Page 34 of An Italian Wedding Adventure

To Sophie’s surprise, Andreas smiled broadly. ‘I know.’

‘You know?’

His hand hovered over her calf, as though he might give her leg a squeeze, but he quickly reconsidered. ‘Of course I know. You screamed, “Tasha, this is your fucking fault,” all the way down the zipline on the second day.’

She stilled, stunned that he remembered that.

‘And the boats… You thought the rafting would kill you – at least it sounded that way. I know just how quickly you learned to deal with your fear. I had thought you’d learned to love outdoor sports, but…’ He gave a shrug and picked up a stone, brushing his fingers over it before flinging it into the water. It skipped four times because skipping stones was exactly the sort of thing that Andreas was good at: distractions from difficult conversations.

She was surprised they’d lasted so long in this one.

‘But what?’

He glanced at her with half a smile that would have been cheeky on anyone else. ‘Na,’ he said with a shrug, a German word he’d once explained as something between ‘so’ and ‘well’. ‘Maybe you did learn to love it and you’ve just forgotten. Maybe you wanted to forget because of me.’

Her brows flew skyward. ‘Is there no limit to your conceit?’

‘I saw you today,’ he insisted with an expansive hand gesture to assert his innocence. ‘You were looking at Monte Pizzocolo with that glint in your eye.’

‘Maybe because the name almost has “pizza” in it and I was starving! But the part I took issue with the most was the suggestion that I gave up something I enjoyed simply because you left me.’

‘I didn’t?—’

‘Break, break-up – whatever. I resent the suggestion. I might have been a moron back then where you were concerned, but I never missed it – climbing, the mountains.’I just missed you. And maybe missing him had got rolled up with the mountains and the squeezing feeling in her chest whenever she thought about ropes and climbs and dizzying drops.

A rock formation on the opposite shore caught her eye and she inclined her head to study the ridges and forested gullies, the prominent spurs and jagged mountain profiles.

‘Is that where we were today?’

He leaned in to follow her gaze, the fresh scent of the water and sunshine on his skin. ‘Mmhmm. There’s Cima Comer directly across from us, the highest point.’ He gestured further to the left. ‘And there’s Monte Castello di Gaino, and Monte Pizzocolo.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘We didn’t get your Gipfelstempel!’

‘My what?’

‘At each summit, there’s a box with a stamp in it for you to collect in your Wanderbuch – your hiking book. We missed two today.’ His teasing smile grew wider.

‘I don’t have a hiking book.’

‘Na, maybe you should get one.’

* * *

When Andreas offered to collect pizza for dinner, Sophie assumed it was because he didn’t want a repeat the awkwardness of their ‘date’ from the evening before. They were spending a lot of time together and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was uneasy –shewas uneasy.

But when he arrived back with two flat boxes and then immediately shed most of his clothes and his shoes, peeling off his socks and slipping into a pair of Birkenstocks, she wondered if his real reason had been nothing to do with her.

The late-May evening was cool and Sophie had retrieved her favourite oversized cardigan, but Andreas sat in a vest top and cargo shorts, eating salami pizza straight out of the box with a knife and fork.

After dinner, Sophie set up her laptop at the kitchen table and loaded the photos from the day. She knew from bitter experience that it was easier to sift through the shots regularly than deal with thousands when she got home.

The lighting at the top of Monte Castello di Gaino was questionable. The weather had been undeniably weird: menacing in the morning and then a surprise heatwave in the afternoon. The dark clouds billowing behind Andreas in the first shots were mirrored in his facial expression.

‘What?’ he asked, looking up from his book when she didn’t manage to stifle a chuckle.

‘I’m sorry I made you be the groom,’ she said with another snort of laughter. ‘You look so pissed off.’

Setting his book down, he came around the table and peered at his image on the screen.

Then he said the last thing she expected. ‘It’s an amazing spot for a wedding.’ He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand as he propped himself up on the table with the other. Leaning across her, he tapped at the arrow button with one finger, scrolling through the many photos of him scowling, until he reached the first one of the two of them in front of the cross and his hand stilled, hovering over the screen.

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