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“Think about what you’ve already suggested,” she continued, her voice strengthening with every syllable. “You’ve asked, no, asserted that I live in Italy. With no explanation, no acknowledgment of my life here or what I would be giving up—”

“What is your life here?” Christos asked, and Rose fell suddenly and appallingly silent. He arched one dark eyebrow, his expression coolly skeptical. “Well?”

“What…what is that supposed to mean?” Rose demanded, knowing her outrage was coming a beat too late. “To imply?”

He shrugged, the movement sinuous as well as dismissive. “You tell me. Give me an answer.”

She shook her head, a rage gripping her now, along with an inexplicable hurt. She didn’t know this man. He shouldn’t have the power to hurt her. Not like that. And yet that question, so simply put, had both humbled and hurt her. To imply that her life here wasn’t worth keeping, worth saving, that it was small and sad and lonely…okay, he hadn’t said all that, but she’d felt it. She’d felt it in herself, and she knew Christos Amanti knew it. That her life was all those things. That she might come out both swinging and smiling, but she had gotten pregnant in the first place because of the lack she’d felt in her life. In herself.

“It’s no business of yours,” she insisted, her voice shaking, “what my life is like here. It doesn’t matter, because it’s mine, and I’m keeping it—”

“All I’m asking,” Christos interrupted her, his voice diamond-hard, “is whether it’s worth keeping, in comparison to what you’d be gaining by living in Italy, as part of a loving family that has unimaginable resources and opportunity—”

“Oh, and I’d be part of that family?” Rose demanded, her voice now vibrating with disbelief as well as hurt. She knew how that went. She’d lived it, day by painful day, and she’d rather be alone than risk being rejected like that again…by anyone. “Welcomed into the fold as one of your own?” she surmised with something closer to a sneer. She shook her head. “I’ve been there before. As if.”

Christos gazed at her for a long moment, his expression assessing as well as understanding. Sympathetic in a way Rose didn’t like, because it felt as if he saw too much. She’d revealed too much with those spiky words, and she hadn’t meant to. Thoughts and memories she didn’t want him to be able to guess at, never mind know.

“Well,” he said quietly, “I can tell you this. You wouldn’t be kept in a dungeon.” The corner of his mouth lifted, lightening his face in a way that almost made him seem like a different person, and lightening her inside, as well, the darkness of those fears and memories starting to recede. “We don’t even have one.”

Chapter Four

Rose let out an incredulous laugh, a sharp, splintered sound. Then, while Christos watched, half hoping to make her smile, her face crumpled before a sob escaped her, and she covered her mouth with her hands.

He leaned forward, feeling appalled as well as surprised—and guilty. Guilty, because he’d caused her this distress, and he wished he hadn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t have called the life she had here into question; it had clearly been a sore point, even though he didn’t totally understand why, although he supposed he could guess. If Rose Delaney was having a baby so she wouldn’t feel so alone, her life here, whatever it was like, had to be lacking.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped out between her hands. “I don’t usually cry. But this is all…just so…weird.” Another sob escaped her, morphing into a ragged laugh. She dropped her hands from her face to give him a stony, stoic look, although her mouth still trembled. “I appreciate the effort you’ve taken, but I can’t… I don’t think I can entertain this any longer. I’m sorry for the trouble you took, but this ends here. Now. I’m not moving to Italy. I’m not upending my life, such as it is, for you or your brother.”

On decidedly shaky legs, she rose from the sofa, tossing her tumbled hair over her shoulders, her lips trembling before she pressed them into a determined line. She was, Christos thought, both magnificent and pitiable.

“Rose,” he called to her in a low voice. “Please. Wait.”

“What for?” she demanded shakily. “I think this has gone on long enough, don’t you?”

“Luca—my brother—was the light of my mother’s life. My father’s, too, when he was alive. Losing him…” He paused, knowing he needed to be honest with her and yet unwilling to display the grief he still felt, a raw wound ripping him open every time he thought of his brother. The guilt, too, that his whole life he’d been the big brother, the one to look after Luca, to keep him safe and steady and on track, and he’d failed him in the worst way possible. “It is unimaginable,” he said quietly, a rawness to his voice that he couldn’t hide. “You said you know how that feels…?”

“Why do you ask that?” she demanded, her arms folded, her eyes narrowed, but at least she’d stopped walking out of the room.

“Because you intimated as much before, and when I asked if you had anyone in your life, you said, ‘Not anymore,’” Christos stated quietly. “I assumed you’ve lost someone, as we have. Someone precious. And so you know how it feels.”

She lowered her head, her hair falling in front of her face, obscuring her expression. “Yes,” she said after a moment, her voice so quiet Christos had to strain to hear it. “I lost my parents when I was seventeen.” She paused. “In a car crash, like your brother. They died instantly.”

“I’m very sorry,” Christos said, meaning it. He realized he’d sensed a solitariness to her. Now he understood why…and he could, perhaps, use it to his advantage. He wasn’t above such tactics, even if perhaps he should have been. Even if he felt an ache of sorrow and empathy for her that he was doing his best to ignore. “You know, then,” he said quietly, “how sudden and shocking such a death is. And,” he continued, his voice growing stronger, “how important those ties are. You are having this baby because of the loss of your parents, yes? To have a family again.”

She glanced up, pushing her hair behind her ears as she regarded him suspiciously. “What of it?”

“We are the same. This baby is the last—the only—tie we have to Luca.”

“Were there not other babies he…he, you know, contributed to?” she asked after a moment, the words grudging, like she didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to continue the conversation any further, but she was. Christos took it as a good sign.

“No, there weren’t. He’d only recently applied to be a sperm donor—an altruistic gesture on his part.” As well as an undoubtedly impulsive one, because that’s who Luca had been. Over-the-top, gregarious, reckless, joyful, fun…and totally exasperating at times. “Sometimes…” He blew out a breath. “Sometimes I wonder if he knew somehow that he wouldn’t have a family of his own. A life. He lived—not recklessly, not exactly, but like every moment might be his last.” He thought of Luca’s ready smile and easy laugh, the way he embarked headlong on every adventure, careless of the consequences, ones that Christos had had to deal with time and time again.

When Luca had been wild as a teen, when he’d dropped out of college, when he’d disappeared on a friend’s yacht for three endless weeks, when he’d suddenly decided to move to New York without telling anyone. They’d been decisions born out of fun and freedom rather than some destructive recklessness, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been consequences—worried parents, negative publicity and Luca always looking to the next adventure.

Every time, Christos had been the one to manage the fallout, pick up the pieces—and take the blame. Because his job, for as long as he could remember, was to keep Luca safe and out of trouble.

Maybe it had started when Luca had almost died as a child from a severe case of pneumonia; after that, he’d been treated with kid gloves, wrapped in cotton wool, and it was up to Christos to watch out for him. You’re older, more responsible. He looks up to you. Don’t fail him, Christos. Christos had been told this so many times, until it hadn’t even needed to be said anymore, because he lived and breathed that responsibility every day. Until he’d failed—refusing to chase Luca all the way to New York because he’d had business to attend to, and he’d felt like a thirty-one-year-old man should maybe finally take responsibility for himself.

And Luca had died. Christos hadn’t been driving the car that had crashed into his brother’s, but he felt like he might as well have been.