And that was asking too much.
Luca turned his head, and smiled. ‘Looking forward to lunch?’
She shifted slightly on her seat, afraid that he might be able to read the progression of her thoughts, half tempted to tell him to stop the car and then to hurl herself into his arms and see where that led them!
‘Mmm. I like Patricio. And Livvy. I like all your friends.’
‘Your friends too, now.’
‘Yes.’ But as friendships they were conditional, she knew that. They relied solely on her relationship with Luca and her position as his wife and sooner or later she was terrified that someone was going to discover just what a sham it all was. And then what?
Luca slowed the car down as it gingerly made its way down the bumpy lane, leading to a long, low farmhouse, sitting like a bird’s egg in a glorious nest of green. Hens were scratching around by a barn door and, somewhere in the distance, Eve could hear a dove cooing.
Luca switched the engine off, his eyes roving over her as she undid her seat belt. She wore the simplest of outfits—a slim-fitting white denim skirt and a little T-shirt in jade green—and yet she managed to look like sex on legs. Thought maybe, he thought, subduing the familiar, dull ache—maybe that was more to do with his current state of heightened awareness. If she had worn a piece of all-enveloping sackcloth, he suspected that the end result of his thoughts would have been the same.
‘You have got your figure back, cara,’ he said softly. ‘The outfit you wear looks lovely.’
Now why say something like that, just before they were due to go into lunch, or had that been the whole point? Pay her a compliment and make her aware of herself and leave her simmering and discontented throughout lunch? What the hell was he playing at?
‘What, these old things?’ she joked. ‘Now, are you going to carry your son in, or shall I?’
The velvet-dark eyes glittered. ‘Want to fight me for the pleasure?’ he challenged softly.
Eve put her hand on the door-handle, afraid that he would see that it was shaking. Was he deliberately making everything he said absolutely drip with suggestive innuendo, or was that simply her interpretation of it?
‘You can carry him,’ she said quickly.
Everyone else had already arrived and were all gathered beneath a vine-covered canopy. The adults were sitting down at a large, wooden trestle-table and various toddlers were waddling around on the terrace. It looked quite idyllic and perfect.
‘Oh, doesn’t it look peaceful?’ sighed Eve longingly.
He looked at her profile, at the way her mouth had softened, and he nodded. ‘The kind of way you thought Italy always should be?’ he guessed softly.
She turned her head to look up at him. ‘Kind of,’ she admitted, but then voices were raised in welcome and there was no chance to say anything more.
Eve gave a wide smile, even though she couldn’t really take in all the faces at first. But there was Patricio, and Livvy was getting to her feet and smiling a great smile of welcome.
‘Eve! Luca! And Oliviero!’
Which gave the cue for everyone to scramble to their feet and coo over her darling baby, though Eve was acutely aware that the language switched immediately from Italian to English. And while she was working hard on it and knew that she couldn’t possibly expect to become fluent overnight, she sometimes despaired of ever mastering the tongue with the careless ease which Luca and his friends had. But she would need to.
She didn’t want to become one of those exiled mothers in a foreign land who never quite fitted in because they had never bothered to integrate. Or to have children who spoke a tongue which remained faintly foreign to her.
But thinking of the future like that scared her and so she forcefully put it out of her mind.
‘Eve, come and sit down and have a drink,’ said Livvy. ‘There are a few people here you don’t know—let me introduce you.’
Eve accepted a glass of white wine and chewed on a salted almond as she was introduced to people with their impossibly romantic-sounding names—Claudio and Rosa, Caterina and Giacomo, Allessandro and Raimonda.
One woman in particular was just so beautiful that even the women seemed barely able to tear their eyes from her. Her name was Chiara, and she was younger than everyone else and with a man Eve hadn’t seen before, either.
‘Who is that woman?’ she asked Luca softly as he positioned Oliviero in a quiet and shady spot.
Luca barely glanced over in the woman’s direction. ‘Her name is Chiara,’ he said, in an odd kind of voice. ‘And the man she is with is one of Italy’s most famous film directors. She’s an actress.’
Yes, she looked like an actress, Eve decided. She had met enough of them in her time. She had that way of holding herself which spoke of supreme confidence—but then who wouldn’t be confident if they looked like that? Her glossy raven hair was knotted back in a French plait woven with ribbon and hung almost to the tiniest waist Eve had ever seen. She wore a simple dress in some kind of pinky-grey colour, but it moulded itself so closely to her body that no one could be in any doubt about what slender perfection lay beneath.
Eve helped herself to some salads and meats and began to falteringly attempt to speak a little Italian to Patricio, who laughed and teased her remorselessly. She drank wine and watched her husband as he kicked a ball to one of the little boys.