Eclipsed Hearts

Chapter 14: The Convoy

The word arrogant was still sitting on Elena's tongue an hour later, then she finally let it loose on Rosa.

"He could have just said something normal," she said, pacing the narrow strip of floor between their beds, arms crossed tight over her chest. "Are you okay?'' Is that so hard? "Instead he grabs my arm like I'm a package he almost dropped and tells me to watch myself like I did it on purpose."

Rosa was sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching her with the amusement of someone who'd seen this particular performance before. "So he's rude?"

"He's unbelievably rude." Elena spun back the other way, her sandals slapping softly against the tile. "You don't just manhandle someone and then lecture them like it's their fault for existing."

"Manhandle," Rosa repeated, one eyebrow lifting. "Is that what happened? I thought he caught you."

Elena's mouth opened, then shut. Her jaw had, in fact, dropped. She could admit that much to herself, if not out loud in the half-second after his hand closed around her arm, when the whole world had briefly narrowed down to the fact that a man built like that had reflexes fast enough to catch her before she even knew she was falling. There had been something in his grip, something certain and unhurried, that she hadn't been able to shake since.

But that wasn't the part she was going to say out loud.

"He could've handled it better," she muttered, dropping onto the edge of her own bed. "That's all I'm saying."

"Mm-hm." Rosa's smile was the particular kind that saw straight through her and had the good grace not to say so directly. "You know, for someone who's furious at him, you've mentioned his hands twice now."

"I have not."

"You have and his eyes, then way he said m*watch yourself, like it was a threat and a compliment at the same time." Rosa tilted her head, entirely too pleased with herself. "You're allowed to be annoyed and interested, Elena. It's not against the rules."

"There is nothing to be interested in," Elena said, with more force than the sentence strictly needed, and Rosa, mercifully, let it go, though the small, knowing curve of her mouth stayed exactly where it was.

Down in the courtyard, Matteo crossed the flagstones toward the black town car idling at the far gate, already reaching to loosen his cuff.

He didn't get far.

"Matteo."

His mother's voice had a particular pitch reserved only for him, pleasant enough to fool a room full of strangers, precise enough to stop him mid-stride. Bianca Romano stood beneath the portico in a cream suit that probably cost more than most of the women inside this building would see in a year, sunglasses pushed up into hair that never moved, a phone loosely in one hand as though she'd only just lowered it.

He turned back, jaw already setting. "I have a call in twenty minutes."

"You'll make it." She came down the two steps toward him unhurried, the way she did everything as if time bent around her schedule rather than the other way around. Her eyes and his eyes, he'd been told too many times to count, and hated the comparison a little more each time, moved over him with the same restless assessment he'd inherited, cataloguing the set of his shoulders, the faint tension along his jaw. "You were in the east corridor for quite a while.

"I was touring it, like you asked."

"Were you." It wasn't a question so much as an invitation to lie badly, and Bianca watched him not take it with the patient interest of a woman who already knew the answer and simply wanted to watch him squirm his way toward admitting it. "One of the girls, you collided with her in the corridor."

His expression didn't change, he'd had a lifetime of practice keeping it that way in front of her but something in his chest went very still. "There are cameras in every hallway, I'm sure you already know exactly what happened. I don't see why you're asking me."

"Because I want to hear how you describe it."

"There's nothing to describe, she wasn't watching where she was going. I caught her and told her to be more careful. I left." He glanced past her toward the car. "It was ten seconds, Mother."

"Ten seconds is usually all it takes," Bianca said, mild as ever, though something colder moved underneath it, "for a man to start making decisions I have to clean up after."

"I'm not making any decisions." His voice came out flatter than he meant it to, an edge of warning under the words. "I'm not interested in her. I'm not interested in any of them, so you can stop looking at me like I'm about to become a liability over a girl I only bumped into"

Bianca studied him a moment longer, unconvinced in the particular way that meant the conversation wasn't actually over, only postponed. Then she smiled.

"Good," she said. "Keep it that way."

He didn't wait to be dismissed twice.

The convoy pulled away from the gate in a smooth, unhurried procession that drew half the building to its windows.

At the front, Matteo's car led the way, a matte-black Aston Martin DBS, low and lethal-looking against the gray afternoon, its engine settling into a deep, controlled growl as it eased through the gates. Behind it followed two black Range Rovers, security trailing at a respectful, practiced distance.

Elena and Rosa stood pressed to the window along with half a dozen other women, watching the whole procession glide past the gates like something out of a world that had nothing to do with this one.

"That's a lot of expensive cars for one man," Rosa murmured, though there was no missing the awe threaded through it.

"That's a lot of car for one family," Elena said, watching the Aston Martin take the corner out of the drive with an ease that suggested the road existed purely for its convenience. Something about the sight, effortless wealth of it, the way three vehicles' worth of security existed solely to move one man safely from one place to another made the ache of her own confinement sharpen rather than fade.

Whatever was happening beyond these walls, whatever this family actually was, it clearly didn't answer to the same rules everyone inside Novara Fertility Center did.

"Do you think he'll come back?" Rosa asked quietly, still watching the empty road where the cars had disappeared.

Elena didn't answer right away. Her mind wasn't on the road at all, it was back in the corridor.

She was still turning that thought over when a soft knock sounded at the door, and Faye stepped inside, her usual bright smile stretched thin and brittle at the edges.

"Elena," she said, "Bianca would like to see you. Now."