‘They died.’ He said the words as if they meant nothing to him. He showed no emotion at all. Not even a flicker. His face was like a marble statue, a blank, impenetrable mask.
‘So you were an orphan?’ Bella prompted.
‘Yeah, that’s me.’ He gave a little laugh as he swirled the contents of his glass. ‘An orphan.’
‘Since when?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how old were you when your parents died?’
It seemed like a full year before he spoke; Bella waited out each pulsing second of the long, protracted silence. It was a silent battle of wills, but somehow she suspected the battle was not between her and him. It was between two parts of himself: the aloof loner who didn’t need anyone and the man behind the mask who secretly did.
‘I don’t remember my father,’ he said with the same blank, indifferent expression.
‘He died when you were a baby?’ she guessed.
‘Yes.’ There was still no emotion. No grief or sense of loss.
Bella moistened her lips, waiting a beat or two before asking, ‘What happened?’
At first she didn’t think he was going to answer. The silence stretched and stretched interminably.
‘Motorbike accident,’ he finally said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Can’t have been pretty.’
Bella winced. ‘What about your mother?’
A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm tugged at the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘I was five,’ he said and twirled his wine again, his eyes staring down at the liquid as it splashed against the sides of the glass.
‘What happened to her?’
‘She died.’
‘How?’
There was another silence before he spoke. A bruised silence. ‘Suicide.’
She gasped. ‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’
He gave a careless shrug. ‘It wasn’t much of a life for her once my father died.’ He tipped back his head and drained his glass, setting it down on the table with a little thump.
Bella frowned as she thought of him as a young motherless boy. She had been totally devastated when her mother had driven away that day, but at least she had known her mother was still alive. How had Edoardo coped with losing his mother so young? ‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’
‘Yep.’
‘And your mother?’
‘English,’ he said. ‘She met my father while on a working holiday in Italy.’
‘Who looked after you after she died?’
He put his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table, his expression closing like a door that had been clicked shut on a sliver of a view. ‘Fergus needs to go outside,’ he said. ‘He’s too stiff to use the pet door now.’
Bella sat back with a frown pulling at her forehead as she watched him stride from the room. He had told her things she was almost certain he hadn’t even told her father. Her father had said Edoardo had always refused to speak of his early childhood and he wasn’t to be pressured to reveal things he didn’t want to reveal. She, like her father, had assumed it had been because Edoardo was ashamed of his background, given that it was so different from theirs. His youth had been misspent on rebellious behaviour that had alienated him from the very people who had wanted to help him. He had used the very words the authorities would have used to describe him: a rebel, a lost cause, bad to the core, beyond salvation. Was he really all or any of those things? What had happened to make him so distrustful of people? What had made him the closed-off enigma he was today?
And why on earth did it matter to her to find out? It wasn’t as if it was any of her business.
He was her enemy.
He hated her as much as she hated him.
She chewed at her lower lip as she looked at his empty chair. It shouldn’t matter to her what had happened to him. He had been surly and uncommunicative for as long as she had known him. He had clearly inveigled his way into her father’s trust and taken control of her life. He had done nothing but taunt and ridicule her from the moment she had turned up at what used to be her house. He was threatening to ruin her wedding plans. He was the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the brick wall she had to climb over or knock down.
It shouldn’t matter … But somehow—rather surprisingly—it did.
EDOARDO waited for Fergus to sniff every tree and shrub in the garden as the moon watched on with its wise and silent silver eye. The air was cold and fresh; the smell of the damp earth was like breathing in a restorative potion.
It cleared his head.
It grounded him.
It reminded him of how far he had moved from his previous life—a life where he’d had no control. No hope. Only pain and miserable, relentless suffering.
Haverton Manor was his sanctuary, the only place he had ever called home. The only place he had ever wanted to call home.
He clenched his fists and then slowly released them. The past was in the past and he should not have let Bella get under his skin enough to pick at the hard crust that covered what was left of his soul. Inside him were wounds he would allow no one to see. The scars he wore on the outside of his body were nothing to the ones on the inside. He could not bear pity. He could not stomach people’s interest in what he wanted to forget. He didn’t want to be painted as a victim. He had no time for people who saw themselves as victims.
He was a survivor.
He would not allow his past to cast a shadow over his future. He had proved all his critics wrong. He had made something of himself. He had used every opportunity Godfrey Haverton had offered him to better himself. He was educated. He was wealthy. He had everything he had ever dreamed of when he had been that cowering child shrinking away from the drunken blows of a cruel and sadistic stepfather. He had pictured his future in his head as a way to block out what was happening to him: he had pictured the luxury cars, the lush, rolling fields of a country estate, the opulent mansion, the beautiful women and the designer clothes.
He had made it come true.
Haverton estate was his: every field and pasture, every hill and hillock, the lake, the woods and most importantly the manor—his very own regal residence, the ultimate symbol of having left his past well and truly behind.
No one would be able to take it off him. No one could toss him out on the street in the cold and wet. No one could deny him a roof over his head.
When he was a child he had dreamed of owning a place such as this. His very own fortress, his castle and his base. His home.
Godfrey had known how important the manor was to him: it was the first place he had felt safe. The first place he had put down roots. The first place he had discovered friendship and loyalty. Within these walls he had learned all he needed to learn in order to make something of his life. Before he had come here he had been close to giving up. He had gone beyond the point of caring what happened to him. But Godfrey had woken something in him with his quiet, patient way. He hadn’t pressured him to open up. He hadn’t bribed him or coerced him in any way. He had simply planted the seeds of hope in Edoardo’s mind, seeds that had grown and grown until Edoardo had started to see the possibility of changing his life, becoming something other than a victim of circumstance and cruelty.
He was no longer that pitiful child with a constant fear of abandonment,