not in the habit of discussing my past!’
‘Yes, well, that’s not
my
fault.’ She felt herself soften. ‘Don’t you think that it’s a good thing to talk about the things that bother us? Don’t you
ever
think about your dad?’
His internal line buzzed and he spoke in rapid Italian, telling his secretary to hold all further calls until he advised her otherwise. Suddenly, filled with a restless energy he couldn’t seem to contain, he pushed himself away from the desk and moved across to the window to look briefly outside before turning around and staring at the girl on the chair who had swivelled to face him.
She looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—very young, very innocent and with a face as transparent as a pane of glass. Right now, he seemed to be an object of pity, and he tightened his mouth with a sense of furious outrage.
‘He’s had a heart attack,’ Caroline told him abruptly, her eyes beginning to well up because she was so very fond of him. Having him rushed into hospital, dealing with the horror of it all on her own had been almost more than she could take. ‘A very serious one. In fact, for a while it was touch and go.’ She opened her satchel, rummaged aroundfor a tissue and found a pristine white handkerchief pressed into her hand.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered shakily. ‘But I don’t know how you can just stand there like a statue and not feel a thing.’
Big brown eyes looked accusingly at him and Giancarlo flushed, annoyed with himself because there was no reason why he should feel guilty on that score. He had no relationship with his father. Indeed, his memories of life in the big house by the lake were a nightmare of parental warfare. Alberto had married his very young and very pretty blonde wife when he had been in his late forties, nearly twenty-five years older than Adriana, and was already a cantankerous and confirmed bachelor.
It had been a marriage that had struggled on against all odds and had been, to all accounts, hellishly difficult for his demanding young wife.
His mother had not held back from telling him everything that had been so horrifically wrong with the relationship, as soon as he had been old enough to appreciate the gory detail. Alberto had been selfish, cold, mean, dismissive, contemptuous and probably, his mother had maintained viciously, would have had other women had he not lacked even basic social skills when it came to the opposite sex. He had, Adriana had wept on more than one occasion, thrown them out without a penny—so was it any wonder that she sometimes needed a little alcohol and a few substances to help her get by?
So many things for which Giancarlo had never forgiven his father.
He had stood on the sidelines and watched his delicate, spoilt mother—without any qualifications to speak of, always reliant on her beauty—demean herself by taking lover after lover, searching for the one who might wanther enough to stick around. By the time she had died she had been a pathetic shadow of her former self.
‘You have no idea of what my life was like, or what my mother’s life was like,’ Giancarlo framed icily. ‘Perhaps my father has mellowed. Ill health has a habit of making servants of us all. However, I’m not interested in building bridges. Is that why he sent you here—because he’s now an old man and he wants my forgiveness before he shuffles off this mortal coil?’ He gave a bark of cynical, contemptuous laughter. ‘I don’t think so.’
She had continued playing with the handkerchief, twisting it between her fingers. Giancarlo thought that when it came to messengers, his father could not have been more calculating in his choice. The woman was a picture of teary-eyed incomprehension. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that she worked for a saint, instead of for the man who had made his mother’s life a living hell.
His sharp eyes narrowed and focused, taking in the details of her appearance. Her clothes were a