But the last time had been and gone, without either of them knowing it. So she slipped her hands from his, slung on the backpack she’d acquired on their road trip, gripped her passport. She had already checked in online, had no luggage to drop, and she needed to make her flight now—right now.
Unable to bear to look back at him, she forged forward through the opening doors, was swallowed up inside.
For one endless moment he stared after her, not believing she was gone.
Then, making his muscles work, feeling a sudden clenching in his stomach, he swung away, back to the SUV, gunned the engine. He drove off. Heading back to the Falcone Nevada.
It was over. His time with Fran was done. His expression tightened, and he wondered why he felt as if he’d just been punched in the guts...
CHAPTER FOUR
BY THE TIME she arrived at Beaucourt Castle, her grandfather’s principal seat, it was late morning.
Her young sister Adrietta ran up to Fran as she climbed wearily out of the Rolls-Royce sent to collect her from Heathrow, hugging her and exclaiming, ‘He’s rallying! He told the doctor to take himself off and he wanted lobster for lunch! Washed down with claret!’
Fran gave a tired, relieved smile. ‘He’s a tough old boot,’ she said fondly.
They made their way to her grandfather’s bedroom where, somewhere in the huge, crimson tester bed, her grandfather was propped upright, looking frail, testy, but blessedly alive—even though he was wired up to all kinds of medical kit and a nurse was hovering.
‘So they got you here too, did they?’ the Duke barked as he saw her, but his voice was hoarse and his face had aged and, despite the defiance of his attitude, Fran knew she’d done the right thing in hastening here.
However wrenched away from Nic she felt.
No, she must not think of that. Must not think, as she had for the ten-hour duration of her flight, of Nic making his way back to the Falcone, sorting her things to be sent on to the West Coast. Must not think of him doing his job, putting on his tuxedo for the evening, resuming his duties. Must not think of him at all.
She felt a strange tearing inside her—a hollowing out. But she knew she must set it aside. Now she must focus on her family, on her indomitable grandfather who had pulled through, and who, even if lobster and claret were most certainly not on the menu today, nor for some weeks to come, was still very much here.
He was commanding the scene, as he always did, ordering her mother to stop fussing and fretting, telling her uncle the Marquess he must make do with his courtesy title yet awhile, that the ducal coronet was going nowhere for now.
And there was relief for Fran for another reason too. Her mother, her face tear-stained, had swept her into a clinging embrace.
‘Darling, I’m so, so glad you came! Thank you...thank you!’
‘Of course I came.’ Fran had hugged her mother back.
It was all that had been said, but Fran knew that her estrangement from her mother was over. It had been helped, she soon realised, not just by her grandfather’s close call with death, but also by the news that was clearly serving to divert her mother from endlessly bewailing Fran’s decision not to marry Cesare.
Adrietta was getting engaged to a highly suitable parti, heir to a visconti—which gave the Marchesa the enjoyable prospect of organising a lavish engagement party and an even more lavish wedding the following year.
Fran was relieved, glad both for her mother and her sister. But her mood was strange. She was being absorbed back into her family, into the world, she’d been born into. Yet it jarred—the contrast between her days now at Beaucourt and how her days so short a time ago with Nic, cruising the American West, could not have been greater.
She told none of her family about him. Tried not to think about him. They had had a road trip romance—brief, impulsive and carefree. It had never been intended to be anything more. Their time together must become a precious memory.
Yet, in the long reaches of the night she could feel her body ache for his as she lay in her bed in the room that was always hers whenever she visited Beaucourt Castle.
As the days passed, and her grandfather gradually regained his strength, her time with Nic receded more and more. She was absorbed into her existence as Donna Francesca, with her parents, her siblings, her aunt, uncle and her cousins, all accepting her presence again easily—just one more member of the close-knit family spread between England and Italy.
With her grandfather robustly on the mend, her parents and siblings decided to head back to Italy. Fran went with them, to spend a week at the eighteenth-century palazzo in Lombardy that was her childhood home, before returning to her university, now that both her vacation and her compassionate leave were over.
She told her parents she would be looking for another research post, and this drew from her mother the hope that she would find one in Europe this time. And, even better, find a replacement for the fiancé she had discarded so cavalierly.
‘I just want you to be happy, darling!’ her mother exclaimed.
‘I am happy. I’m happy in my work,’ Fran replied.
‘Oh, it’s not the same,’ her mother protested. ‘Look how happy Adrietta is! She’s radiant! I want that for you, too, my darling girl. I want there to be that special man in your life who is like no other that you have known!’
Fran did not answer. Thoughts flickered in her head, memories flashing...