Chapter One
Gabriella
“What is the meaning of this?” My mother’s harsh tone rang out and I jumped back from the gardener’s son at once. Timo seized his clippers and attacked the hedges he’d been shaping with renewed zeal and a frown of deep concentration, letting me stand before my mother’s fury alone.
I should have expected no better of him.
Timo was cute and available, and I’d been dying to know what it was to feel someone’s lips on mine, and he seemed like the perfect candidate to find out.
Having just turned thirteen, I was tired of practicing on my teddy bear and wanted to try out the real deal.
The gardener’s son, while nobody special, had been checking me out, so I decided to take a whack at kissing.
His lips were surprisingly soft for someone who worked outdoors most of the day, and here I thought they would be chapped.
When his tongue darted out and into my mouth, I froze.
What was that about? I had read about French kissing, but the concept was foreign.
Going to an all-girls school with my two sisters had not provided me with any real knowledge.
They had some interesting things to say on the subject, but I knew better than to fall for bathroom gossip, as they were surely as much in the dark as I was.
I had lingered, exploring the feeling of his tongue in my mouth without returning it, so lost in study of this sensation that I didn’t even know danger was near until it had found us in the form of my mother.
And she still had me in her sights.
“Don’t make me repeat myself, young lady.”
“He asked me to smell his breath and tell him if he smells like tuna fish. That is what his father brought him to eat for lunch. Isn’t that awful, mama? Tuna fish? Maybe we should supply lunch for our hard-working staff, what do you think?”
I clasped my hands behind my back, gently rocking forward and back on my feet, wearing my most earnestly innocent expression.
I’d learned to become a good actress around my mother.
She could be a real she-devil when she wanted.
But as I’d learned from observing my father, the best way to handle uncomfortable situations with her was to evade the issue and deflect onto something else.
“That better be all,” my mother said with a skeptical sniff. “Timo, your break is over. Back to work. Go see to the beds on the south lawn.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And off he scuttled. Ugh. No backbone whatsoever.
He was as soft as his lips, or so my father would say.
‘Never give your heart to a man, figlia, none of them are good enough for you,’ he repeated often.
Even then I knew exactly what I wanted. Not wealth.
Not status. Not a title. I wanted a man who chose me.
Who would fight for me and could stand up to my parents.
A man who when he looked at a room full of people and still only saw me.
The books I secretly read were filled with heroes who crossed oceans, fought battles, and risked everything for love.
It never occurred to me that the men in my world only crossed oceans for business and fought battles for power.
My mother waited until he was out of earshot before adding a warning. “Mind yourself and don’t let me catch you with that boy again.”
“Si, mama.”
I listened to the sound of her retreating heels on the concrete before scampering off to find Timo.
I wanted more French kissing and didn’t give a flying fig about what my mother thought.
I was thirteen and just beginning my passionate adventures, or so I thought.
I was Gabriella, and all the world was as young and fierce and free as me!
Now where had that memory sprung from? I smiled, lingering in nostalgia and in no great hurry to return to reality. I had earned myself a terrible scolding that day, but no more than that, because my father always indulged me and overruled any punishment my mother tried to implement.
If only my mother could have contented herself with threats of punishment, but no, she wanted to have control over every part of my life.
Years later, when I begged my parents to allow me to get a post-secondary education and pursue my dream of working in the field of medicine, my mother was adamantly opposed.
A waste of time and money, she called it.
A pointless diversion, distracting me from where my true obligations lay.
My father, however, overrode her yet again, and took my side.
“If it makes her happy, why not? She should be allowed to pursue her heart’s desire until her other responsibilities take precedence, Rosa.”
As the eldest of three girls in a Mafia family, I’d thought I’d won the lottery by having the best, most understanding father in the world. Nothing could diminish my excitement for university, not even the underlying threat of one day having a future in which I had no say.
But near the end of the second trimester in the nursing program at U of T, I received a call from Papa, a call that would change everything. He was coming for a visit.
This was not surprising. I went to school in the same city where my family lived, and he often popped by to see me.
This was preferable to going home to my grumpy, over-controlling mother.
But he had never called me to formally say he was coming for a visit before, and had never told me to blook off the time for his visit.
I may not have been raised to know his business, but I knew him. This meant he wasn’t merely a father visiting his daughter. Worse, I was pretty sure something had happened to incite this visit and knew by instinct I wouldn’t like it.
My mother’s words the day I left for university as she watched me pack whispered in my thoughts. “There is no running from this life. In the end, you will wind up just like me.”
While I understood the nuance, I’d always felt that my parents, while not a loving marriage, but a contractual one, had an understanding.
My father had never been mean to her and had never laid a hand on her.
But from weddings we’d attended, I knew many other women weren't so lucky, practically being escorted at gunpoint down the aisle and for what? A business deal, power, money, but not happiness. No way in hell would I be bartered to a man who didn’t give a crap about me.
I wanted love in my life with a man whose world revolved around me.
I paid attention to the way my father conducted himself and his business and noticed the slight change in tone or accent when the context shifted. In the end, I used these very same tactics to escape my family.
“Angelo.” My father always called me Angel and then followed up with a kiss on each cheek. “You look tired, Piccolo Mia.”
He was really pulling out all the stops today by calling me Angel and his little one back-to-back. He was definitely buttering me up for something big.
“Nice to see you too, papa. Why did you ask to see me?”
He wrapped one arm around me. “Let’s walk,” he said, guiding me away from my dorm building.
As it was more of an order than a suggestion, I allowed myself to be compliantly led across the campus.
“Are they working you too hard?”
What an odd question. He usually wanted to know if I was studying hard enough, and would playfully prove difficult to convince while I assured him that, yes, I was going to class, keeping clear of parties, and focused on my tasks.
Even though I knew he was teasing, it sometimes annoyed me that he would suggest I wasn’t taking my studies seriously.
Now he seemed to be fishing for complaints.
“No, Papa, everything here is perfect, and I love it just how it is.” Beneath the surface of my words, I delivered a silent challenge to him, who had always put my happiness first, to second guess and hopefully, leave off telling me whatever he’d come here to say.
He squeezed my shoulders a little tighter. He was a big man and I always felt like a small child in his embrace, which could be wonderful at times, but not now. Instead, I felt a healthy dose of dread.
“I have news,” he finally said as our walk took us further away from the security of people into a less traveled area of the campus.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, I prepared myself for the inevitable.
“Your mother and I have found you a match.”
For a moment, the world continued normally around us. Students walked past. Someone laughed in the distance. A bicycle rattled over the pavement. Yet everything sounded far away, muffled, as though I had been dropped underwater. It was time to play stupid. “Oh? For what?”
My father’s arm squeezed me even tighter, forcing me to keep up to his longer stride. His hand, which had been resting gently against my upper arm, gripped my flesh painfully. There would be a bruise, I was sure.
“Ouch, Papa, not so hard!” I added a quaver to my words, a hint of vulnerability, and he immediately lessened the pressure.
“For you to be wed. We have formed an alliance with another family and to seal the deal, there will be a marriage.”
My heart cracked, his words lashing and wounding me in ways I was unable to express. Not aloud, and not to him.
I needed to play the long game, or he would set extra guards on me.
In my sweetest, most amicable tone, I said, “I understand, Papa.” Years of studying.
Years of fighting for the chance to attend university.
Every late-night exam, every clinical rotation, every sacrifice suddenly felt fragile.
Like a house of cards. One decision from my father and the future I’d spent years constructing threatened to collapse.
“Is there no way to delay it until the end of my next semester? Once I have my certification—”