Vitale frowned. ‘Do I look like a fool?’
‘I never got the chance. Check out the dates if you don’t believe me. I met Loredana at your uncle’s country house, dined with her the following week while I was at our hotel in Rome and invited her to go sailing with me at the weekend. She was a very beautiful young woman but it was a casual thing,’ he declared, shooting a look of discomfiture at his daughter. ‘I had quite enough complications in my life. Your mother and I were hardly speaking to each other at the time.’
Zara stiffened. ‘Nothing you tell us will go beyond these walls,’ she promised uneasily.
‘Loredana was in a very emotional mood when she joined me that weekend,’ Monty Blake revealed. ‘Over our meal she admitted that she’d had a row with some boyfriend and that she was pregnant. It was hardly what I had signed up for when I invited her onto the yacht for a pleasure trip and we had a difference of opinion when I asked her why she had agreed to join me on board—’
‘An argument?’ Vitale queried darkly, his suspicions obvious.
‘There was no big drama,’ the older man replied wearily. ‘Apparently Loredana only accepted my invite because she wanted to make her boyfriend jealous. She hoped he would try to stop her seeing me but he didn’t and she was upset about that. When she started crying I suggested she retire to her cabin for the night—and I mean no disrespect when I say that I’d had quite enough of her histrionics by then.’
Vitale managed not to flinch but he did remember his sister as being a very emotional and vivid individual, easily roused to laughter, temper or tears. There had been no reference to an argument, no mention of Loredana’s supposedly troubled state of mind during the inquest. But for all that there was a convincing ring of authenticity to the older man’s story and he could imagine how irritated Monty Blake must have been when he realised why Loredana had accepted his invitation and that his seduction plans were unlikely to come to anything.
‘Your sister made me feel like I was too old to be chasing girls her age,’ Zara’s father claimed with a curled lip. ‘She depressed me. I didn’t go to bed. I sat up getting very drunk that night and fell asleep in the saloon. Some time during the night, Rod, the chap in charge of the boat, woke me up, said there was a bad storm. He told me to go and fetch your sister and Pam, the stewardess, while he sorted the escape dinghy. He said the two women were together …’ Monty shook his greying head heavily. ‘I was drunk and the generator failed, so the lights went out …’
‘And then what did you do?’ Vitale growled.
‘Your sister wasn’t in her cabin and I didn’t know my way round the crew quarters. The yacht was lurching in every direction. I couldn’t see where I was going or keep my feet. I started shouting their names. Water was streaming down the gangway. It was terrifying. I fell and hurt myself. I rushed back up on deck to get Rod to help but Rod had been injured and he was bleeding heavily from a head wound.’ Something of the desperation Monty Blake had felt that night had leaked into his fracturing voice and stamped his drawn face with the recollection of a nightmare. ‘The boat was sinking and I panicked. Is that what you want me to admit?’
‘All I want is the truth,’ Vitale breathed tightly, almost as strained as Zara’s father.
‘Well, I’m sorry I wasn’t a hero, but with the sea pouring in I was too scared to go below deck alone again,’ he gritted in a shamed but also defiant undertone, as if that was a moment and a decision he had weighed many times over the years that had passed since that fateful night. ‘I pulled on a life jacket and helped Rod into his, struggled with the dinghy while he tried to tell me what to do. I can’t swim, you know … I never learned. The boat was going down, there was no time for a search, no time to do anything else—’
‘You hardly knew her,’ Vitale remarked with hollow finality. ‘You saved yourself. I don’t believe it would be fair to judge you for that. ‘
Zara never did get lunch. They left the hotel in silence.
Neither of them had any appetite after that meeting. She knew Vitale’s thoughts were still on his dead sister. She knew the truth had been hard for him to hear. Loredana had been very young and agreeing to go sailing with a virtual stranger had clearly been an impulsive act. Her father had been drunk and less than brave in an emergency, but only a special few were willing to risk their own life for another person’s and it wouldn’t be fair to blame him for falling short of a heroic ideal.
‘No, there’s not even a hint of a little bump!’ Bee declared two weeks later on Zara’s wedding day, as she scrutinised her half-sister’s stomach from every angle. Bee reckoned that only a woman who had never had a weight problem would have fallen pregnant and then chosen a figure-hugging wedding gown calculated to reveal the smallest bulge. Luckily for Zara, she had no surplus flesh to spoil the perfect symmetry of her flowing lace dress.
Zara studied her reflection, grateful that her pregnancy did not yet show. True, her breasts were a little fuller, but that was the sole change in her shape that she had noticed. Her gown was slender and elegant, maximising her diminutive height. ‘I hope Vitale doesn’t think I’m overdressed.’
‘How can you be overdressed at your own wedding?’ Bee demanded.
‘When it’s a quiet do with only a couple of witnesses attending,’ Zara pointed out, wincing at that reality.
‘Does that bother you?’ Bee asked worriedly. ‘I know this can’t be the sort of wedding you ever expected to have.’
‘It’s what I want. I was never into all the fuss and frills of the wedding arrangements Mum insisted on when I was supposed to be marrying Sergios,’ Zara admitted, a look of discomfiture crossing her delicate features, ‘and this wedding is still only a formality—’
‘I think it’s a little more than a formality when the man you’re about to marry is the father of your baby,’ Bee cut in with some amusement.
‘I’m very grateful that Vitale’s willing to share that responsibility.’
Bee pulled an unimpressed face. ‘Which is exactly why you picked a gorgeous dress and got all dollied up in your fanciest make-up and shoes for Vitale’s benefit?’ she teased. ‘Please, do I look that stupid?’
Zara said nothing, for it was true that she had gone to no end of trouble to look her very best for the occasion. She had not required a church full of guests as an excuse to push the glamour boat out. But it had taken an ironic ton of make-up and every scrap of artistry she possessed to achieve the natural effect she had sought. The natural effect she knew he admired. Her shoes, sparkling with diamanté, were the very cute equivalent of Cinderella’s slippers. To satisfy the something-old rhyme she had her late brother’s school badge tucked into her bra and her thigh sported a blue garter. If the wedding was only a formality why had she bothered with all those trappings?
The circumstances being what they were, she had only invited her half-sisters to share the brief ceremony with her. Bee was accompanying her to the church and Tawny had promised to meet them there. Afterwards she and Vitale were flying straight out to Italy. She had packed up her apartment, surrendered it and had spent the previous night with Bee. She was retaining Rob to manage Blooming Perfect in London. She was hoping that there would be sufficient demand for her services in Tuscany for her to open another small branch of the business. Fluffy had already flown out to her future new home. Zara, however, was as apprehensive as a climber hanging onto a frayed rope: she was terrified that she was doing the wrong thing. In one life there was only room for so many mistakes and on this occasion she was very conscious that
she had a child’s welfare to consider.
The car Vitale had sent to collect her drew up outside the church. She got out with Bee’s assistance and her younger sister, Tawny, hurried towards her.
‘Zara!’ she exclaimed, pushing a long curl of fiery copper hair out of her eyes. ‘You look amazing! Who is this Italian? And why didn’t I get the chance to meet him before this?’
‘I’m pregnant and we’re in a hurry,’ Zara confided, watching her sibling’s bright blue eyes shoot wide in surprise and drop almost inevitably to her stomach.