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father’s dead,’ Allegra said. ‘Stefano, this has nothing—’
‘To do with it? Perhaps it does. You don’t want to face what you’ve done. Well, neither do I.’ His voice was quiet and controlled, yet Allegra felt as if he were shouting. She felt as if he were shouting at her. ‘Why did you cut off all contact with your family? You stayed at your father’s funeral for less than an hour. I know. I was there.’
Her mouth opened, yet no words came out. He gave her a faint feral smile, yet she saw a bleakness in his eyes, a bleakness Allegra felt herself.
‘I watched you from afar. You never saw me.’
‘Why did you come?’
‘I knew your father too, Allegra. I shared in the guilt for his death. He was a foolish man, even an immoral one, but no one deserves to suffer such despair.’
Allegra held up one hand as if to ward off his words, as if they were blows. ‘Don’t—’
‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ Stefano said softly. ‘To remember.’
‘Stefano—’
‘You cut yourself off from everything and everyone you’d ever known, Allegra,’ Stefano said, every word a condemnation. ‘Even yourself.’
‘You don’t know—’
‘Because you couldn’t face it. You don’t want to face it. So don’t ask me to face anything, when you’ve been running from the past for seven years, and you still haven’t stopped.’
‘This is not about me!’ Allegra shrieked. Her voice felt as if it had been ripped from her lungs and her chest, heaving with emotion, hurt. ‘This is not about me,’ she said again, and this time her voice cracked.
‘No? None of it’s about you?’ Stefano rose from the table, his face harsh, his voice utterly merciless. ‘What about your father, Allegra? Did he have nothing to do with you? I know he was crushed by your betrayal. I know it was one of the reasons he killed himself.’
‘No.’ She wouldn’t think of it. She wouldn’t allow him to make her think of it. Like a steel trap, the lid of the box Stefano had ripped open snapped shut. Allegra felt herself go numb—numb and cold, blessedly blank. She rose from the table too, curling her hands around the back of her chair to steady herself. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said in a flat, cold voice quite unlike her own.
Stefano laughed shortly. ‘I think I know all too well. But it’s better this way, isn’t it? For both of us.’ He turned away. ‘We leave for Abruzzo within the hour.’
‘Fine.’ Allegra nodded, still numb. It was so much easier not to feel. Not to feel anything.
Yet, as he left, she found her legs going weak and it all came rushing back, a tide of emotion she couldn’t deal with. Wouldn’t deal with. Allegra sank into her chair, dropped her head in her hands.
Whatever either of them tried to believe, the past was not forgotten. It was alive and well and vibrating between them with a thousand torturous memories.
The sun was high and bright in the sky when they pulled away from the narrow street and into the clogged city traffic. Stefano was dressed casually in jeans and a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled back against his forearms.
‘I think you’ll like Abruzzo,’ he said when they’d cleared the traffic and the road stretched endlessly ahead of them, winding through dusty brown hills and fields of sunflowers ready for harvest. He spoke in a pleasant, impersonal tone that Allegra knew she should be thankful for but instead it grated on her nerves, made her hands clench in her lap. ‘It’s very relaxing there, very quiet. A good place for you to work with Lucio.’
‘I look forward to it,’ she said tersely, her face averted.
‘Good.’
They’d silently agreed on a tense truce, and Allegra wondered how long it would last. For Lucio’s sake, she couldn’t be distracted by Stefano when she worked with him. She knew that, saw it as her first consideration, and she knew Stefano did as well.
At least on that point—the only point, it seemed—they were in agreement.
They both lapsed into silence and drove that way for an hour as the plains and fields around Rome turned hilly, and then mountainous. In the distance Allegra glimpsed rolling fields of saffron, the small purple flowers with their distinctive red-gold stigma stretching to the craggy, snow-topped peak of Gran Sasso.
Stefano turned off the motorway and they drove on a small winding road through several hill towns, huddled against the unforgiving landscape as if they had but a desperate, precarious hold on this earth.
Allegra glimpsed an old woman, dressed from head to toe in black, leading a bony cow along the road. She grinned toothlessly at them, her eyes lost in wrinkles, and Stefano raised one hand in greeting as the car passed by.
There could be no mistaking that this region of Abruzzo was impoverished. Although she’d seen signs on the motorway for ski resorts, spas and luxury hotels, here the hill towns showed no signs of such wealth. The streets were narrow and near empty, the few houses and shops sporting peeling paint and crooked shutters. It was as if time had simply passed by these places, Allegra thought, and no one living there had even noticed.
They drove through another town and out into the countryside again, the rolling, rocky hills leading to mountains, a few falling down farmhouses huddled against the hillside, half a dozen sheep grazing on the desolate landscape.
‘What made you buy a farmhouse out here?’ Allegra asked, breaking an hour long silence.
Stefano’s fingers flexed on the wheel. ‘I told you, it’s my home.’
‘You mean you grew up here? I always thought you were from Rome.’
‘Near Rome,’ Stefano corrected, his eyes on the twisting road. ‘We’re less than a hundred kilometres from Rome, believe it or not.’
Allegra couldn’t believe it. The harsh beauty of this landscape was so different from the ostentatious wealth and glamour of the Eternal City.
She also couldn’t imagine that Stefano came from this place. She’d always assumed he was urban, urbane, born to wealth and luxury if not aristocratic pedigree and privilege.
‘Your family had a villa here?’ she asked cautiously and he gave a short laugh.
‘You could say that.’
He swung sharply on to an even narrower road, little more than dirt and pebbles, and they drove in silence for a few minutes more before coming to a sleepy village with only a handful of shops and houses. A few old men sat outside a café, playing chess and drinking coffee, and they looked up as Stefano drove through. They squinted at the car before cheers erupted from the café crowd and Stefano slowed the car to a stop.
‘Just a moment,’ he said, and Allegra watched in bemusement as he climbed out of the car and approached the men. They were impoverished old farmers, their remaining teeth tobacco-stained, greasy caps crammed on their heads.
Allegra watched as the men embraced Stefano in turn, kissed his cheeks and clapped him on the back. She looked on with growing surprise and wonder as Stefano kissed them back, held them by the shoulders and greeted them with the respect and love of a beloved son.
They talked for a few moments, loudly and with much excitement and agitation, and then Stefano turned to her, his expression tense and still, and beckoned for her to come out of the car.
Slowly Allegra did so. She was not a snob, and she’d certainly been among the lowest of society’s offerings in her seven years in London.
Yet, she realized, she’d thought Stefano was a snob. After all, he’d wanted to marry her for her social connections. He’d married someone else for them.
He