Uncovering the Silveri Secret by Melanie Milburne Read Free Book Online Page B

still no emotion. No grief or sense of loss.
    Bella moistened her lips, waiting a beat or two before asking, ‘What happened?’
    At first she didn’t think he was going to answer. The silence stretched and stretched interminably.
    ‘Motorbike accident,’ he finally said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Can’t have been pretty.’
    Bella winced. ‘What about your mother?’
    A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm tugged at the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘I was five,’ he said and twirled his wine again, his eyes staring down at the liquid as it splashed against the sides of the glass.
    ‘What happened to her?’
    ‘She died.’
    ‘How?’
    There was another silence before he spoke. A bruised silence. ‘Suicide.’
    She gasped. ‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’
    He gave a careless shrug. ‘It wasn’t much of a life for her once my father died.’ He tipped back his head and drained his glass, setting it down on the table with a little thump.
    Bella frowned as she thought of him as a young motherless boy. She had been totally devastated when her mother had driven away that day, but at least she had known her mother was still alive. How had Edoardo coped with losing his mother so young? ‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘And your mother?’
    ‘English,’ he said. ‘She met my father while on a working holiday in Italy.’
    ‘Who looked after you after she died?’
    He put his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table, his expression closing like a door that had been clicked shut on a sliver of a view. ‘Fergus needs to go outside,’ he said. ‘He’s too stiff to use the pet door now.’
    Bella sat back with a frown pulling at her forehead as she watched him stride from the room. He had told her things she was almost certain he hadn’t even told her father. Her father had said Edoardo had always refused to speak of his early childhood and he wasn’t to be pressured to reveal things he didn’t want to reveal. She, like her father, had assumed it had been because Edoardo was ashamed of his background, given that it was so different from theirs. His youth had been misspent on rebellious behaviour that had alienated him from the very people who had wanted to help him. He had used the very words the authorities would have used to describe him: a rebel, a lost cause, bad to the core, beyond salvation. Was he really all or any of those things? What had happened to make him so distrustful of people? What had made him the closed-off enigma he was today?
    And why on earth did it matter to her to find out? It wasn’t as if it was any of her business.
    He was her enemy.
    He hated her as much as she hated him.
    She chewed at her lower lip as she looked at his empty chair. It shouldn’t matter to her what had happened to him. He had been surly and uncommunicative for as long as she had known him. He had clearly inveigled his way into her father’s trust and taken control of her life. He had done nothing but taunt and ridicule her from the moment she had turned up at what used to be her house. He was threatening to ruin her wedding plans. He was the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the brick wall she had to climb over or knock down.
    It shouldn’t matter... But somehow—rather surprisingly—it did.

CHAPTER FOUR
    E DOARDO waited for Fergus to sniff every tree and shrub in the garden as the moon watched on with its wise and silent silver eye. The air was cold and fresh; the smell of the damp earth was like breathing in a restorative potion.
    It cleared his head.
    It grounded him.
    It reminded him of how far he had moved from his previous life—a life where he’d had no control. No hope. Only pain and miserable, relentless suffering.
    Haverton Manor was his sanctuary, the only place he had ever called home. The only place he had ever wanted to call home.
    He clenched his fists and then slowly released them. The past was in the past and he should not have let