Stranger from the Past & Proof of Their Sin

by Penny Jordan

  “I just got here.” He set his keys on the table so he could properly pull her close and absorb the feel of her. His equilibrium began to balance out.

  “Yes, but—”

  Paolo cut her off, kissing her with the hungry insistence that always melted her bones. Lauren was tempted. He ignited her blood, every time. But it was exactly that sensation of coming to life after days of flatness that made her draw back.

  “I’m meeting someone,” she told him, and explained about reaching the woman who had known the man her grandmother had been seeing.

  Paolo frowned. “Surely you can put that off?”

  Lauren carefully extricated herself from Paolo’s firm grip. He looked drained and tired and she felt herself softening, but what happened the next time and the next? She had to start standing up for what she wanted. If he loved her, it might be different, but given the state of their marriage, she needed to establish emotional independence.

  “I could,” she conceded, aware of crumpled hope sitting like litter in her heart. “But why should I?”

  “Because your husband arrived home early and you’d prefer to catch up with him since he’ll be gone again later this week. She’ll understand and reschedule, I’m sure.”

  Well, that answered that question. Lauren’s face hurt, trying not to react. She stared at the wall, already suffering the quiet desperation of his next absence. Something had to change. She had to fill her life with more than pining for her husband.

  “I don’t want to wait,” she said tonelessly.

  Paolo’s hands dropped away. “No? Perhaps I should have stayed in Switzerland then.”

  “I thought you were staying in Switzerland. That’s why I made plans. When you make plans, do I get in the way of them?” she challenged.

  “I’m well aware you don’t give a damn if I’m here or not, Lauren.”

  “I never said that!” Her lungs felt as though glass dust poofed into them, but she couldn’t bring herself to pour out how forlorn she was without him. “Just because I know how to live around a man’s schedule doesn’t mean—”

  “Stop throwing him in my face,” he cut in.

  She jerked her head back. He had a very tight rein on his temper, she realized, and it ignited hers.

  “Is that what I’m doing?” she asked shakily. “Because I thought I was explaining that after a lifetime of going along with everyone else, I’m taking one evening for myself. Which I invited you to come along on, but I’m retracting that. If you want to join me in Milan, you can follow in your own car.”

  She shouldered her bag, shaking with anger that was a precious cover for the hurt that was crippling up her insides. He really did only want a bedmate not a lifemate.

  “Don’t hold your breath, cara,” he said scornfully.

  “Oh, I won’t. I’m equally aware that I don’t mean a damn thing to you beyond a sex partner and a vessel for your child.” So vulnerable she felt naked, she asked, “What do you want, Paolo? A wife who wheedles and begs for your affection? One who makes her husband the source of her self-esteem and happiness? You don’t want that burden any more than Ryan did and my pride won’t let me sink to those depths again.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AT LEAST IT would signify that he meant something to her, Paolo thought as she drove away. At least if she asked for his love, he’d know she wanted it.

  The truth washed over him in a nuclear blast of heat and light. He loved her.

  And like an H-bomb, the fallout left him blistered to his bones, blind and screaming silently.

  Because she didn’t love him back.

  Paolo understood love better than most. He had a huge family he cared for with all his heart. He would fight to the death for every single one of them, including Lauren. How could he have missed that this emotion tearing him up was love?

  Because for the first time it was imbued with sexual need and something stronger. A pair-bond that went deeper than blood ties. It went all the way into his soul.

  As he stood there in the darkening house, he wondered how he’d let the woman he loved walk away with such a shattered look in her eyes. He’d been so wrapped up in not betraying his own hurt, he’d ignored that she had needs, too. Needs that weren’t being answered because her pride was in the way and so was his.

  She wouldn’t beg for his affection, but did she want it?

  She had it regardless. Maybe she didn’t love him back, but he couldn’t keep it inside himself. Dio! Now that he recognized what filled him, it threatened to split him open if he didn’t express it.

  * * *

  Lauren had to pull onto a side street and have a good cry before she carried on to Milan. She thought about going back to the lake house, but honestly, what good would it do to slink back into the house with puffy eyes and a bruised heart? You couldn’t force someone to love you. It was either there or it wasn’t.

  For her it was. Very much so.

  Oh, Paolo.

  Once she could see again, she carried on to Milan where she left the car with the valet of the apartment building and walked the few blocks to the restaurant. Five minutes in the ladies’ room repaired her makeup, but she was still fragile and emotional when she was shown to a table with not one, but two women.

  The elder was her grandmother’s friend Luce. The younger was introduced as Emelia. Emelia was about Lauren’s age and bore a striking resemblance to photos of Lauren’s mother when Lauren had been a baby. Lauren sank into her chair, amazed and overcome.

  Emelia had brought a snapshot of Mamie as a young woman. “My mother stole it from my father’s things. She was very bitter that her father had had an affair.”

  “I wish I had remembered to charge my phone in the car so I could show you photos of my mother. I take after my grandmother, but you and Mom obviously take after our grandfather.”

  They both smiled with pained fatalism as they concluded that neither of their mothers was likely to pursue this family connection. Oddly, that formed a bond of kinship between Lauren and Emelia that Lauren instinctively knew would grow over time. They took each other’s details and promised to be in touch.

  As gratifying as meeting her half cousin was, however, Lauren knew it could have waited. She hadn’t needed to be so stubborn about it. As she strolled her way back to the Donatelli Tower and entered the elevator to the penthouse, she had to fight a resurgence of tears. She shouldn’t have argued with Paolo. The upside to being a doormat was never making anything worse than it already was. She’d just learned that the hard way.

  But she supposed the problems in their marriage would have come to a head anyway. She just wished she knew how they were going to work it out. No matter how hopeless it seemed, they had to. They had a baby on the way.

  Which meant she’d be groveling, and that made her teeth clench in protest.

  The elevator pinged and the doors opened. Paolo stood on the other side, his Italian heritage in full display with an undertone of darkness to his skin, his eyes blazing with passionate emotion. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Lauren fell back a step, stunned. He still wore his rumpled clothes. His face was lined with fatigue and something else that made a fierce white light strike through her as he raked his gaze over her, pulling her apart.

  “I told you, I had a dinner date.” She skittishly exited the elevator.

  “Where? I left right after you did, but I didn’t pass you. I was watching for you. How fast were you driving, Lauren?”

  She let him take the weight of her bag and sidestepped his intimidating nearness. “I pulled off to use the ladies’ room and need to again,” she excused, anxious to drag her composure together. What was he doing here? Her body shook with reaction while her mind raced. She wanted to take this as a good sign, but a sign of what? Did he want some needy pushover of a wife?
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  “Why didn’t you answer your mobile?” he demanded the minute she emerged.

  “It needs to be charged,” she said, drying her still-damp palms on her backside before finding the phone in her purse. She walked it to the dock in the corner.

  Had she really been wishing he had come with her? Right now his dynamic presence made her feel like her world was crashing in. If she was still sometimes overwhelmed by the effect he had on her physically, at least she was used to it, but there was a fresh intensity to him that seemed like a lasso swirling above her head, waiting to alight around her and yank her in. It made her wary because she knew if it happened, she was done. There’d be no self-protection left.

  “What, um, changed your mind about coming?” she hazarded to ask.

  “I wanted to know something.” He scowled at the way she circled away from him toward the windows on the far side of the sofa. She could see his reflection, arms folding with dismay.

  Not sex, then, and definitely not because he missed her. Lauren looked at her feet, then lifted her head. The view of Milan was a blanket of sparkling lights that her blurring eyes didn’t see.

  “You could have called,” she pointed out.

  “I wanted to see your face when I asked.”

  “Oh, good God, it wasn’t a man, Paolo.” She swung around so he could see the hurt and offense on her face. “It was a friend of my grandmother’s and my half cousin. Or quarter. I don’t know what we are, but she was nice and I’m happy I met her. Okay?”

  “Of course it wasn’t a man. Because you love me, don’t you?”

  She sucked in a pained breath, feeling tricked into turning around and letting him see what a devastating effect his question had on her. She couldn’t hide the truth, not from him. That sort of dissembling had been peeled away layer by layer over the past weeks of intense physical closeness.

  It seemed an especially nasty betrayal that he just stood there staring at her, silently demanding the truth from her. Demanding she bare her soul. Insisting she reveal what she wanted most in this world so he could tell her she couldn’t have it.

  Well, damn him anyway.

  “Yes,” she declared with a hint of defiance and tried to stare him down, but her brows were twitching and her inner barriers quivering under the onslaught of intense feelings she couldn’t contain.

  He was far better at it than her, penetrating into her psyche with a look that burned all the way from across the room.

  “How long have you loved me?”

  She couldn’t help flinching. His voice was almost tender, but the question was so cruel she could hardly bear it.

  “I don’t know.” She realized she couldn’t think of a time when she hadn’t loved him. When his opinion hadn’t mattered. When his attention hadn’t scored her like a knife. When every cell in her being hadn’t been tuned in to him. Her lips trembled and her body convulsed in a shivering shrug. “Forever?”

  “Then why in hell did you marry Ryan?” he asked in a voice that cracked.

  She flinched, possibly able to withstand contemptuous fury but he sounded hurt.

  “I was young and stupid,” she said defensively, rallying with a pained, “You know what that’s like. You did the same thing. You married that other woman.”

  “She wasn’t anyone you knew. I didn’t flaunt her under your nose for five damned years!”

  So harshly unforgiving she wanted to cry, but how could she have known it mattered? How?

  Paolo could only imagine what he looked like. His hands had been spiking up his hair for the last two hours while he waited for her, getting nothing but voice mail until he was convinced she was in a ditch somewhere.

  “I hated you for that, Lauren,” he admitted, finally getting off his chest a weight that had been suffocating him unacknowledged since forever.

  She made a sound of extreme hurt, giving him a pinch of compunction, but this particular wound needed flushing before it would close and heal.

  “You married the wrong man.”

  It wasn’t anything she hadn’t said to herself, but the way he said it, angry and filled with accusation, was new and freshly hurtful.

  “You think I should have left my wedding with you.” It was completely illogical, so much easier to say than it would have been to do, but in her heart she believed it, too.

  “Yes,” he agreed, a ring of accusation still in his voice.

  “I didn’t think you were serious. I believed you hated me.” Her voice cracked and she couldn’t continue. Her hands ached where she clutched them together and she tried again to focus on the Milan skyline, but to no avail. The wall of windows was a black slate with a single lamp reflected in it. It winked as Paolo passed in front of it and came to stand behind her and grasp her shoulders.

  She ducked her head, devastated anew by his power to hurt her with nothing but his own hurt.

  “What I feel for you isn’t love, Lauren.”

  A paroxysm of pure anguish struck her. Before she could recoil, his hands tightened and he spoke with swift intensity.

  “Love is a security blanket your family gives you. It makes you strong enough to take on the world. You are not a warm, fuzzy blanket, Lauren. You’re a wildfire. You’re a drop out of a plane without a chute. What I feel for you makes me feel weak and scared and I can’t control it. I have conquered a million different challenges and the one thing I couldn’t do was stop what I felt for you, even though it could destroy lives.”

  She lifted her head and turned to search his eyes, drawn on a rack of conflicting beliefs.

  Paolo framed her face with gentle hands. “What I feel for you is so much bigger than love. You struck me between the eyes the first time I saw you, so much so that I drank myself into oblivion that night. I didn’t put it together. I didn’t realize that the reason I was so gutted by that baby not being mine was because I’d given up something precious for it. You.”

  “I didn’t think it mattered who I married because the one man who intrigued me was taken,” she confided, seeing that truth now.

  “I should have stolen you from the church before you went down the aisle. These lonely years for both of us have been my fault,” he said bleakly.

  She touched his lips, fingertips dampened by his hot breath as delicate hope invaded her heart. “You had to straighten out the bank. I needed to grow up. Mamie needed me. Perhaps it worked out as it was meant to.”

  He nodded somberly. “But I would have come to you in Charleston even if you hadn’t called. It might have been a day or two later, after his death was made public, but nothing would have kept me away. Nothing would be different now.”

  “We’d still have had that fight this evening before leaving the house?” she teased, tearing up with remembered hurt, but soothing over it for both of them.

  He smirked ruefully. “Probably. Because when a man loves a woman this much, he can’t believe she’s so obtuse about what it means when he rushes home to see her.”

  “But that’s because I’m not—”

  He kissed her, stilling any self-deprecating argument she might have raised.

  Paolo lifted his head a few minutes later. A light she’d never seen shone from his eyes. “Quit telling me what you’re not. You’re a Donatelli. That puts you head and shoulders above the rest right there.”

  His arrogance made her smile, which only made him stand taller and even more proud. “You’re gloriously human, Lauren. Passionate and softhearted and capable of making mistakes because you love someone. I need that, working with numbers and bankers and economists all day.”

  “Exactly. Human. Not an international space station or anything really exciting.”

  “And yet I feel omnipotent, having won your love.”

  She blinked fast, trying to see through her tears. “What I feel for you...”
She bit her lip. “I always knew you had the power to consume me. I was afraid to let you, afraid of how intense my feelings were. I never felt this way with Ryan.”

  He cupped her face, thumbs gently smoothing under her damp eyes. “I used to think that after the childhood he’d had, he deserved the love of a good woman. It’s the only way I could justify not stealing you from him. It’s his loss that he didn’t appreciate you, Lauren. I won’t make that mistake.”

  Her smile trembled and fell apart under his tender kiss. Slowly they melted into each other, for once savoring their reunion because they knew now, without doubt, that they had the rest of their lives together.

  EPILOGUE

  Fourteen weeks later...

  LAUREN SMILED, FEELING as though she was an actor in a movie. The hee-haw of the ambulance siren was so European.

  “There’s nothing funny about this, Lauren.” Paolo took the oxygen mask off his face to speak, rocking on his seat as the ambulance took a sharp corner.

  “Don’t be angry at me. This is the one who didn’t want to wait for the ambulance.” She pointed at the sleeping infant swaddled beside her, his little face screwed up in a masculine frown of concentration, as though everything he did would be done intensely whether it be sleep, cry or deliver.

  No mystery where he’d get a quality like that from, Lauren thought with another affectionate grin.

  “He and I will have words about this, make no mistake. He almost put me into an early grave. I still feel weak,” Paolo complained, his words belied by the flush of pride that shone off him like a halo.

  “Keep breathing, Papa,” the female attendant said, urging him to replace the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. “Your wife did all the work, you know. Catching is the easy part.”

  “He did very well,” Lauren defended faithfully. “But I bet you pity your parents now, don’t you?”

  “Quite a bit,” Paolo acceded ruefully. “If this is any indication, karma has arrived in a one-stone package of heartstopping payback.”