She’d been playing chicken with the truth, though. She had believed he wouldn’t want to know, but she’d indulged her conscience just far enough to be able to justify keeping it from him.
And he had missed out. Milly had missed out.
“What now?” The words were a plea in the car.
Cristiano flicked the engine back to life. He turned the Range Rover away from the beach without speaking. The whole of the valley opened up to the right of the car. A pristine area covered in vines and kissed by the glimmering sea. “Now?” He eyed the landscape with a sense of apprehension. “Now, I stay.”
“You’re not going to take her away.” Relief throbbed in her chest.
He gripped the steering wheel tight. “No. At least not yet.” He frowned. “This is the only home she knows. I would be wrong to take her from it just to hurt you.”
She expelled a slow breath. Relief was pounding through her blood. “What about the American? Won’t she be upset?” She couldn’t help quipping.
And purely because he could see it would become an issue that Ava couldn’t move past, he slid her a mocking sidelong glance. “You’re jealous of her.” It was a statement of fact that sent Ava’s mouth working overtime as she tried to swallow her embarrassment.
“I … I’m trying to understand your situation more fully,” she lied unconvincingly.
“My situation is simple now. I am here for Milly. Cindy doesn’t matter.”
Ava closed her eyes. “So you’re just going to leave her like you did me?”
His laugh was without humour. “For a start, Cindy is nothing like you. What she and I are …”
“Yes? What are you?” She begged, her desperation for the truth obvious in her tone.
He expelled an angry breath. “We’ve known each other for years. We flirt. That’s it.”
Ava’s stomach constricted with the force of her jealousy. “You were moving to Napa for her.”
He laughed again. “Bullshit. I was moving to Napa for the vines and the climate. I assure you, Ava, Cindy will not think of me again when she leaves here.”
And Ava truly was reassured. Their situation as so messy, so murky, that it was a blessing not to have to factor in yet another person’s heart and hopes. She ignored the part of her brain that was rejoicing in Cristiano’s being available. It was wrong of her to even think of such selfish pleasures in that moment.
“So you’ll stay here? For how long?”
He nudged the car out of the car park and onto the road. “Around sixteen years ought to do it,” he quipped, though there was noth
ing amusing in what he was contemplating.
“Sixteen years …? You can’t be thinking you’ll move in with us?” She said quickly, her words tripping over themselves.
“Of course not,” he agreed. “I will stay in the villa I’m in now, until I find somewhere more permanent.”
The idea of having him on the property sent her pulse skittering. “Surely there’s somewhere …”
“Ava, stop speaking now. I have missed two years of my daughter’s life. I do not want to miss any more. Do not argue with me over something as irrelevant as where I’m going to live.” He angled his face to hers; his expression was loaded with sardonic coldness. “You can’t think I’ll want to have anything to do with you?”
Her cheeks flamed. The finality in his words cut her to the quick. “It would just be easier …”
“I don’t care what is easy for you.”
He hated her. In that moment, he truly did. She could feel the emotion pulsing from him, and she understood it. Every justification she’d told herself was showing itself to be flimsy and poor.
“Cristiano,” she said, as the car clipped along the road to Casa Celli. “I’m so sorry. I truly believed …”
“That you were doing the right thing. You’ve said that before, and I’ve already told you: I don’t believe it. So stop wasting your breath trying to convince me that this wasn’t you being selfish.”
“Selfish,” she said with a nod. Selfish. Is that what she’d been?