by Tara Pammi
In the beautiful white dress and the expensive jewelry, she looked like a bride.
She hadn’t dressed up like this for their impromptu, impulsive wedding. He frowned. “Princess, is everything okay?”
“Hmm?”
He lifted the bottle to his gaze. Half-empty. “I didn’t know you drank.”
One bare shoulder rose and fell. “I don’t usually, but I feel like I’m drowning. Tonight, I just want to not care.”
He watched in increasing fascination as she took the wine bottle from him and swallowed a mouthful. A drop fell on the golden skin of her neck and rolled down into the valley of her breasts. He cursed under his breath, feeling the tightness in his trousers.
“You should be wary of me. I’m a mean drunk.”
He smiled. “I’ll take my chances, bella.”
Trembling fingers dug through the rumpled mass of her hair. Her chest rose and fell. She rubbed her nose against her upper arm. The grief painted on her tight face sent alarm bells ringing inside his head. He took her hand in his, and pressed his thumb over her knuckles. In a rhythmic movement, back and forth.
“Talk to me, cara mia.”
She shook her head.
“Afraid you’ll spill your secrets?” he teased, faking a humor he didn’t feel.
“I don’t want to be responsible tonight.”
“Then that is exactly why I should be here, tesoro. You can be as dangerous and impulsive as you want. Do your worst, Alex. I won’t tell a soul.”
The brown of her eyes seemed strangely feverish, and intent. Far too present to be truly drunk. The flimsy silk dress looked like it had been made for her. With her hair falling away from its knot and the dress a rumpled mess around her, she still managed to look delicately feminine. Fiercely sexy.
She licked her lower lip and held his gaze. “And if I want things I shouldn’t want?”
His body hardened instantly. “Then we will indulge in that too.”
When she leaned sideways suddenly, her breasts rubbed against his bicep. He felt electrocuted. Singed by the press of her soft flesh. Softly whispered words blew warm air over his neck. “And if the wine doesn’t do its thing, will you help, V? Will you come inside me and—”
“Tell me about this room,” he said loudly, cutting her off.
“Now who’s running scared?” she taunted.
“I’ll give you anything you want, Alessandra. Even if that is me pounding away inside you so that you can forget the grief I see in your eyes. I will let you use me any way you want, bella. But when that’s done, when you wake up tomorrow with your body sore in the most delicious way, that grief will still be there. Waiting for you.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I hate it when you get all sensible.”
He let out a long groan. “I hate it when I have to be sensible when you’re offering sex.”
He saw her lips twitch at that. And it felt like a victory. A small one but one nonetheless. “This is my design studio. Leo had it built for me. He didn’t want me to feel left out.”
“Left out?” The mention of Leo’s name cooled his ardor considerably.
“He had the old wine cellar transformed into a state-of-the-art tech lab for Massimo. Renovated the skeleton of an old greenhouse for himself. When he found out I was cramming yards of fabric in my bedroom, he had this conservatory remodeled into a design room for me.” She ran a hand tenderly over the chaise longue, her voice catching. “I had only been here a year by then and I didn’t trust him at all. When I asked him why, he simply said this was my home too and it should feel like that.
“He was maybe twenty. But then he’s always been a protector at heart.”
Vincenzo swallowed the bitter retort that sprang to his lips. “What do you design here?”
Her shoulders straightened with the deep breath she took, sending one silky strap falling off her shoulder. His fingers itched to trace the smooth expanse of that exposed skin, and follow it up with his mouth. “Evening dresses, mostly. I use vintage clothing and repurpose them to give them a new edge.”
“Are you any good at it?”
“I’m brilliant at it,” she answered, and he smiled. The few pieces he’d seen on the rack looked astoundingly beautiful even to his untrained eye. “But I...I have a love-hate relationship with it. For a long time, I pursued everything but design. Actually, I mostly hated it.”
“Still do?”
A lone tear fell down her cheek. “No. Design is where my heart is. I just... I hated it because it was associated with her. Alyssa. It was the one thing she gave me.”
“Your mother?”
“She was a very talented seamstress. An artist with a glorious vision, to be honest. Designing clothes was the one thing we had in common. She taught me when I was a little girl. All these boxes...they are hers. I wanted to donate the whole lot to charity and wash my hands of it. But...I couldn’t help myself.”
“She made this dress?” he asked, rubbing the silk between his fingers at the hem.
“I think so. It fits me almost perfectly. The lawyer overseeing their estate handed me the jewelry. I... Apparently, it was supposed to be her wedding gift to me.”
“Alessandra—”
“But I didn’t even tell her that I got married. I sent a postcard to Charlie from Bali, telling him, which she must have read. After I left you...she got in touch with me through Javier, wrote me a letter that he sent on. She wanted to meet you but I called her and told her we were too busy. I...told her she’d never been a part of my life and that it wasn’t suddenly going to change. I was absolutely cruel. And a week later, she was gone. Poof. Just like that.”
He took her hand in his and was again struck by how cold she was. Pulling it to his mouth, he blew warmth into it. “You had no way of knowing she’d be in an accident, Princess. Life is...”
“Unfair sometimes, yeah. She cheated on my stepfather. Did you know that? With my real father. Greta’s second husband. She took off on holiday after they’d had a fight, met Carlos in Milan, had an affair and then returned to her husband, pregnant with me.
“And somehow, Steve forgave her. Except for the fact that there I was, the symbol of everything she’d done wrong, growing up in front of his eyes. Forever reminding him of his wife’s infidelity.”
“Was he cruel to you?”
“No.” More tears drawing tracks on her cheeks. “Oh no, Steve was an honorable man, in his own way. It was her, you see. My mother never forgave herself for her mistake. I was the punishment for her sin.”
He pressed his mouth to the back of her hand, feeling helpless against her pain. “You were only a child.”
“There was always a coldness to her when I was growing up. A distance I could never cross. And finally, when I was thirteen, it all came out. The truth about my parentage. And I realized why she could never love me. So I reached out to Carlos and moved to Italy to live with him.
“I refused to live in a situation where I was considered a weakness. A shameful secret. A weapon to be used in any argument.”
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Vincenzo whispered, the full scope of what he had done only just dawning on him now.
“I will not be a weapon to be used against them,” she’d said again and again. “I’m not a prize.”
“Do you know what’s weird? I did so many things in life to enrage her. It wasn’t enough to leave her.
“I became closer and closer to Greta. I took up modeling because I knew my mother would not approve. I...refused to even visit her, despite numerous calls from Steve. I thought I was hurting her. But really I only hurt myself.”
“You did whatever you had to in order to survive.”
She scrubbed at her tears roughly. “She reached out to me again after Charlie was born. I went, not to take her up on the olive branch, but because I was curio
us about Charlie. I was curious about how she would love this baby, if she did at all.
“And she did. I could see it in her eyes—he was a piece of her heart. She loved him like she never did me. And it broke my heart all over again.
“I love him so much now, but when he was first born I was so jealous of this small baby, Vincenzo. Can you believe it? This tiny human being had what she’d always denied me. Now she’s gone. And Charlie’s lost everything too.”
“Shh...tesoro. Shh...none of this is your fault. Grief and guilt are a poisonous cocktail, cara,” Vincenzo crooned as she broke into heart-wrenching sobs. He pressed his mouth to her temple and held her in a firm grip, his chest tight with an ache he couldn’t name.
Her pain felt like his own, and his guilt that he’d only made it worse... It raked claws through him.
“How horrible does it make me that I don’t truly miss her? I only miss what could have been...if we’d patched up our relationship.”
He understood her so perfectly at that moment. The tangle of emotions that could choke your breath, a beautiful future slipping through your fingers and the helplessness it brought... His arms tightened around her and he rocked them both gently.
His mind turned to the implicit trust he had seen between Leo and Massimo Brunetti. The ethics they’d strived hard to instill in themselves were becoming clearer as he delved into BFI’s operations ever since Silvio had been kicked out—with Greta’s help, indeed—and Leo had taken over as CEO.
The bond the brothers shared despite Silvio Brunetti’s cruelty toward his own sons... He’d seen the evidence of it with his own eyes.
Slowly, she turned into a languorous weight on his muscles. Sinking his fingers into her thick hair, he whispered sweet nothings in Italian. “You’re human, bella. Not horrible. What might have been taunts us all.”
Her fingers dug into his muscles, her mouth open against his shoulder. “You were right, you know.”
“About what?” he whispered.
“I’m impulsive. I’m... I run away from hard situations. I take things on for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes, I’m...”
“What, Alessandra?”
“I’m scared, V. So much.”
“About what, bella?”
She took a bracing breath. “What if I’m not the right person to raise Charlie, V? What if that jealousy I initially bore for him translates into my future actions? What if he can see it in me? What if he ends up believing I don’t really love him? What if you were right, and I haven’t thought this through completely?
“He’s so scared right now. Only seven years old and he’s been through so much already. I can’t be another person who lets him down.”
The fear in her voice cut Vincenzo deeply. With rough movements, he turned her until she was looking into his eyes. With her own puffy from her tears, her hair a ragged mess, she was still the most real thing he’d ever laid eyes on. “Listen to me, Princess! You came storming back into this marriage just for him. Your love for him shines through in every word, every action. Trust me—he knows it.
“You don’t know how amazing it is to see your strength, cara. You hated asking me for help, yet you did. Fighting me with everything you had. For Charlie. He’s incredibly fortunate to have you.”
He pressed another kiss into her hair, loving the silky tumble of it. Breathing in the essence of this woman who fought to do the right thing even when she was terrified. “It made me see things in you I’ve never seen before.”
She stilled in his arms, her mouth a warm heat against the hollow of his throat. Her fingers dug into his muscles, but he welcomed the contact. “Like what?”
He shrugged, loath to share his doubts. Doubts she’d created in him.
“I thought of what a ferocious mother you’d be to any children we have,” he finally answered.
She moved out of his arms and the loss of her warmth, her softness was acute.
He swallowed the urge to pull her back into his embrace. “You’re one of those women around whom families are built. Your loyalty...staggers me. You give back everything you receive a hundredfold.”
“And yet you would change the very core of me.”
“No,” he said with careful emphasis. “I only reminded you that I had a right to your loyalty too.”
She looked away and then back, and he noted the resolve in her eyes. He could practically see her emerge from this bout of intense grief, bent but not broken. Ready to take on whatever came next. And that determination aroused him as much as the beautiful dress offering him flashes of long, honey-colored limbs.
“Do you think we made a mistake?”
He didn’t need to ask her to clarify. “No.”
“I don’t want to think of...us having children for a long time. Not until things are...settled. With Charlie. With us.”
“That’s fair,” he said softly, swallowing away the instinctive protest.
“Would you forgive me if I did something like that?”
“Like what?”
“If I cheated on you, like my mother did to Steve. If I slept with another—”
“No!” His answer bounced off the walls and the floor, increasing in volume until it was reverberating all around them.
The idea of losing Alessandra—to anything, much less another man... He felt shaken up from the inside. On levels he didn’t understand. A few months ago, he’d been unaware of her existence and today—he had no words for all the feelings she evoked in him. Only that she was coming to mean so much more than he could ever have imagined.
Too much.
He took a deep breath. “What is it that you’re trying to achieve with these ridiculous questions, bella?”
Defiance glared at him from those golden-brown depths. “Establishing boundaries, I suppose.”
“That question is moot, Alessandra, because I don’t believe you would ever do such a thing to me.
“Strip me bare of every rule I’ve ever lived by, si.
“Drive me crazy with your stunts to protect those two bastards from me, si.
“Make me pant after you like a damn dog in heat, si,” he bit out, with a self-deprecating shake of his head. “But to cheat on me is to cheat on the life we want to build with each other—so, no, bella, that’s not you.”
And in that moment of vulnerability, of giving voice to things he’d never admitted before, even to himself, Vincenzo knew exactly how much she was changing him. Antonio had been right to worry.
From the first day he had met her, she had bowled him over with her beauty, but even more with her generosity, her integrity, her constant attempts to open herself up to others.
Alessandra made him want to be a different man. A better man.
A man who could open himself to the possibility of a relationship with his brothers, a man who gave others the second chance that he’d never been given. A man who could even consider forgiving the woman who had directly ruined his life, who had so thoroughly broken his mother’s heart that she’d never recovered from it.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. His path had been set so long ago that he didn’t know how to choose a new one now. He didn’t know how to be a man whose every waking thought was not filled with taking everything that had been denied him. How to be the man who had to face all the things he’d already done in the name of revenge.
“I was insanely jealous of Anna. How much she’s a part of your past, a part of your present.”
He wasn’t shocked by the sudden turns their conversation took anymore. Neither did he derive any kind of satisfaction from the revelation. It had been a power trip to learn how much he affected Alex. But that was before. Before he realized that it worked both ways. Before he’d begun to view himself through her eyes. “She’s firmly in my past. You’re my future.”
“I want to trust this so much. And not ju
st for Charlie’s sake. I need to believe in this marriage, V, in you.
“I want to stop caring about everything else. About Leo and Massimo, about BFI, about the entire world. I want what you promised me on the island, our life together.”
His chest felt like it would burst open, so much emotion filled him. “All you need is to take a step toward me, bella, that final step.”
“Then why does it feel like defeat?”
He shook his head. “I want your surrender, bella. Not your defeat.”
Some unnamed emotion glittered in her eyes. Pulling the damned dress away from those legendary legs, she crawled toward him on her knees, flashes of bare golden flesh toying with him.
Her hands on his knees pushed them apart and she moved close, intoxicatingly close. The tips of her breasts brushed against his chest, her flat belly against his. Her fingers directed his hands to her thighs with no hesitation. The silk of her skin under his calloused fingers, the incredible scent of her teasing his nostrils... She was a feast he’d been denied for far too long.
“Alex, bella, we don’t have to do this tonight, when you’re still grieving—”
“No, I need this tonight. I need this now.” Her hand moved to his neck, then upward to sink her fingers into his hair. Her warm lips skated over every inch of his face, branding him, staking a claim. “I don’t want to think. I just want to feel.”
Her breath was a warm benediction against his other cheek. He felt engulfed by her. Every moment, every day, she was beginning to own another piece of him. His breath began to come in harsh pants, as if he was trying to catch up to her. And he had a strangely feverish feeling that he would forever be trying to catch up.
“But sometimes I wonder if you’re the devil or an angel,” she whispered, the words flickering over his skin as she shifted that gloriously lithe body closer. And closer. Her lips descended toward his, her grip on his hair getting tighter. Until his head was tilted up to look into her eyes.
“All I care is that you’re mine.” That first press of her mouth against his, after so long, sizzled right through his skin. “Please, V...say you’re mine.”
Words came and fell away from his mouth as she looked deep into his eyes. He considered and threw away platitudes that had no meaning, lies that would damage the surrender she was giving him. Surrender he wasn’t sure he deserved.