Page 2 of Innocent's Wedding Day with the Italian

‘Do you, Rebecca Emily Foley, take Enzo Alessandro Beresi...?’

She breathed in, looked Enzo straight in the eye and, in the strongest voice she could muster, loud enough for the entire congregation to clearly hear, said, ‘No. I. Do. Not.’

Enzo’s head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. The half smile froze on the tanned face that drained of colour. His mouth opened but nothing came out.

The only thing that had kept Rebecca together since she’d opened the package earlier that day was imagining this moment and inflicting an iota of the pain and humiliation racking her on him. Only there was none of the satisfaction she’d longed for. The speech she’d prepared in her head died in her choked throat.

Unable to look at him a second longer, she wrenched her hands from his and walked back down the aisle leaving a stunned silence in her wake.

It was only when Rebecca stepped outside onto the cathedral steps and into the Florentine heat that the magnitude of it all hit her.

Several hours ago, minutes before the hair stylist had arrived, the anonymous package had been delivered to the hotel with her name, suite number andUrgentwritten clearly on it, and the cloud of happiness she’d been living in had been torn apart. And now she felt it in the core of her being, an agony ripping through her soul.

She staggered down the steps. Suddenly, the amassed paparazzi, reporters and well-wishers, all busy chatting amongst themselves while they waited for the service to finish, noticed the bride had left her own wedding twenty minutes early. Before they could scramble into position, Rebecca hitched up the skirt of her silk and lace dress and set off over the piazza at a run, past the limousine waiting to transport the happy couple to the reception, past the ancient fountain which crowds of people were congregated around, oblivious to the gawps, deaf to the calls of concern. She had no destination in mind, just an overwhelming need to flee as far as it was possible to get from the man who’d ripped her heart in two. She would have run until the heels of her shoes had worn to nothing if she hadn’t caught a heel in a cobble and gone sprawling like a child, landing palms down and coming within an inch of smashing her face on the ancient ground.

‘Signorina?’

In a flash, a group of adolescent males whiling their day away admiring each other’s Vespas and generally doing their best T-bird impressions, came to her aid.

A cloud of cheap aftershave enveloped her as she was solicitously helped back to her feet, her hands examined for injuries and the rips in the lace of her two-hundred-thousand-euro dress clucked over. She tried to say thank you as she wiped away the tears streaming down her face but her throat was still too choked. She did manage a form of laughter when shaking her head at a cigarette.

Was that what she’d come to? A damsel in such distress it seemed reasonable to offer her a cigarette?

In the distance behind her came a shout, rapidly followed by more shouts. Those congregating inside and outside the cathedral were on the move. From the hollers, she guessed they’d spotted her. Her fairy-tale white wedding dress hardly made her inconspicuous.

She nodded at the row of Vespas and, her Italian deserting her, asked in English, ‘Can I have a lift please?’

Only one face didn’t respond with a blank look. ‘Where you want to go, lady?’

She gave the name of the tree-lined avenue Enzo’s villa was located. Six sets of eyes widened. And no wonder. It was one of the most exclusive areas of Florence. ‘Please?’ she beseeched.‘Per favore?’

Looking over her shoulder at the growing crowd heading their way and catching her urgent desperation, the young men sprang into action. Before she knew it, Rebecca was on a Vespa, the skirt of her dress tucked as well as it could be between her legs, clinging tightly to a skinny young man she doubted needed to shave regularly, and then they were off. With the rest of his gang coming along for the ride, her saviour zipped through the traffic. The journey should have taken a minimum of twenty minutes but by treating the rules of the road as an old-fashioned inconvenience and tooting his horn at any pedestrian stupid enough to attempt to cross in front of them, they soon left the bustle of the city proper, and fifteen minutes after they set out, her saviour came to a stop outside Enzo’s electric gate.

She jumped off the Vespa and punched the code to open it. ‘Can you take me to the airport?’ she asked as the gate opened. ‘I’ll pay.’ She had cash in her purse.

Her saviour’s mouth, open in stunned awe at the sprawling whitewashed villa with its terracotta roofs, snapped shut. He smiled. ‘Okay, lady.’

‘Five minutes.’ She held up her still-bleeding palm with fingers and thumb stretched out to stress the point, and ran up the drive to the front door. Before she reached it, Frank, Enzo’s uber-professional butler, shot out of his adjoining quarters.

‘What has happened?’ he asked in careful English. Barely a day ago he’d carried her overnight bags and wedding dress to the car waiting to take her to the hotel she would spend her final night as a single lady in, and wished her the happiest of wedding days.

Fearing she would start crying again, Rebecca shook her head.

Concern writ all over his face, he opened the door for her.

Inside, she wasted no time. Kicking off her white shoes, she hurried through the vast ornate reception room, through the arch that led to the east wing, and ran over the terracotta-floored corridor to the cinema room. The walls were lined with original prints of advertisements for Hollywood movies from the fifties and sixties. She went straight to the one with a beautiful blonde flanked by two men in swimming trunks and removed it. She remembered how she’d laughed when Enzo had shown her the safe. Remembered too, the grin on his face when he’d put her passport in it a week ago. She’d thought it a grin of happiness that she’d finally moved in with him, even if they were sticking to separate bedrooms, at his insistence, until the wedding. If only she’d known it was because she was one step closer to giving him what he really wanted. Which wasn’t her. It had never been her, and as she placed her eye to the retina scanner, memories of the day they’d met five months ago filtered like a reel in her mind.

Her aunt’s fiftieth birthday lunch at a beautiful country hotel. The weather as cold and grey as the cloud that had cloaked Rebecca for three and a half years. Her dismay when she left the lunch party to find her car had a flat tyre. Hauling the spare out of the boot. Wrestling with the wheel nuts. The gorgeous man with the heartbreaking dimpled smile and the most amazing translucent brown eyes that danced with merriment, who’d jumped out of the back of a car worth more than her house and offered his help.Insisted.

The memories solidified as she remembered how he’d removed his long, dark brown overcoat and the jacket of a suit that clearly cost more than her entire wardrobe and handed them to her to hold for him. They’d carried the most amazing, woody scent. He’d then rolled his sleeves up and sank onto the cold, wet ground. Throughout his expert tyre change he’d kept up a steady stream of talk, all in the most gorgeous deep, velvet voice and with the most fantastic accent her ears had ever heard. When he’d finished, Rebecca had been mortified to find his expensive trousers and shirt were stained with dirt and grease.

‘You must send me the dry cleaning bill,’ she’d insisted through chattering teeth when she passed his suit jacket back to him. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

He’d slipped his arms into it, his eyes gleaming. ‘Or,’ he’d said, ‘you can join me in the hotel bar and we can defrost over a hot drink by the fire.’

She could still feel echoes of the jolt of excitement that had shot through her.

Even though she’d already checked his ring finger, something she had never done before, she’d handed his overcoat to him unable to stop her gaze from dipping again to his bare left hand. ‘How is that repayment?’

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