The Bride's Awakening - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,25

been two years before they’d regained the relationship they’d once had.

Now she knew she couldn’t really be surprised that he was approaching the issue of her possible marriage with such a cool head.

Vittorio’s arguments would have appealed marvellously to his own sense of checks and balances. Indeed, she shared his sense of logic, prided herself on her lack of feminine fancy. After living with her father as her lone companion for most of her life, the sentimental theatrics of most women were cloying and abhorrent. She didn’t, Ana reflected with a wry sorrow, even know how to be a woman.

Yet Vittorio had treated her as one, when he’d kissed her…

Even so. Marriage…

‘My objection,’ she said, ‘is the entire idea of marriage as a business proposition. It seems so cold.’

‘But surely it doesn’t have to be? Better to go into such an enterprise with a clear head, reasonable expectations—’

‘I still don’t even understand why Vittorio wants to marry me—’ Ana said, stopping suddenly, wishing she hadn’t betrayed herself. Just like her father, she hated to be vulnerable. She knew what it felt like to be so exposed, so raw, and then so rejected.

‘He needs a wife. He must be in his late thirties, you know, and a man starts to think of his future, his children—’

‘But why me?’ The words came, as unstoppable as the fears and doubts that motivated them. ‘He could have anyone, anyone at all—’

‘Why not you, Ana?’ Enrico asked gently. ‘You would make any man a wonderful wife.’

Ana’s mouth twisted. Her father also called her dolcezza. Sweet little thing. He was her father, her papà; of course he believed such things. That didn’t mean she believed them, or him. ‘Still, there would be no love involved.’

Enrico gave a little shrug. ‘In time, it comes.’

She was shredding her roll onto her plate, just as her father had done with his poor little kipper. Her appetite—what little there had been of it—had completely vanished. She looked up at her father and shook her head. ‘With Vittorio, I don’t think so.’ Her throat went tight, and she cursed herself for a fool. She didn’t need love. She’d convinced herself of that long ago. She didn’t even want it, and she couldn’t fathom why she’d mentioned it to her father.

Her father remained unfazed. ‘Still, affection. Respect. These things count for much, dolcezza. More perhaps than you can even imagine now, when love seems so important.’

‘Yet you loved Mamma.’

Her father nodded, his face seeming to crumple just a little bit. Even sixteen years on, he still lived for her memory.

‘Don’t you think I want that kind of love too?’ Ana asked, her voice turning raw. Despite what she’d said—what she believed—she needed to know her father’s answer.

Enrico didn’t speak for a moment. He poured himself another cup of coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. ‘That kind of love,’ he finally said, ‘is not easy. It is not comfortable.’

‘I never said I wanted to be comfortable.’

‘Comfort,’ Enrico told her with a little smile, ‘is always underrated by those who have experienced nothing else.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t…comfortable…with Mamma?’ The idea was a novel one, and one Ana didn’t like to consider too closely. She’d always believed her parents to have had the grandest of love matches, adoring each other to the end. A fairy tale, and one she’d clung to in those first dark days of grief. Yet now her father seemed to be implying something else.

‘I loved her,’ Enrico replied. ‘And I was happy. But comfortable, always? No. Your mother was a wonderful woman, Ana, be assured of that. But she was emotional—and I’m the one who is Italian!’ He smiled, the curve of his mouth tinged with a little sadness. ‘It was not always easy to live with someone who felt things so deeply.’ Snatches of memory came to her, swirls of colour and sound. Her mother crying, the cloying scent of a sick room, the murmurs of a doctor as her father shook his head. And then her mother pulling her close, whispering fervently against her hair how she, Ana, would be the only one, the only child. Love, Ana thought, did not protect you from sorrow. Perhaps it only softened the blow.

Enrico put down his coffee cup and gave Ana a level look. ‘Be careful to realize what you would be giving up by not marrying Vittorio, Ana.’

Ana drew back, stung. ‘What are you saying? That I might as well take the best offer—the only offer—I can get?’

‘No, of course