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The father she’d lost a long time ago, whose death now made her remember and ache for all she’d missed out on over the years. Was that why she’d come? To find some sort of closure? To make sense of all the pain?
Allegra’s mother had been furious that she’d been attending, had seen it as a deep and personal betrayal. Just remembering Jennifer Wells’s icy silence made Allegra’s stomach cramp. Interactions with her mother were fraught at the best of times. Jennifer had never recovered from the way her husband had cut both her and Allegra out of his life, as neatly and completely as if he’d been wielding scissors. Although it hadn’t felt neat. It had felt bloody and agonising, thrust from a life of luxury and indulgence into one of deprivation and loneliness, trying to make sense of the sudden changes, her father’s absence, her mother’s tight-lipped explanations that had actually explained nothing.
‘Your father decided our marriage was over. There’s nothing I could do. He wants nothing to do with either of us any more. He won’t give us a penny.’
Just like that? Allegra had barely been able to believe it. Her father loved her. He swooped her up in her arms, he tickled her, called her his little flower. For years she had waited for him to call, text, write, anything. All she’d got, on and on, was silence.
And now she was here, and what was the point? Her father was gone, and no one here even knew who she was, or what she’d once been to him.
From across the room Allegra saw a flash of amber eyes, a wing of ink-black hair. A man was standing on the sidelines just as she was, on the other side of the room. Like her he was watching the crowds, and the look of contained emotion on his face echoed through Allegra, ringing a true, clear note.
She didn’t recognise him, had no idea what he’d been to her father or why he was there—yet something in him, the way he held himself apart, the guarded look in his eyes, resonated with her. Made her wonder. Of course, she wouldn’t talk to him. She’d always been shy, and her parents’ divorce had made it worse. Chatting up a stranger at the best of times verged on impossible.
Still she watched him, covertly, although she doubted he noticed her all the way across the room, a pale, drab young woman dressed in fusty black with too much curly red hair. He, she realised, was definitely noticeable, and many women in the room were, like her, shooting him covert—and covetous—looks. He was devastatingly attractive, almost inappropriately masculine, his tall, muscular form radiating energy and virility in a way that seemed wrong at a funeral, and yet was seductively compelling.
They were here to commemorate death, and he was all life, from the blaze of his tawny eyes to the restless energy she felt in his form, the loosely clenched fists, the way he shifted his weight, like a boxer readying for a fight. She was drawn not just to his beauty but to his vitality, feeling the lack of it in herself. She felt drained and empty, had for a long time, and as for him...?
Who was he? And why was he here?
Taking a deep breath, Allegra turned and headed for the bar. Maybe she would have that drink after all. And then she would go back to the pensione where she’d booked a small room, and then to the reading of her father’s will tomorrow, although she hardly thought he’d leave her anything. Then home to New York, and she’d finally put this whole sorry mess behind her. Move on in a way she only now realised she hadn’t been able to.
