An Inheritance of Shame - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,41
at her apartment that evening, she was both exhausted and hyped up with adrenalin. She showered and stood in front of her closet with its paltry few dresses, wishing she had something pretty and feminine to wear. She almost wished she hadn’t left the gorgeous clothes Angelo had bought her back in his villa.
Sighing, she reached for a sundress in a pretty, pale blue. It was simple and cheap, and it was all she had. It would have to do. This wasn’t about impressing Angelo, she reminded herself as she slipped it on. It wasn’t about pretending to be something or someone she wasn’t. She wanted him to know and accept who she really was, cheap clothes and all. That was the only kind of chance she was interested in.
She’d just finished her makeup—no more than lip-gloss and a little mascara—when she heard a knock on the door. Taking a deep breath, she hurried to open it, and then found she had no words when she caught sight of Angelo standing there, dressed in a white dress shirt open at the throat and a pair of charcoal grey trousers. He looked effortlessly elegant and deliberately casual, his eyes blazing grey-green in his tanned face.
He smiled as he saw her, and reached for her hand, giving her a little twirl so her dress flared out around her legs. ‘You look lovely.’
‘It’s not much—’
‘Just say thank you.’
She laughed softly. ‘Thank you.’ They stared at each other for a moment, and Lucia tucked her hair—she’d worn it loose—behind her ears. ‘I’m nervous,’ she confessed, and Angelo dipped his head.
‘So am I.’
She gazed at him uncertainly. ‘You don’t seem nervous.’
‘You might be surprised at this,’ he answered, a smile in his eyes, ‘but I’m rather adept at hiding my emotions.’ She laughed again, felt the fizzing tension inside her begin to ease. Angelo tugged on her hand. ‘Let’s go.’
He led her downstairs to his Porsche parked by the kerb. She slid into the luxurious leather interior, felt that anticipation rise again. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A little place inland.’ He glanced at her with a smile. ‘Nothing too fancy.’
She smiled back, reassured yet still nervous. Everything about this felt strange, new and exciting, yes, but scary. So scary.
They didn’t talk much on the way to the restaurant, the silence between them expectant yet thankfully not too strained. All around them the sky was settling into twilight, and the last blush of sunset lighted the rugged horizon as Angelo pulled into the dirt lot of a small and unassuming building in a tiny hillside village about twenty kilometres from Palermo.
He’d been telling the truth when he said the place was nothing fancy, just wooden tables and chairs and plain, whitewashed walls, but a single glance at the menu told Lucia that this was still a high-class restaurant, with high-class prices.
‘Not too many forks,’ Angelo murmured as they were seated to a private table in the back, and she smiled.
‘I can just about manage these.’
‘I have no doubt about that.’
A waiter appeared and Angelo ordered a bottle of wine while Lucia fidgeted with her napkin, her glass of water. Few forks there might have been, but she still felt outclassed.
‘So,’ she said when the waiter left, ‘fill me in on the past fifteen years.’
Angelo smiled faintly. ‘It could be summed up in a few sentences. I worked. I worked some more. I made money.’
‘Give me the long version, then. What did you do after you first left Sicily?’
He shrugged, his long, lean fingers toying with his own cutlery, clearly on edge albeit for a different reason. ‘I went to Rome. I didn’t have any better ideas, to be honest.’
She imagined him in that huge city—a city she’d never seen—with nothing but a rucksack of clothes and his own burning ambition. ‘Did you know anybody there?’
He shook his head. ‘I got a job running messages for a finance firm. I learned the city and English, saved up for a moped, and then after about a year I started my own business offering the same service, only faster and cheaper.’
‘That was quick.’ He would have only been nineteen.
‘I spent the next couple of years building that business, and I sold it when I was twenty-three. I wanted to move into real estate, and so with the proceeds from that sale I bought a derelict building in an up-and-coming neighbourhood and turned it into a hotel.’ He stopped then, and glanced away.
‘And then?’ Lucia asked after a moment.
Angelo shrugged. ‘More