A Legacy of Secrets(27)

‘I wish to hell I had.’

‘No.’ So swift was his retort. ‘You knew exactly what you were getting into. As I said, I don’t hide my supposed mistakes and I don’t expect favours and neither do I give them for sex.’ For a man who appeared to have no morals, he stood there and proved otherwise. ‘For all the bastard you seem to think I am, think carefully, Ella—because your job has never depended on sleeping with me and it still doesn’t. I know how to close the bedroom door and carry on with my work.’

Her back was to the wall, and not just literally, because he was right.

‘How much notice are you giving?’

‘Four weeks.’

‘Fine,’ Santo said. ‘Ring the agency tomorrow for your replacement, see if you can get someone who can start ASAP so that you can train them up. And, this time, can you tell them I want someone fully fluent in Italian, please?’

How that stung but she refused to jump.

‘Anything else?’

‘With a lot of experience.’

‘Good looking too?’ Ella jeered.

‘I would hope so,’ Santo said without contrition. ‘And preferably without too many hang-ups and issues.’

‘You can go on your own dating sites....’

‘I don’t go on dating sites,’ Santo said. ‘I don’t need to, and anyway, I don’t have time,’ he retorted. ‘I want someone who is good at their job, who is pleasing to the eye, and someone who doesn’t pin everything on what happens between the sheets.’ And with that he walked out and slammed the door.

He was right.

Ella sat shaking on the bed.

Her disappointment was on a professional level but it was personal too.

It was she who couldn’t separate things, but of course, with Santo, she’d never been able to.

Ella admitted it herself then—every woman he’d dated, every time he’d crooned into the phone to his latest lover as she drove, she’d had bile black and hissing in her stomach and it had felt like a personal slight.

She had known what she was getting into but had completely ignored it, just to have the refuge of work. Had chosen to keep her days busy when she should have lain on a beach and somehow healed from all that had happened with her father. When she should perhaps have curled up and hid for a while to process things, instead she’d insisted to herself she was fine and had looked for a job, had ignored what now she could not.

A hotel room was not a nice place to be gripped by panic and unlike Santo’s there was no private terrace, just shuttered windows which Ella flung open and gulped in night air. She wanted to ring home, wanted to scream, wanted to run to Santo and batter down his door, for she could not stand to be alone with her thoughts.

She could not bear to remember the feel of her father’s fist in her face and the screams and shouts from her mum and the feeling of being twenty-seven and feeling as if she were six.

Except right now she was doing exactly that.

Remembering every horrible moment, every terrible feeling, crying and sobbing for the first time since it happened, reliving the nightmare when she didn’t want to...

...and in a hotel room alone.





CHAPTER SEVEN



FOR THE FIRST time since she had started working for him, Ella wondered if she could face breakfast with Santo and going through his diary. They always started the week like that, and as she’d had yesterday off, it would be assumed she would meet him in the hotel restaurant at 6:00 a.m., as they did when on location.

Ella stood in front of the mirror after a very sleepless night. A cool shower had done little to reduce her swollen eyelids and the tip of her nose was bright red.

She looked like a woman who had spent the night crying.

Except she hadn’t, as Santo would no doubt assume, been crying over him—it was the issues that he had alluded to that had finally made her break down.

It had been six months without tears.

Six months of telling herself that she was strong, that she would not let what her father had done affect her, would not let his fists bruise her soul.

But they had.

It wasn’t just the beating that had left its mark.

It was the years that had.

Years of watching her mother suffer, years of walking on eggshells so as not to upset him, years of scrimping and saving to afford a home where she could take her mother away from him.

Ella was in danger of crying again, so she chose not to think about that awful day. Instead she attempted magic with a make-up brush, but nothing was really going to work. So, once dressed, it was Ella who donned huge sunglasses this morning and took the elevator down, fervently hoping that Santo would be polite and pretend not to notice the state of her face.