It was a mere two weeks since Eleri had resigned her job at Northwold to return to the fold, and already she felt as if she’d been back in the family business forever. Her father had come to Britain from Italy thirty years earlier to work in his uncle’s restaurant, where he met Catrin Hughes, a black-haired Welsh beauty on the same catering course. As soon as they finished their training the pair got married, and with their combined skills formed an unbeatable team. They took over the running of the restaurant, revamped the menu and the decor, and rapidly attracted a much larger clientele. When Mario’s uncle died he left the business to them both, whereupon the ambitious young Contis took over the premises next door to add the kind of coffee-shop the holidaying British public had learned to appreciate on trips to Italy and ‘France.
In the first years of their marriage Mario and Catrin Conti were blessed with two daughters, Eleri and Claudia. Then, after a long interval, Niccolo Conti opened large blue eyes on the world and Mario Conti finally gained a male heir to his small, but profitable empire.
These days Mario left the actual cooking to four skilled chefs and confined himself to the financial side of the business, but he put in an appearance at the restaurant most nights. Until her marriage Claudia had run the coffee-shop, but Eleri, from the first, had never wanted to work in the family restaurant in any capacity. After gaining a degree in English, she followed it with a business course with her friend, Victoria Mantle, who made straight for a career in London afterwards. But Eleri had always worked within travelling distance of Pennington and lived at home, her annual holidays and occasional weekends in London with Vicky her only breaks from her close-knit Italianate family background.
Now Claudia was married, and Eleri’s resignation from her job had been greeted with passionate enthusiasm by her family. She’d decided to make the best of it and began to run the coffee-shop with the efficiency previously brought to her job at Northwold. Within days she’d taken over the ordering for the entire business, which prided itself on using the freshest of produce from local suppliers wherever possible. Each day she ordered meat, fish and vegetables from the local market and bread from a nearby bakery, while the ice-cream for which Conti’s was renowned came from an Italian supplier based in the Welsh valleys.
At six o’clock, as she did every evening, Eleri locked up, popped her head round the door of the restaurant and had a chat with Marco, the head waiter, then took herself off to the family home tucked away in a quiet cul-de-sac behind the trattoria.
‘You look tired,’ said her mother, giving her a kiss. ‘Finding it hard, cariad?’
‘My feet find it hard, but the rest of it’s easy enough.’ Eleri sank into a kitchen chair, watching as her mother stirred sauce in a pan. ‘The trouble is Mamma mia, that although I like dealing with the general public, especially the regulars, and I quite enjoy the ordering and haggling with the suppliers and so on—’
‘You miss your work at Northwold.’
‘Exactly.’ Eleri smiled. ‘Clever old thing.’
‘Not so much of the old,’ said her mother, then looked up with a smile as her husband came in. ‘Good timing, Mario, your dinner’s ready. Eat it now so you can digest it before you go over to the restaurant. Eleri, you can have a bath before you eat, if you like.’
‘I do like, Ma. My feet are killing me.’ Eleri yawned widely.
Mario Conti was an elegant, olive-skinned man with a head of thick, greying blond hair and heavy-lidded blue eyes. He kissed his wife lovingly, then turned to his daughter. ‘So, cara. How was your day?’
‘The same as usual. Quite busy, in fact. The takings were well up on yesterday.’
Mario Conti looked at his daughter’s tired face, frowning. ‘I was asking how you were, not the takings.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Eleri, heaving herself out of her chair. ‘And I’ll be even better after dunking my poor aching feet in a hot bath! Nico’s at football practice, I assume?’
‘Where else?’ said Mario dryly.
Eleri laughed, and went upstairs, knowing perfectly well her parents would be deep in discussion over their elder daughter the moment she was through the door. In the bathroom she shared with Nico, Eleri let herself down into hot, scented water with a sigh of relief, grateful that her mother appreciated her need for time to herself. She loved her family, but, unlike Claudia, who’d been perfectly happy to live at home and work in the family business, Eleri had enough of her independent Welsh mother in her to need her own space from time to time. She missed her work at Northwold—and James—so badly that sometimes it was a struggle to disguise the fact from her parents, who knew nothing of her fight to forget James Kincaid. Eleri’s sloe-black eyes kindled at the memory of his suspicions. Forget him she might. In time. But forgiving him was something else entirely.
At least she was lucky to get the bathroom to herself tonight, she thought with a grin. Nico wanted to be a football star, not a restaurateur. But whether he achieved his ambition or not the security of the trattoria would always be waiting for him. Just as the coffee-shop had lain inexorably in wait for herself.
Eleri sighed, got out of the bath, and pulled on jeans and thick yellow sweater. She dried her hair, anchored the front strands behind her ears, then thrust her throbbing feet into soft boots bought on a visit to her grandparents in the Veneto the previous spring. She stared into the mirror moodily. She was the odd one out in the family in more ways than one; the only one with the Welsh name Catrin had insisted on for her first child. Claudia had fair curling hair and blue eyes, like their father, but Eleri’s straight black hair and wide-set dark eyes came from her Welsh mother. It was a family joke that Eleri looked more Italian than any of the family—even Nico, whose mane of wild black hair and brilliant blue eyes played havoc with the girls in school.
When Eleri was clearing up after her solitary, peaceful supper the phone rang.
‘Cara,’ said her father. ‘Marco told me a man was asking for you in the restaurant earlier.’
‘Who, Pop?’
‘Like an idiot Marco forgot to ask—it is busy in there tonight.’
Eleri was curious as she put the phone down. Surely Toby hadn’t been misguided enough to come looking for her at the trattoria? She’d been forced to tell her parents why she’d resigned from Northwold, and her father had needed much spirited argument from his womenfolk to prevent him rushing up to London to confront the young man he’d never approved of for his daughter, however casual the relationship. Not that Mario approved of any man for his daughters. Fortunately Claudia had married a solid, dependable young man with a steady job in an accounting firm. But secretly Eleri knew very well she was Mario’s darling, partly because she was the one who argued with him most and stood up to him, but mainly because she was the image of her mother at the same age. And because of it he was harder on her than on his other children. A man would have to be something very special indeed before Mario Conti approved of him for his elder daughter.
Not, thought Eleri morosely, that her father had need to worry on that score at the moment, if ever. After confronting Toby in London she’d refused to speak to him on the phone, and after the first few days he’d given up. Nowadays she worked a six-day week, which ruled out weekends in London with Vicky. She did her best to put on a good face, but sometimes she felt claustrophobic, even caged, and missed James Kincaid far more than she missed Toby. The day James arrived at the Gloucestershire plant of Northwold Eleri had taken one look at him and known that she would stay with him all her working life if he wanted her to. But in a few short minutes of trading Toby Maynard had put an end to her time at Northwold, and changed her life for ever.
The coffee-shop was very busy next day. Saturday always brought more shoppers into town and a gratifyingly large number