A Taste Of Italy. Fiona McArthur
She had connected with his previous statement and why she could sense and understand meanings so easily from a man she barely knew was a puzzle she didn’t want to fathom. She wondered if it worried him as much as it worried her.
To her relief he didn’t try to avoid her question. ‘My parents drowned off the Amalfi Coast from our yacht in a storm.’
Drowned. Poor little boys. ‘Storms at sea.’ She sighed. ‘Mother Nature’s temper can be wild and indiscriminate,’ she said softly. His eyes gazed off into the distance and she was with him. She could almost feel the spray in her face and hear the scream of the wind and she nodded. ‘I’ve lived by the sea. The weather can be unexpected and fierce. My father still has a house on a fabulous beach, but even he nearly drowned one day when he was washed off the rocks.’
He was watching her, listening to her voice, but she could tell half of him was in another place. ‘What happened with you and Gianni?’
He looked through her and his voice dropped. ‘Gianni almost died, and I, too, had pneumonia.’ She glanced at his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his effort to remain expressionless.
‘And you were both in hospital afterwards?’ Spoken gently, because she didn’t want to break the spell.
He nodded and now she understood where his empathy for those in similar circumstances had grown from because she could see the suppressed emotion, even in the careful blankness. That concept hit her hard, in mutual empathy from her early teens and the scars she still bore. ‘How old were you when they died?’
Leon shrugged the pain away. ‘Fourteen.’ Grieving, convalescing, in a hospital that was rushed and old and unintentionally uncaring. With a ten-year-old brother he’d nearly lost as well.
She could see he knew she’d connected the dots. And wasn’t happy. ‘It is better in my hospitals now.’ He changed the subject. ‘To see what you do here, in your maternity section, is good too.’
She allowed the change of subject, aware instinctively how privileged she’d been to glimpse into the private man and sensitive to his need to close the subject. ‘The maternity hospital concept is an exciting idea. I’ll certainly talk to Emma about it.’
No doubt he would also be happy because it would mean his brother’s new wife would be interested in staying more often in Italy. She didn’t fully trust his superior motives without a thought for his ulterior ones.
He was watching her again and she wondered what he’d seen of her thoughts. Not much, she hoped.
‘So you, too, have suffered the loss of a parent?’ His turn to pry. ‘You said you lost your mother young, also?’
Not going there. Fifteen hadn’t been a good age to be allowed to run free. ‘Yes.’ The less said there, the better.
‘And that you lived with your grandmother?’ So he remembered. Deep creases marred his forehead. ‘Why did you not go with your father when your mother died?’
‘It’s a long story and maybe another day.’ She and her father would have preferred that and maybe her life would have been different. She shrugged her shoulders for something she’d no control over. Fifteen had also been a bad age to be told Ben wasn’t her real father.
Rebellion saw Tammy spend many hours loitering at that Italian coffee shop. Months had passed without her father’s knowledge of how little supervision her grandmother had exercised.
Rides in fast cars she later found out were stolen. Dark and dangerous men that even her boyfriend was wary of. Secret meetings she’d had to stay silent in.
The day Ben, her father in all that counted if not legally, had arrived to rescue her.
He’d picked her up from the coffee shop when she’d rung him to say she was pregnant and whisked her to Lyrebird Lake. He’d told her then they were petty criminals. Not long later she’d read that her baby’s father had been sent to jail for a long time.
No wonder she’d found it all so dreadfully, horribly exciting. That risk-taking and foolish time in her life was something she’d buried when she’d become a responsible mother.
Until Gianni had arrived in Lyrebird Lake and wooed her best friend, she’d covered the Italian episode in her life. Hadn’t even tried her language skills out on Gianni so she doubted there was anyone except her father, and maybe his wife, Misty, in Lyrebird Lake who knew her secret.
Emma’s betrothal had been such a whirlwind affair she hadn’t even mentioned it when her friend had fallen for Gianni.
But she had Jack. The light in her life. And she’d change nothing now. Except maybe the subject again.
She had other motives for asking him here and he’d stayed a while already. ‘There’s something I want to ask you, though you may not want to discuss it. Something that means I should apologise for my presumption without knowing the facts.’
He frowned and inclined his head.
She hesitated, because she didn’t really know him or how he’d react, and then typically, she dived in anyway. ‘Was Paulo almost abducted before you came here?’
His brows snapped together. ‘Who told you this?’
She straightened in her seat, refusing to be cowed. ‘Paulo mentioned it to Emma’s daughter, Grace.’ She didn’t say Grace had told Jack and Jack had told her.
His hand tightened on the cup he held and for a fleeting moment she had the ridiculous thought he might crush it without realising. Surely a man’s hand couldn’t really do that? In the silence she imagined she could hear the porcelain creak in protest.
‘This is true.’ He glanced at his white fingers and carefully put the cup down, then ran his other hand through thick black curls. She glimpsed the flicker of white-hot fury in his eyes and it was a warning of what he would be capable of. Strangely she had no problem with that. She’d almost pity the men who tried to harm his son if he caught them.
‘I was stupidly distracted by my wish to arrive well before the wedding and took too little care. We are not the first family to be targeted by those who wish to benefit financially from people they see as too wealthy.’
So it was true. The thought made her want to clutch at her throat but she kept her hands together in her lap as if to hold onto the pictures that wanted to rise up and fill her mind. ‘Good grief. What about the police?’
He inclined his head but the movement was noncommittal. ‘The police do their best to capture these criminals but by then it is often too late for the one abducted. This will not happen to my son or anyone in my family. I have a private investigator and bodyguards working with me full-time now. Experienced operatives whose records are impeccable and that I trust with my and my family’s lives.’
There was almost an aura around him and she recognised the implacable determination that would see him succeed in whatever he set his mind to. ‘So you believe Paulo is safe, now that these people work for you?’
He inclined his head. ‘Already they have paid tenfold for the money I retain them with. Those responsible have been passed over to the police. Paulo is safe now. No more at risk than any other boy, but it is hard not to look into the dark for danger.’
Who were these Bonmaritos her friend had bound herself to? These superficially cultured men who hid wolves beneath their Italian suits and hired bodyguards. More gangsters she’d fallen in with? Or truly philanthropic doctors merely protecting their own from a culture she didn’t understand.
‘This all sounds very James Bondish. Not something Lyrebird Lake would ever have to worry about.’ She said it firmly, and perhaps a little too quickly, but she really didn’t want to think of this scenario in her own home. In the lives of people she knew. In the man opposite her she was strangely drawn to. Dark forces she never wanted to be involved with again. It was too unsettling.
‘So my brother says.