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Despite being bedraggled and obviously starving, its tail began to wag again as it licked my chin and let out more of those excited yips. I laughed, the lightness something I hadn’t felt for so long.

Love washed through me, because the puppy already adored me and had no qualms about showing it.

‘It is filthy,’ Aldo said, but his dark eyes softened as he scratched behind one ear.

‘It definitely needs a bath,’ I remarked, chuckling as I carried the puppy—wiggling and yipping furiously—through the garden gate, towards the house.

‘You will keep it?’ Aldo asked, surprised.

‘It needs a home,’ I said, convinced this was meant to be.

An abandoned puppy had come into our life when I was struggling with the problem of how to get Dante to stop shutting me out.

I introduced my cute canine charmer to the rest of the staff, who all fell for him immediately too. While I fed him the leftover chicken from dinner, which he wolfed down ravenously, my EA Stella rushed out to a local pet shop to buy all the necessary puppy essentials the shop owner advised, including a deworming tablet and the flea treatment just in case. Maria gave him the deworming medicine and applied the treatment, then I carried him to the guest bathroom on the ground floor to give our new house puppy a thorough scrub. I didn’t want to introduce him to his new master until he was a lot more presentable.

But as I shampooed him then dried him and attached the flea collar—while he danced and dived and yipped and wriggled, and we made a catastrophic mess of the bathroom—I couldn’t stop smiling, as I recalled the affectionate glow in Dante’s eyes when he’d talked of the pet he’d once loved so much.

Wrapping the stray in a towel, his fur soft and fragrant now, his tiny snout widening in a huge yawn, I cradled him in my arms, eager to show him to my husband.

Maybe Dante couldn’t admit he had feelings for me, beyond the obvious, because he saw emotion as a weakness, but surely a puppy this adorable could help break down some of those barriers? I couldn’t replace the dog he’d once been so attached to, but maybe Dante would start to realise that love wasn’t a weakness, that admitting his feelings for me—feelings I knew he had, but refused to acknowledge—didn’t have to be any more problematic than bonding with this puppy.

Hope burst in my heart as I headed up to our bedroom, where I knew Dante would be getting dressed to go to the office downtown, positive our new guest could be what we both needed to bridge the gap between us which—after a month of living with Dante and falling ever more deeply in love with him—I was still finding impossible to bridge on my own.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Dante

I knotted the silk tie in the dressing room mirror, aware of the shadows under my eyes. While I was grateful that Eva had not been beside me when I’d woken from another nightmare half an hour ago, the irony also didn’t escape me. The nightmares only ever chased me when she was not in my arms.

Over the past month, I had been forced to accept my dependence on Eva socially, then come to admire her effortless ability to charm anyone and everyone more and more. She had been an asset, just as Vito had believed she would be. Her effervescent personality and genuine kindness—as well as her innate style and taste—had made us a fixture on New York’s social scene, even though I still struggled to disguise my loathing for the parties and events which were part of our role here.

I was not a man used to persuasion. And while enlarging the Rocco-Malvini property portfolio in Manhattan had been a challenge I had enjoyed—after discovering that legal investments could carry the same thrill and reward as illegal ones—I did not have a naturally welcoming personality. Nor did I suffer fools gladly. At all. And I still struggled to refrain from shooting any man who dared look at my wife with lust in his eyes.

But that rarely occurred now, perhaps because I had made no attempt to disguise my fury with any man who got too familiar with her.

But there was another side to our marriage, which had begun to scare me. Those moments late at night, and during the daytime, when I could not stop thinking about her, could not stop wanting her—even when she peppered me with pointless questions about my past—and triggered the panic that had first gripped me weeks ago.

Why, when she looked at me with concern or disappointment in her eyes, did I find it so hard to keep the walls I had relied on all my life in place? Fear pushed at my chest, as it had last night, when she had asked me about love… And a part of me had known that if it was not love I felt for her, it was certainly a weakness I could not afford to feel.

‘Dante, look what I found under the dumpster outside.’

I swung round to find her standing behind me, and the familiar rush of adrenaline, of bone-sapping joy, hit me in the solar plexus, making me ache all over again for something I knew I should not need. Her running gear was soaked, her face flushed with pleasure, but then I noticed the wriggling bundle in her arms.

The nightmare which had woken me tightened around my ribs like a vice. Blood, desperation and guilt ripped through my body, doing more damage than any bullet as my eyes widened in horror.

‘What is that?’ I croaked, that day so long ago rushing towards me. The room closed in around me, sweat formed on my brow and my fingers clenched into fists as I struggled to force the old memories away, and keep the nightmare at bay. So she would not see me shatter.

‘It’s a puppy…’ she said, but her voice had lost the joy of her greeting and the happiness in her eyes had died.

‘Get it out of here. I do not want it in my house,’ I snarled, the fear returning to suffocate me. The fear I thought I’d killed twenty years ago.

‘But w-why?’ she asked, her expression turning from shock to horror at my reaction. ‘I thought… You told me once you had a dog. I thought…’

‘You thought wrong.’ I marched past her, needing to get out of the room, to get away from the brutal reminder of all I had been unable to protect that day.

I had told her I was not a man who could love. Why hadn’t she listened?

‘I want it gone before I get back tonight,’ I demanded, the panic so huge I didn’t even know what I was saying any more. ‘I never want to see it here again.’