‘Well, they are your family papers.’
‘And you’re the expert I hired to make some sense of them,’ he said.
Which made their relationship very clear. He was her client. Off limits.
* * *
Mariana worked quietly and methodically, Angelo discovered during the rest of the morning. He’d hardly know that he was sharing his office space—apart from the fact that he was incredibly aware of her. And he found himself glancing up from his own work to watch her. The tiny pleat between her eyebrows when she was concentrating; the way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear; the way her glasses slipped down to the end of her nose over the course of a few minutes and then she pushed them back again.
He really shouldn’t let himself get distracted.
But he couldn’t help it. Something about Mariana Thackeray drew him.
There couldn’t be any future in this. He wasn’t looking for a relationship and she was obviously very focused on her studies and her work. She’d told him that she wanted kids. It could never work between them. But, even though he knew the sensible thing would be to ignore his burgeoning feelings, he caught himself thinking, What if...?
He checked his emails from the office, made a couple of phone calls and then went back to working on journal transcriptions. Before he realised it, it was gone one o’clock. Whatever her usual schedule was, he was aware that she was still working through the papers—trying not to disturb him, perhaps?
‘Shall we have a break for lunch?’ he asked.
She looked up from her desk. ‘OK.’
He tried to put himself in her shoes. ‘Please feel free to have a break whenever you need one. And help yourself to whatever you want from the fridge.’
‘Thank you.’
Her polite smile told him she had no intention of taking him up on the offer. Did he really make people feel that awkward? Or did she have a filter in her head that made her judge other people by her ex’s behaviour?
‘Come to the kitchen and I’ll show you how to use the coffee machine—it’s a bit temperamental.’ He led the way down to the kitchen, set out the food and the plates, then dealt with the coffee machine.
‘Thank you. This all looks very nice, but I really don’t expect you to provide lunch every day,’ she said.
‘The very least I can do is to feed you while you’re here,’ he said. ‘My family would be appalled if I didn’t. I might be half-English, but I feed people like an Italian—it’s how I grew up. Is there anything you don’t eat?’
She smiled. ‘No allergies, and no food dislikes to worry about.’
‘That makes life easy, then.’
‘Your garden is lovely,’ she said when they sat down to eat.
He barely noticed it; he simply paid his cleaner to do a bit of weeding and water the tubs of flowers. Rosie enjoyed gardening, and particularly liked the free rein he gave her when it came to planting. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘I’m logging receipts on the spreadsheet and cross-referencing them to the files for each painting as I come across them. I’ve found some things relating to a couple of the paintings, but nothing so far on The Girl in the Window.’
They reached for a piece of bread at the same time and their fingers brushed; she drew back as if she’d been burned.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘My fault.’ She flushed.
He needed to put space between them, so she didn’t feel uncomfortable with him. ‘I’m going back to my desk,’ he said. ‘But feel free to take as long a break as you need.’
She seemed to have composed herself by the time she came back into his office.
‘I’ve got some information from the journal in 1962 that you might find interesting,’ he said. ‘Nonno bought a small landscape by Carulli from a dealer.’
‘1962? Give me a second.’ She retrieved her laptop and tapped into a file. ‘Here we go. He told me he bought this one in Florence. Hopefully the dealer’s receipt, which might list the provenance, will be in one of the boxes, but the records for this particular dealer have been digitised, so I can check online to see when the dealer bought it, who from, and we can trace it from there.’