ARIANAWASSITTINGon the narrow deck of the beachfront cottage, gazing out over the sugar-white sand that edged the flat sea beyond. She had been as touched as she’d been surprised when her mother had offered her this haven in Florida. But she was glad her mother was not actually at the grand villa behind the cottage, but was off skiing in Colorado.
She did not want to hear her mother say again, as she had on the phone,‘I know it’s hard, but one day you’ll be glad—’
Ariana silenced her mother’s voice in her head.
Glad?
Another voice came. The doctor at the hospital in Italy. Explaining, carefully—sensitively—what had happened.
Ariana had wept. Sobbed with a sense of heartbreak that had racked her body. The doctor had been kind, the nurses had been kind, everyone had been kind...
Yet still the sobs had come.
And a sense of bitter, bitter irony lacerated with a guilt so profound it had shaken her hand as she’d forced herself to write the letter she’d had to write. Guilt that would be with her to her dying day.
I caused it—I caused the crash. I and I alone.
Like red-hot skewers twisting into her, the self-blame came over and over again.
She shifted restlessly on her lounger.
I have to leave. I can’t stay here for ever.
But where would she go and what would she do? Her business had been closed down—her accountant was winding it up. And as for going to London...there was no point now. Unconsciously, her hand splayed over her midriff. There was an ache inside her that could never be assuaged, shot through with guilt, regret and remorse...
She gazed blankly at the wintry sun reddening into a ball over the sea. Out on the beach a dog barked. Then another noise became audible. A motor of some kind...an electric hum.
She looked around. A wooden boardwalk ran down to the beach from the cottage and a motorised wheelchair was making its way along it.
Steering it was Luca.
He could see her. And he knew she had seen him. She had twisted her head around to stare at him, shock moving across her face. More than shock. Worse than shock.
Grimly, he powered on. The wooden boards were not ideal for the wheels of his chair, and the jolting, even though it was mild, sent pain shooting through him. He ignored the pain—it had become his habit to ignore pain.
He slewed onto the deck where she was sitting, still frozen, immobile, her knuckles white.
The woman he had thought never to see again.
But now he must.
Ariana felt the blood draining from her face. For a moment faintness whirled, then cleared. She jolted to her feet.
‘What...what are you doing here?’
Her voice was a croak. The banal question she had uttered seemed so inadequate she could not believe she had asked it.
Did anything move in his eyes? There was no expression in his face, but that was not what she was looking at. What she was seeing was the greyness of it, the deep lines scored around his mouth—lines of pain. She felt emotion convulse inside her, seeing him looking the way he did. And another emotion too, that responded to it and made her pulse suddenly surge, countering the draining of blood from her own face.
But she must not feel that—she mustn’t.
The mask over his grey lined face did not move.
‘I’ve come to talk to you,’ he said.
She stared at him, still not believing that it was Luca here, now, on a winter beach in Florida. She saw his hands tighten, one resting on the arm of the wheelchair, the other on the control panel. His arms, his torso, moulded by the sweater he was wearing, looked as strong, as muscled as ever. Involuntarily, her eyes dropped to his lower body. Long trousers covered his legs...
Her stomach clenched with horror—the same horror that had convulsed her when the nurse at the hospital had made that nightmare revelation to her.