To Love Again Read Free

front of the secretary's desk.
    Signora! The girl looked up, startled. One never quite knew when Isabella would appear, or just what she would have on her mind. But today Isabella only nodded, smiled, and walked immediately toward Amadeo's office. She knew he was in. She had seen the car. And unlike Isabella, he rarely strayed to the other floors. He and Bernardo kept mainly to their upstairs offices. It was Isabella who prowled, who wandered, who appeared suddenly in the mannequins' room, in the corridors outside the private fitting rooms, in the main salon with the long gray silk runway, which had to be constantly replaced. That was a source of constant irritation to Bernardo, ever practical in his directorship of the house. It was on his shoulders that the budget fell. As president and chief of finance, Amadeo designed the budget, but Bernardo had to live with it, seeing that the fabrics and beads and feathers and wondrous little ornaments fell within the limits Amadeo had set for them. And thanks to Bernardo they always existed well within that budget. Thanks to Bernardo the house had been carefully and at times brilliantly run for years. Thanks to Amadeo's investments and financial acumen they had prospered. And thanks to Isabella's genius with design they had gloried as well as flourished. But it was Bernardo who bridged the world of design and finance. It was he who calculated, speculated, weighed, and pondered what would work, what wouldn't, what would cost them the success of the line, or what was worth the gamble. And thus far he had never been wrong. He had a flair and a genius that made Isabella think of a matador, proud, erect, daring, flashing red satin in the face of the bull, and always winning in the end. She loved his style and she loved him. But not in the way that Bernardo loved her. He had always loved her. Always. From the first day he had met her.
    Bernardo and Amadeo had been friends for years and they had worked together in the House of San Gregorio before Isabella had appeared on the scene. It had been Bernardo who had discovered her in her tiny atelier in Rome. It had been he who had insisted that Amadeo come to see her work, meet her, talk to her, and perhaps even convince her to come to work for them. She had been remarkable even then, sensationally beautiful and incredibly young. At twenty-two she was already a striking woman, and a genius with design. They had arrived in her little studio that day to find her wearing a red silk shirt and a white linen skirt, little gold sandals and not much else. She looked like a diamond set in a valentine. The heat had been crushing, but even more so moments later when her eyes met Amadeo's for the first time. It had been then that Bernardo realized how much he cared too and that it was already too late. Amadeo and Isabella had fallen instantly in love, and Bernardo had never spoken up. Never. It was too late, and he would never have been treacherous to his friend. Amadeo meant too much to him; for years he had been like a brother, and Amadeo was not the kind of man one betrayed. He was precious to everyone, beloved by all. He was the one person you wanted to be like, not a man you'd want to hurt. So Bernardo didn't. He knew also that it saved him the pain of finding out that she didn't love him. He knew how much she loved Amadeo. It was the governing passion of her life. Amadeo actually meant more to her than her work, which in Isabella's case was indeed remarkable. Bernardo couldn't compete with that. So he kept his pride and his secret and his love and he made the business better; he learned to love her in another way, to love them both with a passion of his own, and a kind of purity that burned like a white fire within him. It created enormous tension between him and Isabella, but it was worth it. The results of their encounters, their rages, and their wars were always splendid: extravagantly beautiful women to parade down their runways ' women who