Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
S ERENA GOT READY for her wedding day essentially alone. Oh, there was the woman who did her hair, her makeup. The wedding planner helped her into her dress, buttoning up the back and babbling nervously.
Luciano had not arrived yet.
The wedding planner assured Serena that it was okay. That they were in touch with him and other such nonsense.
But Serena knew. She’d known last night. There had just been something about the way he’d behaved. Fidgety and strange. The spell of the past few weeks broken.
She did not know why. If she looked too deeply at it, she thought she might crumble, and if there was one thing she could not do it was that. She had never crumbled. Not once. She could not let Luciano Ascione be the reason she did so now.
Perhaps that was why she could not seem to stop the motion forward. It would be less embarrassing to call it all off now, before she put the dress on, before someone—some stranger had to come break the news to her.
He wasn’t coming. She felt it in her bones. She knew it.
And yet she couldn’t seem to call it off. Couldn’t seem to save herself the upcoming embarrassment. It was like she had to go through it, in the absolute worst way, or she might be tempted to forgive him.
Not that he’d ask for her forgiveness or want it.
She did not know what had changed. She wanted to believe it had been a bit of cold feet he’d get over. Drink it away and he’d come back in the morning with declarations of love.
That had been the romantic inside of her, and she’d known better than to believe in it. But she’d hoped in spite of herself.
Because she loved him. Loved their life.
She did not know what spooked him about that. What had changed his mind? What had scared him? Because she knew he was scared. Someday, she would think about it. Someday, she would make sense of it.
Today, she couldn’t seem to. There was too much stupid, pointless yearning that she only had herself to blame for. Her mother had always told her she was dull. Never enough.
Serena should have believed her.
So she settled into the old ice. The old frigid detachment. Move one step at a time, calmly and rationally, so that when he didn’t show, this horrible love inside of her would crack into dust and die.
So she’d be so embarrassed and angry that the only thing left would be to turn it around to hurt him. She’d find the fire within…eventually.
But she could only do that if she made it through whatever this was.
The wedding planner bustled out of the room to “check on things.” No doubt to try to track down Luciano. Serena let her. She wanted to be alone anyway. Blissfully alone in this little room.
Just her and a full-length mirror and a beautiful white gown, simple if not for the intricate lace details. Serena studied herself in said mirror. If she pretended to smile, a picture would show a beautiful, glowing bride, eager to start her new life.
But her face in the mirror right now showed the truth. The makeup could hide that she was pale. The white lace could give her an ethereal look. But her expression was all brittle ice because that was what she was made out of.
If she moved the wrong way, she would shatter. All because she’d fallen in love with the last man she should have.
That was on her. And she always took responsibility for her own mistakes.
So she stood, leaning into every last protective instinct. Detach, detach, detach. Don’t let the pain through. It doesn’t matter anyway.
You were always meant to be alone. It was stupid to be fooled into thinking otherwise .
It was something her mother would say if she was here. But, because of Luciano, Angelica was not here. She’d never apologized, and so she’d never been invited.
Tears pricked Serena’s eyes at that thought, but she gripped her hands into fists and blinked them back. She would not cry. She’d rather die .
Before she could decide her next steps, the door creaked open. She looked at it in the mirror, still too fragile to move, then nearly fumbled right there at the sight of Luciano entering the room. But she didn’t whirl. She didn’t sob. She stood completely and utterly still and regarded his reflection in the mirror.
Their eyes met, held there.
He was here , and she knew better than to let her hopes soar. There was that grim set to his mouth, that haunted look in his eyes and the fact he wore now what he’d worn last night leaving her.
And carried a folder full of papers.
Serena inhaled carefully, bracing herself for all that was to come, then turned to face him. Every muscle in her was tense. But she kept her chin up and her eyes cool.
“The wedding planner is looking for you, I believe,” she offered when he said nothing. Just stared at her. “And the wedding is due to start soon. Yet you are not dressed. You do not appear ready at all.”
He blinked once, then twice, before looking down at the folder in his hand. Serena took this moment of him not looking at her to lower herself into a chair. Maybe if he couldn’t see how gently she moved, he wouldn’t see through her.
He took a step forward, held out the folder. “I have come to some new conclusions.”
“I just bet,” she murmured, and she absolutely refused to reach out and take those damn papers, whatever the hell they were.
“I do not need Ascione. You can have it.”
He dropped the file of papers into her lap. She didn’t want to touch it, so she hesitated, trying to work through his words. What he was saying.
What he wasn’t saying.
I do not need Ascione might have been the words he said, but what she heard was I do not need you .
So she firmed her mouth, pulled the papers out of the folder. She took her time and made sure her voice would be clipped ice before she spoke.
“While it’s good to come to this conclusion before we married under these false pretenses,” she said, skimming the document and feeling a strange twist of emotions that she couldn’t make sense of. Success. Failure. Love. Hate. And because there was so much inside of her, she treated him to ice when she looked up at him. “I do wish you’d done it before we’d planned everything. Before I’d gotten dressed.”
His eyes roamed over her. “You look beautiful.”
That just about broke whatever kept her temper firmly frozen, but she was too tired to start a fight. Too tired to do anything but survive.
She pressed a finger to her throbbing temple. “Why are you here, Luciano?”
“It is our wedding.”
She snorted inelegantly, eyes still closed against the assault of all this. “I have the sneaking suspicion you weren’t planning on attending.”
For a moment, he said nothing. “I will not take the coward’s way out,” he said loftily. “I have given you Ascione outright. It would not do to have someone else deliver this news.”
She laughed. It was a little bitter, maybe tinged with hysteria, but she laughed all the same. “What about the news that you don’t plan to marry me?”
“You get Ascione.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him, staring for perhaps a full minute. He said it like it was a trade. She got his company. He got to not marry her. It shamed her and made her feel small, and she would have settled there. She would have accepted that.
Before.
Before he’d spent evenings with her watching the movies she liked. Before he’d gone with her to meet their— her future puppy. Before he had stood up for her and treated her like she mattered. Not because of how smart she was, or what she could do or represent, but simply because of her.
Because of how he had recognized his own experiences in hers. And everything from that moment had felt real. The unfurling of something…wonderful and lasting.
The ice was melting, and she wanted—needed—to hold on to it, except she remembered what he’d said about his mother. About trying to save her.
That night had been the changing point. For both of them. She had realized someone might stand up for her, and she had thought he’d realized someone would allow him to.
But he hadn’t. Whatever resolve he’d had faded, and that made her anger win. She stood, violently enough that the chair nearly toppled behind her. She stepped toward him, fury propelling her.
“Not take the coward’s way out? You are nothing but a coward! But I do not for the life of me understand what you are afraid of.” She shook the papers. “Success? Hope? Happiness? Commitment?” Despair wound through her, but it had nothing on fury. “A fake one at that.”
“This is not fake, and you know it,” he said starkly. “It has become…something else.”
Oh, that should not make her heart soar, especially the despairing way he said it. And still… “A coward too afraid to say what is true. But I am not. You’re afraid of love?”
“I am not afraid . I have chosen a course of action that will keep us both…” She watched him struggle for the word, when he never struggled for words.
“You have chosen to be an absolute idiot.”
His mouth firmed. His eyes narrowed. There was anger there in his strained shoulders. “I have given you what you want. I have given you Ascione.”
“I don’t want—well, no, I still want Ascione.” She could not lie about that. Holding the papers was like holding a golden goose. But it was still just a thing . She didn’t only want a thing. “But I don’t only want Ascione. I want you along with it. I want this—what we’ve built these past few weeks.” She realized in this moment, that she had also been a coward. Because she had been waiting, putting off the inevitable, afraid to tell him what might drive him away.
And he’d driven himself away anyway, so why not drop the bomb he didn’t want?
“Luciano, I love you. I think you might know that, but maybe you cannot fathom it. I love you. And I want to marry you. For you. With no worries or concerns about Ascione or Valli . I want there to be an us . ”
* * *
Luciano had prepared himself for many responses. Tears. Accusations. Violence, even. That is what he was used to when going into spaces he wasn’t wanted.
He should have prepared himself for her ice, and maybe he had tried, but it had still hurt. Gotten under his skin in ways he’d convinced himself it wouldn’t. But he’d been holding his own.
Until this.
He had not prepared himself for love. Even knowing she might have convinced herself she had some soft feelings for him, he had not assumed she would use it like…
“Why ?” He had not meant to question this out loud. Hated the look of soft concern, too close to pity, that chased over her face.
“Luciano—”
“No.” He slashed a hand through the air to get his point across. “No. I have made my choice, my decision. I have given you all that you wanted when you came into my club that night. From here on out, I will focus on my club, which is what I built. And you may focus on this.” He gestured at the folder. “If your lawyers have qualms on the paperwork, my lawyer will be happy to discuss it with them. This…” He gestured between them. “This cannot be.”
She did not have a quick retort to that. So he should leave. Take this silence for what it was and retreat.
His legs would not move. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The dress was simple, but it made her look like an angel. She wore the ring he’d picked out for her and little pink diamonds on her ears that matched. He needed to leave because everything in him screamed to move forward, touch, grab.
Beg. For things he still did not fully understand.
Success? Hope? Happiness? Commitment?
She accused him of being afraid of those things. And love. Maybe he was, but it wasn’t fear of having them that kept him rooted to the spot.
It was the fear of failing to hold on to these things that mattered. He could fail anyone and everyone. He had, to some extent. But he could not bear the thought of failing her.
“Cannot be,” she finally murmured. “Why? What is it that would be so awful about getting married and loving one another? So awful that you would sign away your legacy, retreat to the caricature of yourself you created and pretend that you do not want all the things I know you do?”
It was everything he’d thought, and he did not understand. She couldn’t… She couldn’t possibly see him for who he was, no matter how right she was in this moment. “You do not know me. What I want.”
“I do. Better than anyone,” she replied in that clipped, calm way of hers. “Because I believe I am the only one you have ever actually been yourself around.”
Yourself .
He shook his head—because he didn’t know what being himself even was anymore, but he knew it couldn’t be anything she wanted.
“Then you should have the good sense to take this deal and run, Serena. If you claim to know me, then you would know…” That no one ever loved him. That nothing he did or did not do could change how another person felt.
“I know that you are Luciano Ascione,” she said, very firmly. “And I would never call you perfect, but I would certainly call you a good man. One whom I love.”
Disgusted, he turned away from her. He wished he could turn away from himself. He did not know how this terrible swath of loathing that he had kept at bay for so many years had somehow grown instead of dying away. “You are the only one.”
“Then so be it. I will gladly be the only one.” There was fire in her now, blazing from within. “Do you think that matters to me?” she demanded, grabbing his arm and jerking him back to face her. “Me of all people? What anyone else thinks? When I know you? No one else matters.”
“How could you know me, Serena?” he demanded, finding his own anger in this whole mess that she would not let him handle appropriately. “I am not certain, after all this, that I know myself.”
“Then let me save you this time, Luciano,” she said, softer this time. “Let me stand between you and the things others have said about you. You are clever and kind. You are an arrogant bastard when you want to be, but it is not mean. And I think, perhaps, what you are most afraid of is not your own shortcomings so much as the fact you do not know what to do with this.”
“With what?”
“You love me, Luciano. This scares you, but it doesn’t make you less.”
There was an anvil on his chest. Something lodged in his throat. Love. Love . This useless emotion that was never, ever reciprocated.
Except she’d already said she loved him. How she could, he did not know, but Serena did not lie. She did not exaggerate. And still…
“Loving me doesn’t scare you?” he demanded in a rasp.
“Of course it does,” she said, in that same confident and unbothered way she confessed any of her odd little idiosyncrasies. “But being scared is no reason to run away in business, so why should it be in life?”
“You cannot run life like a business.” He thought he sounded very sure and worldly then, but she only rolled her eyes. There in her wedding dress . Arguing with him about love instead of taking this deal and running.
Like she should.
Like he’d expected her to.
Like he’d needed her to in order to survive this rising tide of hope that he knew would end in pain.
Pain .
“I do not see why not,” she replied haughtily. “It’s all the same. Keep something alive and thriving for as long as you can. Show up every day, work through problems without giving up. It is the same. Except for one thing. One matters, Luciano. I…” She inhaled deeply, took a moment, and her eyes were shining now. Which always undid him. It was unfair. To be undone by this woman.
“I had my grandfather when he was alive,” she said, her voice quiet now. “And he was also not perfect, but I know he cared for me in his way. And that has meant more than all the successes I ever found at Valli. Because love and care are more important than profits and clients. I have no one now. No one to love and care for—except my animals. And you.”
She said it softly, but it landed like a vise around his lungs.
“I could run a Valli-Ascione merger without you. It would be hard, meticulous work. I could do it. I will do it if you insist on ruining everything, but you will not walk out of this room under the very wrong conclusion that you have saved us from anything. If you walk, you ruin it. What could be. The future we’ve both been a little too afraid to admit is possible, but I won’t be afraid any longer. What about you?”
She did not understand. Could not. Except every word she said made it feel like she did. But how could he sentence them to this…this…certain disappointment? “Serena.”
“You have two choices. You may stay. Get dressed for the wedding and marry me, knowing that we have work ahead of us. A business merger and a life merger. That includes a wide variety of animals, now and in the future. That includes love and difficulties and joy. And children. I think I would like to have children with you.”
Children. Just the idea of it sent opposing feelings through him. An icy, paralyzing fear. And a warmth of hope and joy that threatened to melt it.
Children with her brains, her eyes. Children. Theirs. A family. One that would not look like theirs had growing up.
It was impossible. She was saying it was possible, but how could it be? How could it be with him?
“Or you may walk out that door,” she continued, when he stood there paralyzed by her words. “But you will not walk back in it.” She said this fiercely, and he could see she meant it. She needed to mean it. “Ascione will be gone from you forever.” She clutched the papers. “And so will I be. I suggest you make that decision wisely.”
Gone forever. Even though that’s what he’d planned, the idea of it—with her standing there in white, looking like a beautiful angel, looking like everything that had filled his life with warmth and worth for the past few weeks—cleaved through him like a blade.
She represented everything that had changed him. Brought him back to life after lying dormant under that caricature. Or perhaps she’d simply taken a moment to see behind the mask, because she held up one of her own.
And because it was her, and because she was annoyingly always so right, he realized that it was more than what she’d done for him . He wasn’t saving her from him , because… This was not one-sided. It was not parent to child.
It was partners.
He had melted her ice. He had stood up for her when she had been fighting alone for so long.
Was that why she loved him? How she could? He had…offered the same thing to her as she had to him. Just like under all their surface differences, they were so much the same.
He supposed it made as much sense as anything. And maybe it was selfish. Maybe that horrible disappointment was waiting for both of them. The fear of it nearly had him walking out.
But he was more afraid of walking out that door and being refused reentry. Because he believed her. She would not give him a second chance. He would not deserve one.
So maybe…like she said, they could show up every day and work on it. If there was anyone in this world he trusted to do that, it was Serena.
Serena. The woman he loved.
“It sounds like blackmail, Serena,” he managed to say, though his throat was still tight. “Is that any way to start a life?”
She didn’t smile like he wanted her to, but there was something in her eyes. Something warm. “All in all? It sounds very on brand for any Valli-Ascione interaction.”
He could not help himself. He laughed. He did not know how he could when it felt as if all his safe foundations were crumbling, except that she made everything…better. Right. Just by being her. And if she could be brave, if she could love him, did he not owe it to her to do the same?
She moved forward, reached out and gripped his arms. She even gave him a little shake, her expression earnest. “Stay. Love me,” she said, and it was a demand, but he was not one to be demanded into doing anything.
Unless he already did. “I do,” he replied, as seriously as the vows he would soon say. “Love you.”
“I know. I’d just take the business if you didn’t,” she replied haughtily, making him smile.
He pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, studied her beautiful face. “I will make mistakes.”
“Horrible ones,” she agreed.
“And you will ice me out.”
“Most assuredly.”
“And we will…show up every day and try in spite of ourselves.”
“Every day,” she agreed, reaching up to cup his face.
His hands shook as he reached out, as he placed them on her hips, held on to her. His match. His mate. His everything. “Marry me, then, Serena. For real. For love.”
Her eyes were full, but she did not cry. “For us,” she agreed, and then put her mouth to his.