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Which might explain why he was staring daggers at her. Strangely, the glaring didn’t detract from his left-of-center good looks. He wasn’t one of those calendar-ready men whose perfection was more off-putting than alluring. Sure, he had the cheekbones, the inky dark hair and brown eyes that held the mysteries of the universe in them, but he also had that scar. A jagged one that looked as if it could tell a story or two. It dissected his left eyebrow, skipped the eye, then shot along his cheek. If she wasn’t wrong, there were a few tiny ones along his chin, too. Little faint scars she might almost have reached out and touched—if his lips hadn’t been moving.
“Per amor del cielo! Put these poor people out of their misery!”
Fran blinked. Enigmatic-scar man was right.
She looked to his left. The priest-bishop-cardinal was speaking to her again. Asking her to clarify why she believed this happy couple should not lawfully be joined in marriage. Murmurs of dismay were audibly rippling through the church behind her. Part of her was certain she could hear howls from the paparazzi as they waited outside to pounce.
Clammy prickles of panic threatened to consume her brain.
Friends didn’t let friends marry philandering liars. Right? Then again, what did she know? She was Italian by birth, but raised in America. Maybe a little last-minute nookie right before you married your long-term intended was the done thing in these social circles filled with family names that went back a dozen generations or more. It wasn’t illegal, but... Oh, this was ranking up there in worst-moments-ever territory!
Fran sucked in a deep breath. It was the do-or-die moment. Her heart was careening around her chest so haphazardly she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had flown straight out of her throat, but instead out came words. And before she could stop herself, she heard herself saying to Beatrice, “He’s... You can’t marry him!”
CHAPTER TWO (#u17cae29b-0ec2-52aa-b6b6-58a69ed0be08)
“BASTA!” QUICK AS a flash, Luca shuttled the key players in this farce to the back of the altar, then down a narrow marble passageway until they reached an open but mercifully private corridor.
“Her dress was up and Marco—”
“Per favore. I implore you to just...stop.” Luca whirled around, only to receive a full-body blow from the blonde bridesmaid. As quickly as the raft of sensations from holding her in his arms hit him she pressed away from him—hard.
“I’m just trying—” Bea’s friend clamped her full, pink lips tight when her eyes met his.
The rest of the party was moving down the corridor as Luca wrestled with her revelation. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The damage you’ve caused?”
Stillness enveloped her as his words seemed to take hold.
Such was the power of the moment, Luca was hurtled back to a time and place when he, too, had been incapable of motion. Only there had been a doctor and a priest then.
Stillness had been the only way to let the news sink in.
Mother. Father. His sister, her husband—all of them save his beautiful niece. Gone. And he’d been the one behind the wheel.
He closed his eyes and willed the memory away, forcing himself to focus on the bridesmaid in front of him. Still utterly stationary—a deer in the headlights.
Another time, another place he would have said she was pretty. Beautiful, even. Honey-gold hair. Full, almost-pouty lips he didn’t think had more than a slick of gloss on them. Eyes so blue he would have sworn they were a perfect match to the Adriatic Sea not a handful of meters from the basilica.
“Don’t you dare—” She took in a jagged breath, tears filming her eyes. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand what speaking up means.”
Luca’s gut tightened as she spoke. Behind those tears there was nothing but honesty. The type of honesty that would change everything.
His mind reeled through the facts. Beatrice was one of his most respected friends. They’d known each other all their lives and had been even closer during med school. Their career trajectories had shot them off in opposite directions, much to their parents’ chagrin. He’d not missed their hints, their hopes that their friendship would blossom into something more.
Beautiful as Beatrice was, theirs would always be a platonic relationship. When she’d taken up with Marco he’d almost been relieved. Si, he had a playboy’s reputation, but he was a grown man now. A prince with an aristocratic duty to fulfill—a legacy to uphold. When Marco had asked him to be best man he’d been honored. Proud, even, to play a role in Beatrice’s wedding.
Cheating just minutes before he was due to marry? What kind of man would do that?
He shot a glance at Marco, who was raising his hands in protest before launching into an impassioned appeal to both Bea and the cardinal.
Marco and a bridesmaid in a premarital clinch? As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn’t imagine it was the type of thing a true friend would conjure up just to add some drama to Italy’s most talked-about wedding.
He glanced down at her hands, each clutching a fistful of the fairy-tale fabric billowing out from her dress in the light wind. No rings.
A Cinderella story, perhaps? The not-so-ugly stepsister throwing a spanner into the works, hoping to catch the eye of the Prince?
Each time she pulled at her dress she revealed the fact that she was actually wearing flip-flops in lieu of any Italian woman’s obligatory heels. No glass slippers, then. Just rainbow-painted toes that would have brought the twitch of a smile to his lips if his mind hadn’t been racing for ways to fend off disaster.
She’d be far less high maintenance than his only-the-best-will-do girlfriend.
He shook off this reminder that he and Marina needed “a talk” and forced himself to meet the blonde’s gaze again. Tearstained but defiant. A surge of compassion shot through him. If what she was saying was true she was a messenger who wouldn’t escape unscathed.
“I saw them!” she insisted, tendrils of blond hair coming loose from the intricate hairdo the half-dozen or so bridesmaids were all wearing. All of the bridesmaids including his girlfriend. “It’s not like you’re the one who’s been cheated on,” she whisper-hissed, her blue eyes flicking toward Beatrice, who, unlike her, was remaining stoically tear-free.
Luca took hold of her elbow and steered her farther away from the small group, doing his best to ignore how soft her skin felt under the work-hardened pads of his fingertips. Quite a change from the soft-as-a-surgeon’s hands he’d been so proud of. Funny what a bit of unexpected tragedy could do to a man.
“Perhaps we should leave the bride and groom to chat with the cardinal.” A shard of discord lodged in his spine as he heard himself speak. It had been in the icy tone he’d only ever heard come out of his mouth once before. The day his father had confessed he’d gambled away the last of the family’s savings.
“I’m Francesca, by the way,” she said, as if adding a personal touch would blunt the edges of this unbelievable scenario. Or perhaps she was grasping at straws, just as he was. “I think I saw you at the cocktail party last night.”
“I would say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but...”
She waved away his platitudes. They both knew they were beyond social niceties.
“Francesca...” He drew her name out on the premise of buying time. He caught himself tasting it upon his tongue as one might bite into a lemon on a dare, surprised to find it sweet when he had been expecting the bitterness of pith, the sourness of an unripe fruit.
Focus, man.
Luca clenched his jaw so tightly he saw Francesca’s eyes flick to the telltale twitch in his cheek. The one with the scar.
Let her stare.
He swallowed down the hit of bile that came with the thought. He knew better than most that nothing good came from a life built on illusion.
“I don’t think I need to remind you what our roles are here. I promised to be best man at this wedding. To vouch for the man about to marry our mutual friend.”
He moved closer toward her and caught a gentle waft of something. Honeysuckle with a hint of grass? His eyes met hers and for a moment...one solitary moment...they were connected. Magnetically. Sensually.
Luca stepped back and gave his jaw a rough scrub, far too aware that Francesca had felt it, too.
“There is no one in the world I would defend more than Bea.” Francesca’s words shattered the moment, forcing him to confront reality. “And, believe me, of all the people standing here I know how awful this is.”
Something in her eyes told him she wasn’t lying. Something in his heart told him he already knew the truth.
“I’d want to know,” she insisted. “Wouldn’t you?”
Luca looked away from the clear blue appeal in her eyes, redirecting the daggers he was shooting toward her to the elaborately painted ceiling of the marble-and-flagstone passageway. The hundreds of years it had taken to build the basilica evaporated to nothing in comparison to the milliseconds it had taken to grind this wedding to a halt.
A wedding. A marriage. It was meant to last a lifetime.
“Of course I’d want to know,” he bit out. “But your claims are too far-fetched. The place where you’re saying you saw them is not even private.”
“I know! It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Francesca’s eyes widened and the tears resting on her eyelids cascaded onto her cheeks before zipping down to her chin and plopping unceremoniously into the hollow of her throat. Luca only just stopped himself from lifting both his hands to her collarbone and swiping them away with his thumbs. First one, then the other... Perhaps tracing the path of one of those tears slipping straight between the soft swell and lift of—
Focus!
“Which one was it? Which woman?”
Francesca’s blue eyes, darkened with emotion, flicked up and to the right. “She had dark hair. Black.”
The information began to register in slow motion. Not Suzette...a flame-bright redhead. And the others were barely into their teens.
Elimination left him with only one option.
A fleeting conversation with his girlfriend came back to him. One in which he’d said he was going to be too busy with the clinic to come to the wedding. Marina had been fine with it. Had agreed, in fact. So much work at the clinic, she’d said. And then it all fell into place. The little white lies. The deceptions. The ever-increasing radio silences he hadn’t really noticed in advance of the clinic’s opening day.
A coldness took hold of his entire chest. An internal ice storm wrought its damage as the news fully penetrated.
“My girlfriend was not having sex with Marco.”
* * *
Francesca’s eyes pinged wide, a hit of shock shuddering down her spine before she managed to respond.
“Your girlfriend? That’s... Wow.” She shook her head in disbelief. “For the record, she is an idiot. If you were my boyfriend, lock and key might be more—”
Luca held up a hand. He didn’t want to hear it.
It was difficult to know whether to be self-righteous or furious. In Rome, his relationships had hardly warranted the title. Since moving back to Mont di Mare...
The home truths hit hard and fast. Sure, Marina had been complaining that she wasn’t the center of his universe lately, but any fool—anyone with a heart beating in their chest—could have seen that his priorities were not wooing and winning right now.
He owed every spare ounce of his energy to his niece. The one person who’d suffered the most in that horrific car accident. His beautiful, headstrong niece, confined to a wheelchair evermore.
He looked across at Marco. The sting of betrayal hit hard and fast.
He and Marina had never been written in the stars—but Beatrice? A true princess if ever there was one. She was shaking her head. Holding up a hand so that Marco would stop his heated entreaty. From where Luca was standing it didn’t look as if the wedding would go ahead.
He swore under his breath. He had trusted Marco to treat Bea well—cautioned him about his rakish past and then congratulated him with every fiber of his being when at long last he’d announced his engagement to Princess Beatrice Vittoria di Jesolo.
The three of them had shared the same upbringing. Privileged. Exclusive. Full of expectation—no, more than that, full of obligation that they would follow in their ancestors’ footsteps. Marry well. Breed more titled babies.
Luca might have considered the same future for himself before the accident. But that had all changed now. Little wonder Marina had strayed. He’d kept her at arm’s length. Farther away. It was surprising she had stayed any time at all.
“Why don’t you go and get her? Ask her yourself?” Francesca wasn’t even bothering to swipe at the tears streaking her mascara across her cheeks.
“You’re absolutely positive?”
Even as the hollow-sounding words left his mouth he knew they were true. There weren’t that many women wandering around the basilica in swirls of weightless ocean-blue fabric. And there was only one bridesmaid with raven hair. The same immaculate silky hair he’d been forbidden from touching that morning when Marina had popped into the hotel suite to grab the diamante clutch bag she’d left while she was at the hairdresser’s. Not so immaculate when she’d appeared at the altar, looking rosy cheeked and more alive than he’d seen her in months, if he was being honest.
“I—I can go get her for you, if you like,” Francesca offered after hiccuping a few more tears away.
He had to hand it to her. The poor woman was crying her eyes out, but she knew how to stand her ground.
“Why don’t I go find her?” Her fingers started doing a little nervous dance in the direction of the church, where everyone was still waiting.
“No offense, but you are the last person I would ever ask to help me.”
“Isn’t it better to know the truth than to live a lie?”
Luca swore softly and turned away. She was hitting just about every button he didn’t care to admit he had. Truth. Deceit. Honesty. Lies. Weakness.
He had no time in his life for weakness. No capacity for lies.
He forced himself to look Francesca in the eye, knowing there wasn’t an iota of kindness in his gaze. But he still couldn’t give in to the innate need to feel empathy for the position she’d been put in. Or compassion for the tears rising again and again, glossing her eyes and then falling in a steady trickle along her tear-soaked face. How easy it would be to lift a finger and just...
Magari!
Shooting the messenger was a fool’s errand, but he didn’t know how else to react... A knife of rage swept through him. If he never thought about Marina or Marco again it would be too soon.
“It didn’t seem like it was the first time,” Francesca continued, her husky voice starting to break in a vain attempt to salve the ever-deepening wound. “I’m happy to go and get her if you want.”
“Basta! Per favore!”
No need to paint a picture. He almost envied Francesca. Seeing in an instant what he should have known for weeks. He should have ended it before she’d even thought to stray.
“If you want, I’ll do it. Go and get her. I would do it for any friend.”
Francesca shifted from one foot to the other, eyes glued to his, waiting for his response. He’d be grateful for this one day, but right now Francesca was the devil’s messenger and he’d heard enough.
The words came to him—jagged icicles shooting straight from his arctic heart. “I know you mean well, Francesca, but you and I will never be friends.”
* * *
Shell-shocked. That was how Bea had looked for the rest of the day. Not that Fran could blame her. Talk about living a nightmare. She knew better than most that coming to terms with deception on that kind of scale could take years. A lifetime, even, if her father’s damaged heart was anything to go by.
From the look on Luca’s face when they’d finally parted at the basilica he was going to need two lifetimes to get over his girlfriend’s betrayal. Good thing they wouldn’t be crossing paths anytime soon.
“Want me to see if I can find a case of prosecco lying around? A karaoke machine? We could sing it out and down some fizz.”
Fran scanned the hotel suite. The caterers had long been sent away, the decorations had been removed and the staff instructed to keep any and all lurking paparazzi as far away as possible...
“No, thanks, cara. Maybe some water?” Bea asked.
“On it.”
As she poured a glass of her friend’s favorite—sparkling water from the alpine region of Italy—Fran was even more in awe of her friend’s strength. All tucked up in bed, makeup removed, dress unceremoniously wilting like a deflated meringue in the bathroom, Bea looked exhausted, but not defeated.
