Page 62 of A Winter Wedding Adventure
‘I have to—’ Kira made a jerky hand gesture. Moving stiffly past Carla, she fled into the corridor and was gone in a blur of blue.
‘What happened to her?’ Carla asked.
‘Nothing,’ Mattia insisted. ‘We were just telling Alessandra the bad news about the weather.’
‘We?’ Alessandra repeated, her brow low.
‘Yes?’ He gave an elaborate shrug, hoping that made him more convincing. ‘It’s a pronoun. First person plural, I believe.’
‘Matty,’ she continued – but thankfully, her shrill tone had abated – ‘you’re a terrible liar.’ She studied Carla as she came into the room. ‘There’s… no hope of the two of you getting back together, is there?’
Afraid of another outburst – or getting Kira into trouble – Mattia hesitated.
‘No chance at all.’
That pronouncement was the last thing he’d expected to hear. His gaze snapped up to see Carla giving him a sad smile.
‘I hope we’ll always be friends, though.’
‘Of course.’
‘Ale,’ Carla said, taking the bride’s hand and patting it, ‘we don’t need each other to make up for your absence from Naples and you don’t need to feel guilty for leaving. Matty’s not your little brother and I think he’d like the chance to choose his own partner.’
She raised her brow at him, as though challenging him to disagree, but he couldn’t.
‘I would like to have been better friends with Joe, but you know the most important thing to me is your happiness,’ he added emphatically. ‘It doesn’t matter what’s going on with Carla or me.’ At least, he hoped she’d stop giving him suspicious looks and heavily implied pronouns. ‘Once the snow is cleared, it’s your day. Your marriage.’
To his horror, her tears returned.
‘Shhhh, Ale. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’ He grimaced at the door. It might be a while before he could go after Kira.
‘For more than a year, my whole life has been about this wedding: these wild ideas for the destination, the decorations. Joe never once told me “no”.’
‘And that’s a problem because…?’ Carla prompted.
‘After all this, I’m not sure he cares. I just wanted him to care.’
‘Oh, Ale,’ Mattia said with a shake of his head. The first thing that entered his mind was how much he wanted to discuss this with Kira. ‘Have you talked to him about this?’
‘I tried yesterday, but he was drunk; he would have told me anything if he thought I’d forgive him.’
‘Surely that’s true love?’ Mattia suggested with a wince.
‘I thought you had ideals about love, Matty,’ she said softly.
With an awkward glance at Carla, he considered his response. ‘Maybe my ideals are finally being tempered with realism.’
Alessandra’s sigh was deep. ‘That’s a shame, but I suppose it really means you don’t need me to look after you any more.’
He thought of the difficult years at school and university, as he’d come to terms with his sensitive ears and even more sensitive brain. A lot had changed since then; something had changed over the past seventy-two hours.
‘No, Ale. I don’t.’
Upstairs in the loft, Kira grabbed a squeegee from the storage cupboard and continued into the bouldering room, heading straight to the slanting window. She hadn’t come up here to reminisce, but memories assailed her anyway: Mattia appearing, mostly naked and out of breath, all because he was worried about her and he liked her and he cared about her pathetic past – even though she hadn’t told him the full extent of Christian’s betrayal.
She’d had her fingers in his hair and he’d called her carissima.
Gritting her teeth, she ignored the urge to haul herself up on the grips to prove her resilience and clear her head and opened the window instead. As Norbert had said on the phone, the roof was dotted with solar panels, currently buried under a layer of snow.
