‘You offered! You practically begged me to make love to you! To help you out with your little problem. Don’t you remember?’
She shrugged his words away. Nothing he could say could make up for what he had done. ‘What kind of low-life are you? We trusted you, Gus and me, and you reward that trust by treating us like some kind of keys to your fortune?’
‘Then don’t sign!’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to sign. Forget I was ever here.’
‘I’ll forget you ever lived, Franco Chatsfield!’ she cried as the best day of her life rapidly turned into the worst. ‘Just go!’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WINTER MOVED INTO spring. The days grew slowly warmer and sunnier. There was always something to do, always work in the vineyard or the cellar door or even about the house, and yet for Holly, day dragged wearily after day. Even bud burst, usually her favourite time of year as the vines burst back into life, failed to lift her spirits.
Gus did his best to cheer her up, she knew, and she loved him for it. But she didn’t have the heart to laugh at his stories any more. She tried to, she really did, but she just didn’t have the heart for anything. Somebody else had ripped her heart away.
Franco.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Gus encouraged her one evening as she picked at her food. ‘You’ll get over him. He wasn’t good enough for you, just like that other bloke.’
And she smiled at her grandfather and nodded, because she loved him, but Franco hadn’t been like that other bloke at all. She’d never loved Mark Turner, she’d known that for years now. She’d been young and flattered and in love with the idea of being in love, and then she’d been devastated when he’d turned around and walked away and done all he could to trash their brand into the deal. So hurt that she’d turned her hurt into anger and blamed it all on the grandfather who had done her such a big favour by getting rid of him.
There was no comparison between the two.
Loving Franco had shown her what love was. And loving Franco had shown her what it really felt like to experience deep, gut-wrenching hurt.
So she smiled for her grandfather and did what she had to do in the vineyard, while inside she grieved for what she had lost.
Then one night she needed to look something up and was searching for a book on winemaking in the study when she came across the wrappedup package that Franco had left behind when he’d thrown his clothes into a bag in a Sydney hotel room, and disappeared from her life. She’d put it in her luggage and brought it home, meaning to send it on.
She forgot about the book as she looked at the wrapping. It was just a photograph—it wouldn’t hurt to have a look, she reasoned. They’d been there together that day after all. She slipped a nail under the tape and eased it off, unwrapping the paper from the frame.
The mother koala looked into the lens, inquisitive but not bothered, a twig of gum leaves clutched in one paw, while the joey nestled against her chest. But it was the words engraved on the gold plate underneath that drew her eye, words written in both Italian and English.
For Nikki’s Ward,
dedicated to the memory of Nikki.
And then a date.
Curious, she went to her computer and searched and found and read a webpage about a hospital in Italy with a ward for children with kidney disease, Nikki’s Ward, that was funded entirely by one Franco Chatsfield.
There was a picture of a little girl with large, grey eyes and wavy long sandy hair, and a vice clamped hard around her heart because she didn’t have to read any more to know whose child she was.
Franco’s child.
He hadn’t given up his kidney for his friend. It had been to save his own daughter’s life. Except it hadn’t.
And she thought about the scar at his side and how much it must cost to run a ward for children with kidney disease, and her heart ached for a man with secrets.
A man she would never see again.
He was helping with the harvest when he heard the news. He’d returned to Italy and thrown himself into work, but he couldn’t sit still in his office for five minutes, he couldn’t focus. So he helped out with the harvest instead. He picked the grapes that had rescued him once before, when he was just a teenager running away from a family he thought didn’t want him and where he could never see himself belonging.
And one day, after a day’s picking, he’d returned to his office and found an email from Christos Giatrakos waiting for him, an email he’d almost deleted, until he’d registered the subject line.
From: [email protected]
Subject: CONGRATULATIONS
Purman Wines has signed and returned their contract with the Chatsfields. As per our agreement, your entitlements under the Chatsfield Family Trust will continue.