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Frozen, she watched Alessio’s thumb hover over the screen. Then dark golden eyes rose to pierce hers. She wanted to believe indecision flitted across his face. A nanosecond later, when his digit pressed firmly, she knew she’d been mistaken.
The ring tone echoed loudly, the sound almost alien after so much time spent without its intrusion. Then a deep male voice was answering, and Alessio was lifting the device to his ear.‘Ciao.’
The conversation was short, to the point.
Yes, he was fine. Yes, he required his helicopter as quickly as it could be arranged to fetch them. And yes, they would be requiring his jet too to take them back to Sicily.
Them.
That finally roused Giada.
She surged to her feet as he finished the phone call. He stared at her with his hands on his lean hips.
‘My Sicilian isn’t great, but did I hear you tell them that you’re returning to Sicily with me?’
He strolled in that loose-limbed way that made her insides turn liquid. When he reached her, he cupped her shoulders, before his fingers drifted up to spear into her hair. ‘Se, you did. Wasn’t that what we agreed?’
She frowned. ‘But I thought...’ She’d agreed to this when he didn’t know her true identity.
He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You thought what?’ Hardness had crept into his tone, the fingers in her hair applying slight pressure, a subtle warning.
A tremor awoke deep in her belly, the stirring of old anguish wearing a new face. ‘You know now that I’m not Gigi. Surely you won’t achieve anything by keeping me with you?’
Hardness settled in deep, sculpting his face into a chilling work of art without him moving a single muscle. For an age, he stared at her, strands of disappointment and almost pity weaving through those golden eyes before he slid his thumb slowly, contemplatively over her bottom lip. ‘You think, because we’ve had the pleasure of each other’s bodies, that anything has changed,bedda mia? That I should simply abandon my life’s goal?’
Anguish intensified, mocking her for having the temerity to believe it would ever die. For daring to think that she had the power to move a man like him to alter his path. But, even if she didn’t—and she realised now that it’d been a foolish dream—she still wouldn’t hold her tongue.
‘Do you hear yourself? How can this be your life’s goal? You have so much already, the very world at your feet. Why can’t you strive for reconciliation? For peace? For forgiveness? For...love?’
He stiffened into pure steel, his nostrils flaring before he surged closer still, their breaths mingling as he looked deep into her eyes. ‘How can I find peace when those responsible for shattering my family still walk free?’
Her insides clenched, partly with sympathy, but mostly for the raw, unvarnished pain that bricked his voice. ‘Alessio—’
His hands dropped from her as if he couldn’t bear her touch any longer. ‘I made a promise, Giada! And I mean to keep it.’
It wasn’t a roar of intent, but the boom of it blasted through her nevertheless. And as she took one breath after the next, battling against the horrible, terrifying notion that she wasn’t merely attempting to be the rock he needed but to form the foundation of what she yearned for with him, Giada realised there was nothing she could say. Nothing she could do.
She’d strayed so far from her usual tormented path, wandered much farther than she should’ve, that she barely recognised this new, more desolate landscape.
‘I understand,’ she said, not understanding entirely. Perhaps because even though he’d helped her reconcile herself to the possibility that hers was meant to be a fractured family, she couldn’t do the same for him. Couldn’t help him see beyond the red haze of the pain and grieving for everything he’d lost. ‘But you should really ask yourself this—did the father who loved you and taught you a life of integrity and honour want you to lower yourself to the level of the very people who betrayed him, or would he want you to choose a different path? And would your mother have extracted that vow from you if she hadn’t been blind with grief?’
His fists bunched and the brackets around his mouth tightened as he stared down at her, icily condemning her.
She raised her hand before he could flay her with words. ‘I know you think I have no right, but isn’t there a saying about an eye for an eye making the whole world blind?’
‘Are you really preaching at me about turning the other cheek?’
She shrugged. ‘Why not? I don’t have anything to lose, do I?’
‘You think not?’
She forced a smile she didn’t feel. ‘I have a few more days to spare. I’ll come with you to Sicily. Let you toss me into another room so you can feel good about staying true to your vows and whatnot. Once Gigi returns your precious crest, we’ll be truly done with each other. Does that work for you?’
He looked momentarily nonplussed, as if she’d disrupted his grand and mighty chessboard game and ruined his plans. If her insides hadn’t been ripping apart slowly at the stark realisation that she would indeed be walking away from this man in a matter of days with a heart she suspected didn’t belong to her in its entirety, she would’ve laughed.
Would’ve indulged one last time in the touching and banter and ease they’d found in the last few days. In the best Christmas she’d ever had.
Denied that—and knowing more heartache awaited, because hadn’t she ignored all the warnings, breezily believed she could master these emotions?—she turned and walked out of the living room.
