CHAPTER TEN
WOULD SHE SKULK out of the house? Slip back into her jeans and tee shirt? Shimmy away from the clutter of guests, excitedly sipping their expensive drinks and tucking into expensive canapés and exchanging notes on what had happened since the last annual charity gala had brought them together?
Everyone in the neighbouring towns would be there, from the great and the good to those way down the pecking order. No discrimination, as Luca had told her with some satisfaction a few days previously, when she had been fretting about it.
She shuddered when she thought about running away. The guests would not have started arriving if her father arrived on time but if his flight was delayed, then she ran the risk of doing a runner in the most awkward of situations.
How on earth was Luca going to deal with it? What would he say?
She closed her mind off to any weakness and focused on flinging clothes into her suitcase, the one she had brought with her.
When everything was packed, she stood back, breathing hard, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t see herself. Instead, she saw Luca in that darkened office with his arms around Isabella, comforting her, his face soft with affection.
Without stopping to think too hard, she climbed out of the designer dress that had made her feel like a million dollars, and crept back into the loose leggings she had adopted ever since her stomach had started expanding and a baggy white tee shirt.
These were the clothes she belonged in.
She sat on the bed and waited. Eventually, her mobile pinged with a text from her father that he was in the taxi and would be with her in under an hour, at which point she agitatedly paced the room, only emerging to head downstairs when she was sure that he would be about to arrive.
There was no sign of Luca.
She wondered whether he had disappeared back into the office with Isabella. Perhaps he was explaining the situation. Maybe he had decided that he would revert to his original plan and marry the girl he had been destined to marry in the first place. It wouldn’t take him long to realise that joint custody worked.
Cordelia didn’t think there would be any begging by him for her return. He was a proud man and she couldn’t have dented his pride more successfully if she’d spent a year planning it.
The fact that he hadn’t bothered to find her said it all.
For a moment, she’d stepped into a world as dazzling as a fairy tale. Her prince had stepped forward and, okay, so it might not have been ideal happy-ever-after material but, deep down, she’d figured that there was enough love inside her for both of them. Deep down, when she looked close enough, she’d flirted with the tantalising hope that, with a ring on his finger and a baby on the way, the love he claimed he could never give her would find a way out.
For all she had told herself that the only way to deal with what was on the table was to apply cold logic and reason, she had still succumbed to the notion that things might change because nothing ever remained the same.
She’d been a fool.
Leaving the suitcase in the bedroom and with no clear plan as to what she would tell her father or how, exactly, she would make her exit, she headed down the stairs, slipped into the sitting room closest to the front door, and waited by the window for the taxi bringing her father to arrive.
She wasn’t going to do it. Not really. Surely not. The world would be gathering at the villa in under two hours. There was no way she was going to rock the boat at the eleventh hour. She’d reacted with all the emotionalism he knew her to be capable of but she would cool down.
Wouldn’t she?
‘Go and find her,’ Isabella had urged, her pretty face anxious and distressed.
Luca wasn’t going to do any such thing.
She would calm down. At any rate, he refused to go down the road of explaining himself to anyone. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask for trust in a relationship? He had told her that there was nothing going on between Isabella and himself and he didn’t see why she couldn’t take him at his word. Had he ever, since she had shown up, given her any reason to think that he was the sort of guy who couldn’t be trusted? No, he had not!
Skewered with uncertainty, Luca thought of her, her open, trusting face clouded with doubt and accusation. Something inside him twisted and, like a dam bursting, thoughts that had been pushed to the side now broke through in a tumultuous rush.
A rapid succession of images darted through his head, images from the very first time he’d laid eyes on her in that little room in the cottage she shared with her father to that mind-blowing moment when they had made love for the first time.
And along with those images came other things, feelings he had stashed away, emotions he had never thought he would have.
Galvanised into action, Luca took the stairs two at a time, up to the bedroom, where he saw her packed suitcase on the bed.
It was small, a relic from her dad’s days in all probability. The sight of it made him feel sick.
At least he knew she hadn’t left the villa.
Heart hammering, he raced through the rooms, impatiently brushing aside several employees who wanted to talk to him, ask his advice on something or other. He barely noticed the way the house had been transformed. He certainly had no time to stop and make polite noises about all the work that had been put into turning his mansion into a wonderland of lights and candles.
He’d started his search in the vast hall but the room she was in was the last he actually
