Page 22 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

Slowly enough that she stopped being able to talk. Slowly enough that she said his name twice, then couldn’t manage even that.

Slowly enough that when she finally came apart in his hands, he had to press his face into her shoulder and hold on to her, hard.

His own eyes were stinging. Marcello Bastianelli had not wept since his father’s funeral, and he did not intend to start in front of his wife.

“You shouldn’t have married me,” he told her.

He said it into her hair afterwards, when her cheek was on his chest, his hand going up and down her spine without any instruction from him at all.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I heard you say something ridiculous.” She turned her face up. Her chin dug into his sternum. “I’d say it was the best decision I ever made, except it isn’t, because the best one was Rica, and she came out of it, so actually it’s the second best decision I ever—”

“Chisa.”

“—made, and I stand by it.”

He lay there with the rain gone off the windows, and let himself have it for a moment. The weight of her. The ridiculous cheerful stubbornness of her. A woman thrown out of this house at dawn, still making jokes in the bed she’d been thrown out of.

“You’re a good woman.”

“You say that like it’s a problem.”

It is.

Because the woman lying on his chest making jokes about decisions was the same woman who had sat down at a corner table with Nuñez, smiled at him, and let him pay for her dinner. The same woman whose name was on a ledger of calls to Toronto. The same woman who had been in this house the winter his men went into a quarry road.

The two of them could not both be true. For eight years he had chosen the version that let him keep breathing.

Then her hand went flat on his chest, over his heart, and his wife asked the question.

“Marcello? Do you still think I did it?”

Everything in him stopped.

Say no. The word was right there. It would cost him nothing tonight, but everything tomorrow.

A man who said no could not afterwards behave as though he’d said yes. And he had four men on his lawn, a name to find, and no earthly idea which of the people who’d eaten at his mother’s table had put that folder on his desk.

Say no, and he would have to go back to the beginning of everything he had believed since the night he signed her out of his life.

“Marcello?”

He put his forehead down against hers and closed his eyes. “Go to sleep, Chisa.”

It was not the answer she wanted, but it was all he could say for now, and his wife...

She still didn’t make any noise, but he knew anyway.

She cried herself to sleep, and he let her.

None of this changed anything.

Her betrayal. His desire. And this marriage that blessed and cursed him at the same time.

Chisa