Bartering Her Innocence. Trish Morey

very beautiful and so very stupid. ‘So every time you get a loan top-up from Luca Barbarigo, you go shopping at his cousin’s factory.’

      Her mother had the sheer audacity to shrug. Tina wanted to shake her. ‘He sends a water taxi. It doesn’t cost me a thing.’

      ‘No, Lily,’ she said, pushing back her chair to stand.

      There was no point in searching for an answer any longer. Not when there wasn’t one. ‘It’s cost you everything! I just don’t believe how you could be so selfish. Carmela is working down there for a pittance you sometimes neglect to pay. You can barely afford to pay her, and yet you fill up this crumbling palazzo with so much weight of useless glass, it’s a wonder it hasn’t collapsed into the canal under the weight of it all!’

      ‘Carmela gets her board!’

      ‘While you get deeper and deeper into debt! What will happen to her, do you think, when Luca Barbarigo throws you both out on the street? Who will look after her then?’

      Her mother blinked, her lips tightly pursed, and for a moment Tina thought she almost looked vulnerable.

      ‘You won’t let that happen, will you?’ she said meekly. ‘You’ll talk to him?’

      ‘For all the good it will do, yes, I’ll talk to him. But I don’t see why it will make a shred of difference. He’s got you so tightly stitched up financially, why should he relax the stranglehold now?’

      ‘Because he’s Eduardo’s nephew.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘And Eduardo loved me.’

      Indulged you, more like it, Tina thought, cursing the stupid pride of the man for letting his wife think his fortune was bottomless and not bothering to curb her spending while he was alive, and not caring what might happen to his estate when he was gone.

      ‘Besides,’ her mother continued, ‘you’ll make him see reason. He’ll listen to you.’

      ‘I doubt it.’

      ‘But you were friends—’

      ‘We were never friends! And if you knew the things he said about you, you would know he was never your friend either, no matter how much money he is so happy to lend you.’

      ‘What did he say? Tell me!’

      Tina shook her head. She’d said too much. She didn’t want to remember the ugly things he’d said before she’d slapped his smug face. Instead she pulled her jacket from the back of her chair. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I need to get some fresh air.’

      ‘Valentina!’

      She fled the veritable glass museum with the sound of her mother’s voice still ringing in her ears, running down the marble steps and out past the five-hundred-year-old well with no idea where she was going, simply that she had to get away.

      Away from the lamps that looked like trees and the goldfish frozen in glass and the tons of chandeliers that threatened to sink the building under their weight.

      Ran from her mother’s sheer naivety and her unbelievable inability to read the terms of an agreement and then to blithely disregard them as unimportant when she did.

      Fleeing from her own fear that there was no way she could sort out her mother’s problems and be home in a mere three days. Her mother was drowning in debt, just as the ancient palazzo itself was threatening to collapse into the canal and drown under the weight of tons of expensive but ultimately useless glass.

      And there was not one thing she could do about it. This trip was a complete waste of time and money. It was pointless. There was nothing she could do.

      She turned left out of the gate, heading back down the narrow calle towards the canal and a vaporetto that would take her somewhere—anywhere—her mother was not. And at the next corner she turned tight left again, too suddenly to see anyone coming, too consumed with her thoughts to remember she should be walking on the other side of the path. And much too suddenly to stop until his big hands were at her shoulders, braking her before she could collide headlong into his chest, punching the air from her lungs in the process. Air that had already conveyed the unmistakable news to her brain.

       Luca.