Chapter 19 – Renzo
Chapter Nineteen
Renzo
She turns the corner and disappears for a few seconds before I figure out that Geralynn opened the door to the wine cellar. She’s never been down there and doesn’t know how far under the house it extends, but it’s a large enough room that she could get lost in the rooms of wine bottles.
I push the door open and call her name. No response. She’s hiding down there, preferring a cold damp cellar than facing me. With each step down the stairs, the tightness in my stomach becomes impossible to ignore. Is this what my father wanted me to learn? How to love someone?
Why did it have to be Geralynn out of all the women I’ve ever met? I hooked up with plenty of women in Italy who have walked runways in Milan, who owned major social media brands, and others whose families were so deeply involved in “the life” that it felt like we had the same childhoods.
None of them did to me what Geralynn has done with me.
She has completely wrapped me around her finger and reminded me of emotions that I haven’t felt since I was a little boy and my father allowed me and my brother Gino to adopt our very own Italian greyhound.
My mother refused to allow large dogs into the home and our dog, Ravioli, was the first time I ever felt love for someone who wasn’t my mother or my twin brother.
I loved Ravioli before I ever attached to one of my other siblings.
I’m sure Geralynn would sink deeper into the basement if she heard this comparison but…
what awakened in me back then was this profound sense of vulnerability that comes with love.
The older I got, the more of the “grown folks conversations” my father allowed me to listen in on, the greater my vigilance became.
Look at what love has done to Luigi. Or Michael.
Or any number of great men utterly defeated by giving their hearts to a woman.
I’m in the dark, dim wine cellar with shelves and shelves of wine that I invested in upon advice from my family in Italy, and I know she’s somewhere down here hiding from me, preferring the possible company of rats to looking me in the eye.
I understand that I’m old-fashioned. That perhaps I shouldn’t have called her all those awful names. But I love this woman and I can’t live without her knowing and understanding that somehow, the time we spent together locked up has totally changed me.
“Geralynn, you have to come upstairs.”
My voice sounds dark and ominous in the darkness.
I imagine her crouched somewhere like a little mouse, shivering and afraid of me.
I can still follow the rules and love Geralynn.
This doesn’t have to ruin our lives. Men have done it in the past. There were always rumors that this was the case with Aunt Viviana and the man she loved.
He never married her, but to this day, she never speaks ill of him.
The rules are the rules, but I have to follow my heart.
I’m not the eldest like Luigi, nor do I have Gino’s capacity to be the lazy one and stay out of the limelight by always underachieving.
I need to earn my father’s respect and the respect of the rest of my family.
I don’t want to grow old and feel ashamed of how I lived.
I can’t bear the thought of disappointing my father when I’m already just one of his extra sons.
He only needed one heir. Nothing less than perfection would ever get my father’s attention.
With Geralynn, I can be myself, but I can’t be so selfish as to put aside my entire family simply because I want to fuck some woman.
Even if I love her. Geralynn will understand…
“Geralynn?”
“Go away, Renzo! I’m stuck here until I have this baby and I think I’ll just… I think I’ll just live here.”
“In the wine cellar?”
I follow the sound of her voice, hoping that I can keep her talking so that I can find out where the hell she’s hiding down here.
Either I’m close or Geralynn wisens up to my plan because she doesn’t say anything.
I walk around the shelves slowly, listening for her breathing and hearing nothing except blood rushing past my ears – a symptom of my own adrenaline rush.
Can’t it be enough that I’m willing to give her my heart? Do I have to give her everything else too?
“You can’t hide down here forever. That’s not in the contract.”
“Fuck the contract.”
Her voice. Behind me. I turn around, but not fast enough to stop a wine bottle from coming at my head.
I cry out as I duck, unfortunately moving too fast to stay in complete control and coming face first with Geralynn’s weapon.
The bottle hurts like hell but doesn’t break against my face.
I stumble backwards howling in pain and hear the bottle thud against the ground.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
“Are you bleeding?”
Her voice sounds so infuriatingly calm that I want to wrap my hand around her throat and…
hold her against the wall, fucking some sense into her until she realizes that fighting me with a wine bottle won’t stop the explosive chemistry between us.
Does she genuinely think that I want to feel this way about her?
Does she think that I want to even consider toppling everything I’ve worked for my entire life because I got the most forbidden woman in my life pregnant?
Both her skin color and relationship to my sister, not to mention Geralynn’s low social status overall make her completely unsuitable to be my wife or pregnant with my child.
Nicki should have never forced us together like this.
The sick mental games I have to play with Geralynn and myself to understand this situation might ruin me.
I am bleeding. But I stand up, ignoring the blood and ignoring everything except Geralynn, staring up at me with wide, terrified brown eyes.
I press my hand to the wine cellar walls and find the dimmer switch, illuminating the shelves and tunnels with a faint orange glow. She looks so scared. I want to take her pain away almost as badly as I want to hurt her for pushing me into this confused emotional state.
“You are bleeding,” she says softly.
She looks terrified and I move my hand to touch her face, but she flinches.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
I touch her cheek, accidentally getting some of my blood on her.
I lean forward and lick it off with my tongue.
Geralynn flinches and shudders as my tongue touches her cheek.
She tastes salty and the metallic taste of my blood sends a primal sense of desire straight through me as it mixes with Geralynn’s anxious sweat.
“Renzo…”
“Sh…” I whisper, wiping away the spot where I licked the blood away with one of my clean fingers. “I didn’t want to get blood on you.”
“Go away,” she whispers. “Please.”
“No. I won’t. I love you, Geralynn.”
“You don’t. You love a challenge. You love owning my body. You love how it feels to have my undivided attention. If you loved me, it wouldn’t have taken this situation for us to end up together.”
“It’s not that black and white.”
“Well, it’s simple for me. I’m not going to give up my heart to a man who called me disturbing insults and treated me like dirt just because we have chemistry in the bedroom. This baby is going to be a real person, Renzo. Not some mop girl you can bully and push around.”
What the hell does she want from me?
“Do you want me to change the terms of the contract?”
“What?” She asks, her panic genuine. “I don’t want any changes to the contract because I don’t want the contract in the first place.”
“I’ll give you more if you forgive me. We’ll write a new contract that has nothing to do with my sister.”
Her eyes widen with either pity or hope that this will somehow free her from the physical bondage and contract that essentially turns her into my forbidden property. The one woman I was never supposed to touch, let alone own with a deposit of my seed inside her.
“I don’t want you to change the contract due to some misguided sense of guilt,” Geralynn says with detachment in her tone that drives me absolutely mad.
I don’t want her to talk to me as if she couldn’t care less about the outcome.
I want her to know that I’m madly in love with her and questioning beliefs that I’ve held my entire life.
“I want to change the contract to prove to you that… I mean what I say. I–”
“Don’t say it again,” Geralynn pleads with me. I ignore her.
“I love you.”
“Stop.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s ridiculous and it’s the type of thinking that will only get both of us hurt at the end of all this.”
“I can handle getting hurt.”
“Well I can’t!” she screams at me. Her voice echoes around the wine cellar and suddenly it feels like I’m trapped in the same emotional soup as Geralynn.
Blood drips from the wound on my head she caused with that wine bottle, but I don’t even care about revenge as much as I care about securing her love for me.
If I have to fuck her with the same wine bottle she beat me with to get a confession of love out of this woman… that’s exactly what I’ll fucking do.