From the tone of his voice, Aislin guessed he already had suspicions about the authenticity of their relationship.
‘Thank you,’ Dante replied smoothly.
Riccardo patted his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief. He looked as if he was about to say something else when a tiny middle-aged woman with short hair, wearing a trouser suit, joined them.
Immediately, his whole demeanour softened.
‘My wife, Mimi,’ Riccardo said, before addressing his wife in Italian.
Mimi fixed keen eyes on Aislin before embracing her and kissing her cheeks. ‘No English,’ she said, waving her hands as if in apology.
‘No Sicilian,’ Aislin replied with a grin. Although Sicilians mostly spoke their own dialect which to her untrained ear sounded just like Italian, her studies had taught her that Sicilians were proud of their island and proud to call themselves Sicilian.
Dante spoke a few more words and then he led Aislin away from the D’Amores to join the glamorous guests milling around over the immaculate lawn.
‘Don’t leave me,’ she whispered, squeezing his fingers in her anxiety.
‘I won’t. Relax.’
And then she found herself thrust into the heart of the crowd which ranged in age from small toddlers right up to a wizened old man with an oxygen tank attached to his wheelchair.
Names were thrown at her, embraces and kisses exchanged and an ever-replenished stream of champagne and fruit juices carried by model-pretty staff was readily available.
When Dante introduced her as his fiancée, virtually everyone found it impossible to hide their shock. As he’d predicted, everyone was keen to look at her engagement ring, and the women especially made appropriate cooing noises.
But she also noticed the whispers between them and the side glances, and felt herself being weighed up and judged. Not all the judgements were favourable. One woman in particular, a beautiful sloe-eyed brunette called Katrina, gave her the chills. Aislin knew she was prone to an overactive imagination but the Medusa had had a friendlier stare than Katrina.
Dante kept her hand in his protectively throughout, as if he were an anchor keeping her rooted through her navigations in this mega-rich world.
It took half an hour of awkward social chit-chat before people stopped feeling the need to circulate quite so extensively and formed small groups. And that was when she received her first real line of questioning.
‘How did you two meet?’ asked a tall, willowy blonde called Sabine who had mercifully kind eyes and a small child clinging to her legs. Aislin was pretty sure she recognised her and thought she might have once graced the covers of the glossy magazines her old treacherous housemate had liked to buy. Sabine’s husband, a squat French media tycoon, had excused himself for a cigarette.
With the Medusa woman finally out of her eyeline, Aislin lowered her guard. ‘I broke into his father’s cottage and tried to attack him with a showerhead,’ she answered with a grin.
Clearly thinking she was joking, Sabine laughed. ‘That’s one way to make an impression.’
‘She certainly got my attention,’ Dante drawled, thinking Aislin had pitched her answer just right.
‘I can see that. And why did you break into his father’s cottage?’
‘Ah, well, this is where it becomes a little tricky to explain.’ She took a small sip of the champagne she was nursing. ‘We share a sister.’
Sabine’s eyebrows shot up so high they almost met her hairline.
Dante listened to Aislin explain in that humorous, lyrical way of hers the bare facts of their circumstances. She managed to convey it all without laying blame on anyone and by making it seem, without saying the actual words, that it had been inevitable that they would fall in love.
If he didn’t know the truth, he would have been convinced himself.
Sabine turned her attention to him. ‘Have you met Orla?’
‘Not yet,’ he told her smoothly, not adding that he had no intention of meeting her.
A tightness cramped in his guts. He’d given a deliberately non-committal answer to Aislin’s invitation to Finn’s party. He should have given a firm no.
When this weekend was over his life would return to normal and he would forget all about this sister he’d never known existed and had managed perfectly well without. He would have given her enough money from his own funds that he need not feel any more needless guilt.
And he would forget about Aislin too. If she ever became in desperate need of money, she had the ring. She could sell it and find it worth more than the money Orla would get from Aislin’s pure-hearted generosity.