Chapter Nine Raffa #2
“I have not been fair to her,” Leo said, reading my thoughts as only a lifelong friend could.
“It wasn’t about her so much as the woman I loved and lost. She .
. . she reminds me of her. The courage in the face of new horizons.
Even her laugh . . .” He lost himself to memories, and a part of me that had loved Leo my whole life ached for the loss of this woman I had never known.
Their brief affair had only lasted a handful of months a year or two ago, but it had left an indelible mark on him, a measured, melancholy kind of maturity he had not possessed before.
“I am sorry for your loss. You know I am. But I will not tolerate anyone treating Guinevere with hostility. I will not even tolerate her being treated as anything less than the most precious creature in this house,” I admitted, crossing my arms to level him with a declarative glare.
Leo blinked. “I guess I hadn’t realized how much you cared for her. To say that . . . when your mother and sisters and nephews live here? Well, I’m shocked.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Martina finally chimed in, stepping up beside me to press her shoulder into mine in a show of solidarity that soothed some of my agitation.
“When have you known Raffa to take risks? When have you known him to allow himself to be vulnerable? If I did not love Guinevere myself for the woman she is, I would love her for his sake alone.”
“I was just trying to protect you back at Fattoria Casa Luna,” Leo argued. “Can you blame me when I have been trying to do that my whole life?”
“Sometimes you should worry more about being a good friend than a good soldier,” Martina snapped.
And it surprised me that she was right.
Renzo, Carmine, Martina, and even Ludo, who was almost as unfeeling as they came, had all made it a point to get to know Guinevere on a personal level because I clearly cared for her, and only Leo had not.
But Leo was also the only one of my inner circle who had not witnessed the man I was allowed to be in England at university and in my financial career before coming home. He did not know I was even capable of falling in love like an ordinary man.
Though there was nothing ordinary in the way I loved my Vera.
“I am sorry for that too,” Leo added, his expression broken open with earnestness. “I will make it up to you both, I promise.”
“Okay,” I said simply. “You can try, and I want you to succeed. But you have to know, Leo, that if it came down to it, I would end your life before I ever let you endanger hers again.”
Leo studied me for a long moment, awe and regret and sorrow playing over his features before they settled into something like resolve.
“I understand.” He spoke quietly. “You have found the kind of love worth ruining the world for.”
“I have,” I agreed, even though I had never been less sure that love would come to mean Guinevere and I would be together in the end. “So you will excuse me while I go to her.”
“Please.” He waved his hand at the stairs. “She wouldn’t even let Carmine or Angela inside to tend to her. I think the only one she wants is you.”
Hope burned a hole in my chest like a bullet wound to the heart.
With a curt nod, I moved swiftly up the stairs toward Guinevere’s bedroom. The light was on under her door, but when I tried to open the door, I found I could not.
“Guinevere?” I called softly so as not to wake the house.
How my sisters had managed to get their children down after such a night, I had no clue, but it was only one of the many reasons I admired them. To think our father had thought women a “lesser species.”
“Guinevere,” I called again, only to be met with silence.
The door locked from the inside, but no one ever bothered to lock their doors unless they were being intimate, and I did not have a clue where the ancient key might be kept.
“I could look for the key?” Martina asked softly from the mouth of the hall, where she had lingered after following me up. “You don’t think . . . you don’t think she’s harming herself or anything, do you?”
I had not before she uttered the words. Even though I knew Guinevere was not the kind of woman to self-harm, not when she was so grateful for her health, alarm trilled through me.
Bracing my shoulder against the door, I heaved my weight into it while twisting the painted ceramic knob. The wood shuddered but did not give until I stepped back and threw myself into the panel again.
The door popped open with a sharp crack, the lock having punched through the jamb on the inside of the room.
“Wait here,” I told Martina, who walked toward me and then slid down the wall beside the door to sit on the floor as sentry. “Grazie, amica mia.”
If she was startled by my uncharacteristic heartfelt thanks, she did not show it.
I pushed into the room and closed the door behind me before looking to the perfectly made bed.
It was empty, as was the rest of the room.
I walked toward the closed bathroom door and heard the telltale rush of the shower running.
When I tried the knob, it opened easily, steam wafting out in a thick stream.
It obscured the bathroom as if the space had been stuffed with wet cotton, but I followed the damp wall until I reached the glass enclosure and then opened the door, stepping inside fully dressed in my bespoke Brioni suit.
Only that close could I see through the steam to Guinevere.
She sat curled in on herself at the base of the rushing water, her skin pomegranate pink from the scalding spray, hair a wet slick of black down her back.
Her arms were banded around her legs, face pressed to her knees, and even though she had to be ridiculously overheated—burned, even—she was shivering.
“Mia stella cadente,” I murmured, squatting before her so I could reach out to tip her chin up. “What are you doing to yourself?”
She did not want to lift her chin, but my grip was inexorable.
I was greeted by an expression that rent my chest in two like the swift slice of a katana through the rib cage.
Her huge, luminous brown eyes were bloodshot and filled with so much self-loathing I could not bear it.
I recognized the emotion because I had found it too often staring back at me in the mirror.
“I was dirty,” she whispered, tipping her head back and closing her eyes so that the hot water splashed across her face. “I’m trying to get clean.”
I realized on closer inspection that her hands were still bloody, clasped under her calves where the water wouldn’t hit them. It must have been Ludo’s blood, because she was uninjured, and the stronzo who had tried to kidnap her had been tossed from the bell tower rampart.
“Will you let me help you?” I asked softly, because there was no doubt she was a fawn right now, hurt and cornered with nowhere to run.
I wanted to be the refuge she did not realize she could find if only she accepted the hand I extended to her.
She stared at it for a long time. Minutes dissolving into each other as my suit grew heavy and wet, my shoes pooling with water. I did not move. I barely breathed.
Trust me, I willed her.
It had once been so effortless for her to do so, to curl into my chest as early as those first few days of knowing each other, when she was too sick to let societal norms curb her impulse to find solace in me.
Now, even shaking with trauma, she was unsure.
Of all the things in my life I had not wanted to do and regretted, lying to her and letting her run home to Michigan without fighting for her was the worst of them. Worse than all of them combined.
Eventually, though, she unwound her arms from her legs and reached a shivery hand up to clasp my own.
It felt so small and frail within my grip that for a moment I thought I would break her bones tugging her to her feet.
She rose gracefully, with that lithe elegance she seemed to embody no matter the circumstances, so I was surprised when she suddenly collapsed again.
I caught her, lifting her against my torso and securing her there with one arm banded around her back.
The too-hot water burned even through my suit jacket, so I used the other hand to turn the temperature down and then returned my attention to the woman in my arms.
She had frozen, ramrod straight and stiff like a wooden plank, but after a second, she loosed a long sigh and sagged inch by inch against me. The last point of contact was her cheek resting against my chest, nose turned into the drenched lapel and wet lashes spiky against her pale cheeks.
“I’m dirty,” she repeated quietly. “But I’m so tired.”
“I will clean you, cerbiatta mia,” I told her solemnly, and even though it was difficult to do with one hand, I kept her pinned to my chest while I reached for the almond oil soap on the shelf.
She was content to rest heavily against me as I started with her right hand and then moved on to her left, lathering the soap thickly between her fingers, rubbing with the natural sponge in little circles to banish the blood clinging to the ridges of each fingerprint.
Then her arms, slim and pale from the Michigan autumn.
She would always be slight because of her illness, but I found beauty in every inch of her.
It was not a sexual kind of appreciation, tending to the small swells of her breasts and the tender apexes under her arms, between her legs.
It was something sacred that sluiced through my insides like the warm water around us, cleansing me of the impurities I had felt since she had last been in my presence.
Loving Guinevere was my absolution. Worshipping her the only kind of freedom I had felt in the last five years.
Because there was nothing responsible about our pairing, nothing acceptable or free from obstacles, yet it was the only thing I had ever wanted viciously enough to fight for without capitulation.
No one would take her from me unless she walked away herself.