Bella Rosa Marriages: The Bridesmaid's Secret. Fiona Harper

she emerged, smoothing down her hair with a hand, her mother was just finishing a sentence: ‘…of course you must come with us, Romano. I insist.’

      Jackie raised her eyebrows and looked at the other girls. Scarlett stomped off in the direction of the en suite, while Isabella just shrugged, collected up her clothes and headed for the empty dressing room.

      ‘Give me a hand?’ Lizzie asked and turned her back on Jackie so she could help with the covered buttons once again. As she worked Jackie kept glancing at her mother and Romano, who eventually left the room, still chatting and laughing.

      ‘What’s going on?’ she muttered as she got to the last couple of buttons.

      Lizzie strained to look over her shoulder at her sister. ‘Oh, Mamma has decided we’re all going to the restaurant for dinner this evening.’

      Jackie kept her focus firmly on the last button, even though it was already unlooped. ‘And she’s invited Romano?’

      Lizzie nodded. ‘He’s been spending a lot of time at the palazzo in the last few years. He comes into Monta Correnti regularly and eats at both Mamma’s and Uncle Luca’s often.’

      Jackie stepped back and Lizzie turned to face her.

      ‘Why?’ Lizzie said, sliding the dress off her shoulders. ‘Is that a problem? That she’s invited Romano?’

      Jackie smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No problem at all.’

      She looked at the door that led out to the landing. Would her mother be quite as welcoming, quite as chummy with him, if she’d known that Romano Puccini was the boy who’d got her teenage daughter pregnant and then abandoned her?

      She’d always refused to name the father, no matter how much her mother had begged and scolded and threatened, too ashamed for the world to know she’d been rejected so spectacularly by her first love. Even a knocked-up fifteen-year-old had her pride.

      Jackie picked up her handbag and headed for the door. It still seemed like a good plan. There was no reason why her mother should ever know that Romano was Kate’s father. No reason at all.

      Refusing an invitation to dine with five attractive women would not only be the height of bad manners but also stupidity. And no one had ever accused Romano Puccini of being stupid. Infuriatingly slippery, maybe. Too full of charm for his own good. But never stupid. And he’d been far too curious not to come.

      He hadn’t had the chance to get this close to Jackie Patterson in years, which was odd, seeing as they moved in similar circles. But those circles always seemed to be rotating in different directions, the arcs never intersecting. Why was that? Did she still feel guilty about the way their romance had ended?

      That summer seemed to be almost a million years ago. He sighed and took a sip of his wine, while the chatter of the elegant restaurant carried on around him.

      Jackie Patterson. She’d really been a knockout. Long dark hair with a hint of a wave, tanned legs, smooth skin and eyes that refused to be either green or brown but glittered with fire anyway.

      Yes, that had been a really good summer.

      He’d foolishly thought himself in love with her but he’d been seventeen. It was easy to mistake hormones for romance at that age. Now he saw his summer with Jackie for what it really had been—a fling. A wonderful, heady, teenage fling that had unfortunately had a sour final act. Sourness that obviously continued to the present day.

      She had deliberately placed herself on the same side of the table as him, and had made sure that her mother had taken the seat next to him. With Lisa Firenzi in the way, he had no hope of engaging Jackie in any kind of conversation. And she had known that.

      Surely enough time had gone by that he and Jackie could put foolish youthful decisions behind them? Wasn’t the whole I’m-still-ignoring-you thing just a little juvenile? He wouldn’t have thought a polished woman like her would resort to such tactics.

      And polished she was. Gone were the little shorts and cotton summer dresses, halter tops and flip-flops, replaced by excellent tailoring, effortless elegance that took a lot of hard work to get just right. And even if her reputation hadn’t preceded her, he’d have been able to tell that this was a woman who pushed herself hard. Every hint of the soft fifteen-year-old curves that had driven him wild had been sculptured into defined muscle. The toffee and caramel lights in her long hair were so well done that most people would have thought it natural. He’d preferred it dark, wavy, and spread out on the grass as he’d leaned in to kiss her.

      Where had that thought come from? He’d seen it in his mind’s eye as if it had happened only that morning.

      He blinked and returned his attention to his food, an amazing lobster ravioli that the chef here did particularly well. But now he’d thought about Jackie in that way, he couldn’t quite seem to switch the memory off.

      The main course was finished and Lizzie’s fiancé appeared and whisked her away. Isabella disappeared off to the restaurant next door and when Lisa was approached by her restaurant manager and scuttled off with him, talking in low, hushed tones, that left him sitting at the table with just Jackie and Scarlett. He made a light-hearted comment, looking towards his right at Jackie, and saw her stiffen.

      This was stupid. Although he didn’t do serious conversations and relationship-type stuff, there was obviously bad air between them that needed to be cleared. He was just going to have to do his best to show Jackie that there were no hard feelings, that he could behave like a grown-up in the here and now, whatever had happened in the past. Hopefully she would follow his lead.

      He turned to face her, waited, all the time looking intently at her until she could bear it no longer and met his gaze.

      He smiled at her. ‘It has been a long time, Jackie.’

      Jackie’s mouth didn’t move; her eyes gave her reply: Not long enough.

      He ignored the leaden vibes heading his way and persevered. ‘I thought the March issue of Gloss! was particularly good. The shoot at the botanical gardens was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.’

      Jackie folded her arms. ‘It’s been seventeen years since we’ve had a conversation and you want to talk to me about work?’

      He shrugged and pulled the corners of his mouth down. It had seemed like a safe starting point.

      ‘You don’t think that maybe there are other, more important issues to enquire after?’

      Nothing floated into his head. He rested his arm across the back of Lisa’s empty chair and turned his body to face Jackie, ready to engage a little more fully in whatever was going on between them. ‘Communication is communication, Jackie. We have to start somewhere.’

      ‘Do we?’

      ‘It seemed like a good idea to me,’ he said, refusing to be cowed by the look she was giving him, a look that probably made her employees perspire so much they were in danger of dehydration.

      Now she turned to face him too, forgetting her earlier stiff posture, her eyes smouldering. A familiar prickle of awareness crept up the back of his neck.

      ‘Don’t you dare take the high ground, Romano! You have no right. No right at all.’

      He opened his mouth and shut it again. This conversation had too much high drama in it for him and, unfortunately, he and Jackie seemed to be, not only on different pages, but reading from totally different scripts. He looked across the table at Scarlett, to see if she was making sense of any of this, but her expression was just as puzzling as her sister’s. She looked pale and shaky, as if she was about to be sick, and then she suddenly shot to her feet and dashed out of the restaurant door. Romano just stared after her.

      ‘What was that all about?’ he said.

      Jackie, who was obviously too surprised to remember she was steaming angry with him, just frowned after her disappearing sister. ‘I have no idea.’