‘Let me past.’ She was tousled and angry and more beautiful than he had ever seen her and it would have been so much easier to lie down with her than to stay standing. He could see her breasts rising and falling as she breathed hard in anger, see her erect nipples beneath the lace, her thighs slightly apart in her angry stance and her knickers on the floor. He wanted to kiss his way out of it, to push her from the bathroom to the bed and lose himself in her, to end this row without it ever having to take place. Yet somehow he stood, somehow he had to explain. He let her pass but as she reached for the phone he spoke some more.
‘Think before you speak to your father, Allegra—because if it is hell for you, imagine how it might be for Izzy.’
‘Izzy?’ She swung around, phone in hand.
‘From the way your sister was looking to my brother tonight, I think it is no longer just about you.’
She had wanted honesty, wanted to know what went on behind the iron wall that had been around him since they landed here, but now there was dread in her heart, perhaps it already knew, for slowly, like Chinese water torture, the truth was dropping in. ‘What does Izzy have to do with us?’ She halted then—it felt as if her throat closed over—and he stood and watched as her hellish realisation dawned.
‘If I step aside, or if the marriage does not go ahead, Matteo will assume my role. I am quite sure the people of Santina would not be ready for a karaoke queen—though of course she wouldn’t be one, there would be no more singing, no more performances....’
‘Izzy would never stop.’
‘She would have no choice. If the wedding is not announced tomorrow, I will be forced to step aside. It’s up to you, Allegra.’
And she tried to picture it, tried to picture Izzy in this role, and as hard as it was for Allegra, it would be hell for Izzy. There was something about Izzy, something fragile, something wild, something precious that would be crushed in a moment by the weight that was landing on Allegra right now. She felt the fight leave her, stabbed at impossible hope.
‘Izzy and Matteo might not last....’
‘Perhaps not.’ Alessandro shrugged. ‘But at least it should run its course.’ He looked to his fiancée and hated himself for doing this. ‘Tomorrow we announce the wedding date. You can, of course, ring your parents first.’
‘You won’t stop me from seeing them.’ She was depleted but still defiant on that point at least.
‘Of course you will see them,’ Alessandro said. ‘It will be different though, and more so after the wedding. They can come and see you.’ He was most uncomfortable, for though really he couldn’t imagine caring if he didn’t see his parents for the foreseeable future, he knew that family meant a lot to her.
‘It’s already different.’ She looked to him. ‘Have they been spoken to?’
‘I would think that the palace would have met with them—would have told them their role in preparing for the wedding.’ And then he was honest. ‘They spoke with your father, a couple of weeks after the engagement.’
She thought back to that morning on her balcony, to the last real conversation she had had with her father, arguing with him about flirting with the queen, and she was hit with a wave of homesickness so violent she thought the boat might topple over.
‘What would they have said to him?’
‘To pull back, to make sure that all the family does the same. That you were not to be troubled with day-to-day things.’
Like romances and pregnancies and all their gossip. No wonder she’d felt so out of the loop; her family had been told to keep her out of it for her sake!
‘You should have married Anna.’ She meant it. ‘I wish that you had.’
And he saw her hurt and the mess he had created, his fiancée who was crushed—and the worst part was it had been by his own hand. So his answer was honest, for Allegra’s sake:
‘I wish I had too.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
SHE did see her family in the lead up to the wedding, but Alex was right; it wasn’t the same.
Izzy was head over heels and naturally assumed Allegra was—she would talk about Matteo for hours, read out songs she’d penned, clump around in her noisy shoes. Because she was Izzy, because she wasn’t going to one day be queen, it didn’t seem to incense the royals so.