An Inheritance of Shame(48)

After they left the jewellery boutique they wandered along the waterfront and then into a restaurant that had, Angelo told her, the freshest seafood on all of Sicily.

The mood between them had lightened again, and Lucia revelled in the ease and enjoyment they had in each other’s company. When Angelo was being himself.

‘The neighbourhood could use some improvement,’ she joked as they went inside, for while the restaurant was top drawer it was surrounded by unused docks and abandoned warehouses.

‘The government is planning to regenerate this area,’ he told her as they sipped chilled white wine on a terrace overlooking the harbour. ‘Actually, I’m part of the process. I’ve secured a bid to redevelop a housing estate in the area.’

‘You have?’

He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners and flashing grey-green. ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

‘I didn’t realise you had so much business in Sicily.’ He shrugged, averting his gaze, and Lucia couldn’t keep from adding, ‘But you never intend to live here.’

‘Not permanently, no.’

She nodded, accepting, even as she wondered if he simply didn’t see that as a problem for their fledgling relationship. Admittedly, there wasn’t too much to keep her in Sicily any more. Her mother was dead, her father long gone, and what few friends she had weren’t particularly close ones. And yet…

Again, she resisted. Resisted giving more to this man, because she was still bracing herself for the moment when he decided he’d had enough. When he walked away…again.

Firmly she pushed that thought away. She needed to try. Trust was a choice. ‘What made you decide to come back to Sicily after all this time? Just the business opportunity?’

Angelo’s gaze rested on her for a moment, narrowed, shuttered. Then he smiled and took a sip of wine. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Just business.’

They walked along the waterfront for a while after lunch, and then back into the old quarter of the city. The sun was hot overhead and it was pleasant to wander hand in hand through the narrow streets with their crumbling buildings and open-air markets. Despite the elegant, expensive clothes and the pervasive aura of wealth, Angelo seemed like the boy she remembered. The boy she loved.

‘This almost feels like old times,’ she said, only half teasing.

‘Doesn’t it?’ He turned to her with a smile, although she still sensed that guarded sorrow shadowing his eyes, tensing the lines around his mouth. ‘I think you’re the only person I’ve ever been myself with.’ The admission, so quietly made, rocked her, because it was so achingly honest—and because she felt the same. Hope bloomed within once more, more powerful than ever.

‘Me too,’ she said quietly, and squeezed his hand. ‘Me too.’

Angelo couldn’t remember when he’d enjoyed a day more. For a whole day spent in Lucia’s company he’d felt the tightness inside him ease, the emptiness fill. He felt happy. He felt whole.

The realisation terrified him.

He’d told Lucia love was complicated, messy, and it was. He felt it in all of its uncontainable sprawl now, disordering his thoughts, his ambitions, everything. He’d come to Sicily with a simple plan: to ruin the Correttis. Revenge, simple and sweet, served twenty years’ cold. He’d convinced himself it was all he wanted, and yet now…?

Now he wanted this. Her. And not just her, but a life with her, a life he’d never, ever imagined having or even wanting. A life he still could bear to think about only in vague images: a house somewhere, a kitchen with sunlight and a bowl of fruit on the table. A child toddling towards him and loving arms slipping around his waist.

Even those images felt impossibly remote, like fuzzy photographs of another planet. A place he’d never been, and wasn’t sure he could go.

A place he wasn’t sure he should go.

‘Angelo?’ Lucia turned to him with a smile, although he saw the worry clouding her eyes. Always the worry, the fear. He felt it too.

‘I should take you back home,’ he said. ‘I need to get back to work.’

‘I see.’

And she probably did see, all too much. He hadn’t meant it as a brush-off precisely, but it served as one. It was time to get back to the reason why he’d come back to Sicily at all. It was time to focus on what really mattered.

They didn’t speak as he drove her back to Caltarione. As soon as they hit the narrow, dusty streets of the village that time itself seemed to have forgotten he felt himself tense. Resist. He hated this place, hated the memories that came up inside him like the clouds of dust on the road, obscuring everything.