Carrying a Sicilian Secret (Notorious Mediterranean Marriages #2)

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A LCEU WAS IN a state of shock.

And it did not help that he had been standing there, pretending to engage in the typical sort of boring cocktail conversation that Apostolis had always excelled at—and was even better at now, it had to be said—while thinking instead of Dioni.

Of the way she had looked at him the night before last, with such adoration, as she’d woken up to find him with her. He could taste her in his mouth. He had been certain a hundred times already that he had heard her laugh, or smelled her fragrance—a mixture of the soap he preferred and the lotions she used, always mingled with arousal.

Apostolis had already lifted a brow in his direction, more than once, as a sign to attempt to put a smile on his face. And he had tried.

He had tried to try, to be more accurate.

Now she was right there beside him. Touching him, when even looking at her was a weakness.

And yet for all that she was smiling, there was something like steel in her dark gaze.

He wanted to pick her up then and there, and carry her out. He wanted to get his hands on her, his mouth on her. He wanted to lay her down on any flat surface and make them both sigh.

He wanted a great number of things that polite company—and her brother’s presence—forbade him.

“What are you doing here?” Apostolis asked Dioni when all Alceu could seem to do was glare down at her. “Should you be flying anywhere in your state?”

“She should not be,” Alceu said darkly.

“ She flew with medical supervision, naturally,” Dioni said lightly, smiling at the other guests.

“Because she is not a child,” Jolie chimed in.

“Though,” Dioni said with that laugh that drove him mad, “she is finding that she quite likes referring to herself in the third person.”

And Alceu could not abide it. He could not make any sense of this dark wave inside of him, something tidal and primal, roaring up from the depths of him in a way that should have scared him. But it didn’t.

He felt it was the only possible reaction to this moment. To standing here in this dry, tedious business event that Apostolis had insisted they attend because he liked to play the part of careless Greek tycoon only to go around saving people from the unsavory practices of those he met in such places. It was a reasonable response to find the woman who haunted him with every breath right here before him. In flesh and blood.

When he had made it clear that she was to stay back in Sicily, sequestered in the palace.

“Excuse us,” he said, perhaps a bit gruffly, as he took her arm the way he had before and tugged her off from the group. And even though that had a high likelihood of leading to that punch in the face Apostolis would still be only too happy to deliver to him, he didn’t care.

“They’re still newlyweds,” Jolie said with the kind of laugh that made others laugh with her and lean in closer. “Isn’t it romantic?”

That wasn’t the word that Alceu would have used, if asked. It sat on him strangely. It made him feel things he wanted nothing to do with—so instead of engaging with it, he pulled her out into the center of the crowded dance floor.

There were strings playing haunting melodies. There were couples in formal attire. He thought he glimpsed a tiara here, a famous necklace there.

But none of that mattered.

Only Dioni interested him.

He held her in his arms and glared down at her, not certain if he wanted to kiss her...or kiss her and then demand to know what, precisely, she thought she was playing at.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said, though not kissing her felt like an attack all its own. “Perhaps you can offer me a better answer than the one you gave your brother. What are you doing here, camurria ?”

Alceu had not meant to call her that name. He had decided that he never would again, in fact, and then there it was. Right on his tongue whether he liked it or not.

“Well, Alceu, I considered the things you said to me,” she replied with a smile. “And I decided, pretty quickly, that you’re an idiot.”

And she let her smile go sweet.

So sweet that it took him a moment to hear what she’d actually said. “I beg your pardon.”

Dioni’s smile changed, then, and he hated it. He knew it was his fault that it was anything less than sunshine.

But she kept that dark gaze on him, still shaded with steel beneath. “I am not going to play these little games with you, Alceu. As I told your mother today, more or less, it is time to decide who you want to be.”

“You told my mother... what ?”

There was a certain patience in the way she looked at him. A certain knowing kindness that made his ribs hurt. It didn’t seem to matter that her hair was coming out of its fastening and her nail polish was chipped and clinging to uneven nails.

All that mattered was that she was looking up at him.

As if, despite everything, she believed in him.

“Do you want to be the kind of father yours was to you?” she asked him softly. “Or do you want to be a real father to your son? Do you want to be what he overcomes in life—or do you want to love him so wildly and so wholly that there is no possibility that he can become anything but the person he’s meant to be?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She leaned forward, fiercely, and pulled her hand from his. Then she thumped him in the center of his chest, seemingly unaware or uninterested in the stares she got from the people around them. She didn’t even seem to recognize that she was suddenly standing still in the middle of the crowded dance floor, calling attention to them both.

It was something Alceu was certain he should care about—and would at any moment, given his lifelong dedication to seeming perfection at all costs—but he didn’t.

Not then. Not yet.

Not when she was looking at him with so much passion flooding her face.

“Of course you don’t know,” she said, sounding something like ferocious. “Because everything you are doing is about fear.” He must have made some sound because she angled herself closer, or would have, if her belly hadn’t been there between them. “I don’t want that, Alceu. I don’t think you want it either.”

“Dioni—”

“I’m in love with you.” And she said it so matter-of-factly, then. As if it was a fact, not a feeling. “I’ve been in love with you for a long while. Do you really think it makes sense that I held on to my innocence as long as I did, then tossed it aside on a whim? Do I strike you as that kind of person?”

Everything hurt. He had to force words from his mouth and was half-afraid they would come out as something else. “I haven’t given the matter much thought.”

She poked her finger into his chest again. “That is such a lie. Every time you do this, every time you say something so harsh, I assume that it’s that father of yours coming out of your mouth.” He felt as if he had turned to stone, but she was still going. “You think that you’re making it better, somehow, by telling me these things. But you might as well be slinking around in inappropriate clothing with your mother. That’s what it sounds like.”

He blinked at that, thrown off-balance, and he hated that feeling the way he always did.

But it was as if she knew it, because she moved closer, or as close as she could. She pressed into him, gripping his arms.

Alceu expected that she knew that she was the only thing anchoring him to this moment. To this planet.

“I can’t understand why this is so hard for you to comprehend,” he gritted out in a low voice. “I’m trying to save you, Dioni. You keep bringing up my mother—but she is the object lesson here. Do you want to end up like her?”

“What on earth makes you think that I would?” Dioni shook her head as she looked up at him. “How dare you think you could be the ruin of me. Or that you could save me. I am perfectly capable of saving myself, and have done so when necessary.”

“You are misunderstanding—”

“I do not need you to be noble on my account,” she told him, and that passion was still all over her face, but she was no longer speaking in such a fiery manner. And there was that steel again, right there in her gaze. “That is not what I need from you, Alceu. What I want from you, what I need from you, is simple.”

“Dioni. Camurria. ” He felt more than off-balance now. He felt as if the marble floor was melting away beneath his feet. As if there was no solid ground. As if there was nothing but this woman who had come out of nowhere and wrecked his whole world. “Nothing about you is simple.”

“Because you’re in love with me,” she told him, her gaze intent on his. She did not smile, though there was the hint of that sunshine he craved in her gaze. “Madly, wildly, impossibly in love with me. What do you think would happen if you let go of that control you hold on to so tightly? I’ll tell you that I think it would be the worst of all things for a Vaccaro.” Her mouth cured then, only slightly. “You might actually be happy.”

Once again, Alceu felt that wild sea tug at him. It was sensation, emotion—too many things he did not wish to name, tumbling him over and over again. Like some kind of terrible riptide, snatching him away from what he’d always thought was the safety of shore, and hurling him out into open water.

Pitiless. Merciless.

Except Dioni lifted her hand and pressed her palm to his cheek. “A fate worse than death, I know.”

“And what if I am in love with you?” he managed to get out, his voice so hoarse it felt like he was lighting himself on fire. “Don’t you realize that I can think of no greater curse for you to bear?”

And Dioni laughed.

Sunshine and blue skies. Birdsong and deep green forests. That was what she sounded like.

That was how it felt , that laugh of hers.

Like running down the mountain as a boy, alive with a wild joy simply because he moved so fast. Simply because he could .

And because he had been too small, once, to know anything about his family but that. The mountain. The castle. The long, jolting drive to the sea.

That and running until his lungs nearly burst, laughing that off, then running again.

Dioni’s laugh raised the sort of dead who should never have gone to their graves. It made him want to run again, to dance. To render himself breathless and then breathe only her.

Only her. Only this.

She sobered, wiping at her eyes and smearing her makeup, not that she seemed to notice.

“Then we will have to be cursed together,” she said, catching her breath when he ran his thumb beneath one eye, then the other. “Let’s take all of your mother’s dark prophecies and all of your family’s poison, then mix them up all together and make a life out of them. You don’t have to know how to do anything, Alceu. I don’t know myself. All we have to do is try .”

“Relationships require good models, and I have none,” he told her sternly. “I’m not sure you do, either. How can we be anything but a disaster?”

“We will decide,” she said, very surely and solemnly, her gaze on his. “You and I will decide right now. We will decide that no matter what, we will work it out. There will be no more running away. There will be no more ranting on about resisting temptation . There will be no more misplaced nobility, or tedious lectures, or pity. We will be done with that, you and me.”

He sighed, only dimly aware that there were still people all around them. That they were still in a ballroom. That her brother and best friend were not far. But how could he care when she was still speaking to him like this? Like she knew how it would go.

“I think you are optimistic,” he said, still much too gruffly, and perhaps he was afraid of the things he wanted. What if that had been the trouble all along? “But what if you’re wrong?”

“Then we get to be human,” Dioni said, her voice rougher than before. “We will try, we will do our best, and if we get it wrong we will start over again.” She blew out a breath. “Do you know what I’ve been doing on my visits down to the villages?”

“Taking up fishing, I presume.”

She smiled, but her eyes told a different tale, and one that made everything in him tighten.

“I found her family,” Dioni said quietly. “Grazia’s mother and father are still there. And a great many brothers and sisters and cousins. But it was her parents I spoke to most.”

And if she had detonated a bomb, or slapped him across the face, Alceu did not think he could have been more shocked.

He was reeling again, and he was no fonder of the sensation. “You should not go sticking your fingers in wounds like that,” he managed to say.

“There is no ill will, Alceu,” she told him softly. “Not toward you. They knew exactly who your father was. Just as I knew who you were. And they knew their daughter too.”

“You should not...” he started again.

“They know who to blame,” Dioni told him, urgently. “And everything else is the sadness, the grief, for what was lost. What a waste. That’s what her mother said. Grazia was a happy girl with a future ahead of her, by all accounts, when your father got his hooks in her. Why should there be no futures at all, all these years later? Why should you suffer for your father’s sins? Surely the best revenge of all is to live well, Alceu. Even in Sicily.”

He could feel the dance moving around them. It was as if they were one more pillar in the middle of this ballroom.

It was as if he was still out to sea, bobbing up and down in that open water with no sense of where the shore was or how to swim there.

But Dioni had just shown him that if he looked up, he could see the stars.

And when he looked at her, he saw galaxies.

So he took her hands in his. Then he leaned down and set his mouth to hers.

And then kissed her, with all of the longing and need, the wonder and hope, the terror and the desire inside of him.

“I will disappoint you,” he told her. There against her mouth.

But this was Dioni, so she smiled. “I will disappoint you right back. And then we will laugh. Perhaps we will fight first, then find our way to each other again. You will make me cry. I will hurt your feelings. And over time, we will do less of that, I hope. And more listening. Learning. Loving , Alceu.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“I read a lot of books,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“You forget that I knew your father. How are you sure?”

“Because,” she said, her voice low and only for him. Just as she had been. “My mother gave her life for me. It was a gift, and I believe it was meant to be shared. We will not squander it, Alceu. We will savor it. No matter what it takes.”

“No matter what it takes,” he heard himself agree.

Then he kissed her again, and again.

And only stopped when the music did, and only long enough to lean down, and lift her in his arms the way he liked. Then, without a single thought for anyone who might be watching them—or considering a punch in the mouth—carried her off.

Straight into that happy ending she was so sure they had coming.