‘If I’d been given the choice I would have lived with my grandparents. They lived on the same street as us. I had always treated their home like my own. I loved them and they loved me. But I was six and not given a choice.’

Given a choice, Rebecca would have ripped her gaze away from him but her eyes refused to obey, soaking in the stony features, her fingers now gripping the spoon to stop them reaching across and stroking the hard edges away. This hardness was a side to Enzo she had never seen before and for reasons she would never understand affected her far more deeply than if he’d been relaying everything in apity mevoice.

She knew in her guts that everything he was telling her now was the unvarnished truth.

She’d known his father had died when he was six, known his parents weren’t together when the aneurysm killed him, but had thought he’d always been raised by his mother.

Had she assumed that or had Enzo led her to believe it?

He’d deliberately let her make that assumption she realised dimly, because to have told her the truth would have been to open the can of worms that would have revealed his mother’s true nature. As he’d already admitted, he hadn’t wanted Rebecca to have any doubts about marrying him. He’d wanted nothing to make her believe he was anything less than perfect.

This time, though, she couldn’t summon the energy to be angry about the revealing of yet another manipulative lie, not when she felt so sick inside for the little boy he’d once been.

Swallowing back bile, she forced herself to ask, ‘What kind of mother was she once you were living with her?’

‘Terrible,’ he said bluntly. ‘She is the most selfish person I know and had no idea how to raise a child. I went from a typical Italian life with a big extended family to living in an apartment where I was forbidden from touching anything. She resented me for cramping her style and I resented her for taking me away from my family and for not being my father.’

‘What was your father like?’

There was a slight softening in his eyes. ‘He was a great man. He worked as a painter and decorator. He painted cars all over the walls of my room for me. I have nothing but good memories of him.’

Another pang rippled through her chest. Words of comfort itched to jump off her tongue but she clamped them tightly, knowing she mustn’t say them, that it was no longer her place to say them. That she shouldn’t even want to.

Even if she felt she could, the look in Enzo’s eyes told her comfort was neither wanted nor needed, that his past was something he’d already come to terms with and that he was only telling her the unvarnished truth because he owed it to her.

‘Living with my mother...’ He raised a shoulder. ‘Neither of us liked the situation but there was no choice in it for either of us.’ He shrugged again and drained his wine. ‘She had no choice in loving me and I had no choice in loving her. Her love for me is the only reason we still have a relationship. She either likes people or she doesn’t. If she likes you then she will do anything for you. Cross her and she will discard you as if you never existed. She is unable to discard me and that infuriates her. The threats I made to force her into becoming a law-abiding citizen would have seen anyone else cut from her life. I am quite sure she wishes she could cut me off but she can’t, and she has spent five years seething with resentment. She saw the opportunity to strike at me and hurt me, and no doubt sated her conscience by telling herself she was doing it for your benefit.’

‘Robina Hood has a conscience?’

Immediately she regretted her effort to lighten the oppressive atmosphere when a glimmer of humour passed between them.

She didn’t want to be reminded of all the other glimmers that had passed between them because then it would lead to her remembering all the laughter and the sheer joy of just being with Enzo.

‘I told you—her morality is complicated,’ he said. ‘If she had disliked you then I am certain she would have let you marry me and waited for a different opportunity to take her revenge.’

‘Did she get some kind of kick out of being a criminal mastermind?’ What other reason could there be for being so full of resentment?

‘Undoubtedly.’

Rebecca stirred her spoon some more around her mostly uneaten meal and tried to square the Silvana Beresi she knew with the woman Enzo had just described, trying again to muster anger that in all the months they’d been together she’d bared her soul to him like she’d never done with anyone before while he’d blatantly omitted the most important aspects of his history to her.

He’d given her the skeleton of his life but failed, deliberately, to add flesh and blood to it.

But anger still refused to rise. Her heart continued to ache for the small boy he’d been, a child the same age as the children she taught. Those children were spontaneous in their affections and open with their emotions but not yet mature enough to hide whatever they were feeling. It was those who could hide it, she’d learned in the short time frame she’d been doing the job, that you needed to worry about. Would Enzo have been one of those children she’d watched closely, longing to hug them tightly and tell them everything would be all right?

Whatever kind of child Enzo had been, he was not that small boy any more. He’d grown into a man every bit as manipulative as the woman who’d given birth to him. He’d omitted the most important aspects of his life because he hadn’t wanted to shatter the illusion of perfection and thus risk Rebecca having doubts about marrying him.

But she only knew this because he’d admitted it.

Now that everything was out in the open, he was giving her the honesty she demanded, and it made her heart hurt to think that if only he’d been honest with her from the start about her grandfather’s will, maybe they...

There was no point in thinking like this. There was nothey. Enzo didn’t love her. He’d never loved her. Robina Hood had done her a huge favour.

Rebecca took a deep breath then pushed her chair back and got to her feet.

She sensed him watching her every move.

‘It’s late,’ she said, turning her body away from him, too full of emotions she no longer understood to dare looking at him any more. ‘I’m going to try and get some sleep.’