Page 229 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

‘I couldn’t find fresh bedding so I have taken the bedding from the other guest room,’ he said as he dumped his haul on the armchair. ‘They are all clean.’

Of course they were clean, she told herself, desperately trying to think of something to take her mind from the fact her pulses were going haywire. One of Marcello’s little quirks was an insistence of having his bedsheets changed daily. Victoria imagined he’d mentally preened numerous times since finding himself temporarily staff-less at stoically sleeping in the same bedding for longer than a night. She doubted it would have occurred to him to try laundering them himself, a thought that days ago would have made her eyes roll but now filled her chest with an emotion she couldn’t begin to understand and made her haywire pulses thrash even louder in her ears.

He gathered all the pillows she’d slept on. ‘Now that you are well enough to sleep without supervision, I will move to a guest room.’ A brief skim of his eyes to hers and another flash of his teeth. ‘This body of a superhero demands a bed to sleep in.’

The swelling in her chest deflated and sank to the pit of her stomach. So she hadn’t imagined it. He really was craving space away from her.

Trying to fake amusement so he wouldn’t sense the dejection she would hate him to see, she said as lightly as she could manage, ‘Superheroes deserve their own beds.I’llmove to the guest room.’

And be forced to sleep in the bed Victoria had lain over every inch of, and rest his head on pillows her head had rested on? Marcello was trying to drive her out of his senses, not open himself to having her delve deeper into them. He wasn’t a masochist. A few nights in the guest room and then the blizzard would be over, Victoria would return to her own apartment and he would return to his bed without fresh memories of her lying in it.

‘Victoria, when a man is playing the role of superhero he does not make the recovering heroine move rooms,’ he said sternly. ‘I need you to stay here so you can fully appreciate my selflessness.’

Thankful for a task that demanded his attention and distracted his gaze from the beautiful, semi-clad woman curled on his sofa, he yanked at the under-sheet until it submitted and pinged free. He imagined his mother’s reaction at his feat of separating bedsheet from mattress. His ex-wife too, he thought, would be lost for words. He might message Livia and tell her, but...no. It would only lead to questions and he would be unable to give any answer she wanted to hear.

He’d visited her on Christmas Day. Drank a glass of wine with her and her new husband. Not so new now. Six years and two children together. Beautiful, healthy children. Marcello was happy for her. She deserved the happiness she’d found. Livia had found the courage to put her heart on the line again.

For all his genuine happiness for her though, Marcello could never do the same. There was no coming back from the pain he’d gone through. Not for him.

He still didn’t know why he’d woken Christmas morning in his parents’ guest bedroom with the urge to see his ex-wife. They’d kept in touch through the years but he hadn’t seen her since the divorce was finalised and they’d shared one last meal in a concerted effort to part as friends. He could only assume his grandfather giving him his grandmother’s engagement ring on Christmas Eve had set something off in him. He’d known his mother was behind the well-meant gesture so had gracefully accepted the ring, but it had made a difficult time of the year more so.

It was when Livia had been seeing him off from her home and they’d finally been alone that she’d taken his hand and looked him in the eye with a sympathetic smile. ‘You are allowed to move on too, Marcello,’ she’d said.

‘I’m good,’ he’d replied, not pretending not to know what she was talking about.

‘Then why did you come here?’

He hadn’t been able to answer that then and couldn’t answer it now. All he’d known as he’d walked back to his car was that he’d needed to hear Victoria’s musical lilt and so he’d called her, and for the few minutes they’d spoken, a little of the tightness he’d woken with in his chest had eased. It had been enough to sustain him through a day that always felt more bitter than sweet, a day when the gap in his life and the hole in his heart always felt that much more acute.

He reached for the clean under-sheet and said to the woman whose musical voice had raised a smile on a day his cheek muscles rarely worked without effort, ‘Was that your family on the phone?’

‘Yes.’ It was the first time she’d spoken to any of them other than her grandma since New Year’s Day, Victoria realised with a pang. Since she’d moved to Manhattan, the supposed glamour of her life meant things had improved immeasurably when she returned home for visits, her family agog to hear stories about her demanding boss and the city that never slept. But that was only when she was home. Out of sight still meant out of mind. ‘I promised Grandma Brigit that you have been superhuman in your care of me.’

The only wonder was that it had taken so long for the man used to having other people cater to his every need to get fed up of playing nursemaid.

He actually caught her eye at this, a look of astonishment on his face. ‘The fire-breathing dragon is called Brigit? The same as the storm?’

She grinned. ‘Very apt, isn’t it?’

‘Is she as scary in real life as she is on the phone?’

‘Much worse,’ she assured him. ‘When my sister Mags brought her first boyfriend home, Grandma terrified him so much that he never came back. None of my sisters ever brought a boyfriend home after that, not unless they were certain she’d gone out.’

‘She lived with you?’

Watching him wrestle the clean under-sheet with the face of a man wrestling his personal nemesis elicited such a swell of emotion in her that she had to swallow it to answer. ‘My granddaddy died when I was a baby. She moved in with us then.’

The way she saidgranddaddy, with the fullness of her Irish brogue, made Marcello grin improbably.

‘What?’ she asked, noticing.

He shook his head and continued fighting the ridiculous under-sheet. ‘Nothing. So you grew up living with the fire-breathing dragon?’

‘I did.’

He resisted a quip about Victoria keeping her boyfriends away. This current easy conversation was good. The last thing he wanted was to dip into the dangerous territory of thinking about her romantic life.

Even before he’d developed these disturbing feelings for her, Marcello had known he would cheerfully sabotage any kind of romantic life Victoria had until science found a way to clone her for him. He’d only felt compelled to do it once, the one date she’d mentioned to him: her theatre date. He’d taken great delight in imagining her date as an acne-riddled, pot-bellied bore, then experienced even greater delight that her date must have been as boring as he’d hoped when she left him stranded at the theatre so she could help Marcello find his missing Montblanc.

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