His brother had two, his sister had just given birth to her third. Mobility issues aside, there was nothing about this child that should capture his attention and yet… There was something about him…something familiar. Something that made his skin prickle and his heart pound.
‘How old are you, Finn?’ he asked through a throat that had run dry.
The little brow creased before he held three fingers up.
‘You’re three?’ he clarified sceptically. The boy was tiny.
A nod.
‘You’re almost a man.’
The tiny white teeth flashed at him again.
An audible change amongst the congregation caught their attention. The little boy craned to look around him. ‘Mummy!’
The bridal party had arrived.
The beautiful bride made her way down the aisle arm in arm with her proud father, identical beams on their faces. Behind them, holding the long train of the bride’s dress, were two adorable little girls walking either side of a slender brunette in a long, ancient-Greek-style dusky rose bridesmaid dress. Her face was turned to the child on her left and so hidden from Tonino’s sight.
‘Mummy!’ Finn called out again, this time loud enough for the whole congregation to hear.
The pounding in Tonino’s chest ramped up in speed.
And then he caught full view of the brunette’s face and his heart stopped beating altogether.
Orla held on to the train of Aislin’s dress as if it were life support. She could do nothing to stop her legs trembling.
Tonino Valente. The name she’d spent three years desperately trying to remember. Aislin had uttered his name and in that instant a light had switched on in Orla’s brain. If she hadn’t ripped the tiny clasp from Aislin’s dress she might very well have fainted, but the panic over ruining the hundred-thousand-euro dress had been equal to the shock of recognition at Tonino’s name.
The flurry of activity that had followed, the hunt for the designer, who’d eventually been found in the hotel bar and who’d given Orla more evil eyes during the fixing of the clasp than she’d previously received in her lifetime, the arrival of Sabine’s daughters—Orla’s fellow bridesmaids—and the arrival of Aislin’s father… Suddenly the suite had been crammed with people and she’d been forced to get a grip of herself.
This was the biggest day of her sister’s life. Aislin had put her life on hold for three years for Orla and Finn. Orla would never have been able to bear the scars that marked her body inside and out without her sister’s steadfast support. More than support. Aislin had raised Finn for the first eighteen months of his life, been the first to realise he wasn’t developing as he should, the one there every single day of Orla’s rehabilitation.
And now it was Orla’s turn to support her sister; her protector, her best friend, her guardian angel made flesh. This was Aislin’s day.
Sick dread continued its steady drum as they moved closer to the altar and she had to use all her concentration to keep the train of Aislin’s dress stretched out and keep control of the little bridesmaids by her side, both of whom were merrily waving at the packed congregation as if they were royalty. She hardly dared look away from them in case she found the dark brown stare that had haunted her dreams.
Could it really be him?
It had been almost four years. All they’d shared was one night. Or was it two? Or three? Or more? She wished she could remember but her memory had as many holes in it as a lump of Swiss cheese. Many of the holes had closed with time and the lost memories had returned but everything to do with Tonino and her time in Sicily remained blurry snapshots. She knew they’d met at the hotel she’d checked into during her fruitless attempt to meet her father, but that had been her only concrete remembrance…apart from his face. She remembered that handsome face vividly. Every time she’d pictured it, she’d had to suck in a breath of air to counteract the lance of pain that had accompanied it and blink away tears she’d had no clue from whence they had come.
‘Mummy!’
Her son’s voice broke through the fog of fear in her head.
Stretching her cheeks into a smile, she finally had a clear view past her sister to the spot at the left of the altar where she’d been promised she and Finn would sit.
The smile froze, half formed.
A tall, dark, utterly gorgeous man sat beside Finn. His black stare was fixed directly on her.
Her stomach plummeted. Thick heat pulsed and swirled through her head, dizzying her.
She had no recollection of Aislin’s father handing the bride to the groom, no recollection of the two small bridesmaids leaving her side, no recollection of her feet taking her to her son. All she remembered from taking those steps was the blazing heat that suffused her entire body and the feeling that she could fall into a dead faint from the shock.
The man watching over her son until she could take her place beside him was Tonino. Finn’s father.
THE WEDDING CEREMONY passed Tonino by. He rose and sat when directed, joined in with the hymns, recited the prayers at the appropriate times but it was all noise. He could not switch his attention away from Orla. Or her child.
The child who looked the image of his own childhood photographs.
His eyes flew from mother to child, child to mother, his gaze unable to settle any more than his ragged heartbeats could.
The pounding in his head was too strong for coherent thoughts. He couldn’t breathe properly. He’d only been capable of snatching drags of air into his lungs since he’d seen Orla’s face.
He’d risen from the seat he’d been saving for her and they’d stepped around each other, eyes locked, like two moons orbiting an invisible sun. For the first time in his thirty-four years he’d been struck speechless.
Her green eyes had been wide. Frightened. Her face had been white.
That was the last time their gazes connected.
Not once throughout the ceremony did Orla look at him. While his stare remained resolutely upon her and her child, her attention, when not taken by her son, stayed on the bride and groom.
Gradually, anger and incredulity rose inside him and pushed out the shock. Coherent thinking returned. His wits sharpened.
He began to see more clearly too. And what he saw proved that, despite having had a child, Orla hadn’t changed at all.
She was still beautiful. Slender and elegant. The long, thick dark hair he’d last seen spread over his pillow when he’d kissed her goodbye was coiled into a chic knot on the nape of her neck. The elfin features he’d once thought belonged on the pages of a fairy-tale book had been expertly made-up, smoky eye shadow emphasising the stunning large green eyes he’d once gazed into while buried deep inside her. The long-sleeved dress she wore was far less revealing than usual bridesmaid dresses, the dusky pink silk wrapping around her body to kiss her gentle curves but displaying minimal flesh.
Her beauty had captivated him from the first look.
That first look had been pure chance. A member of his public relations team had found a litany of complaints about one of his Palermo hotels online. Tonino had rearranged his itinerary and headed straight there. The Palermo hotel in question had been part of his uncle’s struggling chain until Tonino had stepped in to save it and save his uncle’s reputation from the shame of bankruptcy. Where Tonino specialised in converting old castles, monasteries, chateaux and the like into luxury