Uncovering the Silveri Secret - By Melanie Milburne Page 0,16

on. 'You can't have blocked everything out. You weren't born a teenager with authority issues. You were once a baby, a toddler, a young child.'

He let out a short, impatient-sounding breath and reached for his glass. 'I don't remember much of my childhood at all,' he said and drank a deep mouthful of his wine.

Bella watched his Adam's apple go up and down. Even though his expression was masked, there was anger in the action as he swallowed the liquid - anger and something else she couldn't quite put her finger on. 'Tell me what you do remember,' she said.

The silence was long and brooding, the air so thick it felt like the ceiling had slowly lowered, compressing all the oxygen.

Bella continued to search his features. The stony mask had slipped just a fraction. She could see the flicker of a blood vessel in his temple. The grooves beside his mouth deepened as if he was holding back a lifetime of suppressed emotion. His nostrils flared as he took a breath. His eyes hardened to granite. His fingers around his glass tightened until she could see the whitening of his knuckles.

'Why did you get kicked out of all those foster homes?' she asked.

His eyes collided with hers. They were dark with a glitter that made the backs of her knees go fizzy again. 'Why do you think I was kicked out?' he asked with a tilt of his lips that looked more like a snarl than a smile. 'I was a rebel. A lost cause. Bad to the core. Beyond salvation.'

Bella swallowed a thick knot in her throat. He was so intimidating when he was in this mood but she was determined to find out more about him. His enigmatic nature intrigued her. She had always found his aloof, keep-away-from-me manner compellingly attractive. 'What happened to your parents?' she asked.

'They died.' He said the words as if they meant nothing to him. He showed no emotion at all. Not even a flicker. His face was like a marble statue, a blank, impenetrable mask.

'So you were an orphan?' Bella prompted.

'Yeah, that's me.' He gave a little laugh as he swirled the contents of his glass. 'An orphan.'

'Since when?' she asked. 'I mean, how old were you when your parents died?'

It seemed like a full year before he spoke; Bella waited out each pulsing second of the long, protracted silence. It was a silent battle of wills, but somehow she suspected the battle was not between her and him. It was between two parts of himself: the aloof loner who didn't need anyone and the man behind the mask who secretly did.

'I don't remember my father,' he said with the same blank, indifferent expression.

'He died when you were a baby?' she guessed.

'Yes.' There was still no emotion. No grief or sense of loss.

Bella moistened her lips, waiting a beat or two before asking, 'What happened?'

At first she didn't think he was going to answer. The silence stretched and stretched interminably.

'Motorbike accident,' he finally said. 'He wasn't wearing a helmet. Can't have been pretty.'

Bella winced. 'What about your mother?'

A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm tugged at the lower quadrant of his jaw. 'I was five,' he said and twirled his wine again, his eyes staring down at the liquid as it splashed against the sides of the glass.

'What happened to her?'

'She died.'

'How?'

There was another silence before he spoke. A bruised silence. 'Suicide.'

She gasped. 'Oh, my God, that's terrible.'

He gave a careless shrug. 'It wasn't much of a life for her once my father died.' He tipped back his head and drained his glass, setting it down on the table with a little thump.

Bella frowned as she thought of him as a young motherless boy. She had been totally devastated when her mother had driven away that day, but at least she had known her mother was still alive. How had Edoardo coped with losing his mother so young? 'Your father was Italian, wasn't he?'

'Yep.'

'And your mother?'

'English,' he said. 'She met my father while on a working holiday in Italy.'

'Who looked after you after she died?'

He put his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table, his expression closing like a door that had been clicked shut on a sliver of a view. 'Fergus needs to go outside,' he said. 'He's too stiff to use the pet door now.'

Bella sat back with a frown pulling at her forehead as she watched him stride from the room. He had told her things she