Fiona Harper - Bella Rosa Marriages - The Bridesmaid's Secret

He turned to face her, waited, all the time looking intently at her until she could bear it no longer and met his gaze.

He smiled at her. ‘It has been a long time, Jackie.’

Jackie’s mouth didn’t move; her eyes gave her reply: Not long enough .

He ignored the leaden vibes heading his way and persevered. ‘I thought the March issue of Gloss! was particularly good. The shoot at the botanical gardens was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.’

Jackie folded her arms. ‘It’s been seventeen years since we’ve had a conversation and you want to talk to me about work?’

He shrugged and pulled the corners of his mouth down. It had seemed like a safe starting point.

‘You don’t think that maybe there are other, more important issues to enquire after?’

Nothing floated into his head. He rested his arm across the back of Lisa’s empty chair and turned his body to face Jackie, ready to engage a little more fully in whatever was going on between them. ‘Communication is communication, Jackie. We have to start somewhere.’

‘Do we?’

‘It seemed like a good idea to me,’ he said, refusing to be cowed by the look she was giving him, a look that probably made her employees perspire so much they were in danger of dehydration.

Now she turned to face him too, forgetting her earlier stiff posture, her eyes smouldering. A familiar prickle of awareness crept up the back of his neck.

‘Don’t you dare take the high ground, Romano! You have no right. No right at all.’

He opened his mouth and shut it again. This conversation had too much high drama in it for him and, unfortunately, he and Jackie seemed to be, not only on different pages, but reading from totally different scripts. He looked across the table at Scarlett, to see if she was making sense of any of this, but her expression was just as puzzling as her sister’s. She looked pale and shaky, as if she was about to be sick, and then she suddenly shot to her feet and dashed out of the restaurant door. Romano just stared after her.

‘What was that all about?’ he said.

Jackie, who was obviously too surprised to remember she was steaming angry with him, just frowned after her disappearing sister. ‘I have no idea.’

He took the opportunity to climb through the chink in her defences. He reached over and placed his hand over hers on the table top. ‘Can’t we let the past be the past?’

Jackie removed her hand from under his so fast he thought he might have a friction burn.

‘It’s too late. We can’t go back, not after all that has happened.’ Instead of looking fierce and untouchable, she looked very, very sad as she said this, and he saw just a glimpse of the young, stubborn, vulnerable girl he’d once lost his heart to.

‘Why not?’

Suddenly he really wanted to know. And it wasn’t just about putting the past to rest.

She looked down at his hand on the tablecloth, still waiting in the same spot from where she’d snatched hers away. For a long time she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

‘You know why, Romano,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t push this, just…don’t.’

‘I don’t want to push this. I just want us to be able to be around each other without spitting and hissing or creating an atmosphere. That’s not what you want for Lizzie’s wedding, is it?’

She frowned and stared at him. ‘What on earth has this got to do with Lizzie’s wedding?’

Didn’t she know? Hadn’t Lizzie or Lisa told her yet?

‘The reception…Lizzie wanted to have it at the palazzo. She thought the lake would be so—’

‘No. That can’t be.’ She spoke quietly, with no hint of anger in her voice, and then she just stood up and walked away, her chin high and her eyes dull, leaving him alone at the table, drawing the glances of some of the other diners.

This was not how most of his evenings out ended—alone, with all the pretty women having left without him. Most definitely not.

Back at the villa, Jackie ignored the warm glow of lights spilling from the drawing-room windows and took the path round the side of the house that led into the terraced garden. She kept walking, past the fountains and clipped lawns, past the immaculately groomed shrubs, to the lowest part of the garden, an area slightly wilder and shadier than the rest.

Right near the boundary, overlooking Monta Correnti and the valley below, was an old, spreading fir tree. Many parts of its lower branches had been worn smooth by the seats and shoes of a couple of generations of climbers.

Without thinking about the consequences for her white linen trousers, Jackie put one foot on the stump of a branch at the base of the trunk and hoisted herself up onto one of the boughs. Her mind was elsewhere but her body remembered a series of movements—a hand here, a foot there—and within seconds she was sitting down, her toes dangling three feet above the ground as she stared out across the darkening valley.

The sun had set long ago, leaving the sky a shade of such a deep, rich blue that she could almost believe it possible to reach out and sink her hand into the thick colour. The sight brought back a rush of homesickness, which was odd, because surely people were only supposed to get homesick when they were away, not when they came back. It didn’t make any sense. But not much about this evening had made sense.

She’d expected Romano to be a grown-up version of the boy she’d known: confident, intelligent, incorrigible. But she hadn’t expected such blatant insensitivity.

She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sensation of the cool night breeze on her neck and cheeks.

Thank goodness she hadn’t given into Kate’s pleading and let her daughter come on this trip. If Romano could be so blithe about their failed relationship all those years ago, she’d hate to think how he might have reacted to their daughter.

If only things had been different…

No. It was no good thinking that way. Time had proved her right. Romano Puccini was not cut out to be a husband and father. The string of girlfriends he’d paraded through the tabloids and celebrity magazines had only confirmed her worst fears. Maybe, if he’d settled down, there would have been some hope of him regretting his decision to disown his firstborn. Maybe a second child might have melted his heart, caused him to realise what he’d been missing.

A huge sigh shuddered through her. Jackie kicked off her shoes and looked at her toes.

And Romano had made her miss all of those moments too. Without his support she’d had no choice but to go along with her mother’s wishes. How stupid she’d been to believe all those whispered promises, all those hushed plans to make their parents see sense, the plotting to elope one day. He’d said he’d wait for ever for her. The truth was, he hadn’t even waited a month before moving on to Francesca Gambardi. One silly spat was all it’d taken to drive him away.

For ever? What a joke.

But she’d been so in love with him it had taken right up until the day she’d handed her newborn daughter over to stop hoping that it was all a bad dream, that Romano would change his mind and come bursting through the door to tell her he was so sorry, that it was her that he wanted and they were going to be a proper family, no matter what his father and her mother said.

Well, she’d purged all those silly ideas from herself about the same time she’d tightened up her saggy pregnancy belly. It had taken just as much iron will and focus to kill them all off.

‘Jackie?’

It was Scarlett’s voice, coming from maybe twenty feet away. Jackie smiled. She’d never quite got used to the Aussie twang that both her sisters had developed since moving away. It seemed more prominent here in the dark.