“Greta…” There’s a warning tone in his voice. “I can’t.”
Tears sting my eyes at the rejection. I can’t believe I was willing to accept that the man I’m falling for is mafia, accept his violent family and criminal dealings, and he won’t even touch me.
I step past him, wiping my eyes, and grab my red sweater off the rack. The fabric feels coarse after the finery I’ve been wearing. It comes off the hanger with a pang that sets the rack of clothes rattling.
“What are you doing?” Lorenzo asks.
I pull the sweater over my head and look around for my jeans. I don’t see them anywhere, and maybe they’re too torn to fix. I’ll have to keep these expensive looking shiny pants on, so out of place in the mountains but so beautiful.
“I’m going home, Lorenzo. You’re holding something back, and if you can’t be completely honest with me, then this won’t work.”
I tug at the sleeve of the sweater. Where it’s been darned has pulled it out of shape, and the cuff sits oddly on my wrist. But the movement gives me a distraction from the pain in my heart. I thought I’d found a man. A strange, wicked man, but a man who cared for me. But if he can’t trust me with his body, then I have no choice but to walk away.
“Wait.”
The pain in his voice makes me pause. Lorenzo stands up, and his face is troubled, his brows knit together in a deep crease.
“I’ll show you why I don’t like human touch.”
He undoes the button of his suit jacket and shrugs it off. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without it, and his white shirt clings to a muscular chest. It would be sexy if he didn’t look so damn vulnerable, a look I’m not used to seeing on Lorenzo. It makes me worry for him more than a hundred of his dark looks.
He hangs the jacket over the back of the chair and pulls back the cuff of his shirt. An angry red scar cuts across his skin, the puckered ridges zigzagging up his arm.
“I was eight years old, and I forgot to close the door to the hen house. A fox got in and ate all of the chickens.”
I glance at his face, but he won’t meet my eye.
“Someone did this to you?”
“My father. The chickens were my mother’s. She liked to have them pecking around the yard, and my father didn’t like to see her unhappy. Not unless he was the one causing her misery.”
Even after almost thirty years, the scar is angry and dark. I can’t imagine doing that to an eight-year-old boy.
Lorenzo unbuttons his shirt, and I suck in my breath at the lines on his body. They criss cross his chest, precise thin lines half hidden under curly thick hair.
“I never did well in school. It was too hard for me to concentrate, too much distraction. But every time the school called, my father would get out his blade and cut a new line in my skin.”
He says it matter-of-factly as if he’s telling me a childhood anecdote. But there’s no punchline, no funny story.
“That’s child abuse.”
Lorenzo chuckles. “No, coniglietto. It is the old ways.”
“The old ways are wrong.”
My instinct is to reach out, to trace the scars with my fingers, to heal his hurts in any way I can. But I stop my hands, clasping them in front of me to stop me from touching him. This is why he can’t bear to be touched. Because his asshole father abused him. Because he learned to associate human touch with pain.
As much as I want to kiss the scars away, I wait, letting Lorenzo talk.
He shrugs the shirt off his body and drops it over the chair. Then he turns around.
My hand goes to my mouth, but I’m too slow to smother the gasp. His back islacerated. Puckered ridges streak across every surface. There’s no hair to hide these, and the sheer number of angry welts takes my breath away.
“Lorenzo…” I whisper as tears sting my eyes.
“My father liked the whip. I don’t remember what all of these were for.”
He keeps his back to me, and I force myself not to look away. I swallow the pity and the fear for his younger self knowing it’s not what he wants from me. It takes a few breaths, but when I’m sure my voice will be steady, I speak.
