The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection. Maisey Yates
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round the cobbled lanes in Lugano to pick a quiet restaurant for dinner, but none had yet lived up to the perfection on a plate offered by Vito’s personal chef.
They had visited the Zoo al Maglio, where Angelo had been enchanted by the antics of the monkeys and had struggled fiercely to copy them. They had caught the funicular railway to the top of Monte San Salvatore to enjoy the alpine scenery and on the way back they had stopped off at a chocolate factory, where a peckish Holly had eaten her weight in chocolate and had sworn never to eat it again while Vito teased her about how much he adored her curves.
There had been shopping trips as well, to the designer boutiques on the Via Nassa, where Holly had become bored because her new wardrobe was so expansive she saw no reason to add to it. She had much preferred the bustling liveliness of the farmers’ market in the Piazza Riforma, from which she had returned home carrying armfuls of the flowers she couldn’t resist. Discovering that arranging them was more of an art than a matter of simply stuffing them in a big vase, she had resolved to ask her mother-in-law for some tips.
‘Your mother...’ Vito reminded her. ‘Are you going to sleep?’
‘No. It’s only two o’clock in the afternoon.’ But in truth she was already smothering a yawn because their post-lunch nap had turned into a sex-fest. ‘Mum...’ she reminded herself. ‘It was the last time I ever lived with her. I thought she wanted me back because I was no longer a child who needed looking after twenty-four-seven. I thought she finally wanted to get to know her daughter. But I got it all wrong—’
‘How...?’ Vito asked, long fingers inscribing a soothing pattern on her hip bone.
‘Mum was living with a guy who owned a little supermarket. She asked me to help out in the shop...’ Holly’s voice trailed away ruefully. ‘It was a crucial school year with exams and I didn’t want to miss classes but she insisted she couldn’t cope and I fell for it—’
‘And...?’ Vito prompted when she fell silent again.
‘It turned out that she only wanted me working in the shop to save her having to do it and they weren’t even paying me minimum wage. I was just cheap labour to please her boyfriend and give her a break.’ Holly sighed. ‘I missed so much school that social services took me back into care. Of course I failed half my exams as well. I haven’t seen her since. I realised that she was never going to be the mother I wanted her to be and I had to accept that. She wasn’t the maternal type—’
‘And yet you’re so different with Angelo.’
‘And if you compare your relationship with your father, aren’t you different with Angelo too? We both want to give our son what we didn’t have ourselves,’ Holly murmured, rejoicing in the heat and strength of his long, lean length next to hers. ‘Why didn’t you invite your father to our wedding?’
‘I thought it would be too awkward for my mother and our guests, particularly when Ciccio is fighting for a bigger divorce settlement because he stands to lose a lot of things that he’s always taken for granted.’
‘Concetta seems quite happy...well, for someone going through a divorce, that is,’ Holly qualified ruefully.
‘With my father gone she has a lot less stress in her life and for the first time she has her independence without the restriction of either a father or a husband. She loves her new home and the freedom she has there.’
‘It’s a new life for her,’ Holly mused drowsily, thinking that her own new life was still in the honeymoon period and wouldn’t really officially start until they returned to the castello the following day and embarked on a more normal routine.
‘I didn’t realise that marrying you would be a new beginning for me as well,’ Vito admitted thoughtfully, acknowledging that he had not fully thought through the ramifications of marrying and becoming a parent. He had plunged into matrimony, dimly expecting life to go on as it always had only to learn that change was inevitable.
‘Do you have regrets?’ she whispered fearfully. ‘Do you sometimes wish you were still single and unencumbered? I suppose you must.’
‘I have no regrets when I’m in bed with you...not a single one.’ Vito gazed down at her with dancing dark golden eyes alive with wolfish amusement. ‘Sì, I knew you’d be annoyed by that point but, Dio mio...at least I’m honest!’
And as his eyes laughed down at her, her heart swelled inside her and she knew, just knew in her very soul that she loved Vito. She loved him the way she had tried not to love him. She had tried so hard to protect herself from feeling more for Vito than he felt for her because that was the hard lesson she had learned in loving her unresponsive mother. You couldn’t make a person care for you; you couldn’t force those feelings.
In any case, it had crossed her mind more than once that Vito’s emotions might be quite unavailable in the love category. Holly had met Vito on the rebound, shortly after his fiancée had ditched him. That Christmas theirs had been a classic rebound attraction. Was Vito still in love with Marzia? Had he tried to return to the beautiful blonde during the fourteen months he and Holly had been apart? Had he mourned the loss of Marzia once he’d decided that he had to marry Holly for his son’s sake? And how, when he never ever so much as mentioned the woman, could Holly possibly ask him to tell her honestly how he currently felt about Marzia?
She couldn’t ask because she didn’t think she could bear to live with the wrong answer.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Holly shuffled the messy pile of financial publications that Vito always left in his wake and lifted the other, more gossipy newspapers out to peruse. She flicked through the pages, thrilled when she was able to translate the occasional word of Italian.
Her knowledge of the language was slowly growing. She could manage simple interactions with their staff and greetings. Hopefully once she started proper Italian lessons with a local teacher later in the week her grasp of Italian would grow in leaps and bounds. After all, both her son and her husband would speak the language and she was determined not to be the odd one out. Vito’s desire that their son should grow up bilingual was more likely to be successful if she learned Italian as well.
Abandoning the papers, she selected a magazine, flipping through glossy photographs of Italian celebrities she mostly didn’t recognise until one picture in particular stopped her dead in her tracks. It was a photo of Marzia wearing the most fabulous sparkling ballgown with Vito by her side. She frowned and stared down at it with such intensity that she literally saw spots appear in front of her eyes. She struggled to translate the blurb beneath the picture. It appeared to be recent and it had been taken at some party. The previous week, Vito had spent two nights at his Florence apartment because he had said he was working late. Well, the first time he had been working late, the second time he had actually said that he had to attend a very boring dinner, which invariably would drag on into the early hours...
For dinner, read dinner dance, she reflected unhappily. Her entire attention was welded to the photo. Vito and Marzia had been captured at what appeared to be a formal dance with their arms in the air as if their hands had just parted from a clasp. Both of them were smiling. And my goodness, didn’t Marzia look ravishing? Not a blonde hair out of place. Holly’s fingers crept up to finger through her own tumbled mane. She studied Marzia’s perfectly made-up face and thought about her own careless beauty routine, which often consisted of little more than eyeliner, blush and lip gloss. Looking at that gorgeous dress, she glanced down at her own casual silky tee and skirt and low-heeled sandals. She was dressed very nicely indeed in expensive garments but there wasn’t even a hint of glamour or sequinned sparkle in her appearance.
Maybe it had only been one dance that Marzia and Vito had shared. And of course they had been photographed for such a potentially awkward moment between former partners was always of interest to others. And they were smiling and happy together. Why not? Her heart had shrunk into a tight, threatened lump inside her chest and her tummy felt as though it were filled