Page 1 of In Italy for Love

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‘Be reasonable, Jules! You can’t justleave. We haven’t sold the building yet.’

Jules felt anything but reasonable. If she didn’t get away from Luca in the next ten minutes, she was going to break something – and it wouldn’t be her heart. It was too late for that. ‘You have my number. You can call me when we need to talk about offers.’Generousoffers, she bloody well hoped, after the sinkhole of debt their B&B had become.

Her Italian dream was well and truly over, destroyed by renovation hell, persistent low occupancy and a partner who’d performed a giant relationship U-turn at the first sign of trouble.

She grabbed another handful of clothing out of her wardrobe and stuffed it into her overflowing backpack with too much force. She’d brought that backpack to Europe from Australia four years ago full of curiosity, courage and hope for the future, and now it was fraying at the seams like a bad metaphor for her life.

‘How are you even going to pay your phone bill? I don’t understand,’ Luca added too calmly. ‘You can stay at my mother’s as long as you need. If you’re planning to go backto Australia… You remember your passport expired, right? And you haven’t applied for an Italian one yet.’

She wasn’t likely to forget the fact that she currently held no valid passport. ‘I’ll sort it out while we wait for offers.’

‘Why not wait here then? You need an address to apply for passports. You needhelp.’

After the bureaucratic nightmare of applying for Italian citizenship, she knew he was right, but Jules was done accepting help from Luca – the kind of help that came with strings and side effects.

‘I’ll manage. You can have all the time you want with Claudia without your awkward ex hanging around like a bad smell. I thought you’d be relieved you won’t have to babysit me any more.’

‘Babysit you? Jules, we…’

She straightened and looked him square in the face. ‘We what? That is exactly the problem, Luca. I should never have thought I could stay here after we broke up. I shouldn’t have moved to Italy in the first place when we barely knew each other.’

‘You regret our entire relationship?’

Arco whined from where he sat in the doorway, cocking his head in confusion so one curly ear hung low. The dog could probably feel the dread shooting through her veins. Jules wanted to rub his belly, reassure him that she loved him and she’d never regret adopting him, even if he’d been a doomed addition to their not-family when it was already too late to save it. The thought of leaving him wrenched at her.

But yes, she regretted the rest. She regretted ever fancying herself in love with the handsome Italian she’d met in London and followed home – as though she’d been the stray puppy. She’d sunk her last pennies into the B&B and lost everything, whereas he’d always had assets locked up for a rainy day.

They’d never been equal partners. This washishome,hislanguage. She’d given up everything.

‘What does it matter to you if I regret things?’ she asked. ‘You broke up with me a year ago. I should have left straight away – for both of our sakes.’ She’d tried to be reasonable back then, swallow the hurt and the rejection and focus on the business, but she should have got out before she’d paid an even higher price: her pride.

Panic rising up her throat made her slam the wardrobe closed, a few T-shirts still lying, rumpled, on one of the shelves. Arco gave a sharp bark, earning him a glare from Luca.

‘You don’t speak Italian well,’ he pointed out – another pin into her thin skin. ‘Where are you going to go?’

‘It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s far away from you!’

His face flattened with a concerning lack of expression that made Jules shudder. ‘If you’re going to blame me for everything that’s happened, then maybe it’s best if you go,’ he said.

‘We agree on that.’ She didn’t blame him for the business failing, but she had no desire to go into all the ways he’d hurt her over the past year – no, three years – if he didn’t already know.

‘Wherever you escape to, they’d better accept dogs,’ he said, his voice without inflection.

It took her a moment to process what he’d said.

‘What are you talking about? I’ll be staying somewhere temporary. It’ll be no place for Arco, when your mum has a garden.’

‘You know Mamma doesn’t like that dog.’

The cold spread from her veins into her stomach. How had she been so stupid with Luca? So wrong? She’d left everything and moved to Italy for a man she barely knew and now barely respected.

She wished she could go back in time and convince her naïve, twenty-five-year-old self not to put herself through all of this.Don’t go to Italy, you starry-eyed nitwit!

With a shot of unease, she wondered if he’d even take good care of Arco.

‘I’ll come back for him. When I’ve got somewhere to stay, I’ll take him.’ She didn’t want to know how much sending a dog to Australia would cost, but Arco was up-to-date with his shots. She’d cross that bridge when she came to it. ‘Just for a couple of weeks. You have to keep him?—’

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