Ava wondered why she didn’t feel any better.
‘What’s going on, Av?’ Josh was looking at her with something approaching concern.
In the past she had always fobbed him off. She was the protector, the one who kept the wolf from his door, but right now all she could think about was how isolated she was. She’d landed right back where she’d begun—alone in the world.
‘You were right, Joshy,’ she said, using her old name for him. ‘I am destined to be alone.’
She couldn’t stay there a moment longer. Picking up her skirts, she made her way to a set of doors. As she ran down the steps outside the palazzo it did cross her distressed mind that all she needed at this moment was to lose a shoe, but her Jimmy Choos were holding on as she skirted past security guards who watched as a woman in a fairy-tale dress ran out of the bright lights and into the shadowy road beyond.
Two blocks, Alessia had said.
She could run that far.
* * *
Gianluca couldn’t find her.
He had made mistakes in his life. This wasn’t one of them.
This was a catastrophe.
Had he really pushed a ring onto her finger?
Bullied her like that?
Whatever her reasons for being here with him, it didn’t change the single, life-changing fact that he was in love with her, and he’d allowed his anger and resentment with his past to interfere in the way he had treated her.
The one person who made him want a future.
But why the hell had she said she wanted to end it?
Where the hell was she?
‘Benedetti?’
Right accent. Wrong Lord sibling.
‘Have you seen Ava?’ he demanded.
Josh reached back and made a right-hand swing that Gianluca instinctively blocked. He shoved the younger man away.
‘Dio, what’s your problem, Lord?’
‘You’re my problem, Benedetti. You and the way you’ve treated my sister.’
Gianluca tensed.
‘Yeah, that’s right. I’m calling you on it. Some loser dumps her and you move right in. She might be smart as a whip, but she’s like a deer in headlights when it comes to men.’
‘Si, we are agreed on that.’
The younger man frowned.
‘I want to marry your sister,’ Gianluca said impatiently, aware that he was only wasting time. ‘I’m in love with her. Does that clear things up?’
There was a sharp female intake of breath. Both Valentina and Alessia were standing behind them.
‘Where is she?’ asked Valentina.
‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you,’ announced Alessia, clearly enjoying the drama. ‘She ran out of here in a state. Possibly to our hotel.’
Gianluca was already pushing his way across the reception area, his head roaring with blood.
He was going to kill her—but only after he made sure she was all right first.
‘Benedetti!’ Josh Lord was breathing hard as he reached him on the steps. ‘You need to hear this, man. She came to Rome expecting a proposal.’
‘Si, she’s told me,’ he growled impatiently.
‘No, you don’t understand. She paid for the tickets, she booked the hotel, she arranged some damn fool tour of Tuscany—and she bought the ring.’
Gianluca stared at the other man as if he were speaking some language hitherto unknown.
And then he knew what he’d done.
I used to watch that film as a girl and I wanted that life. Some other life, so different from my own it was unrecognisable...
And he’d given her a shoddy proposal at a charity ball. He’d forced a ring onto her finger. He’d made a mockery of her romantic dreams after she’d confessed them to him.
If he didn’t find her in the next five minutes he was going to go tear this city apart.
‘She won’t be at our hotel,’ said Josh in a low voice. ‘Not if she’s hurting. When we were small, and Mum was off her meds and at her worst, Ava would take me for a walk. We’d walk to the end of the road and then she’d say, “We’ll just go to the end of the next road, and the next...” as if she were looking for something. She did the same thing the night of my wedding. According to one of Alessia’s friends, she didn’t come back till the crack of dawn.’
With those words everything fell into place.
‘Grazie. I know where to find her.’
I stayed there all day, hoping you’d call.
He started to run. She was on foot. He was foot. But one of them was running for his life.
* * *
The bar of The Excelsior was dark, lit here and there by lamps, but he saw her the moment he stepped inside.
Gianluca was supremely fit, so he couldn’t blame the run for the heaving of his chest as his heart hammered home just how important this moment was.