Elisa threw clothes into a suitcase with little consideration for what she was packing. He’d looked shocked when she suggested the hotel, but she knew how intractable he could be. He would spend the night with her no matter what she wanted. Her apartment was out of the question. Just the thought of sharing such small living space with him made her cringe. She needed a door to shut between them a room to call her own a bed that would hold no memories.
Not that he’d ever shared her bed in this new apartment, but somehow, if he stayed, she knew it would feel tainted by his presence. She would have to move again.
She refused to consider why he had such a strong impact on her emotions still or why hate sometimes felt like the other side of a bruised and bleeding love.
CHAPTER THREE
LYING in bed in the luxurious hotel suite later memories she was too exhausted to fight washed over her.
Seeing him had brought it all back.
The debilitating pain. The sense of betrayal. The grief of loss but also the glory of possession.
For a short while, it had been the most glorious time of her life. She had belonged to someone, had a place in his life. Not a grudging place as she had with her mother. Not an inconvenient place as she had with her father.
Salvatore had accepted and desired her for herself.
Or so she had believed.
If it were possible to go back in time she would go back, not to the point where she had met Salvatore in an effort to make a different choice with him. But she would go back to those four short weeks when she had believed herself loved as she loved and if she could she would stay there forever.
She would never know the misery of his defection, the humiliation of his hurtful beliefs about her, the desolation of his lack of commitment to her. AII of that would be in a future she would not have to live… if it could be so. Nor would she know the pain of losing the one being she had been certain to belong to forever who she would have spent a lifetime giving a mother’s love she had only ever dreamed of.
Her mind took her back to the moment when she had realized Salvatore was interested in her.
She’d been in Milan attending an estate sale for a woman who was known for her jewelry collection. She remembered that her hotel room had felt stuffy because the air-conditioning unit was broken. The phone had rung just as she stepped out of a cooling shower. She’d considered letting the front desk just take a message, but in the end had traipsed across the room to pick it up, dripping and naked but for a thin towel wrapped around her.
‘HeIIo?” Elisa. Salvatore here.”
Salvatore? ‘My father’s friend?” she squeaked, unable to believe he was calling her in her hotel room in Milan.
‘I hope your friend as well cara.”
Oh, he was smooth. yes, of course.
‘Is something the matter with him?”
‘Him?”
‘My f-father.” She stumbled over the words, tongue-tied in a way she hadn’t been since adolescence .
‘Why should you think that?” his voice purred down the line at her.
‘you’re calling me.”
‘And a man cannot call a beautiful single woman with any other reason than to discuss her father?” The gentle mockery had her knees going weak and she plopped down to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘of course I just… ”
‘Cara. Surely you realized I was interested in you.”
Funnily enough she hadn’t.
‘You mean because you flirted with me?” she asked feeling gauche for saying it. But still,I thought you flirted with every woman.”
‘Do I?’
‘I don’t know.” He was practically a stranger to her. She had grown up with her mother in America and as close as her father and Salvatore’s father were she and Salvatore had met only infrequently over the years when she visited her father in Sicily.