LITMIR.BIZ

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and Bella did the same. Only hers were cheap ones and did little against the glare, but she wore them so he could not see the tears in her eyes.

      Oh, it was hard to see him so sleek and beautiful. Harder too to get out of her head the image of him in bed this morning with a woman that had not been her.

      ‘You share an apartment with Sophie?’ Matteo checked.

      ‘I do.’ Behind her glasses Bella blinked nervously. For Sophie’s sake she did not want Matteo to see how they really lived—they had done all they could to avoid the embarrassment.

      For her sake too now, Bella thought.

      ‘Sophie told Luka that you worked from home.’

      There was a slight inference there and, given her behaviour this morning and the way she had spoken to him, Matteo clearly thought she was topping up her wages with the oldest profession in the world.

      Once a whore...

      She recalled his words.

      Bella knew what she had done to get here to Rome and she knew he would never forgive that.

      He didn’t need to know the salacious details and certainly Bella never wanted to tell him.

      In some ways it was easier to go along with his thinking, to be smart-mouthed and streetwise.

      To pretend that facing him wasn’t the hardest thing she had ever done.

      She glanced up at Matteo. He was so effortlessly elegant, so out of place by her side.

      Yet, just as she always had, she loved him.

      ‘Wait here,’ Bella said.

      ‘You’re not going to invite me into your home?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘That’s not very Sicilian,’ Matteo teased lightly.

      ‘Ah, but we are in Rome,’ Bella said. ‘You know how city people are, peeking out from behind their door, terrified you might want to come in.’

      ‘I do.’

      ‘Well, you can’t,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’

      She left him at the end of her street.

      The buildings were high, and some of the ancient buildings contained apartments that had been beautifully renovated. He could not guess, Bella hoped, that hers was not.

      She turned down another small side street, unlocked a huge iron security gate and wrenched it back, and then climbed the many steps that led to a very small apartment.

      Their lounge was relatively spacious but bare. It easily held two small sofas and a coffee table. Off that was a kitchen and Bella headed straight to the fridge and took out a bottle of water and drank it down, but nothing was going to help her become cool and sophisticated this morning. All their combined efforts had gone into ensuring that Sophie could present herself to Luka looking chic and glamorous—Sophie had wanted to appear far from the peasant that Luka had admitted to calling her during the trial.

      Had she given it proper thought, Bella might have known that if Luka was around, then Matteo would be too.

      But you deliberately didn’t think, Bella reminded herself.

      For five years she had done everything she could to keep the memories out.

      Now he was back and the best she could do was pull from her drawer a small black tube skirt and add to it a tight top with spaghetti straps.

      She ran a cloth over black ballet pumps and then brushed and retied her hair and headed out, locking the iron gate behind her. She walked back up the narrow hilly street to where he waited.

      ‘That was quick,’ Matteo said.

      ‘Did you want me to make a little more effort for you?’

      ‘I meant,’ he said as they walked, ‘that that was quick.’

      There was tension between them.

      Bella was still furious at the sight that had greeted her this morning and Matteo had been less than impressed by her crude seductive taunt.

      But aside from that there was a different tension, once-upon-a-time lovers trying to act as polite, distant friends who were merely catching up and wondering how the hell to adapt to that.

      ‘How about here?’ Matteo suggested as, instead of a corner café he stopped by a fashionable restaurant, and Bella nearly turned and ran.

      She had once tried to apply for a waitressing job at this very restaurant and hadn’t even made it past the doorman.

      She knew that she wasn’t glossy enough even to wait on tables here, let alone sit at them, but Matteo was already asking for a pavement table.

      She saw a couple of sideway glances—and she knew they were for him. Here amongst Rome’s elite and most beautiful he still stood out.

      The frowns, though, the double takes, well, they were for her.

      Amongst Rome’s elite and most beautiful Bella stood out, but for all the wrong reasons.

      They took their seats and as the waiter arranged the shade cloth, for once Bella thought Rome looked beautiful.

      ‘How do you find Rome?’ Matteo asked.

      ‘Busy,’ she said.

      ‘Do you miss home?’

      ‘This is home,’ she said, glad for dark glasses. ‘What about you—do you miss Bordo Del Cielo?’

      ‘No.’ Matteo shook his head. ‘I have nothing there to miss.’

      ‘Your mother?’ she asked.

      ‘She and her new husband moved away after Malvolio died. The property prices went up and they sold out. They spent all the money they made, of course...’ He didn’t elaborate, he was tired of his mother’s dramas.

      ‘Do you keep in touch?’

      ‘She rings for money, I send it. That’s it.’

      ‘You don’t see her?’

      He gave a very brief shake of his head.

      ‘Do you ever wonder about her?’ Bella asked, though the lump in her throat meant she was asking more about herself.

      ‘I don’t let myself,’ he said.

      ‘What about your brother, Dino?’ Bella asked, and she watched his jaw tense. She knew what Dino had told him about her.

      ‘Dino is in prison. Once Malvolio died there was no one who wanted his ways. He is in the same prison that Paulo was.’

      ‘Do you visit him?’

      ‘No,’ Matteo said. ‘I do everything I can not to think of him.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sure he’s the same, people don’t change.’

      ‘They don’t,’ Bella said. The poor stay poor, she thought. The rich get richer and the beautiful age well.

      She looked at the living proof.

      There he was, immaculate and completely at ease.

      And there was her image in his glasses and when she saw that she was nibbling on her nails she moved them from her mouth and sat a little straighter.

      ‘Do you like your work?’ he asked.

      ‘Oh, I love to make beds.’ Bella’s voice dripped sarcasm. ‘And sometimes, when I am shining a sink, I feel so blessed, but that doesn’t compare to cleaning a rich drunk’s toilet.’

      ‘What about your dressmaking?’

      ‘What about it?’ She shrugged. ‘I am not as good as I thought I was. I have applied to many design schools...’

      ‘You don’t need a design

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