But as she pulled back the door she froze. It was the last man on earth she’d ever expected to see again.
Malcolm.
Salvatore climbed into the taxi at Heathrow and curtly gave the address, throwing himself back into his seat and yanking on the seat belt. The devil was driving him, he knew that, and had been since his return to the palazzo from Milan. But now the devil had pushed the accelerator button.
Courtesy of Giavanna.
He could still hear the false sympathy in her voice as she’d stood there in his apartment in a replay of her last visit. But this time her bombshell had not been that she wanted to marry him. It had been one that was still ripping his guts out.
‘My poor Salva... I think I may know why Lana has left you. Take a look at this—’
She’d held out her phone to him and he’d seen the photo—a man he had not recognised—but the caption had made his identity clear.
Giavanna’s falsely sympathetic voice had trilled in his ears.
‘Hollywood gossip says it’s all over between Lana’s ex and the A-lister he hooked, so he’s going back to London. Who knows? Maybe he wants to get back together with Lana...’
Denial stabbed in Salvatore.
No! He would not believe it! It was just Giavanna making trouble, being vindictive! He would not believe that the reason Lana had left him was because she was rushing back to the man who had treated her so despicably!
Then his lawyer’s words echoed in his head. Lana was refusing to take any of the money agreed in their prenup. Why would she do that? Unless—
Is Malcolm coming back to London to pay her back the money he took from her? And if he does will she forgive him? Take him back? Is it him she loves—has loved all along?
The thought was like icy water in his veins. He could feel it now, chilling him to the core, defying him not to believe what he so desperately hoped was just Giavanna’s poison—what Lana herself would, surely, por Dio! prove was nothing but poison when he got the truth from her!
Of course she had never gone back to Malcolm!
And then she will come back to me! To me...
Emotions scythed within him, slicing and slicing at him. He could not name them, knew only that they were emotions he had never felt before—and that they were unbearable.
Agony.
The taxi ate up the miles into London, cutting through the streets towards Notting Hill, drawing up outside the white terraced house he remembered from so long ago, when he’d given Lana a lift back from the fashion show after-party. He moved to open the taxi door—then froze.
The front door was opening. Someone was coming out. Not Lana. A man with bleached blond hair, gleaming capped white teeth, a California tan, sauntering down the steps with a smile on his face that was a smirk of satisfaction. He walked by, taking no notice of the taxi at the kerbside.
A knife was skewering Salvatore. A knife coated with Giavanna’s poison. Poison that was no lie but devastating truth. The evidence of his own eyes.
He slumped back in his seat, curtly ordering the taxi driver to drive on. Where, he didn’t care.
Only blackness was in his heart.
Bleakness.
Lana carefully stepped into the shower, felt the warm water sluicing down over her. As she started to lather her hair she glanced down at her fast-growing bump. Memory stabbed at her of how she’d stood in the pool house at the palazzo, seeing her newly rounded figure.
So long ago now.
Summer was long gone. Autumn too. And by spring—
By spring I’ll be preparing to receive my first visitors. Opening up for Easter. The start of the holiday season.
She hadn’t moved to the seaside after all, but she wasn’t that far away, in an attractive abbey town in Dorset, popular with tourists. The established B&B was an old, pretty stone cottage, part of a terrace in a quiet street, with hollyhocks in the garden and lavender along the path. She’d bought it after the rapid sale of her flat, and it was already well booked for next season. It would bring her in sufficient income, she reckoned, to make her living there financially viable.
A new start—a new life.