The Bride's Awakening - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,29

more in the doorway, her lips pursed in impatience. She was holding a gown over one arm, frothy with lace. Ana had never seen anything so beautiful. She could not imagine wearing such a thing, or what she would look like in it. It could not possibly be her size.

‘Ana,’ Vittorio murmured, ‘you will look beautiful in these clothes. Surely you want to look beautiful?’

‘Perhaps I just want to be myself,’ Ana said quietly. She didn’t add that she was afraid she wouldn’t look beautiful in those clothes, or that she wished he thought she looked beautiful already. It was too difficult to explain, too absurd even to feel. She didn’t want Vittorio to want to change her, even if she was willing to be changed. Stupid, unreasonable, perhaps, but true. She shook her head and pushed past him to the door. ‘I’m sorry, Vittorio, but I’m not going to be your Cinderella project.’

Vittorio stifled a curse as he called back to Feliciana before following Ana out into the street. He’d thought she would appreciate the clothes, the opportunity to look, for once, like a woman. He’d thought he was giving her a gift. Instead, she acted offended. Would he ever understand women? Vittorio wondered in annoyed exasperation. He’d thought he understood women; he was certainly good with them. Allow them unlimited access to clothes and jewels and they’d love you for ever—or think they did.

Not that he wanted Ana’s love, but her gratitude would have been appreciated at this point. He gazed at her, her arms wrapped around herself, her hair blowing in the breeze off the canal, and wondered if he’d ever understand her. He’d thought it would be simple, easy. He’d thought her an open book, to be read—and discarded—at his own leisure. The realization that she was far more complicated, that he’d managed to dismiss her before even getting to know her, was both annoying and shaming.

‘I think perhaps you should take me home.’

‘We have reservations at one of the finest restaurants in Venice,’ Vittorio said, his voice clipped, his teeth gritted. ‘That’s why I brought you to this boutique—so you could be dressed appropriately, preferably in a dress!’

‘If you want to marry me,’ Ana replied evenly, ‘then you need to accept me as I am. I won’t change for you, Vittorio.’

‘Not even your clothes?’ He couldn’t keep the caustic note out of his voice. The woman was impossible. And, damnation, she was blinking back tears. He hadn’t meant to make her cry; the last thing he needed now was tears. He’d hurt her, and his annoyance and shame deepened, cutting him. Hurting him. ‘Ana—’

She shook her head, half-talking to herself. ‘I don’t know why I ever thought—hoped, even—that this could work. You don’t know me at all. We’re strangers—’

‘Of course I don’t know you!’ he snapped. Impatience bit at him, the swamping sense of his own failure overtook him. He’d lost control of the situation, and he had no idea how it had happened. When she’d come into the villa this evening and he’d seen how her eyes had lit at the sight of him, he’d felt so confident. So sure that she was going to marry him, that she’d already said yes in her mind, if not her heart. Hearts need not be involved.

Yet, even as Vittorio reminded himself of this, he realized how impossible a situation this truly was. He wanted to be kind to Ana; he wanted affection and respect to bud and grow. He wanted her loyalty; he just didn’t want her to fall in love with him.

Yet there seemed no danger of that right now.

‘I thought,’ he finally said, ‘this could be an opportunity for us to get to know one another.’

‘After you’ve changed me.’

‘After I bought you a dress!’ Vittorio exploded. ‘Most women would have been thrilled—’

‘Well, I’m not most women,’ Ana snapped. Her cheeks glowed with colour and her eyes were a steely grey. She looked, Vittorio thought with a flash of surprise, magnificent. Like a woman warrior, Boadicea, magnificent in her self-righteous anger, and all that vengeful fury was directed at him. ‘And most women I know,’ she spat, ‘wouldn’t entertain your business proposition for a single minute!’ With that, her eyes still shooting angry sparks at him, she turned on her heel and stormed down Frezzeria towards the Piazza.

This time Vittorio cursed aloud.

Standing alone, crowds of tourists pushing past her, Ana wondered if she should have gone back with that stick-thin saleswoman and tried on those