BY THE TIME she emerged from her bedroom the next morning, dressed in combat trousers and T-shirt, ready for their hike on Mount Etna, she’d made a decision. Last night, looking at the stars with Mauro, had been foolish.
She’d let her curiosity get the better of her, asking about Mauro’s ex, and it had steered them into very dangerous waters. Today, she had to be sensible. She had to put that kiss behind them and forget any crazy ideas she had had about Mauro and her. So today was all about Operation Forget the Kiss. She hadn’t meant to make Mauro change his mind about relationships, but show him that his assumptions about his last girlfriend might have been off the mark. Somehow, after Mauro’s thoughtful silences, she suspected that she needed to be more careful than ever.
But she had her defences firmly in place, so she’d spend her last couple of days enjoying the island and not fantasising about her and Mauro.
‘Morning,’ she said, flicking him a wave on her way to the coffee maker already steaming on the stove. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Like a baby,’ Mauro answered. ‘Were you up early? I thought I might see you in the pool.’
‘I got in a quick session before you were awake. I didn’t want to presume on any more free coaching.’ And she hadn’t trusted herself to be in the pool with him. That was a key part of the plan—be sensible. There was no reason why two adults couldn’t get through two days together without locking lips. Even two adults who found each other attractive. And were living together. And had already kissed once anyway. They just had to make a resolve and stick to it.
He didn’t comment further on the fact that she hadn’t waited for him, and she took that to mean that he understood why she had done it.
‘So I never asked,’ Amber said. There she went again, being sensible. If they strayed into risky topics, like, say, whether they should be in the pool together, then she should change the subject as quickly as possible. ‘This hike that we’re heading out on. How’s that going to work? Not in that chair, surely?’
‘I’ve got a hand cycle,’ Mauro replied, smiling and looking at her closely. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve taken it out so I’m looking forward to it.’ His words sounded stilted, and she wondered if he was thrown off course by her attitude this morning. He shouldn’t be. It was what they had talked about yesterday. But for some reason, it seemed Mauro still wasn’t happy about it. Well, it was nothing. He’d get over it, she was sure. There’d be someone else along to entertain him and distract him soon enough. He wouldn’t be lonely for long.
‘Are you looking forward to the walk?’ he asked. ‘You’ve brought boots and stuff?’
She’d not worn her walking boots since a weekend to the Lake District that had involved a lot more wine than walking, but she hoped that the hours that she put in keeping fit in the pool would mean that she’d make it to the top of the mountain unscathed.
She nodded as she took a bite of her pastry—she really could get used to Italian breakfasts. ‘Yep, Ayisha let me know that I’d need walking gear. It’s been a while but I’ll be fine. Have you been before? To Etna, I mean.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve been going ever since I was a kid. It’s like nowhere else on the planet, Amber. It’s so raw up there. Exposed. There’s nowhere to hide.’
A shiver ran down her spine and she wondered whether that had been meant as a challenge.
She wasn’t sure how to respond. So this was what it was like when you tried to pretend the most mind-blowing kiss of your life had never happened.
Etna loomed on the horizon as they drove through the heart of the island, the fields all around them scorched by a summer of fierce sunshine. Silence filled the car as they ate up the miles, the mountain growing ever larger before them. Amber kept her eyes on the landscape, too afraid of what it would lead to if she brought her attention closer to home. She had tried to strike up conversation, they both had, but with the black hole in the middle of their small talk all attempts had fizzled into nothing.
She jumped nearly out of her skin when Mauro’s hand brushed against hers when they both reached for the bottle of water in the holder between them.
‘Whoa. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ Amber said quickly. ‘You do remember, Mauro, that I still don’t want Ayisha or the cameras to see what happened between us?’
How was this so hard? All they had to do was pretend that they had never kissed; pretend that she didn’t know the scent of his skin and the taste of his lips. When they had talked about it before, it had seemed so simple. The kiss was meant to get their lust out of their system; once she had acknowledged the attraction, had answered the million questions that her brain had had about what it would be like to kiss Mauro, it should have been enough. She should have been able to laugh and joke with him, without their mutual attraction hanging over them.
But the memories of those few moments in the Castello Vigneto still wouldn’t leave her be. It had seemed so simple to say that they were just going to pretend that it had never happened; two days later, she still couldn’t do it. She stared out of the window again, making the most of this time they had alone. As soon as they reached the base camp, the TV crew would catch up with them and they’d have to get back to faking it.
She shook her head as she looked out of the window, contemplating the ruins her career—not to mention her heart—would be in if today didn’t go well. She was worse off than when she had arrived. At least at the beginning she’d had nothing to hide from the cameras.
She glanced over at him as the car started to climb, and his jaw was set firm, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. The gleam of white on his knuckles gave away his tension and she felt a stab of unease at this hint that he was finding it as hard as she was to pretend that nothing had happened. They had to get through the next couple of days, and then they had to walk away from each other. Anything else would only lead to one or both of them getting hurt, and neither of them wanted that.
They were both going to have to get their game faces on if they were going to get through today. She needed it to go well, and for all that to happen she needed Mauro’s co-operation.
‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ he replied with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
Well, that was one way of assuring that she wouldn’t say it out loud.
‘No reason. You just seem a bit quiet, that’s all. So it’s not...’ She didn’t want to be the one to bring it up again, out into the open where they couldn’t ignore it any longer. But she could feel the tension between them, could feel that their grand plan to pretend that it had never happened wasn’t going to hold water. And she didn’t want it there on the screen, where it might come back to bite her.
‘It’s nothing. Honestly.’ He took his eyes off the road for a moment to turn and smile at her. ‘Just concentrating on the road.’ As his gaze returned to the windscreen she followed it with her own. Just as well he wasn’t letting himself be distracted. The road was unlike any she’d travelled on before, with one hairpin bend after another as they climbed higher and higher up the mountain.
Mauro was driving them up to the Rifugio Sapienza, the start of the funivia—the cable car—where there was a collection of shops and restaurants, halfway up the south slope of Etna. It would be their base camp for the day. From there they would hike up to the next checkpoint, where the funivia finished, and then go on to the craters at the summit. From what she knew of Mauro, they wouldn’t be taking any shortcuts.
As they climbed they passed villages that had been brushed at the edges by fingers of lava. The rivers of rock were black against the vegetation, a record of decades and centuries of rebellion by Mother Nature against the ingress of human habitation upon her territory.
Wide expanses of scrubland stopped dead as they reached the corpse of another river of fire. And then the balance shifted. No longer was the lava eating into the vegetation, but it had taken over completely, and there was nothing but rock to see on all sides.
‘It’s awesome,’ Amber said, her gaze fixed on the changing landscape.
Mauro raised an eyebrow.
‘No, seriously,’ she went on. ‘As in, I’m full of awe. The lava—it must have just destroyed everything in its path. Can you imagine sitting in your house in the village, and looking up and seeing that coming towards you?’
He nodded, but didn’t speak. Yet more proof that, however they might try, there was no banishing the awkward. But if they could just keep it on hiatus until the cameras had finished shooting for the day that would be enough.
They continued up the side of the mountain, switchback after switchback, and by the time that Mauro’s four-by-four pulled up at base camp, the landscape was positively lunar. Hillocks of coarse black rock were all around them, big enough to hide the summit of the mountain from view.
Rifugio Sapienza was more touristy than she had been expecting. Chalets housed gift shops, hiking equipment stores and restaurants, and tourists milled around, dressed in various states of propriety, from full climbing gear, with walking poles and backpacks as big as she was, to tourists who had come in coaches from the beach resorts, dressed in jeans and white plimsolls, and looking decidedly concerned about the potential of lava dust to cause serious harm to both.
Mauro stopped the car and looked over at her. ‘You ready for this?’ he asked.
‘Which?’ Amber laughed. ‘The hike or the cameras.’ He gave her an understanding smile, and as she looked over at him their eyes met and she felt that familiar spark, the familiar pull towards him. If she had thought that the not knowing, the wondering what that connection meant, was bad, having the answers was far worse. A couple of days ago she would have wondered what it would feel like if he pulled her across the centre console and into his lap. Today, knowing the answer to this question, it made the reach for the door handle almost impossible.
‘So...’ Mauro’s gaze was locked on her eyes, refusing to let her go. ‘It’s still as we discussed yesterday? We pretend that—’
‘Nothing happened,’ Amber said, urgently. ‘Exactly. Just like we said.’
Fumbling for the door handle while she still couldn’t look away from Mauro, she all but fell out of the car. Well, it might not be the most dignified exit, but it got the job done. Got her out of danger, out of proximity with those soulful green eyes, with all the memories and promise that they held.
As she leaned back against the car she heard the click of the boot opening and the mechanical whirr of a motor. It was Mauro getting his bike out, she guessed. The one with the rugged tread on the tyre and the hand pedals. He’d trekked up Etna plenty of times, he’d told her, both before his accident and after, so he shouldn’t have any problems dealing with the terrain here. Shame—a flat tyre calling the whole thing off could be just what today needed.
As Mauro rounded the corner of the car, Ayisha stepped out from the restaurant and started asking Mauro about his cycle.
‘And you’re sure that you don’t need a guide?’ she asked. ‘Because we’ve got a guy on standby and it’ll be no trouble at all to have him accompany you, just in case you run into any problems.’ She shifted awkwardly for a moment. ‘Uh, so to speak, you know.’ Amber waited for the laugh from Mauro that usually smoothed over this type of awkwardness, but it didn’t come. And when she looked at him, those lines across his forehead were deeper than ever.
‘We’ll be fine.’ His tone clearly brooked no argument.
‘OK, no guide, that’s not a problem, Mauro. It’ll be just you guys, and me and Piotr will follow behind with our guide. Julia will be waiting back here for us. We’ll do a couple of really quick interviews before we send you off, and then we’ll try and keep our distance as much as possible. You’ll both have mikes and sports cameras on, so we can hang back a bit without missing anything.’
She looked from Mauro to Amber, and Amber knew that she had picked up on the tension between them. How was she going to play it in the interviews? Amber wondered. Would she try and help them paper over the cracks so that they could get a fairy-tale ending, or as near as possible, for their Christmas TV special—or would she go for the fireworks? Push them and play them off against each other to get the dynamite material that Amber knew they could deliver. God, she hoped it would be the first one, because she and Mauro had been managing—just about—to keep smiles on their faces and the elephant out of the room this morning, but she suspected that it wouldn’t take much for their awkwardness to spill over into something more dramatic. She shut her eyes against the sun and leaned back against the car. God, she just wanted this to be over. She wanted to be home. To start forgetting.