Chapter Eight #2
She wished her heart didn’t leap so hard at this and wished, too, that she didn’t put an automatic cynical slant on it. Domenico was starting as he meant to go on, and she needed to do the same.
Injecting some positivity into her voice, she smiled. ‘Does this mean you’re skiving off work again?’
His eyes crinkled. ‘Better than that. I’m taking the next week off.’
‘Are you being serious?’ In all the years Marnie had known him, the longest Domenico had taken off work had been five days over the Christmas period. That had happened only once, a few years before they’d married and only after months of nagging from his mother and sister.
He drew his head back a little and gently ran his fingers through the length of her hair. ‘We need to know each other, Marnie, and we need to understand each other. It’s the only way we can make it work.’
It was hard to think coherently when shivers of sensation were dancing through her skin and veins. ‘I already know you, Dom.’
‘I know you do, probably better than anyone, but you need to understand what underlies it all, what the drivers of my life are, just as I need to understand the drivers of your life.’
‘There isn’t anything to understand about me. Compared to your life and everything you’ve achieved, my life has been the epitome of mundanity.’
His eyes glittered. ‘I don’t believe that for a minute.’ And then he brushed his lips to hers in a light, chaste kiss before he climbed off the bed and strolled, magnificent in his nudity, through the adjoining door.
Domenico’s driver crossed the Tiber, and soon they’d driven into a bohemian neighbourhood rich with ancient buildings.
Stopping at the foot of a narrow cobbled street, their driver ignored the angry toots of other drivers while Domenico climbed out of the car and held a hand out for Marnie. To his gratification, she accepted it, only releasing his hold when she was safely on two feet.
He led her up the street, stopping when they reached a bakery with outdoor seating. He pointed across the road. ‘That’s the apartment I grew up in. We lived on the top two floors.’
He watched her face, the interest alive on it as she soaked in the salmon-coloured fascia.
‘Do you see the balcony on the top floor? The one with all the plants?’
She nodded.
‘That was my parents’ bedroom. The window to the left of it was my sister’s. My bedroom was at the back. My nonna—my grandmother—lived with us too. Her bedroom was next to mine.’
‘Whose mother was she?’
‘My mother’s. I never knew my father’s parents. My father was sixty when I was born. My nonna was three years younger than him.’
Marnie digested this in her usual quiet way. ‘I knew he was classed as an old father, but I didn’t realise he was that old.’
‘There were twenty-nine years between my parents. My father and my mother’s father were old friends.
My father’s first wife had died, and my grandparents invited him to spend Christmas with them.
My mother was there. They married that summer.
I was born three months later, my sister a year after that. ’
‘Did your father have children from his first marriage?’
‘No. I believe they tried, but it didn’t happen for them.’ He slipped his hand into hers and squeezed. ‘Come, the offices he worked at are around the corner.’
It took a few moments for her fingers to relax in his hold, but she didn’t pull them away.
Around the corner was a large piazza bustling with life.
He walked with her to the ancient fountain close to the Basilica of Santa Maria and sat on its steps.
‘You see that arched door?’ he said, pointing at the building facing them.
‘That was the door into my father’s offices where he practised law.
I joined the firm when I graduated and passed all my law exams under his tutelage.
’ He pointed to an alleyway close by. ‘That, there, leads to the lower secondary school I attended. It’s a hotel now, but in my years there, I would visit my father’s offices on my walk home.
My school finished at three, and my father insisted his diary be kept clear of appointments at that time so he was always free to greet me. ’
If Domenico closed his eyes, he could hear the tap on his father’s office door he always made and how he would open it without waiting for a response and step inside as his father was rising to his feet with a wide smile on his face, eyes already alive with interest at the stories his son was about to relay of his day.
‘Were you very close to him?’ Marnie asked softly.
He nodded, breathing out to loosen the tightness of his chest that always happened when he reminisced about his early life.
‘I loved both of my parents, but always gravitated to my father. My sister always gravitated to our mother. She worked as a tour guide at the Vatican for English speakers. In our school holidays, she would often take me and my sister with her so we could absorb the English language—she was determined that we would grow up bilingual. We spoke more English in my home than Italian.’
‘The Vatican’s not far from here, is it?’
‘About five kilometres. Easy walking distance. I walked everywhere in those days. All my family did. I never imagined I would want to live or work anywhere else.’
‘So why did you?’
‘A long story to be shared over a long lunch.’ He stretched his neck and pointed across the piazza. ‘That trattoria over there, next to that hotel, makes some of the best pasta in Rome. Shall we?’
‘Sure.’ She let him help her up and let him keep hold of her hand as they crossed the piazza to the trattoria that had been a staple of this district for the whole of Domenico’s life.
‘Was it because of your father that you chose law?’ Marnie asked as they walked.
‘For sure… Although there was a time when I wanted to be a professional footballer like pretty much every Italian boy grows up dreaming of being.’
She smiled. ‘It was the same where I lived. All the boys wanted to be footballers.’
‘And you? What did you want to be?’
She shrugged. ‘I never had any career aspirations.’
Having reached the trattoria, he let that go. But only for now. ‘Inside or outside?’
She tilted her face to the blue sky. ‘Outside.’
The outside space being cordoned off, they settled at a corner table where fresh water was poured for them and the day’s specials reeled off by the welcoming waiter.
Their orders taken, olives and breadsticks placed between them, Domenico relaxed back into his seat. Marnie’s stare, he noted, was flickering all around her in every direction but at him.
He liked the dress she was wearing. The colour of autumn leaves, it was short-sleeved with a smart collar and buttons running its length.
There was an unfussy simplicity to its design that perfectly suited the unfussy simplicity of the woman wearing it.
But even the most seemingly simple things had hidden depths, and Marnie was one of the most potent cases of still water running deep that he’d ever known.
‘So, my story for leaving Rome…’
Her stare snapped to him. Her eyes were now a deep blue. That morning, when they’d woken, they’d been a dark grey.
Dio, a man could lose himself in those eyes, whatever colour they happened to be shining.
‘By the time I graduated, my father was in his eighties and getting frailer by the day. He should have retired years earlier, but he’d been looking forward to me joining him.
You have to understand, he was too old to be the kind of father my friends had.
He had a heart condition and was riddled with arthritis, so he couldn’t play football with me or do the other physical stuff fathers do with their sons, and he felt great guilt for that.
For him, us working together was the father-son thing he’d spent my life longing for, and it’s to my eternal sorrow that he became too ill and frail for it to last. He held on until I qualified and became a full partner in Cannavaro Law, and then he slipped away in his sleep. ’
The blue eyes widened in sympathy.
He took a deep breath. ‘Two weeks after we buried him, my wife left me for my best friend.’
The wide eyes held steady. She obviously knew that part of it.
‘Carmela would tell you she was a victim of my neglect. That is a way to spin it that I don’t disagree with, but my neglect was never intentional, and given time, would have righted itself.
I didn’t set out to be a workaholic, but between my studies and my father’s increased frailty, which meant I was doing as much of his work as my own, I didn’t have the time to devote to her.
She is very temperamental and wanted to be the centre of my world and refused to accept that my father needed me too.
She punished me by having an affair with Davide. ’
Her eyes clouded, compassion mingling with the sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t imagine anything crueller.’
‘Neither could I.’ He dipped a breadstick in the balsamic vinegar. ‘My father’s death had destroyed me. I knew it was coming, but even so…’ He grimaced.
‘But it was still a sucker punch,’ she supplied softly. At his questioning stare, she lifted her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter if you know it’s coming; nothing prepares you for losing a parent.’
The weight that seemed to have taken permanent residence in Domenico’s chest pushed tighter against his ribs.
He knew Marnie’s mother had died before she started working for him and that her father wasn’t on the scene.
He couldn’t remember how he knew about her father other than it was the kind of thing you picked up on when you spent as much time with someone as he had with her, but he knew about her mother because the first Christmas she’d worked for him he’d overheard one of the other staff asking something—he couldn’t remember what—Christmas related.
What he’d never forgotten was Marnie’s quiet reply of, ‘My mum died some time ago.’
While he’d never forgotten those words, he’d never dwelled on them either, and when six years later he’d asked about close family she wanted to invite to their wedding, he’d accepted her, ‘There isn’t anyone,’ without pursuing it.
She was such a dedicated worker that if he hadn’t known she’d been born by humans, he’d have considered it perfectly plausible that Marnie was born through a cloning technique specially designed to produce the perfect assistant for him.
It sat increasingly uncomfortably in him that this was how he’d seen her and treated her.
All these years, first in work and then in marriage, he’d acted as if Marnie had been put on this earth specially for him. He’d never allowed himself to think of her as fully human in her own right. As fully woman.
But she was a human, and she was all woman.
A startlingly pretty woman whose beauty grew the more you looked at her, and the more he looked at her now, the harder his heart pounded painfully and guilt curdled like acid in his guts as the magnitude of his attitude towards her made itself clear to him.
This beautiful woman hadn’t been beamed into his life from a laboratory but had lived a life he’d never cared to learn about because he was a selfish, narcissistic bastard who hadn’t wanted to see her as the flesh and blood woman she was.
He’d been so intent on protecting his heart from further hurt that he hadn’t wanted to see that Marnie had a heart that also needed protecting. And cherishing.
He would have taken her hand if steaming bowls of ravioli hadn’t been brought out to them, and he took the moment to take a breath and wonder what the hell was happening to him.
Something was shifting—had shifted—inside him, and he didn’t know if it was the fact of their child growing inside her slender body…
He didn’t know what the hell it was, but whatever it was, it was stronger than him, and no amount of reminding himself that he’d never wanted to feel anything for her could deny the fact that he did.
Just watching her spoon the soft ravioli into her mouth and chew it and swallow it and hold it down…
Dio, her suffering had marked him, and he was forced to admit he’d been more frightened he was going to lose her than he’d ever wanted to acknowledge to himself.