LITMIR.BIZ

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manoeuvred her into the nearest sofa. She landed with a bump, eyes wide and staring.

      ‘Why can you never take good advice when it is offered to you?’ he ground out as he came down on his haunches and took a strong grasp on her ice-cold hands. ‘It was a simple request—a wise request. You almost collapsed as I knew you would. You are your own worst enemy, do you know that? I cannot believe you are still such a—’

      She tugged her hands free. The action silenced his angry tongue, snapped his lips together and tightened the muscles in his face. In the new silence that developed Shannon struggled to get a hold of what was trampling through her. Her heart was palpitating wildly, her breathing reduced to tight and shallow catches of air. Keira was the only person left in this world that she truly cared about.

      Keira, her beautiful Keira, whom everyone loved and wanted a piece of.

      ‘Tell me what happened,’ she whispered unevenly.

      His mouth had developed a white ring of tension around it. She had to look away because she couldn’t bear to see him while he said what he had to say. ‘They were in the fast lane on the main autostradale into Florence when they ran into a heavy downpour of rain,’ he explained. ‘An articulated lorry skidded on the wet surface. It criccoaccoltellato—jackknifed directly in front of them, swerving right across the road. They did not stand a chance,’ he uttered in a voice like thick gravel. ‘With no room or time to take avoiding action they hit head-on and—’

      The words stopped when he was forced to swallow. Silence returned, crawling all over the two of them while Shannon sat staring over the top of Luca’s dark head as the whole wretched thing played itself like a macabre action movie in front of her eyes.

      ‘Is she—?’

      ‘No,’ he cut in quickly—roughly.

      Relief feathered through her, then she tensed again as the next dreaded thought flipped into her head.

      ‘They. You said they,’ she prompted shakily, and looked at him then, really looked at him and saw for the first time the strain etched into the fabric of his lean, hard features—and the pain burning in the deep, dark depths of his eyes. Realisation dawned, the muscles in her own face began to collapse, tears of a desperate, desperate understanding flooding into her eyes.

      ‘Oh, no, Luca—no,’ she choked out unevenly. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘not Angelo …’

      But the answer she wanted to hear didn’t come, and as a set of her cold fingers jerked up to cover her trembling mouth Luca muttered something thick in Italian, then lowered his head to bury his face in his hands.

      Dark mists of shock and grief wrapped around them. For what could have been an age Shannon couldn’t move or think or even feel. Angelo and Keira—Keira and Angelo—the two precious names spun in her head on an ever dizzying spiral while the rain lashed wildly at the window and Luca remained squatting in front of her with his face covered and his wide shoulders taut as he fought his own battle with shock and grief.

      Luca and his brother were close. They worked together, played together, laughed and talked together all the time. To think of one without thinking about the other was—

      ‘Oh Luca …’ Lifting her hand with its trembling fingers, Shannon gently touched them to his rain-dampened hair. ‘I’m so s—’

      It came without warning. At the first light brush of her fingers he was thrusting away from her with a violence that left her stunned and shaken as he climbed to his feet, turned his back on her and strode away several paces to then stand still and rigid while he fought a battle with his moment of complete collapse.

      When he turned to face her he was back in control again, or as controlled as a man could be who’d just lost the brother he loved. Shannon hadn’t moved, and as his gaze lashed over her she saw the ice, the cold hatred, and knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he did not deserve to lose his brother and she did not deserve to have her sister still.

      Yes, she thought, he hated her enough to think like that.

      Bitterness returned, and with it came a welcome sense of foggy calmness. Shannon climbed to her feet, wished with all her aching heart that she could just walk away from him, but there were still things she needed to know.

      ‘Y-you said the prognosis for Keira isn’t good,’ she prompted, feeling the shake in her voice as well as in the fingers she used to smooth down the rucked fabric of her slender skirt. ‘Why isn’t it good?’

      The tense shape of his mouth slackened slightly as he parted his lips to speak. ‘Her injuries were extensive. She had to be cut out of the car—’

      Shannon flinched and lowered her eyes from him, painfully aware that the they had now changed to she. Did that mean that Angelo had been beyond help? She didn’t ask, didn’t dare, didn’t think she could cope with the answer.

      ‘By the time they freed her, Keira had lost a lot of blood,’ Luca continued in a low voice like rough sandpaper. ‘Thankfully she was unconscious throughout so was aware of—nothing …’

      The nothing broke into uneven fragments, and as her heavy lungs tried their best to breathe for her Shannon wondered if Angelo had been aware of nothing.

      Angelo. An ache hit low in her stomach. Never to see his lazy grin again or the teasing gleam in his beautiful eyes—’Oh,’ she choked and her legs went hollow, forcing her to sit down again and cover her face with her hands.

      ‘There were problems,’ Luca pushed on relentlessly, obviously deciding to get the whole wretched thing said now he had begun. ‘Some of which the doctors could fix, some they—could not …’

      It was during this next thick pause Luca allowed to develop—presumably to give her time to absorb what he’d said—Shannon suddenly remembered something she should not have forgotten: there was still yet another being involved in this awful tragedy.

      A sudden rush of nausea forced her to swallow thickly. Sliding her hand away from her face, she looked up at Luca, her eyes dark and haunted. ‘Oh, God, Luca,’ she whispered frailly. ‘What about the baby?’

      Her sister was seven and a half months pregnant—the longest period Keira had managed to carry a baby, one of her many, many attempts to bear Angelo a child. His eyelashes flickered, lowering over dark brown irises to hide his own feelings about what he was about to say. ‘They had to do a Caesarean section,’ he informed her briefly. ‘Keira was haemorrhaging badly and it became a matter of urgency that they deliver the baby as quickly as they could—’

      The abruptly spoken words came to a stop again. It seemed that he could only give information in short bursts before he had to pause to gather himself. It was all so dark and utterly wretched, shock piling upon shock upon horror and grief and blood-curdling dread.

      ‘And …?’ It took a tight clutching at her courage to prompt him to continue.

      ‘A girl,’ he announced. ‘She is quite small and needs the aid of an incubator to breathe, but otherwise the doctors assure us that she is fully formed and perfectly healthy. It—it is her mama that gives grave cause for concern. Keira now lies in a coma and I’m afraid the final outcome does not look good.’

      In the cold, dark silence that followed, Shannon knew she was slipping into deep shock. Angelo was dead, her sister was dying, their baby daughter needed help to breathe. It couldn’t get any worse.

      It could, she discovered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly.

      But he wasn’t sorry, not for her at any rate. It was too late for him to murmur polite words of sympathy when he’d looked at her the way he’d done a few minutes ago. He resented bitterly the fact that he had lost his beloved brother while she, the undeserving one, could still cling to a small thread of hope.

      ‘Excuse me,’ she said thickly, ‘but I’m going to be sick,’ and, dragging herself up from the sofa, she made a dash for the bathroom.

      He

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