McGillivray's Mistress - By Anne McAllister Page 0,61
desire to stand there and watch her fly away.
“You could always come and stop her?”
He looked up then. “No!”
Molly sighed. “Fine. Be that way. I’ll tell her you had an emergency call, that you couldn’t get away, but that you’re happy for her. All right? She’ll want to know you’re happy for her.”
Lachlan doubted that. But he shrugged. “Whatever.” He kept his voice neutral and his eyes on the page. They didn’t stray as long as Molly stood there, nor even as her footsteps receded and he heard the inn’s front door open and shut.
Only when she was gone did he lift his gaze then and stare bleakly out across the pristine sand toward the empty horizon.
He was happy for Fiona. Of course he was. He kept telling himself that.
He just hoped someday he believed it.
CHAPTER TEN
FIONA LOVED ITALY.
She’d always thought she would.
She was delighted with the village of Tremulini, high on a Tuscan hillside. For a Bahamian girl who didn’t know hills from mountains, Italy was a revelation. Fiona was fascinated by all the ups and downs. She was thrilled with the food and spent hours prowling the markets and sampling local dishes in little trattorias.
She liked her classes, the hands-on introduction to media course—painting, drawing, sculpting and printmaking—that was required of all new students, the beginning sketching-for-sculptors class where she learned to undo all the bad habits her caricaturing had taught her, and the history-of-art-in-Italy overview, which sent her to churches and museums and town squares all over the region to absorb and reflect and study.
But she knew that when Adela Dirienzo, the sculptor with whom she would do her apprenticeship, returned from teaching master classes in Amsterdam, her work would really begin.
That was fine with her. Fiona was determined to be a sponge, soaking everything up, cramming each day full to the brim with new sights, new sounds, new ideas, new friends.
Since she’d arrived a month ago, she had made a lot of new friends at school—Roberto from her sketching class, and Hans and Resi from her history class, and Maria, Guillermo and Dmitri from her media course. She’d made friends in the community as well. Giulia, the registrar’s secretary, had taken her under her wing, had found her a tiny flat above the wine shop her uncle Tommaso ran. Her uncle Pietro, a waiter in the local trattoria, plied Fiona with forty flavors of gelato and introduced her to other local delicacies, and Giulia’s cousins, Vittorio, Alberto, Franco, Giancarlo, Sophia and Marcelo took her into their lives and made her a part of the family.
And a good thing, too, because Fiona needed family. Desperately.
For as much as she loved Italy and her friends and her classes and all she was experiencing and learning, and as much as she looked forward to learning from Signora Dirienzo, she was homesick, too.
She kept her days as full as she possibly could.
But her nights were long and filled with memories.
Nights brought dreams of soft pink sand beaches and warm turquoise seas, of conch fritters and pineapple soda and ice-cold beer, of pastel-colored houses and white picket fences and potholed streets.
And not just food and places, but faces.
People.
Mike and Claire and Tom and Peter. Paul and Julie and their new twins, Alison and Jack who had been barely three weeks old when Fiona had left. Maurice and Estelle and their family. Carin, Nathan, Lacey and Josh. Miss Saffron. Tony. Nikki. Molly. Hugh.
Lachlan.
She couldn’t sleep for remembering Lachlan. Wanting Lachlan.
Loving Lachlan.
It was stupid and she knew it. But there it was: she’d come halfway around the world and hadn’t left him behind at all.
It was early days yet, she told herself. She’d barely been gone a month. Surely by Christmas she wouldn’t be dreaming of him every night. She wouldn’t be thinking of him a thousand times a day.
If she was, she couldn’t possibly go home for the holiday. She would have to go with Resi and Hans to Innsbruck to go skiing. A little island girl like her going skiing in Austria? The mind boggled. But then hadn’t there been a Jamaican bobsled team?
She was out in the world doing things, learning things, growing and getting a life. And someday, God willing, Lachlan would be only a small insignificant memory.
She was sure she already was that to him.
She didn’t believe that once she had left, he had wasted a moment’s thought on her. He’d wanted her. He’d had her.
End of story.
To make sure it really was the end of the story,