by Lisa Cardiff
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Uh huh.” He lifted me, tossing me flat on my back on my bed. Bracing his hands next to my shoulders, he rolled partially on top of me. “What’s your preferred method of torture today? Kissing or tickling?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I would.” His hand shifted to my neck, making its way to my armpit, pausing there for a second. “Decide.”
“Neither.” I grabbed his wrist, attempting to hold him in place.
“Five. Four. Three.”
“Don’t you dare.”
His smile widened. “Two. One. Too late,” he announced as his hand dove in, tickling me until I couldn’t breathe and my body was wiggling like a lunatic.
“Stop. Stop! I’ll tell you. Please. I’m going to pee my pants!” I said between ragged pants.
“Okay.” His hands curled around my waist. “Go ahead. Spill.”
“Ugh. You jerk,” I said without heat.
He flexed his hand, silently threatening to continue tickling. “Go on.”
“All right.” I kept my gaze planted over his shoulder. “Did you ever…” My heart picked up speed.
“Say what you need to say. I’m not going be mad at you.”
“Were you and Lettie ever together? You know, intimate?”
His eyes narrowed, all humor melting from his face. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“Alessandro said something after I left the mudroom that made me think you and Lettie hooked up in the past.”
“Fucking Alessandro. I really hate that guy.”
“So it is true?” My voice quivered on the last syllable.
“There’s nothing going on between Lettie and me. I don’t like her. I already told you that.”
“You promise?” I searched his face for any signs he wasn’t telling the truth. I didn’t see anything except anger.
“Lettie’s married.”
“So?”
“I already told you how I thought Pietro had something to do with my dad’s death. Why would I get tangled up with his wife?”
“To get even.”
“He doesn’t give a shit about his wife. She’s a trophy on his arm, that’s all. He’s still with Alessandro’s mom.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
“Shit. I shouldn’t have said anything. Look, don’t tell Lettie. I’m pretty sure she knows, but I don’t think she wants it known, if you understand what I mean.”
“If Pietro is still with his ex, why’d he marry Lettie?”
“Because his ex’s parents threatened to disown her if she kept Alessandro or married Pietro. She married someone else ten years ago, but apparently she refuses to give up Pietro or he won’t let her. Who knows? And frankly, I don’t give a shit either way. The whole family is twisted as fuck, including Alessandro.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
He framed my face with his hands, his eyes searching mine. “I am right. Now are you going to stop ignoring me? Because I can’t do this anymore, Em. I miss you. You haven’t touched me in a month. It’s killing me.”
“I’m sorry. I miss you too.” I slid my hand around his nape and pulled his lips against mine. My reservations about him, about us, ceased to exist, along with my conflicted feelings for Marcello.
“So much, Sal.”
“Don’t do that again.” He shifted onto his elbows, breaking our kiss. “Promise me you’ll talk to me when you’re worried about something instead of bottling it all up.”
“I promise.”
“Good, because you’re the only one I want. Will ever want.” His body melded into mine and he kissed me everywhere—my lips, my cheeks, my forehead, my eyelids, and I was lost in him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
The last few months were filled with a flurry of preparations and so much love. It was true. I loved Sal so freakin’ much. I’d been dying to tell him those three magic words for the last months, and I would soon because I couldn’t imagine my life without him, his kisses, and his heated touches. The way he looked at me when he didn’t think I was watching made my heart swell twenty times its size, and for the first time in my life, I felt full rather than half empty.
Footsteps echoed outside of my closed door, and I stuffed the clutch wallet filled with fifteen thousand dollars into my duffle bag and slid it to the back of my closet behind the rows of neatly hung pants. Only two weeks until Easter, and Sal and I had everything we needed to vanish without a trace. Money; clothes; bus tickets; a route; a plan.
Love.
My door hinges squeaked, and I whirled around, my hand pressed to my chest.
“Did I scare you?” Sal said, closing the door behind him.
“Yes. Jesus. I was going through my getaway bag again, and I thought you were my dad.”
He crossed the room and lifted me into his arms, spinning me into a circle. “Stop digging in there. Everything’s ready to go, and you are going to get caught one of these days if you keep double checking it.”
“I know, I know. I can’t believe it’s all coming together, though, and I have this weird compulsion to make sure the money hasn’t disappeared.”
“I have something for you that might alter our plans.” He pulled an envelope out of the pocket inside his navy suit jacket and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I grabbed it, twirled it around in my hands, then opened it. Inside was a business card from the Royal Conservatory in London. Hope rushed up from my stomach like a balloon. “What’s this for?”
“Your dad told me your piano teacher had some things of yours and he asked me to swing by and pick them up. I was expecting books or a lost jacket. She handed me that envelope asking that you contact Darryl Wright. Apparently, he’s holding a place for you this fall.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You have to show up sometime before June for an in-person interview, but according to Mrs. Vitali it’s nothing more than a formality. There’s a place there if you want it.”
“I can’t believe it. It’s too good to be true.” I stepped back until my legs hit the bed, and I plopped down on top of the mattress.
“I know.” He took a seat next to me. “This is perfect, right? We can fly to London or somewhere else in Europe and explore for a week or two before heading to the conservatory. Or we can skip the conservatory altogether. My nonna lives outside of Napoli, and I haven’t seen her in a decade. She’s too old to travel to the U.S. by herself. She wouldn’t mind if we stayed with her for a while.”
“God, I’d love that. I’ve never been out of the tristate area, much less out of the country.”
“Neither have I.”
“Don’t you think my father will look for me at music conservatories? I mean, we fought about it for days, and I stopped talking to him after he refused to let me go. It’d be one of the first places he’d look. And crap, we’ll need passports, which means I’ll need to leave the house at some point. He hasn’t let me go anywhere in weeks.” My shoulders sagged. “This sucks.”
“Don’t worry about it. I have a contact that can get both of us a passport with new identities.”
“Won’t my father find out?”
“No. He doesn’t know this guy. He’s someone I met a couple of years ago.”
“Speaking of my dad, where is he today?”
My father left the house less and less these days. Either he suspected I was up to something or he was so close to his goal of marrying me off to Marcello and he didn’t want anything to go wrong at the last minute.
“He had some stuff to take care of. He’ll be back in time for dinner.”
Nodding, I stuffed the business card into my back pocket. “So we have three or so hours.”
“Yeah, but we can’t go anywhere.”
I rolled my eyes and climbed onto his lap, straddling him. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything else. Not with how irrational my father is these days. You’d think there was a seria
l killer on the loose intent on hauling me off to his personal torture chamber before dismembering me piece by piece.”
“Hmm.” Sal glanced to the side, breaking eye contact.
“What is it?” I guided his face back to me so he couldn’t look away.
“It’s probably nothing.”
“No. You’re not hiding information from me. I’ve had enough of that with my dad. He’s got it in his head that he can protect me by keeping the truth from me and I hate it. It makes me feel like a brainless child who can’t put two thoughts together.”
“It’s nothing, Em. Really. Trust me on this. And none of this will matter because we’ll be gone in a month anyway.”
I pushed him onto his back. “Tell me.”
“I’d rather kiss you.”
“You can do both.” I toyed with the top button of his sky blue collared shirt for a few beats before popping it open. I repeated the process until I reached the bottom. I traced the grooves of his hard chest down to his abdomen. His muscles bunched and jumped beneath my fingertips, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck.
“Stop. We can’t do this.”
Smirking, I tugged on his belt buckle, loosening it. “Why? You don’t want me to touch you?”
“Dammit.” His hand clamped around my wrist. “It isn’t a matter of want, Em. You know that. We’ve had this discussion a hundred times. I’m not going to do anything else with you until you’re mine.”
I pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, rocking back and forth so I could feel every inch of him. “I am yours. I’ve been yours for almost a year now, and it pisses me off that you’re still holding back. You haven’t done anything except kiss me since that time in your apartment. Are you sick of me?”
Groaning, he squeezed his eyes closed for a second, and released my hand. “I’m trying to be the good guy here and protect you. There are things you don’t know. Things you don’t need to know. Just know that I have your best interest in mind and every choice I make is for you. You’re all that matters. Don’t ever forget that.”
My heart melted into a pile of mush, and undoubtedly my face was beaming like a light bulb. I loved this guy so much, and while he may not have told me, I could tell he felt the same way. I was so lucky to have found Sal. I may have a shitty father who planned to pawn me off on some random guy, but I won the lottery with Sal.
“You don’t need to protect me.” I peppered kisses over his neck and chest, getting high on his salty taste and masculine scent. “In less than a month we’ll be far away from here. There’s nothing to worry about now. Everything is set. We’ll either get lost in some mountain town or we’ll go to Italy. There’s nothing preventing us from being together. We don’t have to wait.”
Even as I muttered the words, I knew they were a lie. There were plenty of things to worry about. Marcello Masciantonio was a wildcard. He could force me to go to Chicago with him when he left. He could read more into our letters than I intended. My father could make Sal disappear if he found out about us.
And I couldn’t forget Lettie. I’d cut her out of my life and refused all of her phone calls. I couldn’t face her after she spied on Sal and me. While I hoped she’d drop out of my life without forcing a confrontation, it didn’t look like I’d be that lucky. She showed up unannounced last week, and I told my father to send her away because I didn’t feel well. He didn’t question me even though he knew I was lying, and I was grateful. Five minutes after he sent her home, she fired off a text warning me not to push her out of my life along with a bunch of other cryptic stuff about not knowing the real Sal. I didn’t respond. I had absolutely nothing to say to her. She showed her true colors, and I no longer wanted her anywhere near me.
Sal’s hands slipped under the hem of my shirt, bracketing my ribcage, and he ran his mouth up the side of my neck. Goose bumps sprinkled my arms.
“Don’t kid yourself. So much could still go wrong, and I won’t have it on my conscience that I took your virginity and you were forced to marry Marcello. He’d make your life hell.”
“He won’t even notice.” I infused my words with more conviction than I felt. I didn’t know crap about Marcello except for the little hints of his humor I saw in his letters. Even thinking about them made me smile. Each one bolstered my opinion that we could be friends.
“He would.”
“Why does it matter? It’s not the eighteen hundreds, and I seriously doubt he saved himself for me. If I end up with him because of some weird twist of fate, I’d be happier knowing I gave my virginity to you, someone I care about, rather than a stranger who married me to cement an alliance with my father. So you see, regardless of the how this turns out, I want to be with you. I want you to be my first.”
He picked me up and set me on the bed, leaving at least a foot of space between us. “I can’t. Not yet. Trust me, okay? I know things you don’t.”
“What do you know?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, his shoulders tense and his brow scrunched together. “Things about Marcello. Your dad made promises to him and…let’s just wait like we planned. Look at it as a celebration of finally being free from all this.”
My shoulders sagged. Sal wouldn’t cave. I’d pushed him too many times to count, and he never budged from his talking points. He had the patience of a saint. I’d never even had sex, and I lived in a state of perpetual frustration.
“Fine. You win,” I grumbled.
“It will be so much better this way, and I can wait.”
“It’s torture.”
“No shit. Kissing you, having your body pressed against mine, knowing we can’t do anything…” His sinful lips pulled upward. “Well, maybe we can kiss a few more times. You know, so we can catch up for those weeks you ignored me after Christmas.”
“That sounds fair.”
He pulled me into an intoxicating kiss, erasing any lingering feelings of rejection from my mind. He was talented like that.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
I ran my brush through my hair one more time, studying my reflection in the mirror. My lips were painted a soft pink. I had blackened my already dark eyelashes with mascara, and they resembled butterfly wings. My wavy hair looked like black silk against the strapless lavender lace dress hugging my slight curves. The woman staring back at me bore no resemblance to the real me, which in some respects was fitting given the deception I was about to commit.
Marcello Masciantonio was waiting downstairs to be formally introduced to me for the first time, believing we were on our way to being married. That would never happen. I couldn’t let it happen.
A knock sounded at the door, and I pushed out a ragged breath. God, I didn’t want to do this. My heart clutched tightly at the notion of going downstairs and putting on a show for my family and my father’s acquaintances. I’d smile, I’d laugh, and a man I had never seen except one time years ago would announce our engagement.
“Come in.” My voice was strained, and my stomach was rolling with vinegar.
The thud of footsteps echoed in my room, and I lifted my gaze, latching onto my father’s reflection in the mirror. A smile stretched across his normally stoic face making him appear ten years younger.
I spun around, taking in his dark, crisp suit. Today he had on a mint green tie with light blue stripes instead of his usual red or black, probably a nod to it being Easter.
“You look so much like your mother. She’d be so proud of you.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled, not wanting to talk about my mother. She wouldn’t be proud of my father or me tonight. While she may have been preoccupied with her love of music, she always stressed the idea of finding the right person to marry. According to her, life was so much easier when you married a partner, not an adversary. Despite our letters, I didn’t have any illusions that Marcello would be anything other than an adversary. We wanted different things, different lives. Sal, on the other hand, had shown me time and time again that we were on the same waveleng
th, and most importantly, he didn’t want anything to do with the mafia.
“I have something for you.” My dad pulled a rectangular box from inside his jacket and opened it. Inside was a long strand of gray pearls with a diamond-encrusted clasp. Even though I hadn’t seen this piece for years, I recognized it immediately. “I gave them to your mother as an engagement gift. She would want you to have them.”
Tears threatened to leak down my face, and I blinked them back, stifling the emotion. “They’re beautiful. She used to wear them all the time when I was little.” I couldn’t count the number of times I watched her rotate her fingers over the pearls absentmindedly. She wore them nearly every day until the fighting with my dad started.
“May I?” He dangled the strand from two fingertips. Nodding, I turned my back to him and lifted my hair. He fiddled with the clasp, then the cold strand hit the back of my neck, and I shuddered.
“I bought them for your mom because they matched her eyes.”
I turned to face him. “She never told me that.”
“I don’t think she knew.” He slid his arm through mine. “We should go. I wanted to give you a few moments with Marcello before everyone gets here.”
“Okay. That’s probably a good idea.” I trod down the stairs on my dad’s arm, my mouth dry and my legs like jelly.
This is irrelevant.
None of this matters.
I’ll be gone in less than a month.
My dad pushed open the heavy walnut and glass door to his study, and the sound of the door latch boomed like a gunshot in my ears. Unable to move, I froze in my tracks.
“It’ll be okay. You have nothing to worry about. You’ll see.”
My father guided me forward, and I fixed my eyes on the profile of a man dressed in a crisp navy suit with a pale lavender tie and a starched white shirt. Apparently, my dad told him the color of my dress so we could match. On any other man the lavender tie might look effeminate, but somehow he succeeded in looking even more masculine.
He had one elbow propped on the precast mantle and a lowball of amber liquid in one hand. He had a Roman nose, long with a high bridge. His inky hair contrasted with his olive skin, and even years later I recognized him as the man arguing with my dad in the study a lifetime ago.