‘You’ll continue the charade?’
He frowned. ‘It’s not exactly a charade.’
‘You know what I mean. You’ll pretend I’m still here, even when I’m back in England?’
‘I simply won’t tell her anything at all,’ he corrected, then made an effort to soften his words. ‘She’ll be okay, cara.She is used to my short attention span with women.’ His smile was barely a flicker of his lips, and the coldness of it turned her core to ice. Not because of Luca, but because of her father, and his supreme control of his emotions, because of the way he could turn on a dime.
He was wrong about Pietra. He clearly didn’t understand how relieved the older woman was that Luca had, apparently, fallen in love. He didn’t know what their marriage meant to her. The peace she would get on her deathbed, of believing that he was no longer such a determined loner.
Olivia shivered, despite the balmy warmth of the night. Everything about their surroundings was perfect, but she was cold to the core. ‘I think I’ll go inside, Luca. I’m tired.’
He watched her swim away, fighting a desire to follow her, to draw her back into the water or to follow her inside. They’d been spending too much time together, despite his best efforts to guard against that. She was putting space between them—and that was wise. The smartest thing to do was to go along with it. After all, in less than a week they’d be living different lives in different countries.