He paused outside a set of massive double doors to give her an encouraging smile and one brief kiss before turning the knob and letting the doors swing open. The conversation died instantly as everyone’s eyes were drawn to Paige and then to Daniella who had suddenly become very vocal about being put down.
“I want to see my nonna and papa,” she demanded.
Dante arched a brow. “What do you say when you want something, princess?”
Daniella stopped squiggling and pursed her lips for a moment before answering him. “A young lady always says please when she wants something,” she recited the words he’d taught her. She beamed at Dante when he nodded in approval. “Please can I get down now, Daddy?”
Every heart in the room melted when Daniella gave Dante a kiss before he set her on her feet. Her obvious affection for him had already endeared Daniella to the Vittorio family, but it was the fearless way she studied everyone’s face as she searched for Dante’s mother and father that finally broke the tension Paige had felt when they’d walked it. Pride swelled in her chest when Daniella waltzed boldly up to where Ravenna and Cesare Vittorio were seated and did a little curtsy. Paige silently blessed Mireia for teaching her such an adorable gesture of respect.
“Ciao, Nonna e Papa,” Daniella said in Italian. “Il mio nome e Daniella. Sono lieto di incontrarmi con voi.”
Ravenna’s arms opened wide, her rapid Italian thick with emotion as she lifted Daniella onto her lap. Paige glanced up at Dante and saw he was as surprised as she was by what had just happened. She was also extremely relieved that everyone had gathered around Ravenna and Daniella because it gave her a few minutes to get her own emotions in check. It also gave her the opportunity to study them.
Dante’s brothers were all similar in stature, each one of them as handsome as the next. His sister, Milana, had the same dark hair and eyes, and even in the later stages of pregnancy she was an extremely beautiful woman. Her gaze moved to Simon and Logan’s spouses. The Vittorio men apparently preferred their women with light complexions and hair coloring because Lilly was a stunning blonde while Shelby had a gorgeous mane of auburn curls.
Cesare Vittorio was as tall and broad shouldered as his sons. Though his hair was streaked with silver, he was still a very handsome man. Finally, Paige turned her attention to Ravenna. Hair as dark as coal with eyes to match, she held herself as regally as any Queen. She was a striking woman and though she showed nothing but loving kindness to Daniella, Paige sensed a hardness beneath her beauty that led her to believe Ravenna Vittorio was the glue that kept her family together. She imagined Dante’s mother could scare the living hell out of someone with just one icy glance.
****
“Look at her,” Dante said in total awe of his daughter, “already she has them wrapped around her pretty little finger.”
“I wonder how she figured out which one was your mother.”
“That is easy enough to explain. I have been showing her pictures of my family and made a game of having her tell me their names when I pointed to each one. It is Mireia who performed a miracle by teaching Daniella how to greet my parents properly. I shall have to give her a generous bonus.”
“What did Daniella say to them?”
“She said, hello grandmother and grandfather. My name is Daniella. I am happy to meet you.”
Paige’s eyes went to her daughter who was being fawned over and loving every minute of it. “Do you think she knew what she was saying?”
“I am certain she did. I have a feeling whenever our daughter is in the kitchen helping Mireia bake cookies she has also been learning her Daddy’s native language.”
“Her Daddy,” Paige repeated with a soft smile. “You really do love being a father don’t you?”
Dante took her hand and lifted it to his lips. “There is only one thing I will love more, cara mia; being your husband.”
“You’re going to make me cry if you keep talking like that.”
“We cannot have that,” he grinned. “I will be blamed from here to eternity for making your mascara run just before you met my family.”
Paige grimace. “It it time?”
“I believe so. Mother has given me the look twice now and there will be hell to pay if I ignore her again.” Dante slipped his arm around her waist and walked her to the sofa where his parents and Daniella were sitting. “Mother and Father, this is Paige Spencer.”
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” Paige said with a timid smile.
“Yes,” Ravenna agreed, “but it would have been much nicer to meet before the birth of my granddaughter.”
“But we have our enchanting granddaughter now, tesoro,” Cesare lightly chastised. He rose to his feet and kissed Paige on the cheek. “We are delighted that you are here. Let me introduce you to the rest of the family.”
Paige pasted a smile on her face as he made the rounds. She shook hands with his oldest brother, Simon, who was married to a beautiful woman named Lilly. The next oldest was Logan and his wife Shelby, then came Raffaele and Gianluca who were both still single. His sister, who was several months pregnant, met Paige’s gaze with a cold stare. Milana stood beside her husband, Luc, with her arms crossed and simply nodded when they were introduced. Paige was just congratulating herself for making it this far fairly unscathed when Ravenna handed Daniella to her husband then stood up and gave Paige a speculative sweep with her eyes.
“Welcome to the family,” Ravenna said without a trace of warmth in her voice. “It is my understanding that you and Dante will be married soon?”
“Y-yes, but we haven’t actually set the date yet.”
“Do you love him?”
Paige shifted uneasily. “I wouldn’t be marrying him if I didn’t.”
Ravenna arched an elegant brow. “But you have not set a date, which I can only assume means that you are not a hundred percent sure of your love.”
“She is sure, Mother,” Dante interceded sharply.
Ravenna’s expression was skeptical to say the least when she turned her eyes back to Paige. “Are you? You have not seen each other for four years and have only been together again for less than two months. Are you sure you are not marrying my son because you want someone to share the responsibilities of raising a child?”
“This is not an inquisition,” Dante said heatedly. “If that was all Paige was after she would have agreed to marry me the first time I asked her instead of refusing me time after time until she was sure of my love for her.”
Ravenna shrugged, obviously unmoved by his passionate defense of Paige. “There could have been any number of reasons why she held out. I am merely pointing out that you have only been together for a short time so you cannot honestly say…”
“Maybe so,” Paige finally spoke up, “but the feelings I have for Dante developed a long time ago. I love him, Mrs. Vittorio, and I’m sorry if you don’t believe it but it’s true. I started falling in love with Dante the first time we met and it’s only grown stronger over the years.” She glanced up at Dante. “I never stopped loving him and nothing would make me happier than to be his wife.”
“If you truly love my son…” Ravenna stopped abruptly when Daniella tugged at her dress.
“Nonna, why are you and Mama fighting?”
“We…we are not fighting, my darling.”
“Uh huh, you are,” Daniella bobbed her head up and down. “You said Mama didn’t love Daddy but she does too love him and I love him and Daddy said we could be a framly.”
Ravenna smiled down at her. “You are too little to understand…”
“I’m not little, Nonna, I’m the tallest girl at daycare,” Daniella stated proudly. “And anyway if Mama doesn’t love Daddy, how come they do kissing all the time?”
Paige blushed profusely. “Maybe we should have this conversation another time.”
“An excellent idea,” Cesare concurred with a warning look at his wife.
Daniella, however, was not quite finished. “Mireia said that’s
what Mama's and Daddy’s do when they love each other and Mireia said it made her happy ‘cause Daddy was crabby before but now he has Mama to kiss and he got his little princess to love so he’s not crabby anymore.”
Dante leaned down and scooped Daniella up into his arms and kissed her cheek. “You are a very smart princess, do you know that?”
“Course I am. Can we eat now, Daddy, my tummy feels hungry.”
“Course we can,” he grinned.
“You all run along and start dinner,” Ravenna said. “I would like to have a few moments alone with Paige so we can finish our conversation.”
Dante rarely defied his mother, especially when she was in the mood she was in now, but he was not about to leave her alone with Paige so she could continue to badger her. He knew Paige’s nerves were strung about as tight as they could get without snapping, and a talk with his mother wasn’t going to do anything but make matters worse.
He wasn’t happy with his mother right now. As a matter of fact he wasn’t happy with anyone in his family at the moment because of their lukewarm reception towards Paige. He curled his arm around Paige’s waist in a protective gesture his mother couldn’t miss.
“I think there has been enough talk for one day, Mother.”
Ravenna opened her mouth to issue a protest but Paige beat her to the punch. “No, Dante…your mother is right, we need to finish our conversation. It’s okay,” she said softly when he pulled her closer to his side. “We need to clear the air so there are no bad feelings between us.”
“You are sure, cara?”
“No,” she said with a smile, “but I’m doing it anyway.”
Dante reluctantly left her there with his mother. He planned on having a nice little chat of his own with the rest of the family and he seriously doubted they were going to like what he had to say. Once he had Daniella settled at the table and the meal was served, Dante eyed his father and each of his siblings in turn, a dark scowl marring his face. He spoke in Italian so Daniella wouldn’t understand…at least he hoped she didn’t.
***
Ravenna returned to her place on the sofa. “Have a seat Paige.”
Paige tried to convince herself she wasn’t intimidated in the least as she seated herself in the chair directly across from Ravenna. She felt like a school girl who’d been called to the Principal’s office and was now anxiously waiting for the lecture that was sure to come. Paige squared her shoulders, drawing confidence and strength from the words Dante had told her before they came inside. You and I were destined to be together from the moment we met and nothing will keep us from fulfilling that destiny.
“I understand your reasons for disliking me, Mrs. Vittorio, but I want you to know something before you begin. I love Dante with all my heart. I realize I should have told him I was pregnant but there’s nothing I can do to change that now. What I can change is the path of misery I chose for myself when I left him. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to marry Dante with or without your approval, but for his and Daniella’s sake I hope we can work out our differences.”
Ravenna’s eyes were as cold as her voice. “You have caused my son a lot of pain. That is not something a mother can easily forgive.”
Paige nodded solemnly. “I know he was hurt when he found out about Daniella but we’ve moved past that.”
“I am not talking about the discovery that he had a daughter, I am talking about the four years of hell you put him through before that.”
“I’m sorry to disagree with you, Mrs. Vittorio, but I think you’re wrong. Yes we were close but he wasn’t in love with me, or at least he didn’t know it at the time, and there have been other women in his life since. I bruised his ego is all, but I’m sure it didn’t take him long to bounce back.”
“I imagine my son did try to convince himself he was not in love with you after you had deserted him because it was the only way he could make it through each day.” Ravenna's stone mask slipped and a heavy sadness took its place. “Oh, he covered it well but I knew he was deeply disturbed about something, I just did not know what it was. There were other women but they were merely a distraction to keep him from thinking about you.”
Paige drew in a stilted breathe. “Did he tell you that?”
“Not in so many words.” Ravenna leaned forward. “I found him in the study one day sitting behind the desk and just staring vacantly into space. It broke my heart to see such utter desolation on my son’s face, but when I asked him what was wrong he would not tell me. When he stood up, something slipped out of his hand and dropped onto the desk. That is when I knew a woman was the cause of his anguish.”
“What was it?”
Ravenna shook her head sadly. “A ring. An engagement ring to be more precise. You see, that is why I know he was in love with you, and that is how I know what pain he has suffered over the past four years. Now maybe you can understand why I find it so difficult to forgive what you have done. Dante was going to ask you to marry him, Paige, but you killed that dream when you walked out on him and took his heart with you.”
Chapter 13
The color seeped from Paige’s face. “That can’t be true,” she said weakly. “He couldn’t have been thinking of marriage when he hadn’t even told me he loved me.”
“Did you have to say the words out loud to know they were true?”
Paige shook her head slowly. “What…what did he say when you saw the ring?”
“He tried to brush it off and said it was just a trinket he bought for his current lover, but he did not fool me. Cesare loves seeing me in diamonds and has been extremely generous over the years. I know a trinket from an expensive piece of jewelry and I can certainly tell the difference between a cocktail ring and an engagement ring."
"I should have pursued it,” Ravenna said remorsefully. “I should have coerced him into telling me who it was for and why he looked so miserable but I assumed he would be able to fix whatever was wrong between him and the woman he loved. After all,” her smile was wry, “he is a Vittorio, and what woman could possibly resist his charms?”
“If only he’d told me…” Paige choked back the enormous boulder lodged in her throat. “It hurt…leaving Dante was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I thought I was doing the right thing, giving him his freedom so he’d be able to concentrate on his career.”
“It was wrong of him not to be honest with you, though I understand why he did it. It is inconceivable to me that any woman could look at my sons and not realize there is more to them than the power and money they possess.”
“I hope you don’t think that I…”
“Of course not,” Ravenna cut her off. “Dante realized from the very beginning that hiding his wealth from you was unnecessary, but your relationship had only just begun so he was reluctant to confess his dishonesty.”
“I wasn’t exactly honest about my financial status either. It seems doubly sad to know that neither of us would have cared in the least how much money the other had. So much time has been wasted, so many lonely hours spent grieving over something that should never have been lost in the first place.”
“Is that how it was for you?”
“Yes, yes it was.” Paige curled her arms around her waist, reliving her own pain even as a new, sharper pain seized her heart. “I never meant to hurt him. I guess I never really believed his feelings for me ran deep enough to cause the same kind of anguish I went through.”
Ravenna eyed her speculatively for a moment. “Is that why you ran, because you thought he did not love you?”
“No, I…” Was that why she’d done it? Her stomach knotted as the revelation that Ravenna was right sent another spiral of pain twisting its way through her. “Maybe that was part of it,” she admitted. “I was so happy when I discovered I was carrying his baby but I was scared too.”
“So you thought it was better to walk away still holding onto the dream that he might be in love with you rather than stay and find out for certain that he di
d not?”
“Something like that,” Paige said in a hoarse whisper.
“Are you sure he loves you now and that he is not with you because of Daniella?”
A soft smile curved her lips. “I’m sure.”
“That is a good start, Paige, but it takes more than love to hold a marriage together. So often people are willing to work hard to get married, but nobody wants to work to stay there. It is not easy being the wife of a Vittorio; they are hard-headed and domineering and extremely possessive of their women, but they are also passionate and kind-hearted and they love with a fierceness that takes your breath away. Are you prepared for that?”
Paige shook her head with a helpless smile. “I was lost the second I laid eyes on Dante and I’ve been lost ever since. I don’t know if I’m prepared for a life with him, I only know I have no life without him.”
VITTORIO'S MISTRESS Page 16