The Italian's Love-Child

So he had noticed! But of course he had noticed—it was probably as much a part of his life as breathing itself to have women staring at him.

‘Guilty as charged! Why, has that never happened to you before?’ she challenged mockingly.

‘I don’t remember,’ he mocked back.

She opened her mouth to say something spiky in response, and then pulled herself together. He had been sweet and kind to her once, and just because a girl on the brink of womanhood hadn’t found that particularly flattering, you certainly couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault that he was so blindingly gorgeous and that she had cherished a schoolgirl crush on him which hadn’t been reciprocated. And neither was it his fault that he was still so gorgeous that a normally calm and sensible woman had started behaving like a spitting kitten. She smiled. ‘So what do you think of the Hamble?’

‘It isn’t my first visit,’ he mused.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

He studied her. She was not his type. Tall and narrow-hipped where he liked his women curvy, and soft and small. Her face was not beautiful either, but it was interesting. A strong face—with its intelligent grey-green eyes and a determined mouth and soft shadows cast by her high cheekbones.

It was difficult to tell what colour her hair was, and whether its colour was natural, since she had caught it back severely from her face, and tied it so that it fell into a soft, silken coil on the base of her long neck. Her dress was almost severe too, a simple sheath of green silk which fell to her knees, showing something of the brown toned legs beneath. The only truly decorous thing about her was a pair of sparkly, sequinned sandals which showed toenails painted a surprisingly flirtatious pink, which matched her perfect fingernails.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember you. Should I?’

Of course he shouldn’t. ‘Not really.’

She gave a little shrug and turned her head to the view once more, but he put his hand on her bare arm and sensation shivered over her.

‘Tell me,’ he murmured.

She laughed. ‘But there’s nothing to tell!’

‘Tell me anyway.’

Eve sighed. Why the hell had she even brought it up? Because she liked things straightforward? Because the probing nature of her job made her explore people’s feelings and reactions?

‘You came here one summer, a long time ago. We met then. We hardly knew each other, really.’

Luca frowned for a moment, and then his face cleared. So it had not been a woman he had bedded and forgotten. There had been only one woman during that long, hot summer and she had been the very antithesis of this keen-eyed woman with her scraped-back hair. ‘Unfortunately, cara, I am still none the wiser. Remind me.’

It had been a summer of making money, which had never really been in abundance in Eve’s life. Ever since her father had died, her mother had gone out to work to make sure that Eve never went without, but there had never been any surplus to buy the things that seventeen-year-old girls valued so much in life. Dresses and shoes and music and make-up. Silly, frivolous things.

Eve had been overjoyed to get the summer job as waitress at the prestigious yacht club. She had never been part of the boating set—with their sleek boats and their quietly expensive clothes and all-year tans and glamorous parties. She’d had precisely no experience of waitressing, either, but she’d been known and liked in the village for being a hard-working and studious girl. And she’d suspected that they’d known she’d actually needed the money, as opposed to wanting the job in order to pick up a rich boyfriend.

And then Luca Cardelli had anchored his yacht one day, and set every female pulse in the vicinity racing with disbelieving pleasure.

The men who had sailed had been generally fit and muscular and bronzed and strong, but Luca had been all these things and Italian, too. As a combination, it had been irresistible.

She had been breathlessly starstruck around him, all fingers and thumbs, her normal waitressing skills deserting her, completely dazzled by his careless Italian charm. On one embarrassing occasion, the plate of prawns she had been carrying had slipped so that half a dozen plump shellfish had slithered onto the floor in a pink heap.

Biting back a smile, he had handed her a large, linen napkin.

‘Be quick,’ he murmured. ‘And no one will notice.’

No one except him, of course. Eve wished that the floor could have opened up and swallowed her. But she told herself it was just a phase in her life, of being utterly besotted by a man who saw her as part of the background.

Their conversation was limited to pleasantries about wind conditions and her uttering unmemorable lines such as, ‘Would you like some mayonnaise with your salmon?’ which made his act of generosity so surprising that she read all the wrong things into it.

The end-of-season yacht club ball was the event of the year, with the ticket prices prohibitedly high, unless you got someone to take you, and Eve had no one to take her.

‘You are going dancing on Saturday?’ Luca questioned idly as he sipped a drink at sundown on the terrace one evening.

Eve shook her head as she scooped up the discarded shells from his pistachio nuts. ‘No. No, I’m not.’

He lifted a dark, quizzical eyebrow. ‘Why not? Don’t all young women want to dance?’

She ran her fingers awkwardly down over her apron. ‘Of course they do. It’s just…’

The brilliant black eyes pierced through her. ‘Just what?’

Humiliating to say that she had no one to take her, surely? And not very liberated either. And the tickets cost more than she earned in a month. She wished he wouldn’t look at her that way—though what way could he look for her not to feel so melting inside? Maybe if he put a paper bag over his head she might manage not to turn to jelly every time he was in the vicinity. ‘Oh, the tickets cost far too much for a waitress to be able to afford,’ she said truthfully.

‘Oh.’ And his eyes narrowed.

Nothing more was said, but when Eve went to fetch her coat that evening there was an envelope waiting for her and inside it was a stiff, gold-edged ticket to the dance. And a note from Luca. ‘I want to see you dance,’ it said.

Eve went into a frenzy. She was Cinderella and Rockerfella combined; it was every fairy tale come true. She borrowed a dress from her friend Sally, only Sally was a size bigger and they had to pin it into shape, but even after they had done it still looked like what it was. A borrowed dress.

Eve surveyed herself doubtfully in the mirror. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Nonsense! You look gorgeous,’ said Sally firmly. ‘You definitely need some make-up, though.’

‘Not too much.’

‘Eve,’ sighed Sally. ‘Did or did not Luca Cardelli give you a ticket? Yes? Well, believe me—no man splashes out that much if he isn’t interested. You want to look sophisticated. Mature. You want him to whisk you into his arms and dance the night away, don’t you? Well, don’t you?’

Of course she did.

But Eve felt like a fish out of water when she walked into the glittering room, feeling an outsider and knowing that she was an outsider. Everyone else seemed to be with someone, except for her.

And then Luca arrived, with a woman clinging to his arm like a limpet, a stunning vision in a scarlet dress that was backless and very nearly frontless.

She remembered almost everyone’s eyes being fixed with envious fascination on them as they danced in a way which left absolutely no doubt about how they intended to end the evening and Eve felt sick and watched until she could watch no more. He said hello to her and told her that she looked ‘charming’. It was a curiously unflattering word and she wondered how she could have been so stupid.

She crept home and scrubbed her face bare and carefully took off Sally’s dress and hung it in the wardrobe. Luca left for Italy soon after and she didn’t even see him to say goodbye. She didn’t even get the chance to thank him.

But that experience defined her.

That night she vowed never to make her ambition overreach itself. To capitalise on what she was and not what she would like to have been. And she was no looker—certainly not the kind of woman who would ever attract a man like Luca Cardelli. She had brains and she had determination and she would rely on those instead.

Time shifted and readjusted itself, and it was an altogether different Eve who looked into the dark eyes with their hard, luminous brilliance.