Carrying a Sicilian Secret (Notorious Mediterranean Marriages #2)

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

A LCEU V ACCARO HAD not been so close to losing control of himself since—well.

Since the last time he had been in the presence of his best and only friend’s younger sister, which made something inside him seem to roar.

But that was the trouble. There should be no roaring. There should be no reactions of any kind. That reminded him of his parents and their bitter theatrics and he had spent his entire life making certain that he was absolutely nothing like them or anyone else in his cursed family.

His late, venal, grasping father. His histrionic mother. His uncles, all of whom had met their bitter ends, and his grandparents, who were legends in Sicily for all the wrong reasons. In a place known for warring tribes and badly behaved people, his family had managed to distinguish themselves.

They had all been despicable. His mother still was. Alceu wanted nothing to do with them.

So he had decided, long ago, that it would all end with him.

He would not inflict himself on some poor woman as a spouse. He would certainly not bring another member of his bloodline into being. He would repair what he could, make reparations for what he couldn’t, and when he died, the diseased strain of Vaccaro genetics would pass forever into oblivion.

Because that is not at all depressing , Apostolis had often said.

Though Alceu had never thought so. I consider it a liberation , he had always replied. For everyone else.

He had been in Paris with his friend when Apostolis had let it drop that his sister had taken off for New York City, an urge she’d developed seemingly out of nowhere.

Alceu had not reacted well to that news.

Because much as he preferred to pretend that he could not remember any part of that wedding or its aftermath, the truth was that he remembered it entirely too well. He had learned a great many things about Dioni Adrianakis, and not all of it had to do with her responses to his touch.

For example, he had discovered that she alone managed to light a fire in him no one else ever had. When, in fact, every other woman he had ever gone near had seemed like nothing more to him than a little match, quickly extinguished. But that was his cross to bear.

The more germane thing he knew about Dioni was that she had no interest at all in ever leaving that island. She had waxed rhapsodic about how much she loved that she got to live there all throughout the painfully awkward run-up to Apostolis’s forced wedding. He knew her opinions of all the villages, each beach, and a great number of the local tavernas .

He could think of only one reason that she might leave.

It must have something to do with what had happened between them.

Or more likely , a hard voice inside had chimed in, what happened after. When you dismissed her as if she was an embarrassment.

He had done what was necessary, he assured himself now.

Again.

But because he had made certain that she would not pursue him in any way, he had decided that he could not go and see if she was all right himself. It would be unwelcome. It should be unwelcome. He was not even certain where the urge to check up on her had come from. Everything about Dioni was...disruptive. He could not make sense of it.

Alceu had therefore done what any man in his position would have done, and he’d had one of his men track her down and follow her to gather the necessary information. He had not told this man what he’d been looking for, because he hadn’t known himself. He’d simply...wanted to see if she was all right.

An unaccountable urge by any reckoning.

He had been sitting there alone, in the folly of a castle that exemplified everything he detested about his family, when he’d seen the pictures of her.

Of Dioni—for it was clearly Dioni—

He had seen all the pictures, but he hadn’t believed it until now.

Alceu still couldn’t believe it.

He’d watched her walk all the way down the length of the street, and it had clearly been her from the moment she’d turned the corner. He’d tried to convince himself otherwise, but it hadn’t stuck. It wasn’t as if she was unrecognizable .

Not with that face that had haunted him for months now, a face that he imagined could have given Helen of Troy a run for her money.

But he could not accept that what he was seeing was true, not even with her standing right here in front of him.

Because Dioni Adrianakis was pregnant.

Six months pregnant, almost to the day, if he had to guess.

But he didn’t have to guess. He knew.

She was studying him now as if she had tried not to recognize him, too, and everything about her...was infuriating.

She was dressed as if she was anyone. Anyone at all.

A pair of casual jeans. A T-shirt with a fox on it. Both stretched over her belly, so he had seen hints of a swath of her skin as she walked. It wasn’t that he minded casual clothes, but this was Dioni Adrianakis and it should not have been possible to simply...come upon her like this. Where was her security? Where was her understanding that she was currently carrying the heir to two fortunes?

Then, of course, there was the Dioni of it all.

Her dark hair was clipped to the back of her head, but it never stayed there. Tendrils were falling as they would, and, as ever, she seemed wholly unaware of it. Her eyes were dark and fathomless, though even now they seemed to tip over into merriment a little too easily for his liking.

Pregnancy clearly agreed with her, and he hated that too.

She looked ripe. Sweet.

And the temptation of her mouth that he had managed to resist was right there. Much too close.

She was looking at him as if he’d said something outrageous.

“What is there to explain?” she asked.

There were many things Alceu wanted to say to that. He wanted her to explain what had happened that night, because he still could not account for it. He still could not understand how she had somehow managed to become that storm to him.

It had been bad enough in that sitting room, where she had been far more potent than the whiskey he’d pulled out in honor of his friend’s lowest point yet. And instead had found himself discussing kissing with Dioni Adrianakis, of all people.

He would like her to explain how, when he’d left that room because he’d refused to be swept up in anything he couldn’t control, no matter who it was or who was involved, he had somehow tossed open the wrong door and walked out onto a terrace drenched with rain.

And had been somehow unsurprised to find that she had followed him.

That, worse still, they had then locked themselves out.

The staff have all been sent on their way until later , she had told him, in that merry way of hers that he told himself made him livid, even in retrospect. And I am not going to be the one to interrupt my brother at a time like this. Someone will come and open the door soon enough.

He would like her to explain how sitting out a rainstorm had turned to sharing a bottle of the local handcrafted raki— far too potent—and ill-advised dancing.

He would like her to explain how any of this had happened.

“You are pregnant,” he said, perhaps with the faintest hint of accusation.

She blinked at that, then looked down. Then she rubbed her free hand over the great swell of her belly. “You’re very observant.”

“By my calculations, we are talking about six months.” He bit off those words, harshly. “When, pray, were you planning to tell me that you and I managed to conceive a child?”

She kept her eyes on her belly for a moment and when she lifted her gaze, he was surprised to see something like defiance there. “I wasn’t.”

“You planned to hide this?” Alceu could not take that on board. “Do you think this is some kind of prank, Dioni?”

“Why would I tell you?” She looked genuinely astonished, as if he was the one behaving outrageously. “You made it perfectly clear that you were appalled at what happened between us and wanted nothing more to do with me. I believe you said you pity me, and were ashamed of yourself for indulging—” She stopped, with a shake of her head. “There’s no point talking about it. I heard what you said and acted accordingly.”

Alceu had always prided himself on keeping his temper in check, but he thought he was as close to fury today as he had been since he was a university student. “You call this acting accordingly , do you? You picked up and moved across the planet, alone, to a city like this? Do you know the sorts of things that happen to foolish, sheltered women in places like New York? Every day?”

She regarded him for a long moment, and he disliked it. Intensely. The way she looked at him made his chest seem to contract.

“There are foolish and sheltered women everywhere,” Dioni said, very quietly, which did not help the constriction in his chest at all. “Including, most notably, at my brother’s wedding. But don’t worry, Alceu. I’m significantly less foolish these days than I was.”

“Where is your security detail? Who is watching out for you?”

And he only realized that he had moved closer to her when her chin tipped up, so she could keep meeting his eyes. “I told my brother to leave me alone. He has respected my wishes.”

He reminded himself that standing this close to her led nowhere good. It led to streets in New York City and the reality of the baby she was carrying. Why compound the error?

But he didn’t step back. “To what end, Dioni? Do you think you can keep this secret forever?”

“I was considering it,” she shot back. “New York allows a person to be happily anonymous. My brother never comes here. It’s entirely possible that I could just...”

“Raise the baby without him noticing?” he finished for her, incredulous.

And Alceu had to caution himself against reaching out and putting his hands on her body. It didn’t matter that he wanted to, desperately. He knew better. Now he knew all too well where it would lead.

“The fact of the matter is that it’s not Apostolis’s business when or how or if I share this with him,” Dioni said, with a certain calm that Alceu found far more offensive than the previous flare of defiance. “And it’s not yours, either.”

“I beg your pardon.” He could hear the ice in his own voice. He saw it make her shiver. “Am I laboring under a misconception? Are you not carrying my child, Dioni? The girl who had never been kissed has had a host of lovers since that night, is that it?”

He was pleased—and ashamed that he was pleased—that he could see the color rising in her cheeks.

“You’re the father,” she said, as if she would love to deny it. She scowled at him. “But I’m perfectly capable of forgetting that when it comes time to sign a birth certificate. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you.” He stared at her, stonily, and her scowl deepened. And her voice took on a slightly belligerent tone. “I don’t even want your pity , Alceu, so feel free to take that with you when you turn around and go back to wherever you came from today.”

The fury in him was like a lightning bolt, and it struck him again and again.

“I do not believe that I will be doing that,” he told her.

Then he took her arm, the way he had done once before, and led her up the stairs and into her own home.

When he had done the same thing after that interminable wedding breakfast, he had assumed that she was that easily cowed. He knew better now. There was a certain alchemy, a certain chemical reaction when his flesh touched hers. It was one more thing he could not account for. But he also could not deny it.

And he was not above using it.

This was how he found himself standing in the well-appointed foyer of a historic Lower Manhattan brownstone with the door shut tight between him and Dioni, and the world.

Which, if he’d thought about it at all, was really not the wisest course of action.

“I don’t know how you do that,” she was saying, forging ahead of him to move deeper into the house, tugging her arm free from his grasp. “It’s impolite, at the very least, to be forever propelled about by the arm when you least expect it. And you do it too easily.”

She walked differently now, and he found it mesmerizing. Her hips moved like a sinuous metronome, so different from the nervous way she’d darted about before. He followed her, not sure what that seething thing inside of him was, all of those lightning bolts—or how it might explode.

Though he had done enough exploding in her presence.

Clearly.

At the other end of a series of drawing rooms and studies, it was all light. She led him into a kitchen that stretched out into a glassed enclosure, bursting with plants. Beyond it was a lovely little garden, walled off from the rest of New York.

He might have liked the place, under different circumstances.

“There’s no one else here,” she told him without bothering to glance back at him. “So no one will ever know that you came today. You can turn around and go, Alceu, and that will be the end of it. No one will ever know who the father of my child is, my brother will get over it in time, and we can all carry on as we were.”

“But I will know.”

She turned to look at him, her hands braced on the counter before her, and a different sort of frown on her face.

“I will know,” he said again. “And I don’t know what gave you the impression that I am the sort of man who shirks my responsibilities.”

“All this out of pity ?” Dioni shot back at him. “On behalf of both me and my unborn child, no thank you. We will be perfectly fine.”

“It is not a matter of pity or any other emotion,” he told her coolly, amazed that every time she threw that word at him—a word he knew full well he had used deliberately, to hurt her—it seemed to dig into him a little deeper. “You are an Adrianakis. Your child stands to inherit—”

“Nothing.” She cut him off. “The hotel and everything in it goes to my brother and Jolie. And I am happy with that arrangement. You don’t need to be involved.”

“Your child is also a Vaccaro,” Alceu continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “And I’m afraid that the child is the last heir to a vast estate. A curse I intended to take with me to my grave.”

She digested that, and then her eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, what are you suggesting? That I intended otherwise? Are you suggesting that the virgin in this scenario should have been in charge of the birth control? Really?”

He thought she was going to shout at him. Or light into him, whether raising her voice or not. And part of him welcomed that, because it would be a kind of proof, wouldn’t it?

That she was overwrought. That she was out of control. That he had been perfectly right to draw a line under that episode on the terrace and more, had likely not been as much to blame as he’d thought he was, ever since.

But instead, Dioni laughed.

She laughed and she laughed.

He was offended. Then he was baffled. Then there was something else inside of him, some scratchy sort of clawing feeling that had him questioning whether he’d ever before been laughed at .

Alceu rather thought not.

Not by a woman. Not like this . His mother, Marcella, always used her pointed laughter as a weapon, but this was something else.

Dioni looked as if she actually thought that this was funny.

She laughed so hard that tears streamed down her face, and in her usual careless fashion, she pulled up the collar of the shirt she wore and scrubbed at her eyes. Then let it fall again, as if using her garment as a tissue was the most natural thing in the world.

He found himself staring at the splotches of liquid right there on the collar of her shirt. As if the secret to the universe waited for him, just there, if he could only decode it.

But then she reached over to that brown paper bag she’d been carrying and pulled it toward her across the gleaming countertop.

He watched, in what he could only term bemusement , as she lifted out a little box and set it on the counter. She unfolded the cardboard edges to open it up, then fished a plastic fork from the bag so she could dig in.

It was a hefty slice of cake, he realized in the next moment. Something green and pink, with icing and fondant and all manner of bells and whistles.

She put the first bite in her mouth, chewed with her eyes closed, and then let out a moan that he was quite certain he had heard before.

His body was positive that he had.

He felt himself shudder into a kind of high alert as she took another bite and moaned again, with the same delight, so that he could feel it deep in his sex.

But she was not looking at him. She scarcely seemed aware of him at all.

Her eyes were closed tight and she was feasting on takeaway cake with a plastic fork as if it was ambrosia from the gods.

Nothing about this made the faintest sense to Alceu.

He had been born perfectly aware of his place in the world. His family’s wealth had allowed them to escape a great many consequences of their legendary and historic vile behavior, but it could not do much to alter public perception. No one would dare these days, but when he’d been a boy it had not been uncommon for strangers to grab his arm and let him know exactly what they thought of his father. His mother. His entire twisted family tree.

Alceu had quickly realized that the accusations were true. Each and every one of them.

And so he had made certain that his life was a monument to iron control.

By the time he’d met Apostolis, there were very few things that he could not arrange to his liking. By the time they graduated from university, the idea that something could not be managed to suit him was laughable.

And from that moment until now, there was only Dioni to suggest that he was not, in fact, impermeable to the temptations that felled weaker men.

He had told himself, these last six months, that it was unforgivable. That she had done this to him with some witchery he would never understand, as he’d never expected to lay eyes on her again.

But now he realized that the real problem with Dioni was this .

The heedless joy she took in forking in bite after bite of her ridiculously over-the-top cake. The fact she didn’t mind the plastic fork, when he was quite certain that there were ample utensils in this well-appointed kitchen.

She didn’t care that her appearance was less than perfect. She was perfectly happy to wipe her face on her own shirt and carry on. She was not sophisticated in the least, and it wasn’t that Alceu looked for a certain sophistication or elegance in anyone. It was that the presence of those things generally indicated a certain commitment to some or other notion of excellence.

If Dioni knew what the word excellent meant, Alceu would be surprised.

Shocked, in fact.

And yet he was transfixed.

With every bite she made another deep, sensual noise. And with another woman, he might have suspected that the point was to make him react in the way he did.

But he suspected that this was actually far more insulting.

It was entirely possible that she had forgotten he was here.

That lightning seemed to strike him harder. Deeper.

In his reaction to his family, and the family reputation, and the distinct understanding he’d had for the whole of his life that he could never make up for the sins encoded in his blood, Alceu had made himself as much an object of his own control as everything else.

He was fastidious. He always looked ruthlessly perfect. He prided himself on the perfection of his manners, his propriety, and his excruciatingly correct behavior under any and all circumstances.

She had already proved him wrong on that count once. He had polluted the one good relationship in his life—his friendship with Apostolis—by touching her. By proving himself the hypocrite he had always feared he was, because of who he was.

Now it was happening again. This time she did not even bother to look at him, such was her sorcery and worse, his reaction to it.

She made him feel something he hadn’t felt since he was a very small child.

Helpless.

Except this time, that helplessness was also wrapped up in the wild pleasure he had taken in her body.

He could remember the rain. The wind. The crash of the sea in the distance. He could remember fighting himself out on that terrace, still not fully realizing what it was that was rising in him, one dangerous heartbeat at a time.

It’s like music , Dioni had said, and it had meant something that she wasn’t looking at him. That her eyes were out toward the sea, the storm.

Maybe he’d made a noise. Both of them were damp from the rain that the wind threw their way, even though they stood beneath the vines of the pergola.

She looked over at him, her dark eyes dancing. Can’t you hear it?

And then she started moving, dancing to music only she could hear. And yet the longer she moved, the longer she danced, the more he could hear it, too.

When she spun around and around and around, and then tripped—because of course she tripped, this was Dioni— how could he do anything but catch her?

He could still remember it so clearly.

Her eyes, sparkling. Her skin, so hot despite the coolness of the rain and the wind, burning his palms.

The way she laughed as if there was nothing more delightful on earth than this foul weather to mark the most cynical wedding that he had ever attended.

The way she looked at him as if he was not a creature of iron and stone, atonement and sorrow.

She looked at him as if he was made of light and air, as if he, too, could dance with the rain, unfettered and free.

He had done none of those things.

What he had done was, in many ways, worse, because he could still feel every touch, every taste, as if they were tattooed into his flesh.

Now that same rush of helplessness was taking him over again, and he hated it.

Why should this woman be the only creature on earth who had power over him?

Why should this bedraggled, stained, careless woman be the only one alive who could get under his skin without even trying?

He liked women who exuded so much sophistication that they might well be mistaken for marble statues, not a woman so chaotic that even one of the finest finishing schools in the world had failed to smooth off her edges.

How could this be happening?

It was an outrage. He wanted, desperately, for this to be a mistake.

But the hardest part of him told him otherwise.

And in any case, there had only ever been one solution to the Dioni problem. He was only sorry he hadn’t understood that from the start.

Therefore, when she took the very last bite of her cake and then stared at the empty box as if heartbroken that she’d demolished it so quickly, he did the only thing he could.

The only possible thing there was to do.

“Marry me,” he gritted out.