LITMIR.BIZ

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up, is she?’ she whispered.

      Luca didn’t answer for a moment, then he shook his dark head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he responded huskily.

      ‘I’ll stay,’ she agreed on a thick swallow.

      Luca sat back against the bench suddenly and the air hissed out from between his teeth in a tense, taut act of relief. A moment later something dropped on her lap next to the sandwich carton.

      It was a plastic security card. ‘Access,’ he explained. ‘You might need it if I cannot get here to collect you.’

      She nodded.

      ‘If I cannot make it then my driver Fredo will come for you. You remember Fredo?’

      ‘Yes.’ Another nod while she stared down at the card. Fredo was a wiry little man with amazing patience—he needed it for the hours he tended to hang around waiting for Luca to appear.

      ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I don’t have to worry about you getting into the back of some stranger’s car.’

      It was a joke. She hadn’t expected it. It surprised her enough to force a small laugh out of her. Luca laughed too, one of those deep, soft, husky sounds of his that caressed the senses. But it all felt so strange and wrong to be laughing in the circumstances that soon they both fell silent and still.

      ‘You don’t have to worry about me at all,’ she thrust into that stillness.

      ‘Worry is not the word that shoots into my head,’ he countered. ‘Someone should be here with you supporting you through this. Here.’ Something else landed on her lap. She stared in surprise at the sight of her own mobile telephone. ‘It was in my overcoat pocket. I found it this morning,’ Luca explained. ‘Here is my private number. Log it in the phone’s memory. Don’t hesitate to call me if you need me, Shannon.’ It was a serious threat more than polite reassurance.

      Then he stood up so suddenly that he made her blink. Big and lean and dark and tense, he blocked out her sunlight. She felt cold—bereft. He was going to leave and she wanted to fling herself at him and beg him to stay!

      But he had duties to return to and she had a bedside vigil to keep.

      ‘I have to go.’ He stated the obvious and tension zipped through the air like electric static. ‘Use the phone, do you hear me?’

      Shannon pressed her lips hard together and nodded. He turned and strode away without glancing back and she remained sitting there with the sun trying to put back the warmth he had taken with him.

      It didn’t.

      Luca had never felt so inadequate or useless in his entire life as he did when he walked away from her like that. But he had things to deal with, lousy, throat-locking, soul-stripping things that could not be put off.

      But his mind was locked into Shannon—or was it his heart? He didn’t know. What he did know was that Shannon might have betrayed him two years ago but he was betraying her now by not being there when she needed him.

      And it had to be him. That was the other part of his inner conflict that was flaying him alive. He did not want someone else to be there with her. He didn’t even want to think about her leaning on someone else.

      ‘Dio, leave me in peace!’ he rasped when the land-line on the desk began to ring.

      It was a reporter wanting him to make a statement. This was not the first insensitive lout he’d had to deal with today and probably would not be the last. As he was replacing the receiver Renata put her head round the door to look him a question. She’d added ten years in twenty-four hours. They all had.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was the press, not the hospital.’

      Renata remained hovering in the doorway and he knew she wanted him to hold her. Walking across the room, he took her in his arms and let her weep into his shoulder and wished it could be OK for him to break down and weep.

      ‘How is Mama?’ he asked when the flood subsided.

      ‘She’s awake now, and looking a little stronger,’ Renata told him, then added carefully. ‘Luca, about Shannon—’

      ‘Don’t go there, Renata,’ he warned thinly and was glad of the excuse to move away from her when the phone rang again. His sister hovered for a few seconds longer, silenced by his censure and waiting to find out who was calling before slipping away once she knew the call was business.

      He did not want to discuss the rights and wrongs of Shannon staying with him at his apartment. He did not want to discuss Shannon with anyone—period.

      His personal assistant was asking him a question that required his full concentration. Luca gave it to him and dealt with the problem as if it were perfectly normal to make corporate decisions while the world lay in rubble at his feet.

      It was while he was in the middle of a curt, clipped sentence that his private cell-phone began to beep.

      Shannon. He was certain of it. He dropped the other phone as if it were a hot brick.

      His fingers shook as he made the connection. All she could manage to say to him was, ‘Please—will you come?’

      CHAPTER FIVE

      LUCA came to a stop in the doorway, a thick breath labouring in his chest. He was too late. She had called him too late. Now he was having to stand here and witness just how alone she must have felt.

      The doctors had advised him to take her away now, but how did you prize those slender white fingers from her beautiful, beautiful sister’s fingers for the last time?

      Tears hit his eyes and remained there, burning like acid, though he did not let them fall. It was going to happen soon, he knew that. Soon he was going to give way to all of this hard, aching grief and cry himself empty, he promised himself.

      But for now he wanted to hit something again, put his fist through a window or a wall. The pain it would cause had to be more bearable than what he was suffering right now, he thought grimly as he made himself walk forward on legs that felt hollow and slowly went down on his haunches next to Shannon’s chair. She didn’t even notice, but as he gathered up her free hand her eyelashes flickered and she looked at him.

      ‘It’s over,’ she whispered.

      ‘Si,’ he murmured unevenly. ‘I know.’

      Her eyes drifted back to her sister’s quietly serene face and she forgot he was there again for a while, then the sound of a muffled sob came from somewhere behind them, and glancing round Luca saw that the rest of his family had arrived.

      He’d taken off without them with Fredo driving like a madman leaving the others to find their own way here, now they poured forward, crowding the bed to begin this next wave of unbearable grief. As they pressed around the bed he saw Shannon become aware, blinking blank and dazed eyes at the sudden commotion, and he knew by instinct that she was not going to cope with the Italian way of letting feelings pour out like this.

      With his jaw set like a closed vice, he reached across for her other hand and with gentle fingers began carefully easing it away from Keira’s hand.

      Shannon gasped and looked him a pained protest. But he shook his head. ‘It’s time to let go, cara,’ he told her gently.

      For a moment he thought she was going to refuse. She looked back at her sister with glistening tears drawing a film across her eyes and it ripped him apart inside because he knew those tears displayed the beginning of acceptance.

      A few seconds after that she allowed him to complete the separation, allowed him to ease his arm around her waist and help her to her feet. The others flooded towards her now, crowding her by reaching out to embrace her and murmuring their tearful phrases of condolence; his mother looking dreadful, his weeping sisters and their sober-faced husbands all taking their turn.

      Shannon accepted their embraces from within a cocoon of dazed bewilderment

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