Bought with the Italian's Ring

by Tara Pammi

  Pia laughed and pushed her wet hair out of her face. She didn’t know whether to be mad or glad about his possessiveness. “I just... I’ve never been in a relationship like this before and with you everything’s muddied.” She smiled when he joined her on the bed and sat up with her tucked between his legs. “I didn’t want to assume.”

  “This is not an affair, si? What it is, we’ll figure out later.”

  Turning in his arms, she kissed his mouth full on. It was a good minute before she let him go and by then they were both breathing hard.

  “Raphael, who was that on the phone?”

  “My lawyer. He’s heard from Allegra now that she’s out of the clinic.”

  “Your ex is out? How is she?”

  “Apparently, she worked through the entire program, is certified to be drug-free and has her addictions under control, no boyfriends in tow, and is desperate to see Alyssa.”

  Pia wanted to ask for more information, dying to know about the woman who had once worn his ring. She rubbed her finger, and then dropped it when she realized what she was doing. “I heard your mother say she was extremely beautiful.”

  She cringed the moment the words were out but Raphael barely seemed to note the wistful tone in her voice.

  “She’s extremely beautiful, the life of every party,” he replied with a faraway gaze, “and every man she knew wanted to possess her. I had the biggest bank account among the fools who pursued her and so she chose me.”

  “You can’t believe she chose you just for that,” she said, shocked by the depth of his cynicism. “You’re a very—” He arched his brow and she flushed. “You know your appeal, Raphael. Modesty doesn’t suit you.”

  “It was my pocket and my power that attracted Allegra. Not that my looks didn’t help. Actions speak louder than words however much she professed to love me. All her behavior, that I was too besotted to see then, proved how much she cared for the status of being Raphael Mastrantino’s wife and not at all for me and our marriage.”

  “So you have no culpability at all for its failure?”

  “Not everyone wants to shoulder blame when it’s not theirs. Frank took advantage of you. It’s not your fault.”

  “But you loved her, didn’t you? When they think I can’t hear them, or maybe because they want me to hear it, people dissect your marriage. They talk about how you pursued Allegra for three years. They call it the match of the decade.”

  Trust Pia to drill down to the matter.

  There was never judgment in Pia’s tone. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tighter against him. He knew himself and yet every time Pia delved deeper, he found something new.

  Not always good things, but things he hadn’t known.

  * * *

  Jaw tight, Raphael pored over her question. Had he loved Allegra?

  Not that he’d had eyes for anyone but his stunning ex. He had been thinking with something other than his head.

  Drunk on his success with Vito Automobiles, puffed up with power, he’d decided she was the perfect candidate long before she had set her sights upon him. He had pulled his family from scandalous ruin and bankruptcy and all that had been missing was the perfect society wife to complete his ascent.

  “No, I didn’t love her. And in hindsight, I wreaked even more damage on her than her mother had done with her affairs and her neglect. I should have never married her. She needed someone softer, kinder and I...all I wanted from her was a trophy wife.”

  He laid his head back against the headboard. Christo, of all the times to realize his faults. He couldn’t soften toward his ex now.

  “Isn’t it good for Alyssa that her mother’s worked through the program?” came Pia’s tentative voice.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I forgave her when she had affairs behind my back. I forgave her when she lied to me about—”

  A hard gleam entered his eyes. But Pia was beginning to see beneath that hardness. Beginning to understand that Raphael felt things deeply. More than even he understood. That he was just good at burying it all.

  She pressed her face into his chest, feeling an overwhelming tenderness for him. And waited.

  “I found her high at the house once with Alyssa barely a month old. Gio and her mother, even mine, they all pled her case. They said that addiction is like a sickness, that she didn’t know any better. But she’s an adult who’s responsible for her actions. I won’t forgive that. She’s not getting her hands on my daughter in this lifetime.”

  “That sounds so final,” Pia said, before she could stop. “Are you protecting Alyssa? Or punishing Allegra? Is it even about Allegra, or is it about your father?”

  He looked so furious then that Pia braced herself for a cutting reply. She’d gone too far. Worse, they both knew she’d unwittingly struck on the truth.

  “Only you could look beneath my anger for a junkie ex, Pia.”

  Something in his tone tugged at her. She longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him. To tell him that caring for someone was not weakness. That he wasn’t invincible, whatever the world led him to believe. “I just... I think you’ve never forgiven your father for what he did.”

  He looked away but didn’t deny it. “He had been my hero for so long. And then suddenly, one day he was gone, without a word.”

  And he’d left Raphael alone with a burden that would crush most seventeen-year-old boys. A burden he’d used to fuel his own ambition. A burden that his mother had continued to put on him.

  “Raphael—”

  “It’s all in the past, Pia.”

  He took her mouth in a hard kiss that sent little waves of pleasure through her body. When he pulled her beneath him, when he rocked into her with the utmost tenderness because he was worried she’d be sore, when he kissed her mouth with warm languorous strokes, she gave herself over to him.

  He loved her slowly, gently this time, as if she were breakable in his rough hands. He told her in sweet Italian what she did to him. But as their climaxes hurled them into ecstasy, as he tucked her under his arm, an ache unlike any she’d ever known settled in her chest.

  Raphael might think it was in the past, but the mark was still there.

  The anger, the hurt, were both still there buried under a hard shell.

  He would never let himself weaken, never care again.

  Pia knew it as surely as she did that she felt something more than attraction for him. Something more than admiration. And the scariest part was that she didn’t know how to stop it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PIA DIDN’T SEE Raphael for another two weeks.

  He wanted her. But whether he’d have acted on it if he hadn’t been shaken by Gio’s sudden heart attack, if he hadn’t been vulnerable, was a doubt that gnawed at her constantly.

  She was more aware of her body now than she had ever been before—aware that anytime she thought of them in that huge bed, her sex became damp and her breasts tingled; aware that anytime she caught even a hint of that aqua-based cologne her skin prickled; aware that when she touched herself when she was showering or when she was finding sleep hard to come by, her body ached for a more purposeful, knowing touch. Ached for him.

  He hadn’t forgotten her, that was for sure.

  Because for every day she hadn’t seen him, he had sent her flowers, a diamond bracelet by an up-and-coming designer whose pieces had year-long waiting lists, so Gio had informed her. She was determined to return it, but then came a brand-new coffeemaker with endless capsule refills because she’d been complaining that Italian coffee was too strong for her. And then one day, the present that had her heart thumping against her rib cage arrived: a high-end set of carving tools and a particular type of wood that she’d told him she couldn’t source anywhere in the world.

  Her heart warmed at the thoughtfulness of his gifts, highlighting the contrast from when it had only been a pretense.

  She didn’t want things with Raphael to be over. She wanted more of his kisses and his hot caresse
s, his warm smile that only she brought out, and just more time with him.

  She wanted a relationship with him.

  But after the second week of still no Raphael, mild resentment and a gnawing anxiety settled on her. Especially when his mother took it upon herself to visit Pia and slyly let it drop that Raphael was dealing with matters relating to Allegra, who had briefly visited Alyssa two days ago.

  More than once, Pia caught a hint of suggestion from Portia as to how hard Raphael had worked to build Vito Automobiles to what it was today. And how much Gio himself owed Raphael.

  All she cared about was that he’d been so close and hadn’t dropped by to even say hello.

  At least her application to a prestigious online university to get her master’s degree in education had been accepted—a dream of hers for so long. No sooner had she received the email than he had sent her a brand-new laptop, a box of chocolates, a pair of her prescription glasses because she’d told him she kept losing her first pair and misplacing the spare.

  When Pia had laughed for two minutes straight, Gio had been utterly puzzled.

  So most afternoons, Pia settled down in the veranda with her laptop and lesson plans while her grandfather napped. Afraid of creating even the smallest ripple through Gio’s precarious health, she had abandoned her plans for leaving Italy for now.

  So it was fifteen days later that she found Raphael standing in the courtyard with a glass of white wine in his hand.

  He cast a tall shadow in the afternoon sun, his broad shoulders tapering into a lean waist and muscular thighs, the very ones that had cradled her. There had been such power, such strength in him and yet he had been so gentle with her. That she knew his body with such intimate knowledge sent a strange thrum of power flowing through her veins.

  Not that she had any illusion that he belonged to her.

  She doubted Raphael would ever truly belong to any woman. And yet, seeing him stand there, Pia could only feel tenderness for him. As if somehow she could bring a new facet out of this hard man. As if she could give him something he didn’t have or hadn’t known before.

  She sighed and trudged up the steep path. His hair, grown overlong, curled over the collar of his shirt. A pang beat through her chest as she noticed the dark shadows he sported under his eyes.

  Wineglass raised to his mouth, he froze when he spotted her. That intense stare of his made her pulse flutter, that familiar feeling of excitement and anticipation singing through her veins.

  His dark eyes swept over her with such lingering hunger that Pia instantly knew that he felt this thing between them just as strongly as she did.

  Sweat had gathered over her forehead and her neck for she’d been walking for almost an hour. Her hair was a nest around her face. She wished she’d worn anything but another pair of old jeans and a collared T-shirt.

  Then hated herself for thinking that.

  “Hello, Pia.”

  Pia walked around him, the clamor of her heart far too much to stand being near him right then, and poured herself a glass of ice-cold water. Only after she took a fortifying sip did she lift her gaze and meet his.

  “Hello, Raphael.”

  The table stood between them, yet nothing could dilute the awareness singing in the air between them, or his displeasure. His fingers gripped the wine flute so tightly that she was afraid he would break it and hurt himself.

  “You didn’t come to the phone when I asked for you.”

  She shrugged while her grandfather watched them as if he were at a tennis match. “I just...it wasn’t a good time to talk on the phone,” she said.

  “All five times that I asked for you?” His tone rang with disbelief. His gaze lingered on her lips, searching, seeking.

  There were a thousand questions in that simple sentence and Pia couldn’t answer all of them in front of Gio, even if she had the answers.

  “I’ve been busy. Studying. I enrolled in a wood carving class in the village. Also thank you so much for the new tools and the wood. And the laptop. And my new glasses. I appreciate all the gifts,” she said lamely.

  He carefully put his wineglass down and folded his hands behind him. “Do you?”

  She hesitated at his combative expression. “Yes.”

  “Tell him about the man you met when you went out to the trattoria the other night,” Gio urged. “You’re seeing him again, aren’t you?”

  Like a hound scenting prey, Raphael walked past the table toward her. “Who is this man?”

  Pia glared at Gio. Really, she didn’t understand Gio sometimes. Of all the hundred things he could’ve mentioned to Raphael her non-date was what he told him? “Just a guy I met at the café.”

  “Is he a local? Does everyone at the café know you’re Giovanni’s granddaughter? Why didn’t Emilio tell me?”

  “So Emilio is spying for you?”

  “Emilio keeps an eye on Gio and now on you too.”

  “I’m not answerable to you. You’re going to let him question me like that?” She appealed to Gio when he finally put the phone down.

  “Raphael,” her grandfather said in a mock warning.

  While she had been taking her stand, he had moved closer. The familiar scent of him—musk and heat—had her knees trembling beneath her. Pia clutched the table when he reached out a hand and brushed her cheek.

  His hand pushed at a lock of hair behind her ear, while with the other he cupped her hip and pulled her forward. Her pulse racing, her body turned traitor, dipping toward him as if he were her true north.

  “Are you trying to make me jealous, tesoro?”

  Staring into his eyes, Pia forgot the entire world. “You’re the one who jumped to conclusions. And I would never do anything so low.”

  “You wouldn’t?” He looked at her as if she were the answer to a lot of questions. A thumb traced her jawline, resting at the corner of her mouth. “You still haven’t told me anything about him.”

  “Christ, Raphael. He’s a waiter at the café in the village. He saw me with some tools, we started chatting and it turns out carpentry is his hobby. We started talking, found we had a lot in common and when he told me about the class, I enrolled in it. That’s it. I made a friend. Sometimes, we hang out at the café. I didn’t know I was supposed to send you a day-to-day summary of my movements. I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to make friends. Am I so untrustworthy? Am I answerable to you?”

  “No, cara mia. Not answerable, and not untrustworthy, but you’re...”

  “Naive and foolish?”

  “Innocent.” How she was beginning to hate that word! “I do not care who you make friends with as long as the only man you let hold you like this is me.”

  “Raphael, please, can we—”

  She never finished the sentence because he pressed his mouth to hers in a soft buss and she was instantly lost. Every slumberous nerve ending leaped to life.

  Oh, how could she want him so madly and be so mad at him at the same time?

  His lips were so soft and yet hard, so familiar and yet there was something new in his every kiss. She could spend a lifetime in Raphael’s arms just savoring the taste of him, learning what he liked, discovering what she needed. Twining her tongue with his, Pia poured her heart and soul into his kiss.

  When he held her like that, when he looked at her with such tender desire in his eyes, desire and love didn’t feel so different. What resonated in her body seemed to calm the clamoring in her soul. When Raphael was near, everything in her lined up.

  “Maledizione, but I have missed kissing these soft lips,” he whispered into her mouth, sending arrows of pleasure to scandalous places. “Tell me you missed me, cara mia. Tell me you lie awake like me in the middle of the night wishing for my body, like I did for yours.”

  Vining her hands around his neck, she sank into his hard body. Soft groans rumbled from their mouths as, thigh to thigh, their bodies fit perfectly against each other.

  Pia had no idea how far she would have gone, if he hadn’t pulled
back. It took her a few minutes to realize through the sensual haze that Gio had spoken.

  She burned with embarrassment. Yet her grandfather ignored her completely, as if the responsibility of it solely lay at Raphael’s feet. “Gio, it’s only—”

  Engaged in some macho one-on-one with Raphael, her grandfather wouldn’t even look at her. “Pia, I would like to speak to Raphael alone.”

  She’d never been dismissed like that ever in her life before. “Not if you’re going to discuss me,” she said, frustration bleeding through her words. “Nonno, I know you worry for me and I didn’t make it easy by trusting Frank but I can take care of myself and this is really not anyone’s business but—”

  “That cheating man is not my concern, Pia. Knowing what is at stake, knowing my worries and my plans for you, what my godson does with you is. Raphael, this has gone on long enough. Will you do the right thing or shall I—”

  “Calm down, Giovanni,” Raphael said softly, a hint of steel in his tone. “The status of our relationship was hardly crucial when you were lying in the hospital bed.”

  “And now?” Gio taunted.

  Raphael replied in that same cutting voice that sent chills up Pia’s spine. “Leave it to me.”

  Pia stared from one man to the other, feeling as if she were standing on ground filled with land mines. A sudden grin transformed Gio again to that loving, but cantankerous old man. Dread pooled in Pia’s belly. “So, you two will be married soon?”

  Words came to her lips but Raphael’s grip around her waist tightened.

  “As soon as I can manage it, si,” Raphael replied, and Pia went utterly still.

  It was as if someone had pulled the rug from under her. As if someone had punched her in the stomach in the dark.

  Contrary to what would be expected of an eighty-four-year-old man who had just had two heart attacks in one year, Gio laughed heartily. “This year, Raphael.” His bushy eyebrows scanned Pia’s face. “You’ll be happy with him, piccola.”

  Whatever protest Pia was about to make died at the transformation in his face. How could she do anything to ruin the happiness in his face? “Nonno, I’d like to wait until you’re better before we even talk about the plans.”