was, something jarred the illusion. ‘What did she want?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe to talk to the priest but there was a queue for the confessional. I’d taken some flowers to Lucia Mancini’s memorial and she stood near the door, looking around. For a moment I thought …’
‘What?’
‘That I knew her.’ She gave a little shiver, moved on. ‘She didn’t stay.’
‘We were talking about Lucia,’ Matteo said. ‘I was telling her how she saved my grandfather’s life. Kept him safe. Sarah thinks the village should erect a statue of her in the square.’
‘For suckling your grandfather?’
‘For saving the village.’
‘What nonsense.’
‘Maybe.’ But it would give her an excuse to come back. ‘Without my grandfather, things would be very different today.’
‘That is true.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘I wouldn’t have you, Matteo.’
Sarah had said something like that. Or begun to. ‘Without her, neither of us would …’ She’d stopped, not because Graziella had returned at that moment, but because she realised she was going to say too much. What?
‘Or Bella,’ he said automatically.
‘You are different,’ she said, pausing at her favourite seat to settle herself in the shade. ‘Is she coming back? The Englishwoman.’
Quando veniamo a contatto di ancora? When will we meet again?
‘She said she’d got what she came for.’
‘And what was that?’
He had no idea. He thought he knew, but a few photographs of the house, the view? The unexpected bonus of a face to face meeting with him? It didn’t make sense. She should have stayed. Taken full advantage of the opportunity he’d given her to look around the house, the estate.
He’d invited her to stay overnight, for heaven’s sake. He couldn’t have made it easier for her.
Was she afraid that she’d gone a little over the top in her response to him? The kiss that had flared from nothing to a flashpoint of heat in an instant, leaving warmth that still lingered. Her tongue on his fingers as the grape juice exploded over her lips.
Or just afraid?
It was not long since she’d broken up with the man she had been going to marry. Some people responded to that kind of loss by flinging themselves into affair after affair. Others found it hard to move on as he knew only too well.
Had he got it so wrong?
That was the thing about trust. Once it was destroyed, everyone’s motive was open to question. He’d even doubted Stephano, prepared to believe that, always short of money, he would let in the Trojan Horse.
But the worst of it wasn’t his distrust of other people. It was that he no longer trusted his own instincts.
The desire that had flickered through him as he’d touched Sarah had triggered only a warning.
He could not respond as a man should to a woman who aroused his senses. With his heart, with passion, with no thought of tomorrow.
Without that, it was simply sex. Meaningless. He tightened his hand into a fist as if to crush the memory of her lips against his fingers. Told himself that he was glad she had left.
He glanced at Nonna, but her eyes were closed and, leaving her to sleep in the shade, he went to his study, opened up his laptop and retrieved the photograph he’d sent from Sarah’s phone.
He sat for a long time looking at it, trying to remember everything that had happened. Everything she’d said. Something was niggling at the back of his mind. Nothing about Bella, but she had said something that wasn’t quite right …
Then, because he had to know the truth, he called up Google and typed her name into the search engine.
The drive back to Rome was swift and smooth in the air-conditioned comfort of the Mercedes.
Sarah told the driver where to drop her but as he came to a halt, she said, ‘If I give you a note for Signor di Serrone, can you see that he gets it?’
‘Of course, signora. I will leave it at the palazzo on my way home.’
He lived in a palazzo? Oh, wait. It didn’t only mean a palace, but an apartment block. She lived in a palazzo herself and, really, it was nothing to write home about.
‘Thank you.’
She scrabbled in her bag, found a pen and a postcard of the Spanish Steps that she had intended to send to her mother, and wrote.
Dear Matteo, Thank you again for today. I can’t cook as well as Graziella but, if you’re prepared to risk it, maybe I can return your hospitality one evening?
She added her telephone number and address and signed it simply ‘Sarah’.
She read it through. It sounded like the kind of bread-and-butter tha
nk-you note she would have written to an aunt for a birthday present. Not the kind of note you would write to a man who could make your heart beat faster with a touch. Who had shaken your world with a kiss.
Taking her courage in both hands, she scribbled a PS, then handed the card to the driver before she lost her nerve.
There was a flurry of flashes as he opened the door for her and she practically had to fight her way out before the photographers realised that she was not Bella.
There was a volley of questions fired at her. Half a dozen men all shouting at once in Italian, but she didn’t need the language to understand what they saying to get the drift.
They wanted to know where Bella was.
Who she was.
‘Io non lo so,’ she said very slowly in her phrase book Italian. ‘Mi spiace.’ Then added an I can’t help you shrug for good measure.
There were one or two angry comments that she was no doubt better off not understanding. A number of gestures that were unmistakable in any language. A wry smile or two that grudgingly admitted they’d been had.
She shouldered her bag and headed up the hill. One or two of the more insistent ones followed her, still firing off questions.
‘Non parlo Italiano,’ she said, over and over. Damn Matteo. She knew she should have caught the train.
One of them tried German, then French. She waved her arms, shook her head in a helpless I don’t understand gesture but, even when they finally got it, backed off, she had the sense to keep going and walk right past her own front door.
How quickly you began to feel hunted, she thought, keeping her head down and heading up the hill.
At the top was the café where she stopped for an espresso and pastry most mornings on her way to work. By the time she reached it, she appeared to have shaken off even the most persistent of followers and she ducked inside, taking refuge until she could be sure the coast was clear.
‘Ciao, Sarah. What can I get you?’
‘Ciao, Angelo. Un caffé freddo, per favore.’
‘Will you have a pastry?’
She shook her head, tapped her stomach. ‘Antipasto.’ She raised her hand a notch. ‘Pasta al funghi.’ And again. ‘Pollo. Dolcelatte … Basta!’
He grinned. ‘You haven’t finished until you have eaten something sweet, Sarah.’
It was a daily battle between them. She practised her feeble Italian on Angelo, while he was determined to improve his already excellent English.
‘I had a grape,’ she said, giving up when she couldn’t remember the word.
‘One grape?’
‘It was a very large grape.’
She could still taste it, taste Matteo’s fingers on her lips. Would he ring? Probably not. And if he did would she have the courage to follow through? It was one thing to be kissed when you weren’t expecting it. To joke about having an Italian lover. Quite another to actively encourage him. He might take her seriously.
She might take herself seriously.
‘I’ve been on a jaunt to the country,’ she said, to distract herself.
‘Jaunt?’ Angelo seized on a word he did not recognise.
‘Trip. Excursion. Visit.’
‘Jaunt,’ he repeated, pushing his order pad towards her so that she could write it down. Repeating it while she dug out her phone to show him where she’d been.
The disturbance released the lemon scent of the sprig of thyme that Matteo had given her and she stopped, remembering the moment.
The sun, the bees, Matteo’s sun-darkened hands as he’d broken off a piece of the plant for her. So much of today had been about his hands.
Cupping her head as he’d kissed her. Holding her around the waist as he’d lifted her from the wall. At her elbow, supporting her on the lane.
She touched her lips where they tingled with a memory that she couldn’t quite pin down …
‘Where did you go?’ Angelo asked.
She snatched her fingers from her mouth. ‘Here,’ she said, flicking through the photos to find the one she’d taken of the view across to Arpino. ‘Isola del Serrone.’
‘Did you try the local wine?’ he asked, sliding the iced coffee in her direction. ‘It is like nectar.’
‘I did. And you’re right, it is.’
‘And Isabella di Serrone.’ He kissed his fingertips to the air. ‘Her family still live there.’
Isabella?
‘I had lunch with her cousin, Matteo di Serrone.’
His eyebrows rose and he blew on his fingers, then shook them. ‘Whew! You mix in high society, Sarah.’
‘No,’ she protested, then let it go, unable to cope with explaining the difference between high society and celebrity. ‘Is she beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Isabella.’
‘Bellissima …’ He put his hand to his heart. ‘When she smiles you feel it in your heart. You feel—’ he searched for some way to express his feelings ‘—you feel as if you have been kissed.’
Another customer claimed his attention and she looked through the photographs she’d taken, pausing at the one Matteo had taken of her.
She hardly recognised herself.
She’d wanted to replicate the photograph of Lucia and had done rather better than she could have hoped. Had she really looked at him like that?
Mouth, eyes with that soft, just kissed look. Leaning forward, almost offering herself to him.
No wonder he’d asked her to stay. He must have thought …
She blushed at what he must have thought. When he got her postcard he would have no doubt. And she groaned.
Matteo began his search on the website of the international school and there she was. Sarah Gratton, formerly Deputy Head of the History Department at Maybridge High School and now in Rome, covering for a teacher on maternity leave.
She gazed serenely back at him from a photograph that suggested absolute calm. A woman in complete control of her subject. Her world. It was a trust me, your child is safe in my hands portrait.
It was a very different image from the photograph he’d taken of her sitting on the wall above the house. Big eyes, a soft just-kissed mouth, that come-and-get-me smile. And, despite his certainty that she was the enemy, his response had been immediate.
He ran a search for Maybridge High School and she was there, too, listed on the school website as on a temporary posting to Rome.
She’d suggested they were eager to be rid of her so that they could keep her ex on the staff, but it didn’t look that way to him. ‘Rome’ was a hot link and, when he clicked on it, he found himself reading her first impressions of the city in a blog she’d written. Italian for Beginners. She was the real thing, he decided, smiling as he read it. And he’d bet this year’s vintage that the photograph of her foot, with its slender ankle, in a pair of the strappiest sandals imaginable, had been for the benefit of her pregnant replacement. He had not the slightest doubt that the woman would be glued to this, hoping against hope that Sarah would find someone new and fast.
Definitely more than a load of old Romans.
Would her trip to Isola del Serrone feature in her next blog? Modern history as it had touched one small village in the foothills of the Appenines. Or an encounter with one of the resident wolves.
He bookmarked the page, then went back to the staff list. There was only one ‘Tom’, a brawny, fair-haired young man wearing a track-suit and an amiable smile.
He couldn’t see them together.
No Lex, though. But that was surely a diminutive. Alex? Alexander? He couldn’t find anyone on the staff list. Could he be family?
He checked Facebook, but she didn’t have a page on that or any of the other social networking sites. Probably wise if you were a teacher.
He returned to her photograph. The wide, generous mouth, smiling eyes. She was smart, lovely, they sparked off one another like the national grid, and she hadn’t taken any of the chances he’d given her to get closer to him, to his family. Well, maybe leaping at the chance to stay overnight would have been t
oo obvious, but she hadn’t accepted his offer to show her around the area, drive her back to Rome, either.
Having decided not to resist her, to keep her close, he was the one doing all the chasing. With the touch of her tongue still burning his fingers, she’d driven away without a backwards glance. She hadn’t offered as much as a telephone number, an address, much less a hope that they might meet again.
Was she incredibly clever? Letting him glimpse a fathoms-deep reservoir of apparently untapped passion. Lighting the blue touchpaper and then standing well back while it fizzled.
Or was she exactly what she said she was? A woman still smarting from a broken relationship, not ready to deal with her own unexpected desire for someone new?
He could sympathise with that. He’d been there, done that, as they said. Had the scars to prove it.
Could he have got it so wrong? And, if he had, did it matter? If she was playing the long game, then he had to know. If she wasn’t … Well, she professed to be looking for a dark-eyed Italian lover. He qualified on the first two counts and, as even a cursory glance at the gossip magazines would reveal, he didn’t lack experience in the third. All he had to do was work out what would most charm her and, in the meantime, guard his heart well.
But there was no rush. He was just about convinced that she was an English schoolteacher out for a day in the country, but he’d wait a while before he called and see whether she made the first move.
CHAPTER SIX
ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS
… as the guest of a man whose family has lived in this area for centuries. Who still speaks a dialect older than Latin.
Tall, dark and seductively charming. How easy it is to be seduced by laughter. By hot, dark eyes and a smile that steals your senses under the warm Italian sun …
SARAH read through her blog so far, using it as a temporary distraction. Finding it nothing of the kind.
Should she say a man? Or would it better to say a family?
The last thing she wanted was for anyone to start speculating on who she had lunch with. What else they might have shared.
Or did she?
Matteo had implied that she’d chosen a Machiavellian strategy to punish Tom for his desertion. If she had, it had been unconscious and maybe, if he thought she had someone else in her life, she could put that right.