‘This is it?’ he queried incredulously.
His question voiced nothing more than her own thoughts about the size of her new home, but it hit a very raw nerve. Lily had spent three busy days decorating before Jonny’s visit. She had slapped on two coats of white emulsion in an effort to make it look bigger. She had hung mirrors everywhere to reflect back the light. In the limited space available, she’d positioned pot-plants and some carefully chosen family photos and had scattered cushions over the brand-new sofa-bed. But none of her efforts had changed a thing. The flat had still looked exactly what it was—a cramped place which was much too small for a gangly teenager with sneakers the size of dustbin lids.
Not that Jonny had complained. She almost wished he had. The brave look he’d adopted had seemed too heartbreakingly old for his sixteen years. It had made her want to cry—to rail against a fate which had already robbed him of so much of his childhood. And after he’d gone back to school she had found the crumpled letter which had fallen from his rucksack—and that was when her own tears really had come.
‘This is it,’ she agreed, wishing that Ciro didn’t look so infuriatingly strong and dependable as he stood in the centre of the minute sitting room. Because by some kind of weird osmosis his towering strength seemed to emphasise her own terrible sense of weakness. ‘What do you want?’ she croaked.
What did he want? Ciro took in the belligerent set of her mouth, which wasn’t quite managing to disguise the fact that it was trembling. Her question was a pretty difficult one to answer. What would she say if she’d known that he’d been waiting for her to call after that frustrating conclusion to their dinner date? That he’d found himself looking incredulously at his mobile phone for a message which had never arrived? He’d thought that she would be unable to resist coming back for a little more of his love-making. That once she’d realised she was uselessly depriving herself of pleasure she’d see sense and come round to his way of thinking. He’d thought she would be in his bed within days. But she hadn’t. There had been nothing from Lily Scott but a resounding silence.
He’d waited. And waited. Until he couldn’t wait any more—and had come here today thinking that he wanted to find the quickest way into her bed. But now he wasn’t sure what he wanted any more because the sight of her puffy eyes was filling him with a feeling he wasn’t used to. As if he wanted to ring-fence her from trouble and keep her safe from every bad thing the world could throw at her. He frowned. So what the hell was that about?
‘Are you going to tell me why you’ve been crying?’ he demanded.
Lily stared at the ground, swallowing down the infuriating tears which kept springing to her eyes. ‘None of your business,’ she muttered.
‘Lily.’ And when still she didn’t respond, he said her name again. ‘Lily. Will you please just look at me?’
Unwillingly, she lifted her head to meet his dark gaze. ‘What?’
‘Why have you been crying?’ he repeated.
Why did he think? She could have given him a whole list of reasons. Because it was no fun living in a place which was next door to a noisy pub. Because she was still exhausted after having done the move herself—stubbornly hiring a van which had been bigger than anything she’d ever driven before. What a nightmare it had been trying to manoeuvre the cumbersome vehicle around the village green, while all the regulars had stood outside The Duchess of Cambridge, shaking with laughter. But all these irritations had been eclipsed by her discovery that Jonny was just about to have his hopes and dreams crushed by their new-found poverty.
She shook her head, terrified that the tears would return and that this time they wouldn’t stop. That they would pour down her face in an unstoppable flow and she would turn into a blubbering mess in front of him. She wanted to keep her mouth clamped tightly shut and refuse to answer and yet there was something so unyielding about him. Something so strong and determined—as if he wasn’t going anywhere unless she provided some sort of answer.
She gave a small shrug. ‘It’s just been more difficult than I thought—moving in here. It was hard saying goodbye to the Grange, and even harder knowing what furniture to bring here.’ Her stepmother had taken anything of value, of course, and most of the stuff left over had been far too large and grand to ever contemplate putting in a tiny flat above a cake shop.
Lily had managed to hang onto her mother’s old writing desk and the painting of a ship which had hung in her father’s study and always fascinated her when she’d been a child. Other than that, she had taken very little. Her new sitting room now contained an old, overstuffed armchair, a table which was slightly too big—and the new sofa-bed which looked completely out of place. She remembered the pitiful sight of Jonny’s six-foot frame barely able to be accommodated within its cheap frame and she stared defiantly at Ciro, as if he was to blame. And he was to blame, she told herself fiercely. If he hadn’t bought the Grange then none of this would have ever happened.
‘And my brother was here this weekend,’ she continued.
‘Jonny?’
She was surprised he’d remembered his name and, somehow, that small touch of thoughtfulness made it even worse. She could feel that scary helplessness welling up inside her again and the tears she’d been trying to suppress started to slide remorselessly down her cheeks again.
Ciro stared at her, his face tensing. ‘Lily?’
‘No!’ she protested, wiping a clenched fist across her face. ‘It… it’s not such a big deal. We’ll work it out.’
‘Work what out?’
‘It d-doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, believe me—it does,’ he said grimly, putting his hands on her shoulders and guiding her towards the sofa and gently pushing her down onto it, before heading out of the room towards the kitchen.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she called after him.
‘I am making you tea. Isn’t that what you English always do in times of trouble?’
The remark—delivered in his deep, Neapolitan accent—might have made her smile if the circumstances had been different. As it was, she’d never felt less like smiling and she was just blowing her nose into a sodden tissue when Ciro came back into the room, carrying a loaded tray.
He put the tray down on the table and stared at her with a stern expression. ‘So what’s happened with your brother which
has made you cry?’
Slumped with exhaustion against the sofa, Lily watched as he poured her a cup of horribly weak tea and a terrible urge to tell him washed over her again. Maybe it was because she had bottled things up for so long that it felt as if she was threatening to explode. Or maybe it was because he just looked so determined that she suspected he wouldn’t leave until she’d given him the information he wanted.
‘He’s been offered a place at art school.’