CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BENEDETTOLISTENEDTO his friend with an impassive mask. Despite the fact there was no one else in his office, he didn’t want to let his guard down. But his insides were far from unaffected by the phone call.
‘I’m worried about her.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s not happy.’
Benedetto gripped the phone more tightly. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘She’s my sister. I can tell.’
Benedetto’s eyes closed.
‘Did she tell you anything about her life in Valencia? About what she was doing there? Is it possible she had more going on than we realised? A serious relationship? Something important she couldn’t leave? But if that’s the case, why not go back? No one’s forcing her to be here. Did she say anything to you, Ben?’
‘No.’
‘I want to help her, I want her to be happy. I just don’t know where to start.’
Benedetto ground his teeth together. Guilt slammed into him. He’d messed everything up.
‘She’s been through a lot,’ Benedetto said.
‘I know. But this isn’t like Amelia. I’ve never seen her like this.’
Benedetto leaned back in his chair, his mind conjuring an image of Amelia with ease, her beautiful, happy face on the boat, her laugh, her sun-kissed smile.
‘So she didn’t say anything to you?’
Benedetto dragged a hand through his hair, not answering the question directly. ‘In my experience, no matter the problem, time’s the solution. Your sister is right. In time, she’ll be herself again.’
He disconnected the call as quickly as he could, hoping he was right.
But if having Amelia permanently moored in his brain had been hard before, it was almost impossible now that he imagined her miserable. Now that he saw her face as it had been after the wedding, when he’d found her staring at the fountain as though it held the answers to the universe. He imagined her sadness and ached to draw her into his arms, to hold her, to kiss her until she smiled against his mouth, until she laughed, or cried out in ecstatic euphoria, whichever came first. He ached to swim with her, to travel with her, to simply co-exist at her side. Five weeks after he last saw Amelia, and he began to suspect he was wrong: perhaps time wasn’t the answer he was looking for. So what was?
She wasn’t sure why she’d come back. Only when she’d woken that morning and gone through the motions of pretending everything was fine, that her heart wasn’t breaking over and over again, and her mother had asked what was on Amelia’s schedule, she’d heard herself say, without putting any thought into it, ‘I’m going to Crete.’
Only in uttering the words had she realised that she’d been thinking of that day with yearning for weeks now. In Crete, they’d walked hand in hand through narrow laneways, admired brightly coloured buildings, he’d picked a geranium flower and handed it to her—she still had it flattened in between the pages of a book. In Crete, she’d stopped running: from her family, but also from the love she felt for Benedetto. In Crete she’d accepted she couldn’t go in a different direction from him. And even though he’d subsequently left her, the need to be back on those streets, to exist in the midst of memories that were so tangible and real, had called to her.
‘Oh, lovely, darling. What will you do there?’
‘I have a few things in mind,’ she’d responded vaguely. ‘I’ll see you later today.’ She’d pressed a kiss to the top of her mother’s head, bowed in the vague direction of her father, then walked from the room with more purpose in her step than she’d had in over a month.
Benedetto couldn’t have said if it was courage or stupidity or a strange kind of sadism that had led him to set up a news alert on Amelia’s name. Morbid curiosity? Or a desire to reassure himself that she was okay? That the press wasn’t hounding her as it once had? And what would he have done if that had been the case? Flown to Catarno and rescued her? As if he had any right.
Whatever his reasons, when an email came through some time after midnight with Amelia’s name in the headline of the article, he stopped everything he was doing and clicked into the link, breath held, eyes furiously scanning his tablet, reading everything, before he saw the photograph of her in a familiar setting, and every part of him froze.
His finger hovered over the photograph, but that jerked the article closed. He swore, reloaded it, forced himself to look but not touch.
Princess Amelia Moretti enjoys a break at a local restaurant.That was the subtitle that accompanied the photo.
But he knew which restaurant she was at—one they’d been to together. Where they’d sat and talked, and the sun had filtered in through the window and Benedetto had felt happy and relaxed and— He frowned, searching for another word to describe the elusive emotion that had coloured every moment of that day, until she’d run away. Then he’d gone from sunshine to shadow, feeling as if he’d lost everything in the world.
Until he’d arrived at the marina and Amelia had been waiting for him, and it had been as if he could breathe again; as if everything had been restored.
There was no sunshine for him now, only a heaviness he could hardly live alongside, a true absence of pleasure in every moment.
When Sasha had died, it had been truly awful. He had grieved her because he’d had to.
This was different.
Amelia was still here, alive, well, in another country. He was separated from her by choice, which made it harder to grieve her, to accept how much he missed her.
He flicked back to the photo, studied it, looking for any kind of sign that she was doing okay. Looking at her face, trying to understand her. Listening to the photo as though he might be able to hear her speak, hear her thoughts, learn something from the picture beyond the fact that she’d gone to the restaurant in the first place.
His instincts were pulling on Benedetto, telling him to stop fighting this, to go and see her, to talk to her, to just work everything out later, because suddenly nothing mattered more than at least being in the same room as her. He didn’t know what the future held, but he knew he could no longer live at this great distance from Amelia. She was in his soul, weaved into all the fibres of his being, and he was starting to realise that she always would be.
He called Anton from the air. The conversation was brief and businesslike—the content made that a necessity.
Benedetto and Anton were men cut from the same cloth: both private, proud, not quick to trust. Neither wanted to jeopardise their friendship, but Benedetto recognised the necessity of honesty with his friend, now that he stood on the brink of—he didn’t know what. But he at least needed to explain to Anton, as a courtesy, that things were more complicated than anyone had realised. That he was coming back to see Amelia, and, finally, that he needed Anton’s help. In a voice that could only be described as moderately shell-shocked, Anton agreed. ‘Of course I’ll help. But if you hurt her, Benedetto, if you hurt her—’
Anton didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew what was at stake.
‘I’m not really in the mood.’
‘Would you do it as a favour?’ Vanessa asked, a smile playing about her lips that spoke of some secret or another.
Amelia sighed softly. ‘Does it have to be the marina?’ She hated the thought of going back there, of seeing the boats but not Benedetto’s. She hated the memories that she knew would flood her, hard and fast.
‘I cannot possibly go onto a naval boat at the moment.’ Vanessa leaned forward, confidingly, looking around the dining room to assure herself that they were alone. ‘I already feel as though I am fighting seasickness all day and night—standing on a boat, I would be likely to be sick everywhere. Can you imagine the photographs?’ She winced and concern eclipsed Amelia’s feelings of self-preservation.
‘Are you not well?’
‘Oh, I’m very well,’ Vanessa contradicted, then quite obviously pressed a hand to her still-flat stomach. ‘It’s the hormones.’
‘Oh!’ Amelia stood up, feeling her first flush of joy in a long time, truly delighted for her sister-in-law and brother. ‘What wonderful news!’
Vanessa smiled. ‘We’re thrilled.’
‘I’m sure you are. How absolutely lovely. A baby!’
‘Yes,’ Vanessa whispered, looking around quickly. ‘But we have not yet told anyone.’
‘My parents?’
‘In a week or so,’ Vanessa said with a nod.
Amelia was honoured that her sister-in-law had chosen to share this secret with her. ‘I won’t say a thing.’
‘Thank you. Now, regarding the boat opening?’
‘Of course I’ll do it,’ Amelia agreed immediately, hating the idea of a ribbon-cutting of any sort, because of the necessary publicity that would ensue, but knowing she had to rise to the occasion. She was not the same young woman she’d been when she’d fled Catarno, nor the girl before that who’d been hounded while at university and made to feel as though everything she did was wrong. Amelia had grown up a lot in the last two years, and, vitally, had learned who she was, away from the palace and her role in the royal family.
Dressed in a striking navy-blue suit with a crisp white collar, and almost at the marina, she admitted to herself that she wasn’t dreading this half as much as she’d thought she might.
Until the car came to a stop and she looked around, eyes automatically gravitating towards the berth that Benedetto’s boat had occupied, expecting to find it empty, only to see that Il Galassia was still in port.
Her chest rolled.
She felt as though she might be sick. Butterflies danced through her central nervous system and little tiny lights flickered in her eyes. She gripped the door of the car, closing her eyes and giving herself a stern talking-to. So his boat hadn’t left. That meant nothing. It wasn’t even necessarily the case that Benedetto’s crew was on board. Perhaps they’d flown somewhere else, to do something else, leaving the boat here to be maintained until he needed it again. Or perhaps Cassidy and Christopher were on board. Perhaps if she went to them, after the opening, they’d let her step inside. To sit for a while in the underwater lounge room and remember what it had been like to spend a week with him. Maybe even to pretend that she’d slipped back in time and they were still together, on the boat.
Her heart twisted painfully and she blinked open, eyes landing on the deck again.
The car door swung open and she knew she couldn’t indulge these feelings any longer. She was on display, here representing the royal family. She had a job to do, and Amelia was determined to prove to everyone how much she’d changed.
‘This way, Your Highness,’ one of the members of the royal guard said, then bowed and gestured towards the docks. There was only one other boat in sight and it was not new. She looked around, wondering if perhaps there was a larger craft further out at sea that she was to be taken to.
But the guard led her, not to any naval boat, but rather towards Il Galassia, and each step brought more confusion, not clarity, so that when they reached the plank that led to the back of the boat, she stopped walking, memories slamming into her now, hard and fast.
‘I’m sorry, there must be some mistake.’
‘No, Your Highness.’
A numb sort of curiosity had her moving forwards, her mind refusing to allow her heart to hope, concentrating impossibly hard on not imagining anything, on simply walking, one step in front of the other, until she was on the boat.
The guard didn’t follow. She looked around, frowning, then continued to move forward. ‘Hello?’ she called out. No answer.
Lips tugging to one side, she moved up the stairs, to the next deck, then around to the front of the boat, eyes widening when she saw that, instead of the pristine white deck with which she was familiar, there were tens of thousands of red rose petals scattered like a carpet, everywhere she looked.
Her eyes squeezed shut, as if to clear the image.
When she opened them, Benedetto was standing there. He wore a suit, but the jacket had been discarded and the shirt sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, one side had come untucked. He looked so incredibly good in this dishevelled state. Though he would have looked good to Amelia no matter how he presented because it was six long weeks since the wedding and every day had been filled with a yearning for Benedetto that had taken her breath away.
Nonetheless, she stayed exactly where she was, the hurt of the past impossible to ignore, and it served as a shield now, making her cautious.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
Benedetto didn’t move at first either and then, slowly, he crossed the deck, stopping when he was just a few feet away from her. Close enough for her to see every detail of his face, to touch him.
She crossed her arms quickly, to prevent her from doing anything quite so stupid.
‘You went to Crete.’
It was the last thing she expected him to say.
‘How do you even know that?’
‘I saw an article.’ Was she imagining the slight darkening on his cheekbones? A blush, from Benedetto? ‘Why did you go back there?’ His voice was so gruff.
She angled her face away, staring out at the sea, trying not to react, trying not to feel. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she said, eventually, aware that she was hedging the question. ‘I’m more interested in why you’re here now. In what all this is about.’ She gestured to the boat.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, moving a step closer, so she flinched. She had to be strong, but she was so tired, and had missed him so much. ‘Or is it that I know, and cannot put it into words?’
‘Well, why don’t you try?’ she snapped, frustrated and in so much pain she couldn’t believe it. ‘Because I’m going to walk off this boat in about one minute.’
‘I don’t want to do this any more.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Do what? You’re the one who came back, who brought me here.’
‘I mean I don’t want to do this without you.’ His voice was a low rumble, like thunder. ‘Life. I have been miserable since I left here, miserable with missing you, wanting you, needing you, aching to talk to you, to see you, to hear you, to just be with you. I was so sure I could conquer those feelings, that it was better for me to stay away, because I don’t want what you want, because you deserve better than the future I can offer you. And yet here I am, discovering that, for you, I would do anything, go anywhere, be anything.’
Amelia’s lips parted in wonder and surprise, but her brain was there, quickly tamping down on her excitement, because surely there was the possibility that she was misunderstanding him in some vital way.
‘I have never been in love. I’ve never even really witnessed it. My parents were at each other constantly. I’ve avoided relationships of any meaning. But you are everywhere I look, including deep down in my soul, always in my thoughts. You are in my dreams, and everything I see and do seems a little worse when you’re not there to share it with. Is this love, Amelia? Is it love to crave a person to the point you would do anything to see them, just one more time? Is it love that makes me know I would give my life to save yours? Is it love to know that I could spend every minute with you for the rest of our lives and it would still never be enough? Is it love to want to protect you from any force in your life that might do you harm even when knowing you are strong enough to protect yourself? You are the best person I have ever known,’ he said gruffly, cupping her face then, staring down into her eyes. ‘I don’t want to fight this anymore.’
She closed her eyes, inhaled him deeply, her heart exploding.
‘I hate that I hurt you. I hate that it took me so long to wake up to what I was feeling. I hate that I had to hurt us both before I could see that the only future I want is one with you in the very centre of it. Most of all, I hate that when you told me how you felt, I didn’t understand my own feelings enough to shout from the rooftops that I love you too.’
She pressed a hand to his chest, struggling for breath, let alone words. ‘Oh, Ben,’ she whispered, tears on her lashes. ‘It’s okay.’
‘No.’ He was adamant. ‘It’s not. I’ve been such a stupid, selfish bastard, and I cannot forgive myself for that. But if you are generous enough to let me back into your life, to tell me you still love and want me, then I will never give you any reason to doubt my feelings again.’
And she knew he wouldn’t. ‘Even that night, I didn’t really doubt them,’ she said. ‘I knew that loving someone like I did you wasn’t, couldn’t be, one-sided. Every memory I have on the boat is about us falling in love, not just me. This is a partnership.’ She reached for his hand, linked their fingers together. ‘We always will be.’
‘Yes,’ he said with such a sound of relief that she couldn’t help but smile. ‘We always will be.’ And in the middle of the deck, surrounded by so many rose petals she half wondered if a whole country had been denuded of flowers, Benedetto di Vassi broke the promise he’d made himself as a young boy to always be alone, and instead begged Princess Amelia Moretti to be his other half, always and for ever.
And she agreed, in an instant.
It was much later that day, when the sun was almost gone and the stars had come out, that Benedetto explained the process that had finally brought him to heel. He told Amelia about the news alerts, about how desperately he’d sought out even the smallest hint of information about her, but that there’d been nothing—because I was hiding out in the palace—until the day she went to lunch, and then it had hit him like a meteor, right between the eyes.
He loved her.
He had to be with her. There was no question of choice or free will, it was simply as inevitable as breathing.
He explained to her that he’d known their relationship and happiness had to be secured but that he’d known that happiness would always be slightly lessened if it came at the cost of Anton’s happiness, of their friendship. Benedetto relayed the conversation with Anton, in which he’d very succinctly explained that he’d fallen in love with Amelia and intended to propose to her, that he knew Amelia too well to ask anyone’s permission for her hand in marriage—‘I’m my own person and I’m glad you understand that!’—but that he nonetheless felt the courtesy of a heads-up was appropriate, given their friendship.
‘And what did he say?’
‘There were some threats,’ Benedetto drawled.
Amelia laughed softly.
‘But then he told me that I deserved to be happy, and so do you, and that if we can make each other happy, there would be no greater supporter of our relationship than him, except perhaps Vanessa. Apparently she suspected something was going on between us.’
‘I’m not surprised. She’s very observant.’
‘I didn’t want to ask anyone for permission but once he’d accepted how things were between us, it was like the last piece fell into place. I knew I had to do this. I just hoped, with all my heart, that I hadn’t ruined things between us completely. I was so worried you would have stopped loving me. That you’d have realised you couldn’t love anyone who’d put you through this.’
‘I was upset,’ she agreed softly. ‘But I don’t think love is quite so transient as that. Certainly not the love I feel for you.’
‘Nor I for you,’ he promised, leaning closer, pressing a kiss to her lips. She sighed happily and snuggled into his arms.
Royal tradition dictated that Amelia should have a full, elaborate wedding, and so she did, but twenty-four hours before the ceremony the world was invited to attend via the news cameras positioned throughout the abbey, Amelia and Benedetto said their own vows privately on the deck of his boat, surrounded only by her family, and Cassidy and Christopher. It was an intimate ceremony imbued with all the love they felt for one another, and each and every guest in attendance felt that heavy in the air—it was an evening of magic, of love, and of happily ever after, just as the bride and groom deserved.