Page 2 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

Marcello still hated it. Even though the smile was no different from the way he had seen his wife smile at a waiter who had served her water and other random people...

That smile convicted her of nothing. He simply hated that there was a photograph of his wife smiling at someone else.

A restaurant. That was the detail that kept catching on him, like a nail dragging through silk.

Because their first date had been a restaurant, too. A small one on Halsted, because she had gone pale at the sight of the first place he suggested. She couldn’t read the menu without her glasses and had been too embarrassed to put them on in front of him, so he had ordered for her, and she had eaten every bite of a dish she later admitted she couldn’t name.

Halfway through dessert, she had gone quiet. Then...

“Can I ask you for something?”

“Anything.”

“When you get tired of me...” She had said it lightly. She had even smiled while she said it, and her hands had been shaking around her spoon. “Because you will, and that’s all right, I’ve done the maths. I know what I am, and I know what you are—”

“Chisa.”

“—but will you tell me to my face? Please? Don’t send someone. Don’t just stop calling. I’d rather have it from you, even if it’s horrible. Especially if it’s horrible.”

She was the first person in his life who had ever asked him for something that cost nothing.

“You have my word,” he had told her.

And Marcello Bastianelli had never once broken his word. Not to his father, not to his enemies, and not to a girl in a borrowed dress who had believed she was asking him for something small.

Overhead, the floor creaked. She was up again, walking off the cramps as the doctor had told her to, humming while she did it, and the sound...

Despite everything, the sound still had both Marcello and Curzio wincing. It was that bad, and it would always be so. Music would never be her gift, and that was why it took them several moments to realize...

Curzio barely managed not to wince when he finally recognized what she was humming. It was the song that she had asked him to play in the car, on their way to the wedding. As in, the day she had become Marcello Bastianelli’s bride. And this had the old man wondering miserably yet again...

Why must it be like this? Why couldn’t Chisa have stayed the girl they all thought she was? Why couldn’t there be an end to all these bad things?

Marcello’s gaze slid back to the photo as Chisa’s humming continued. But this time, all he could see was their wedding night. They had married in a courthouse one late afternoon, with only a handful of witnesses, and then afterward, when he had taken her to his home for their wedding night...

“Is it normal to be this nervous?” She perched on the edge of the bed with her glasses on and her shoes still buckled, as if she might have to leave in a hurry. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t know what’s going to—”

“Cara?”

“Y-Yes?”

“Take off your glasses.”

Despite the gentle tone he had used, the command had still made her cheeks turn red as if he had asked her to undress. She had been so flustered, in fact, that in the end it was he who had removed her glasses before setting them on the table, and when he had turned to look at her...

“I can’t see you now.”

She had whispered the words in a panic, and it had made his lips curve even as he answered her very solemnly.

“That’s the point.”

“W-What do you mean—”

Instead of telling her, he had shown his wife instead what he meant. And he had taken his time, too, so that when she was finally lying under him, she was too dazed with desire to be worried, and when he said, “Guardami...”

Look at me.

Chisa had simply lifted her brown eyes to his, innocent, trembling, and yes, just a little terrified still, even with her body already made captive by need and desire.