Page 5 of Unveiled As The Italian's Bride
‘Was I?’ Kate blinked and looked at Dante and, for a few seconds, the breath caught in her throat because he was so close to her, close enough for her to fall into the dark depths of his eyes which made her feel oxygen-deprived.
‘He’s considering bee-keeping as his new hobby,’ Dante imparted with a frustrated gesture. ‘I have no idea where that came from. I believe he watched a documentary a few days ago... Look, the point is, he’s having a re-evaluation of his way forward and that seems to involve several...what can I say...?’
He defaulted into Italian and, fluent though Kate now was, she couldn’t quite keep up with whatever he was trying to say. Whatever it was, he wasn’t comfortable with it, and she felt just the slightest twinge of unease.
He’d told her that there was nothing to worry about, that she wasn’t going to be reprimanded, but what if this impromptu meeting was to sack her? Or perhaps justlet her go, maybe with a sympathetic golden handshake?
Kate was suddenly clammy with panic. She depended on this income and the prospect of having it whipped away filled her with fear. Two and a half years ago, her father had had an accident on his damned motorbike. He was in his fifties and yet still fancied himself a young buck, with his fast bike which always seemed to take precedence over the rusting old car her mother preferred to use.
It had been horrific. He had lost a leg in the accident and, at that point, the travelling days had come to an abrupt end. Her father, always the most genial of guys, always ready for a joke, a sweet-natured bear who’d have done anything for anyone, had plunged headlong into a crippling depression.
The change to their lifestyle, the intense months of physio, and the loss of all those occasional earnings that had kept them afloat had all been too much.
As well the shame. Her dad had had to face the lack of time and thought he had put into their future, always living in the moment. With little to fall back on, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of failure, and it had been heart-breaking.
At the time, Kate had just started teaching at a primary school in Windsor. Her parents had rented themselves a mobile home by the coast and had been planning to stay in one spot for the duration of summer.
Her mother would sell the jewellery she made at Christmas fairs and her dad would find work at one of the local nurseries. He was a talented landscape gardener with an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants.
The accident had put paid to everything.
Her mother had been strong and supportive but there was no way a mobile home was going to be sufficient. For the first time in their lives, they had been forced to face the prospect of bidding a permanent farewell to their travelling days.
They had no money saved to speak of, no pension set aside for a rainy day and an indefinite wait for the sort of intense physio her dad needed—and never mind his mental health, which had been in a sorry state.
Her wonderful, free-living parents had needed more than just cups of tea and sympathy. They had needed hard cash. They had needed money for a house that could be adapted, for a dedicated physiotherapist, for someone to help get her dad’s head back in the right place and to take the stress and strain off her mother’s shoulders.
And then this job had been advertised. Kate had applied on a whim because it had hinted at a good package. She had got it and the package was stupendous.
What the heck would she do without it?
There were still all sorts of things eating up the money she sent over every single month. She had been able to put down a deposit on a tiny place in Lancashire for them but there was still a mortgage to be paid off. Physically, her father’s recovery had been all they could have hoped for, but he was still prone to bouts of depression, so still saw his lovely therapist once a week.
Then there was the business of them earning money. They were still relatively young. She had set up a cottage industry for her mother to pursue her jewellery-making on a bigger scale, which was going well. The house had a fair amount of land and, at some expense, Kate had developed an acre of it into crops that her father could harvest for their own consumption and to sell locally. Everything took money and, amongst all of this expenditure, she herself still had to save money for her own place at some point.
She whitened as a future scenario unravelled in her head, taking a wrecking ball to dreams and expectations she now knew she had been stupid to bank on. How long had she reasonably expected this job to last—for ever? How could she not have factored in the obvious, which was that everyone was expendable, and no more so than a young teacher who had landed the plum post through sheer luck—or something. She had never quite worked that one out.
She tucked her hair behind her ears and realised that her hands were shaking.
‘I know what this is about,’ she said, clearing her throat, determined to deal with the elephant in the room before it stampeded all over her. Circumstances had made her strong. A peripatetic lifestyle had toughened her, forged an independence in her, because she had never had the luxury of the same faces, the same friends, around her growing up. Her father’s accident and everything that had happened subsequently had only served to make her stronger.
But right now she felt weak.
‘I very much doubt that,’ Dante murmured truthfully.
‘When somebody close to you falls ill, everything changes. Your uncle is ill and you—you’ve had a rethink about Angelina and her future.’
‘I have? Hmm...maybe so, in a manner of speaking...’
Kate chewed her lip and tried hard to summon up all that strength and energy she had always been able to fall back on but those reserves were proving hard to locate.
‘You no longer need my services.’
She looked away because she was terrified of seeing confirmation of that blunt statement in his eyes. The silence stretched.
‘Interesting deduction, but you’re very wide of the mark with that one,’ Dante drawled eventually.
‘What do you mean?’
