Italian Marriage: In Name Only Read Online Free

dappled light onto the path through the tracery of green branches and there was a fragrant smell from the eucalyptus trees. Hard to believe that on such a beautiful September day her life was falling apart. But it was. Because the bank had said no to her and that was her last hope.
    Deep down she’d known that they wouldn’t extend her credit, but it was still the most dreadful disappointment. Now it seemed that everything she had worked so hard for was slipping away.
    And what on earth was she going to tell her staff? They all seemed to have the utmost faith that she would sort the business out.
    How had this happened? she wondered in anguish. How could she be the owner of a successful restaurant one moment and be staring bankruptcy in the face the next? The situation had crept up on her so gradually as to be almost insidious.
    Nathan wriggled impatiently in his stroller. He wanted to get out and although he didn’t talk much yet he was making the fact very clear.
    Victoria stopped and went around to unfasten his safety harness. ‘OK, honey, you can toddle for a while now,’ she told him softly, and he gave her a winning smile, his dark eyes sparkling up at her full of life and mischief.
    At least she had Nathan, she thought, her heart swelling with love. He was the most important thing in her life. Everything else could be worked out.
    But what would become of them now? The question made fear coil inside her like a snake. Everything she had was tied up in the business.
    Victoria had experienced poverty as a child, had watched her parents scrimping and scraping to get by. They’d tried to hide the problems from her but she remembered all too well the cold hard reality of it. Her father had died when she was thirteen—the family home had been lost and for a while she and her mother had lived in a small flat in an inner city suburb of London. That had been a truly terrible time and her mother had died less than a year later, leaving Victoria under the care of social services until her mother’s sister in Australia had been found and she had been sent to live with her.
    She’d never met her aunt Noreen until the day she’d stepped off the plane in Sydney and she had been incredibly nervous. All she had known about the woman was that she was her mother’s older sister but they hadn’t been close. Deep down Victoria supposed she had been hoping for a kindly aunt—someone who resembled her mum, someone who would help heal the loneliness and loss she felt. But it had been immediately apparent that Noreen was not the sentimental type and looking after a heartbroken fourteen-year-old girl was not something she had wanted at all. In fact, she’d made it very clear from the start that she had only taken her in because she’d felt obliged to. There had been no warm hug of welcome, no platitudes about how sad the situation was—just a cool handshake and a let’s-get-on-with-it attitude.
    Noreen had been in her late forties, single and a formidable businesswoman. She owned a small restaurant out at Bondi Beach and she put Victoria to work there almost as soon as she arrived. ‘You’ll have to pay your way, girl. I can’t afford passengers,’ she’d told her as she tossed an apron in herdirection. ‘You can have two evenings off during a school week, the rest of the time you start work at six-thirty.’
    Those years had been hard and the hours unsocial but Victoria had done as she was told, and had in fact shown a natural aptitude for cooking as well as for business. And Noreen had been pleased. An emotionally cold woman, she had no time for the fripperies of being a female but she had taught her well in the ways of business, encouraging her to go on to college to get business qualifications and qualifications in catering.
    When she was twenty, Victoria was running Noreen’s business for her single-handedly. But the hours were long and hard and she had little time for herself. And it was at this point that she had