by Lynne Graham
‘Obviously they read that newspaper article … or your ex-father figure talked. Dress up,’ Vito advised. ‘You don’t want them feeling sorry for you.’
‘Or thinking that you would consort with a poorly dressed woman,’ Ava completed cheekily.
‘I’d consort with you no matter what you wore,’ Vito imparted with a lazy sardonic smile.
‘But you probably prefer me in nothing,’ Ava pointed out drily.
Her mind awash with speculation, Ava dug in haste through her extensive collection of new clothes. Gina and Bella, both in their thirties, were always well groomed. Vito’s comment had struck a raw nerve. Ava didn’t want to look like an object of pity, particularly after the humble letters she had sent in hope of renewed contact with her siblings had been ignored. So, why on earth were they coming to see her now? Her generous mouth down curved as she wondered if her sisters were planning to ask her to leave the neighbourhood to protect them from embarrassment. Gina, married to an engineer, and Bella, married to a solicitor, had always seemed very conscious of what their friends and neighbours might think of their mother and her drink problems. Elegant in a soft dove-grey dress teamed with a pale lavender cardigan, her revealingly tumbled hair carefully secured to the back of her head, Ava slid her feet into heels and went downstairs.
Nerves were eating her alive by the time she opened the drawing-room door. Vito was not there. Gina and Bella were small, blonde and curvy like their late mother and both women swiftly stood up to look at her. Recognising the pronounced lack of physical similarity between her sisters and herself, Ava marvelled that it had not previously occurred to her to wonder if they had had different parentage.
‘I hope you don’t mind us calling in for a chat,’ Gina said awkwardly. ‘We came on impulse after seeing that photo of you in the paper with Vito Barbieri. Dad didn’t realise that you were staying here at the castle when you visited him and Janet yesterday.’
‘I don’t think he would have cared had I come down on a rocket from the moon,’ Ava declared wryly as she sat down opposite the other two women. ‘I was only in their home for about five minutes and once he’d said his piece there didn’t seem to be anything more to say.’
‘Well, actually there is more,’ Bella spoke up tensely. ‘Dad might still feel that he has an axe to grind over the fact that he chose to pretend that you were his child all those years but, no matter what Mum did, you’re still our sister, Ava.’
‘Half-sister,’ Ava qualified stiffly, unable to forget her unanswered letters. ‘And let’s face it, we’ve never been close.’
‘We may have grown up in a very dysfunctional family,’ Gina acknowledged, compressing her lips. ‘But we don’t agree with the way Dad is behaving now. He’s made everything more difficult for the three of us. He demanded that we keep you out of our lives. He prefers to act like you don’t exist.’
‘And for too long we played along with Dad for the sake of family peace,’ Bella admitted unhappily.
‘And sometimes we used his attitude to you as an excuse as well,’ Gina added guiltily. ‘Like us not coming to see you while you were in prison. To be frank, I didn’t want to go into a prison and be vetted and then searched like a criminal just for the privilege of visiting you.’
‘We did once get as close as the prison gates,’ Bella volunteered with a wince of embarrassed uneasiness.
‘Prison-visiting … it just seemed so sordid,’ Gina confided more frankly. ‘And the gates and the guards were intimidating.’
‘I can understand that,’ Ava said and she did.
Eleanor Dobbs entered with a laden tray of coffee and cakes, providing a welcome distraction from the tension stretching between the three women.
‘Mum wrote a letter to you just before she died,’ Gina volunteered once the door had closed behind the housekeeper again.
Ava sat up straight and almost spilt her cup of coffee in the process. ‘A … letter?’
‘That’s why we tried to work ourselves up to come and visit you—to give you the letter,’ Bella confessed.
‘Why didn’t you just post it to me?’ Ava demanded angrily. ‘Why didn’t anyone ask if I could visit her before she died? I didn’t even know she was ill.’
‘Mum passed away very quickly,’ Gina told the younger woman heavily. ‘Her liver was wrecked. Dad didn’t want you informed and Mum insisted that she couldn’t face seeing you again, so we couldn’t see the point of telling you that she was dying.’
Ava absorbed those wounding facts without comment. News of her mother’s death had come as a shocking bolt from the blue while she was in prison. She had been excluded from the entire process. Now she had to accept the even harsher truth that, even dying, her mother had rejected a chance for a last meeting with her. ‘The letter …’ she began again tightly.
Bella grimaced. ‘We didn’t post it because we know prisons go over everything offenders get in the post and the idea of that happening to Mum’s last words didn’t feel right. But we’ve brought it with us … not that it’s likely to be of much comfort to you.’
‘Towards the end Mum’s mind was wandering. The letter’s more of a note and it makes no sense.’ Gina withdrew an envelope from her handsome leather bag and passed it across the coffee table.
‘So, you’ve read it, then,’ Ava gathered.
‘I had to write it for her, Ava. She was too weak to hold a pen,’ Bella explained uncomfortably. ‘It’s obvious that she was feeling very guilty about you and she did want you to know that.’
Ava’s hand trembled and tightened its grip on the crumpled envelope. She still felt that her sisters could have made more of an effort to ensure that the letter came to her sooner but she said nothing.
‘We all loved her but she wasn’t a normal mum,’ Gina remarked awkwardly. ‘Or even a decent wife and we all suffered for that.’
Her attention resting on Ava’s pinched profile, Bella grimaced and murmured, ‘Let’s leave this subject alone for the moment. Are we allowed to satisfy our crazy curiosity and ask what you’re doing living in Bolderwood Castle?’
‘I’m organising the Christmas party for Vito,’ Ava advanced. ‘Everything else just sort of happened.’
‘Everything else?’ Gina probed delicately. ‘You used to be besotted with him.’
‘I got over that,’ Ava declared, privately reflecting that proximity to Vito and a closer understanding with him had merely made her reach a whole new level of besottedness.
‘Come on, Ava. The whole countryside is talking and you’re killing us here,’ Bella complained. ‘Spill the beans, for goodness’ sake!’
As the door opened Ava was rolling her eyes in receipt of Bella’s pleading look and saying, ‘Vito’s not my partner or my boyfriend, nor are we involved in anything serious … he’s just my lover.’
‘Outside the bedroom door I rarely know where I am with your sister!’ Vito quipped without batting a single magnificent eyelash while he strolled fluidly across the room to greet her sisters as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Registering that Vito had heard that unplanned statement, Ava turned a painful beetroot shade, her discomfiture intense. But she hadn’t wanted her siblings to get any ambitious ideas about where her relationship with Vito might be heading and a dose of plain speaking had seemed the best approach to take. Ava watched as her siblings reacted predictably to Vito’s stunning good looks and white-hot sex appeal. Gina stared at him transfixed while Bella giggled ingratiatingly at almost everything he said. Vito, in comparison, was smooth as silk as he invited her sisters to the Christmas party and asked them about their children. As distanced as though she were on another planet while she had that all-important letter still clutched in her hand, Ava learned that Bella had given birth to a baby boy the previous year, a brother to round out her trio of daughters. Gina, of course, never as child-orientated, still had only one child, a ten-year-old son, and a successful career as a photo-journalist.
Ava was stunne
d to hear Vito invite her sisters and their husbands to attend the private lunch that was always staged for his closest friends before the party kicked off in the afternoon.
‘Why did you do that?’ she demanded accusingly when her siblings had gone.
‘It seemed polite and you do want your sisters back in your life again, don’t you?’ Vito asked levelly.
‘Sort of …’ Too much had happened too fast for Ava to be sure of what she wanted, aside of Vito. He was the one constant she did not need to measure in terms of importance and that hurt as well. How could she have been stupid enough to let her guard down and fall for him again?
‘What’s wrong?’ Vito prompted, watching troubled expressions skim across her expressive face like fast-moving clouds.
Ava explained about the letter.
‘Why haven’t you opened it yet?’
‘I’m afraid to,’ she admitted tightly, her blue eyes dark with strain. ‘Bella implied it would be disappointing. It’s one thing to imagine, something else to actually see her words on paper. If it’s unpleasant those words will live with me for ever.’
‘Maybe I should open it for you …’ Vito suggested.
But such a concession to weakness was more than Ava could bear and she slit open the envelope to extract a single piece of lined notepaper adorned with Bella’s copperplate script.
Ava,
I’m so sorry, sorrier than you will ever know. I made such a mess of my life and now I’ve messed up yours as well. I’m sorry I couldn’t face visiting you in that place or even seeing you here in hospital—should the authorities have agreed to let you out to visit me. But I couldn’t face you. The damage has been done and it’s too late for me to do anything about it. I wanted to keep my marriage together—I always put that first and it couldn’t have survived what I did at the last. I do love you but even now I’m too scared to tell you the truth—it would make you hate me.
Eyes wet with tears of regret and disappointment for she had had high hopes of what she might find in the letter, Ava pushed the notepaper into Vito’s hand. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t know what’s she’s talking about,’ she declared in frustration. ‘Gina said Mum was confused and she must have been to dictate that for Bella to write.’
Frowning down at the incomprehensible letter, Vito replaced it in the envelope. ‘Obviously your mother felt very guilty about the way she treated you.’
‘Did she think I’d hate her when I found out that I wasn’t her husband’s child?’ Her brow furrowed, Ava shook her head, conceding that she would never know for sure what her mother had meant by her words. ‘What else could she have meant?’
Vito rested a soothing hand against the slender rigidity of her spine. ‘There’s no point getting upset about it now, bella mia. If your sisters are equally bewildered, there’s no way of answering your questions.’
He was always so blasted practical and grounded, Ava reflected ruefully. He didn’t suffer from emotional highs or lows or a highly coloured imagination. Reluctant to reveal that she was unable to take such a realistic view of the situation when the woman concerned had been dead for almost eighteen months, Ava said nothing.
His mobile phone rang and he dug it out with an apologetic glance in her direction. That was an improvement, Ava conceded. In the space of little more than a week, Vito had gone from answering constant calls and forgetting her existence while he talked at length to keeping the calls brief and treating them like the interruptions they were. She focused on his bold bronzed profile as he moved restively round the room, another frown drawing his straight black brows together. For once the caller was doing most of the talking, for his responses were brief.
Ava was staring out of the window at the white world of snow-covered trees and lawn stretching into the distance when he finished the call.
‘I’m afraid I have to go out,’ Vito murmured flatly.
‘I’m going to take Harvey for a long walk,’ Ava asserted, keen to demonstrate her independence and her lack of need for his presence. It was a downright lie, of course, but it helped to sustain her pride.
CHAPTER TEN
BOXES of decorations littered the big hall. Ava was using a stepladder to dress the tree and cursing the fact that her carefully laid plans were running behind schedule. It had taken most of the day to have the tree felled, brought to the castle and safely erected in the most suitable spot. A towering specimen of uniform graceful shape, the tree looked magnificent, but she had had to search the attics for two hours before she finally tracked down the lights.
Her generous mouth took on an unhappy tilt. After the tragedy of the last Christmas celebrated at the castle three years earlier, all the festive decorations had been bundled away without the usual care and attention and some items had emerged broken while others appeared to have been mislaid. It saddened her to recall that the last time she had dressed a tree Olly had been by her side and in full perfectionist mode as he argued about where every decoration went, adjusted branches and insisted on tweaking everything to obtain the best possible effect. In truth, Olly had adored the festive season as much as Vito loathed it.
To be fair, though, what happy memories could Vito possibly have of Christmas? When he was a boy, his mother had walked out on his father and him shortly before Christmas and his father had refused to celebrate the season in the years that followed. Olly’s demise at the same time of year could only have set the seal on Vito’s aversion to seasonal tinsel. Ava did not want to be insensitive towards his feelings.
The night before, Vito had fallen into bed beside her late on and in silence. She did not know where he had been or what he had been doing and even after she made it clear that she was still awake he had not offered any explanation. For the first time as well he hadn’t touched her or reached for her in any way and she had felt ridiculously rejected. Her faith in her insuperable sex appeal had dive-bombed overnight. She had started wondering if there was more depth than she knew to his comment that being with her was ‘hard work’. She flinched at that disturbing recollection. That tabloid story combined with her distress over her mother’s baffling letter and the emotional mood engendered by her reunion with her sisters could not have helped to improve that impression. Vito was not accustomed to complex relationships with women. Perhaps he was getting fed up with all the problems she had brought into his life and forced him to share. He might even have reached the conclusion that he would be quite content to wave goodbye to her after the party. Last night, she thought painfully, she had felt as though he had withdrawn from her again, his reserve kicking back in when it was least welcome.
Her mobile phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket.
‘It’s Vito. I can’t make it back for a couple of days so I’ll stay in my apartment. I should mention though that I’ve set up a meeting for you with some people for the day after tomorrow. Will you stay home in the morning?’
‘What people? Why? What’s going on?’ Ava prompted, striving to keep the sound of disappointment out of her response. He was a workaholic—she knew he was. He might have worked shorter hours the previous week to be with her but it would be unrealistic to expect that sexual heat and impatience to continue. And to start imagining that maybe another woman had caught his eye or that he wanted a break from the woman he had, perhaps unwisely, invited to stay in his home, was equally reasonable.
‘I’m bringing a couple of people I want you to meet,’ he advanced.
Her brow furrowed, surprise and curiosity assailing her. ‘Do I need to dress up?’
‘No. What you wear won’t matter,’ he said flatly.
Who is it? she was tempted to demand, but she restrained her tongue. Vito already sounded tired and tense and she didn’t want to remind him that she could be hard work in a relationship. Relationship, get you, she mused irritably as she dug her phone back into her pocket and selected a fine glass angel to hang on the tree with careful fingers. A casual affair was a relationship of sorts but not of t
he lasting, deep kind that led to commitment. She was with a guy who didn’t commit and didn’t lie about it either. A whole host of far more beautiful and sophisticated ladies had passed through his life before she came along and not one of them had lasted either. He was thirty-one with neither a marriage nor even a broken engagement under his belt and she was the very first woman to live at the castle with him. At that acknowledgement, her mouth quirked. And what was that concession really worth? She had had nowhere else to stay and it was more convenient for her to organise the party while she lived on the premises.
She checked the rooms set aside for the party. The estate joiner had done a fine job with the Santa grotto for the younger children and the nativity set with life-size figures, which she had hired to place in the opposite corner, added a nice touch about the true meaning of Christmas. The room next door was decorated with a dance theme for the teenagers and rejoiced in a portable floor that lit up. On the day there would be a DJ presiding. Across the hall lay the ballroom where the adult event would take place with a manned bar and music. The caterers had already placed seats and tables down one side and the local florist would soon be arriving to install the festive flower arrangements that Ava had selected.
She found it hard to get to sleep that night even with Harvey sleeping at the foot of the bed. Persuading the dog from his station waiting at the front door for Vito’s return had been a challenge. That she could have been tempted to join the dog in his vigil bothered her. It was never cool to be so keen on a man and it would not be long before she betrayed herself and he recognised the fact that she had fallen for him. Then he would feel uncomfortable around her and he wouldn’t be able to wait to get rid of her. She would leave after the party with dignity and no big departure scene, she told herself fiercely.
A couple of restless nights in succession ensured that Ava slept in the morning that Vito was bringing company back and she had to wash, dress and breakfast at speed. By the time she heard the helicopter flying in over the roof of the castle, she was pacing in the hall. With a woof of excitement and anticipation, Harvey stationed himself back by the entrance again and Ava suppressed a sigh at the sight.