Page 30 of Innocent's Wedding Day with the Italian

Only seven a.m. With only one hour of sleep, she should be shattered but there was a glow to her skin and in her heart that overrode any exhaustion, and as they zipped through the lemon trees of Enzo’s estate, her hands rested lightly on his hips and she lifted her face to the slowly rising sun, determined to make the most of these last six hours with him. It wasn’t as if she could do any more harm to herself. She couldn’t love him any more than she did. Leaving him couldn’t hurt any more than it was going to do. The price to be paid would be the same if she spent the next six hours locked in a room away from him.

After a couple of minutes spent following the narrow trail, they reached a small gate in the perimeter wall. Enzo punched the code to open it and then they were riding on a dust track that soon connected to the main road the press was camped along. In moments, the press pack was far behind them, unaware their targets had evaded them.

The roads they travelled were mostly empty of traffic but the deeper they rode into the city, the more human life began to emerge, street cleaners sweeping away the night’s litter, young parents with babies and toddlers in prams and strollers, dog walkers; all interspersed with the odd vampiric figure staggering back to their bed after a night of hard partying. Unlike the Vespa boys of the day before, Enzo rode at a sensible pace. Rebecca didn’t doubt that if she hadn’t been riding as his passenger, he’d be extracting every inch of speed he could out of it.

The scent of fresh coffee filled her nostrils and she wished she could remove the helmet and press her cheek into his back and close her eyes and fill her lungs with both Enzo’s scent and the scent she would always associate with this beautiful city. Tempting though it was, he would go berserk if she removed it. They’d only the one helmet between them and he’d insisted she wear it, going as far as to put it on her himself and securing the strap. Oh, well, it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford the fine that would be slapped on him if they got pulled over for Enzo’s own failure to wear one.

After crossing the river, they entered a part of the city she’d never visited before. Soon they turned the corner near a vast piazza and entered a narrow street lined with all manner of grocery shops that, if it were not Sunday, would have cheeses, hams, fruits and vegetables displayed under the colourful awnings.

Enzo pulled over by—yippee!—an open coffee shop with outdoor seating. After parking the Vespa next to two others, he helped Rebecca dismount then, with a smile, unclipped her helmet and pulled it off her head. Immediately she fluffed her hair up, making him grin at this little display of vanity and ruffle her hair, which in turn made her slap his hand.

‘Pack it in,’ she scolded, straightening her buttoned olive-green dress which fell to just above her knees.

His eyes sparkled. ‘Make me.’

She gave him her best schoolteacher face, making his grin widen so much she could practically see all his straight white teeth.

He was still grinning once he’d taken his seat, his dimples flashing when a member of the waiting staff, eyes still puffy with sleep, came out to take their order. With a strange, almost manic energy fizzing inside her, Rebecca couldn’t stop smiling either. She didn’t think she’d ever felt the rays of the early morning sun so strongly before or experienced such awareness of her surroundings, as if all her senses had been injected with caffeine, making everything sharper, from the scent of Enzo’s cologne to the smart khaki shorts and black T-shirt his beautiful body was wrapped in. The pigeons scavenging crumbs and the few people milling about were sharply in focus too, although she doubted any of them would think for a moment that the couple sitting al fresco at this ungodly time for a Sunday were at the top of the European press’s most wanted list. And if they were recognised...well, they’d get back on the Vespa and Enzo would whisk them away.

Not until their breakfast had been brought out to them and the pastries demolished did Enzo put his phone down from reading a message he’d received, don his shades—the sun really was gaining strength and today promised to be a scorcher—nod at the five-storey faded yellow building that ran the length of the street on the other side of the road facing them, and idly say, ‘That’s where I lived with my father.’

Startled at this unexpected revelation, she tried to read his stare beneath the darkness of his shades before giving up and turning her attention to his early childhood home. ‘Which apartment?’

‘Directly opposite. Third floor above the pizzeria.’

She counted up to the Juliette balcony with potted plants showing between the rails.

‘It was a greengrocer when I was a child,’ he told her. ‘The owner would give me an apple every morning when I walked to my grandparents’.’

The grandparents she’d never met.

‘Which one was theirs?’

‘First floor above the florist.’ She found the balcony, one of many on the building with laundry drying on it. ‘They had a communal garden I played in. It was only small but it had a slide and a swing that I would fight with the other children to play on.’

Rebecca closed her eyes and slowly filled her lungs, trying to hold on to the fizzing energy, trying to eradicate images of a small Enzo hurtling himself down a slide. Twenty-four hours ago she’d still been unaware that Enzo had spent the first six years of his life living with his father.

In a few short hours it would be exactly a day since his mother had thrown the grenade that had imploded her world. ‘Why are you showing this to me?’

‘Because I wanted you to see where I really come from before you leave. And because I owe it to my father. I should never have diminished his role in my life or the role my grandparents played in those early days. Another regret for me to live with.’ He gave a quick, wry smile then sighed and looked back at his childhood home. ‘I can still hear his voice and hear him telling me off for trying to climb onto the balcony railing and I can still smell the turpentine he used to clean his brushes, but his face disappeared a long time ago. I can spend an hour looking at a photograph trying to fix him back into my mind and then the next day he’s gone again, and now I have to live with knowing I pushed him further away in my mind for my own ends. My grandparents too.’ He grimaced. ‘They asked many times to meet you before the wedding. I made all the excuses to them.’

‘Couldn’t risk them telling me the truth about your early years?’

‘Yes.’ This time she could see through the darkness of his shades to his eyes and the self-recrimination blazing from them. ‘I saw little of them after I moved in with my mother but for the first six years of my life they were a huge fixture of my life. My grandmother collected me every day from school. She always cooked my favourite food for me—you think Sal makes a goodmelanzane alla parmigianabut no one makes it as good as her.’

It took a beat for Rebecca to realise he was talking about the aubergine and mozzarella dish he so loved.

‘Like your family, my father and my grandparents struggled for money but I never went hungry or cold. What I remember most about the first six years of my life is being safe and happy.’

There was nothing Rebecca could say to this. As when discussing his mother’s initial abandonment of him, everything Enzo was telling her was delivered matter-of-factly. Sympathy and platitudes were neither expected nor required.

He wouldn’t want to hear it but it hurt her heart to think he’d only known safety and happiness for his first six years.

She had to respect that he could hold his hands out and admit to the wrongs he’d committed.

Finishing her cappuccino, she couldn’t help but wonder how a man so clear-headed and principled—she could hardly believe she was thinking of Enzo andprincipledin the same sentence, but that’s why she usually limited her caffeine intake—could go to the lengths Enzo had done. He didn’tneedClaflin Diamonds. With his fortune, he could have created a dozen brand-new fully staffed laboratories in every country on earth and still had change to spare.

Before she could find the question to probe, his lips quirked and he reached over and wiped her top lip.

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