The Italian's Christmas Miracle. Lucy Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ no newspaper would have dared to publish—intimate, shocking pictures taken by mercenary ghouls, showing smashed bodies in terrifying detail. One had showed Carlotta and James, lying dead on the ground. James’s face had been covered with blood, but Alysa had recognised his jacket.

      They’d still been in the chair, leaving no doubt that they had travelled together. She’d just been able to make out that in the last moments before death he and Carlotta had thrown themselves into each other’s arms.

      Now it was over, she told herself. Ended. Finished. Forget it.

      One night, as she’d stared at the computer screen, she’d felt shafts of pain go through her like knives. What had happened then had been too fast for her even to call for help. Stumbling to the bathroom, she’d collapsed on the floor and fainted. When she’d come round, she had lost James’s child.

      Afterwards she’d been glad that she hadn’t confided in anybody. Now she could weep in privacy. But the tears hadn’t come. Night after night she’d lain alone in the darkness, staring into nothing, while her heart had turned to stone.

      After giving the matter some rational thought she’d decided it was for the best. If she couldn’t cry now she would never cry again, which was surely useful. When you loved nothing, feared nothing, cared for nothing, what was there to worry about?

      With that settled, she’d embarked on the transformation of her life. A shopping trip had provided her with a collection of trouser suits, all stunningly fashionable and costly. Next she’d lopped off the extravagant tresses that had marked her earlier existence. The resulting boyish crop was elegant, but she cared little. What counted was that it marked the end of her old life and the start of her new one.

      Or just the end of life?

      Her face too had changed, but in ways she couldn’t see. It was tense, strained, so that every feature was sharpened in a way that would have been forbidding if her large eyes had not softened her appearance. They were now her main claim to beauty, and more than one man had admired them, only to find them looking right through him.

      She’d thrown herself into her career with renewed fervour. Her bosses were impressed. The word ‘partnership’ began to be whispered. A year after James’s death, she should have completely moved on. And yet…

      She wandered slowly back to the water and looked up again to the place where James and Carlotta had swung up high, moments before the cable had snapped.

      ‘Why am I here?’ she asked him. ‘Why haven’t I managed to forget you yet?’

      Because he was a ghost who haunted her even now, and in this place she’d planned to exorcise him. Foolish hope.

      ‘Leave me alone,’ she whispered desperately, closing her eyes. ‘In the name of pity, leave me alone.’

      Silence. He wasn’t there, but even his absence had a mocking quality.

      Beneath a huge tree a stone had been erected, bearing the names of the dead, with James near the bottom. She knelt and touched his name, feeling the stone cold beneath her fingers. This was as close to him as she would ever be again.

      ‘Sapevi che lui?’

      The voice, coming from behind her, made her turn and find Drago di Luca towering over her, glowering. He looked immense, blotting out the sun, forcing her to see only him.

      ‘Sono Inglese,’ she said.

      ‘I asked if you knew the man whose name you touch.’

      ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly. ‘I knew him.’

      ‘Well?’ He rapped the word out.

      ‘Yes, well. Very well. Is that any business of yours?’

      ‘Everything concerning that man is my business.’

      She rose to face him. ‘Because he ran off with your wife?’

      She heard his sharp intake of breath and knew that he would have controlled it if he could. His eyes were full of murder. Much like her own, she suspected.

      ‘If you know that—’ he said slowly.

      ‘James Franklin was my boyfriend. He left me for a woman called Carlotta.’

      ‘What else did he tell you about her?’

      ‘Nothing. He let her name slip, then refused to say any more. But when this happened—’ She shrugged.

      ‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘Then every detail came out for the entertainment of the world.’

      The crowd jostled her slightly and she moved away. At once he took her arm, leading her in the direction he chose, as though in no doubt of her compliance.

      ‘Are you still in love with him?’ he demanded sharply.

      Strangely the question didn’t offend her as it would have done from anyone else. Their plight was the same.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. ‘How can I be? By now it should be all behind me, and yet—somehow it isn’t.’

      He nodded, and the sight gave her an almost eerie feeling, as though she and this stranger were linked by a total understanding that reduced everything else to irrelevance.

      ‘Is that why you came?’ she asked.

      ‘Partly. I also came for my daughter’s sake.’

      He indicated the child standing a little way off with an elderly woman who was leaning down, talking to her. It was the same child who’d been in the picture, a year older.

      As Alysa watched, the two moved across to where the flowers lay, so that the little girl could lay down her posy in tribute. Looking up, she saw her father, and she smiled and began to run towards him, crying, ‘Poppa!’ At once he reached down to pick her up.

      Alysa closed her eyes and turned slightly. When she opened her eyes again the child would be out of her sight line. Something was happening inside her, and when it had finished she would be all right. It was a technique she’d perfected months ago, based on computer systems.

      It started with ‘power up’ when she got out of bed, then a quick run-through of necessary programs and she was ready to start the day. A liberal use of the ‘delete’ button helped to keep things straight in her head, and if something threatened her with unwanted emotion she hit the ‘standby’ button. As a last resort there was always total shut-down and reboot, but that meant walking away to be completely alone, which could be inconvenient.

      Luckily, standby was enough this time, and after a moment she was able to turn back and smile in a way that was almost natural. She could do this as long as she aimed her gaze slightly to the right, so that she wasn’t looking directly at the child.

      Drago was absorbed in the little girl, whom he was holding up in his arms. Alysa marvelled at how his face softened as he murmured to his daughter, words she could not catch.

      The woman spoke in Italian. Alysa picked up ‘introdurre’, and guessed it meant ‘introduction’.

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ