Semua Bab The Priest's Forbidden Love : Bab 1 - Bab 6

"Open this door!"Angela De Luca's voice tore through the narrow corridor of the Fontana Inn like a blade through silk. It was not a request. It was never a request when Angela De Luca spoke. The hotel manager, a small, round man named Bertolini who had managed thirty years of scandal within these walls without losing his composure for once, found himself trembling for the first time in his career."Madam, I assure you, the guest in room seven has paid for her privacy and…""Her privacy?" Angela laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that made children cry and grown men step backward. " Give me that key, Bertolini, or I will have this establishment closed before the feast day bells stop ringing."He gave her the key.By then, the corridor had filled. It was Saint Michael's Feast Day, the holiest day on the Calabrian calendar, a day when every decent family in the province sat together at long tables laden with roasted lamb and fresh bread, when the church bells rang from sunrise to s

Ferdinand De Luca came home on a Tuesday.There was no warning, no letter sent ahead, no messenger dispatched from the road to give Angela time to prepare the house and her face and the particular version of domestic peace she liked to present to her husband after a long absence. He simply appeared at the door of the house on Via Margherita with his travelling coat still on and his luggage behind him, looking exactly the way he always looked after weeks on the road, larger than the doorframe, darker than the hallway, filling whatever room he entered with a quality of silence that made everyone in it instinctively straighten their backs.He was not a tall man, Ferdinand, not especially broad, but had the kind of presence that had nothing to do with size, the presence of a man who had never once in his life wondered whether he had the right to speak first, sit first, eat first, decide first. A merchant by profession, a patriarch by disposition, and a man who believed with complete since

The chair across the desk was empty.Seraphina had been sitting in the small room at the end of the corridor for six minutes , she had counted, because counting was something to do other than look at the plain walls and the wooden crucifix and the single narrow window that looked out onto a grey courtyard with nothing interesting in it. The room smelled of candle wax and old paper and the particular variety of self-righteousness she had come to associate with church buildings in general. A Bible sat on the corner of the desk. A small vase of white flowers she could not name sat beside it. Everything in the room was arranged with the deliberate simplicity of a space designed to remind visitors that they were here to be humble.Seraphina was not feeling especially humble.She had dressed for this room. That was the thing. She had stood in front of her mirror that morning and chosen every detail with the precision of a general choosing ground before a battle , the green silk, the hair d