Free Far From Perfect by Portia Da Costa

dislike. “But I expected a certain degree of consideration on your part. Assurances. Firmly drawn ground rules.”
    She set down the mug and Nick noted that she hadn’t touched a drop of her tea. “ And a chance to put Martin in the picture first. He deserves that. If circumstances had been different I might have been announcing my engagement to him tonight. Not you.”
    He knew she was lying outrageously, but even so, black jealousy enveloped Nick like a descending thunderstorm. The same irrational urge he’d experienced earlier out in the square, the desire to break things, to seek and hunt and obliterate, surged through him. His sangfroid teetered on the edge of shattering completely, but by the closest margin he managed to hang on to it. Just.
    “I see.”
    He wanted to roar, but he kept his tone soft. “And an engagement to Johnson is so infinitely more desirable than an engagement to me?” Slowly, with a precision that felt like a Herculean effort, he pushed away his unwanted coffee.
    “At least an engagement to Martin would have been genuine. Not the sham that you’re suggesting. What happens to Carlo when eventually we have to pretend to call it off again? And what happens to Dad too?” A look of pain flickered across her face, revealing and very real. “He’s ecstatic, you know. How’s he going to feel when we snatch all this happiness away from him? He’s having a hard enough time as it is, what with one thing and another. Don’t tell me you don’t know that Felgate’s is rocky.”
    I think I’m in hell.
    Nick was wracked by a turmoil of feelings. For one, he wanted to grab her and shake her over the tales she was telling about her erstwhile boyfriend. Lydia had told him that was going nowhere. For another, he wanted to reach across, take her hand and stroke it gently. He wanted to charge round the accursed table that separated them, envelop her in his arms and tell her everything would be all right and that he would look after both her and her near-bankrupt father for as long as they wanted and needed him. It was a physical pain, the thought she might feel worried or sad or unsure of either her future or her father’s. She ought to be safe and secure and cherished forever and ever as long as she lived.
    Maledizione ! What was he thinking? He could never offer her those assurances.
    All right, he could take away her father’s money worries with the stroke of a pen, something he’d already put measures in place to do, regardless of the success or otherwise of the engagement plan. But those other things? The long-term commitment to one woman, the absolute safety and the cherishing. No. Those he could not offer. It wasn’t in his blood.
    In a grim flashing moment, he relived the shouting and crying he’d heard as a child, his mother and father arguing with savage bitterness. Those arguments had driven his mother to drink and pills and his father into the arms of other women.
    Marriage to a Lisitano man was poisonous, even when there was love there—perhaps especially when there was love there—and it was a deadly chalice that he would never force on any woman. Least of all Anna. To drive her to the tragic end his mother had endured was unthinkable. A death decreed accidental, but which even at a tender age, he’d known in his heart was suicide.
    “Nick, are you even listening to me?”
    Anna’s sudden demand made Nick realize the terrible events of his childhood had taken him away from the problems right at hand.
    “Of course,” he shot back, the dark memories making his voice harsher than he’d intended, the loss still flooding his mind after all these years. “I trust you’ll be tactful and gentle when the time comes. As will I. But my father’s recovery right now is my main concern, and I won’t allow anything to get in the way of that.”
    “Not even the fact I’m as good as engaged to another man?”
    Again the stubborn lie about Johnson. Caught on the raw, it angered