It was as if slow motion had stilled to nothing. Most of all in Fran’s hollowed brain. Then, as if motion had started again, she saw Nic’s expression change. Saw it drain, stiffen. The steel mask dropped down over it again. Yet behind it she could see the glitter of his eyes.
She heard him speak.
‘Donna... Francesca.’
The simple repetition. Two words. Like stones dropped from a great height, one after another. Then his eyes went past her to the man she was clinging to as if for dear life. The man she had called Cesare.
Cesare the hick...the country bumpkin. The farm boy. The dismissive names he’d given to the man who’d been in Fran’s past paraded through his head with mocking brutality.
Cesare was the Count of Mantegna. Polished, cosmopolitan, a man of the world, owner of vast ancestral estates, moving in the very highest echelons of Roman society, holder of a title that stretched back a thousand years.
This...this was the man she’d spoken of that day, in another world, another life, when she’d sat beside him in that speedboat on the desert lake... The woman he’d romanced across the Canyonlands and deserts, in the wild, wide-open spaces of America, who’d laughed with him, travelled with him, made love with him...
His mouth twisted. His guts twisted.
I thought I knew who she was! Doc Fran, who gazed up at the stars and told me all about them. Who fell into my arms and held me close. Doc Fran, who didn’t care that she was romancing a guy she took to be a security guard at a hotel.
But she wasn’t that person at all. She came from a world that was nowhere like the free and easy democratic society of the States. Her world—her true world—was one of stiff formality and ancient titles, of blood that had been blue for centuries. A world of palazzos and castellos, of ancestors reaching back into the annals of history. A world of those born to privilege and possessions. A world that had nothing, nothing to do with him.
That never could. Nor anyone who belonged to it.
For one endless moment his gaze rested on her, then on the men standing in a protective rank beside her, flanking her, guarding her, keeping him at bay, keeping him away from her. The men she belonged to, in the world she came from, as she stood there in her couture gown, antique sapphires glittering in her priceless necklace... Donna Francesca...
Not the woman he knew. Had thought he knew...
But he hadn’t. Not at all.
He turned away, feeling skewered, eviscerated. Walked off. Not caring that he was doing so. His stride was rapid, mechanical, and he almost pushed past other guests to reach the conservatory, march up to the elevator, jab at the button to open the doors, walk inside.
His face was a steel mask, his eyes glittering with an emotion he would not name.
But he knew what it was, and why it was scything through him like a knife in his guts.
* * *
‘Nic, wait!’
A hand had seized the closing doors, forcing them open again. Fran stumbled inside, the tightness of her gown constricting her, her high heels twisting her ankles in her desperate haste. She grabbed the handrail to steady herself, hearing the doors slice shut again, felt the lift begin to descend.
‘Nic—’ She started again, but he cut across her. His voice hard.
‘We have nothing to say to each other.’ The words fell into the yawning space between them. Then, with a savage punctiliousness, he added, ‘Donna Francesca.’
Her face contorted. ‘Don’t call me that!’
The glitter in his eyes flashed, as coruscating as the priceless antique sapphires around her throat.
‘But it is who you are,’ he said. His voice was still harsh, biting out the words.
‘So what?’ she shot back.
Emotion was storming inside her. What had happened back there had been horrendous: Cesare at his most pompous and lordly, Harry being a Hooray Henry to a T, Vito barely civil and deliberately, she was sure, hammering home her family and her title. It was the very worst way she could have imagined Nic learning who she really was.
But he isn’t ‘just’ Nic Rossi, either!
That fact seared across her.
‘And Nicolo Falcone is who you are!’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘You never mentioned that, did you? And I never mentioned a title that means absolutely nothing in America!’