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“Women?” He looked over his shoulder. “I only see one woman.”
Her lips lifted in a small smile. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.” He lifted his shoulders. “The truth is, no, mainly because I consider Ondechiara off limits to my normal life. I bring very few people here. It’s private and I don’t li
ke to share my private life.”
Yet he’d brought Michael. The thought dropped through her like a rock. “Has that always been the case?”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re so perceptive, aren’t you?”
Her brows lifted. “Am I?”
“I suppose I used to feel differently. But a few years ago I decided I wanted a bolthole, a place I could come to away from all the crap that comes with being a Montebello.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Why do you think something happened?”
“It just feels like you’re not telling me something.”
“Are you hungry?”
She lifted a hand and batted his shoulder playfully. “You’re avoiding my question.”
“By trying to cater to your appetite?”
“You’ve already done that. All of my appetites,” she said with a gentle shake of her head.
“I hope not.” He ran his hand over the curve of her hip and she swept her eyes shut as pleasure surged inside her.
“So you just woke up one day and decided to shut up shop?”
“Shop?”
“It’s a colloquialism,” she clarified.
“It was a difficult time in my life,” he said quietly. “It felt right.”
“Why?” She moved a little closer, her body seeking his on autopilot. But she didn’t want to feel desire more than she wanted answers, so she was careful not to kiss him because she knew one kiss could incinerate them both.
“Non lo so. It just did.”
“What had happened? Why was it difficult?”
“Has anyone ever told you you can be very stubborn?”
“You’re being a stupid, stubborn little bitch. For Christ’s sake, Maddie, just make the damned lasagne.”
“I’m kidding,” he was frowning, his eyes roaming her face with instant concern.
And he thought she was perceptive? “My grandfather had died a year or so earlier. It was hard on all of us. Yaya was devastated – we adored him. And his death, while reasonably swift, came at the end of a pretty harrowing cancer. Seeing him so weak and altered was…you know. It was hard.” When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed in his hair-roughened throat.
“I’m sure it was,” she murmured sympathetically.
“But I had also just made the rather disturbing discovery that the infant I had been told was my son was, in fact, not. That the woman I was engaged to had been sleeping with another man. So you see, Maddie, I wanted very much to shut the world out for a while and make sense of that.”
Chapter 7
