‘Look, living here is a lot more comfortable and private than a hostel dormitory would be,’ Ava replied with spirit. ‘Would you like coffee?’
‘I’ve just had a meal. I’m fine,’ Vito responded with a polite nod, stationing himself by the dirty window. He noticed that his breath was misting in the air; there was no heating. He was appalled to find her living in such surroundings and no longer marvelled at the fact that she had been wearing second-hand shoes.
‘You can take your coat off—I promise not to steal it!’
‘It’s too cold in here.’
Ava crouched down to switch on the gas fire. She used it for an hour every evening to heat the room before she went to bed. She smiled to herself. Vito might be tough but he loved heat. If there was no sunlight he had to have a fire on. Olly used to tease him about it. At the thought her smile died away as quickly as it had come and she wondered if she would ever be in Vito’s company without remembering the awful loss she had inflicted on him.
‘You said you wanted to speak to me,’ she reminded him, turning to face him.
His eyes glittered like black diamonds in the light from the lamp by the bed. ‘I have a suggestion to put to you.’
Ava rested her head to one side, copper-red hair glinting like fire across her dark jacket, strands of honey gold lightening the overall effect.
‘You look like a robin when you do that.’
Ava didn’t want to be compared to a bird. Since when was a robin stylish or sexy? It was more of a perky, cheeky bird, she reasoned, and then flushed at the way her mind was working, seeking a compliment, approval, anything other than his indifference, that was her and it was pathetic at her age to still be so needy!
‘I want to hold the Christmas party again this year,’ Vito continued doggedly. ‘Well, I don’t really want to but I believe it’s time.’
‘You mean you haven’t had one … since?’ Ava completed, her voice cracking a little on that final emphatic word, which encompassed so much.
A haunted darkness filled Vito’s stunning eyes, revealing a clear glimpse of pain, and it tore up something inside her. ‘No, not for three years,’ he responded flatly.
‘OK …’ Recognising that further enquiry would be unwelcome, Ava strove to match his detached attitude and ram down the pained feelings swelling inside her that sometimes felt too big and powerful to hold in. ‘So?’ she prompted jerkily, wondering what the subject could possibly have to do with her.
‘I want you to organise it—the party, the decoration of the house, the whole festive parade,’ Vito extended, a sardonic look on his handsome face.
‘Me? You want me to organise it?’ Ava was incredulous at the idea, utterly filled with disbelief.
‘You and Olly always took care of it for me before,’ Vito reminded her, noting how very white she had become, the subject no easier for her than it was for him. ‘I want you to do it again, deal with the caterers and all the fuss. I won’t be involved but I think my staff and neighbours should feel free to enjoy the event again.’
Finally, Ava accepted that he was making a genuine request but it did not remove her astonishment. ‘You can’t have thought this through. Me? Have you any idea what people would think and say about me doing the arrangements for the party again?’
Vito raised an incredulous brow. ‘I have never in my life stopped to worry about what other people think,’ he countered with resounding assurance. ‘It strikes me as the perfect solution. You will recreate Christmas in the same spirit as Olly did. The two of you revelled in all that traditional nonsense.’
Ava dragged in a ragged breath and had to literally swallow down the unnecessary reminder that Olly was gone. Nonsense, yes, she recalled helplessly, Vito had always believed the seasonal festivities were nonsense, only excepting those of a religious persuasion from his censure. Even so, he had tolerated her and Olly’s efforts to capture the magic of Christmas with the same long-suffering indulgence that an adult awarded childish passions.
‘I suggest you stay at AeroCarlton for what remains of the week and move into the castle at the weekend.’
‘M-move into the castle?’ Ava stammered, shaken at the suggestion.
‘You can hardly do the work from here,’ Vito pointed out, his measured drawl as cool as ice on her skin.
Christmas at Bolderwood, the stuff of dreams, Ava conceded abstractedly and familiar images washed through her mind: gathering holly and ivy from the forest, choosing the tree and dressing it, eating mince pies by the fire in the Great Hall. Even as she felt sick with longing at the recollection of happier times something snapped shut as tight as a padlock inside her brain. Christmas without Olly in what had once been Olly’s happy home: it was unthinkable. She didn’t deserve it, couldn’t even consider such an undertaking when she had for ever destroyed Christmas for Vito.
‘I couldn’t do it. It would be a frightful mistake to use me. It would offend people.’
‘If it does not offend me, why should it offend anyone else?’ Vito enquired with arrogant conviction. ‘You’re over-sensitive, Ava. You can’t live in the past for ever.’
‘You can’t forgive me!’ Ava suddenly cried in jagged protest. ‘How do you expect me to forgive myself?’
Vito cursed her emotional turbulence. Everything he controlled she expressed, but he saw her attitude as another sign that he was taking the right path. ‘It’s three years. It might feel like it only happened yesterday but it’s been three years,’ he pointed out harshly. ‘Life has to go on. Make this Christmas a proper tribute to Olly’s memory.’
Ava was struggling to suppress such a giant surge of emotion that her legs trembled under her and she braced her hand on the back of a chair, her eyes stinging with a rush of tears. Olly’s memory. It always hurt too much to examine her memories of him and then be forced to accept the reality of his death again.
‘Do you really think that my brother would have wanted to see you living like this?’ Face taut, eyes ablaze with impatience, Vito lifted both arms in an unusually dramatic gesture of derision.
Ava’s chin came up at that question and her spine straightened. ‘No, I know he wouldn’t have wanted this,’ she admitted grudgingly, blinking back the tears that had almost shamed her. ‘But I can’t help it.’
‘Che cosa hai! What’s the matter with you?’ Vito reproved, his dark deep voice growling over the vowel sounds. ‘You’re a fighter—I expected more from you.’
Mortified colour sprang up over her cheekbones, flooding her porcelain pale skin like the dawn on his Tuscan estate. That stray thought, far too colourful for a man who considered himself imaginative only in business, set his even white teeth on edge. He looked at her, grimly appraising her appearance in shabby clothes. Hair like molten copper in an unflattering ponytail, face dominated by bright blue eyes and that luscious mouth, garments too shapeless and poorly fitting to compliment even her slender figure. Nothing there to fascinate or titillate, he reasoned impatiently, but his attention roamed back to her delicate features and lingered. A split second later he was hard as a rock, his blood drumming through the most sensitive part of his body as he imagined that succulent mouth pleasuring him.
‘Yes, I’m a fighter,’ Ava breathed shakily, gazing back at him, feeling the change in the atmosphere and finding it quite impossible to ignore it. How could he make her feel this way without even trying? All right, he was very good-looking but surely she should have outgrown her teenaged sensitivity to his