An Inheritance of Shame(33)

He didn’t need Lucia.

Seeing her again, he acknowledged, learning about Angelica, all of it had weakened his resolve. Made him want things he knew he couldn’t have. That kind of life wasn’t for him, could never be for him. It was better this way. It would have to be. An hour later he was in the corporate offices of the Corretti Hotel, dressed in a designer suit of grey pinstriped silk, about to confirm a meeting with the shareholders of Luca Corretti’s fashion company, Corretti Designs. He’d been buying up stock in the company for several months now, quietly, unnoticed by the other shareholders and, it seemed, by even Luca himself. He didn’t have enough to stage a takeover like he had with the hotel, but with Luca absent he was going to take the opportunity to put a little pressure on the other shareholders. Hell, maybe they’d even agree to unseat Luca and make him CEO. He already had the hotel after all. It would bring him one step closer to his ultimate revenge.

It was time to think about business—and stop thinking about Lucia, or love. This was why he’d returned to Sicily, what he’d always wanted. His face now set into familiar harsh lines of determination, Angelo reached for the phone.





CHAPTER EIGHT



SHE WAS DOING the right thing. Lucia repeated that to herself as she walked into the hotel on unsteady legs, everything around her a blur. She was doing the right thing. Leaving Angelo, refusing his offer, was the right choice. It had to be, because if one night had nearly felled her seven years ago, what would a week do now? A month? However long Angelo decided he wanted to be with her, all on his terms. I don’t want this to end now.

Not now, but at some point, yes. He would decide to end it at some point in the not-too-distant future, and when that moment came he would walk away just as before. Just as he always did.

She worked steadily through the morning, grateful to scrub and sweep and spray down counters, and not have to think. Wonder. Regret.

She was doing the right thing.

She kept repeating that to herself, a desperate mantra, throughout the next few days. She didn’t see or hear from Angelo, and from the sinking disappointment she felt at his absence she knew at least a part of her had been hoping to, even as she knew, bone-deep, that she never would.

Three days after she left Angelo, Maria found her at break time, sitting alone at a table, lost in her own thoughts.

‘Lucia?’ The older woman smiled uncertainly, a sheet of paper clutched to her chest.

‘Ciao, Maria.’ Lucia did her best to smile and push away the tangled thoughts about Angelo that turned everything inside her into knots of doubt. ‘Did Stefano send you another letter?’

‘Not yet, but I want to write him.’

‘Again?’ Just a few days ago she’d helped Maria write a rather gushing response to Stefano.

Maria nodded, determination glinting in her deep brown eyes. ‘Yes…He’s not so good a writer, yes? So I keep writing, because I love him.’

The simple, heartfelt statement made Lucia still, those tangled knots inside her loosening just a little. I keep writing, because I love him. Maria’s love didn’t change, no matter Stefano’s response—or lack of it. Of course, a mother’s love for a son was different from a woman’s love for a man, but…

Did she—had she—loved Angelo like that? For years she’d told herself she had, yet she’d never sent him a single letter. Not after he’d left at eighteen, and not seven years later when he’d left her bed. She’d tried, of course, when she’d found out she was pregnant. She’d written draft after labourious draft, yet she hadn’t sent a single one. She hadn’t got so far as putting any of them in an envelope. She’d never, Lucia saw now with a cringing insight, intended on writing him at all.

Why?

‘Lucia?’

‘Yes…sorry. Of course I’ll help you write him.’ She gestured to the seat next to her and Maria sat down, putting the single sheet of paper on the table and smoothing it carefully before handing Lucia a pen. ‘What would you like to say?’

Maria smiled shyly. ‘Just that I love him. I miss him. I pray for him.’ Obediently Lucia wrote this all down, with Maria gazing at her neat handwriting in a kind of incredulous admiration. ‘And also that my arthritis, it’s better. In case he worries.’

Lucia glanced up, smiling, her eyebrows raised. ‘Is it better, Maria?’

The older woman shrugged this aside. ‘It’s not so bad.’