Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Elio watched his new wife go through the paperwork in her inbox, which mostly consisted of her reading through it and then shredding it. Although she did an excellent job of pretending he wasn’t there, fury vibrated off her petite, curvy form in waves.
He would bet she could still taste his kisses as much as he could still taste hers. Bet she could still feel the hunger in them.
Poor Siena. Betrayed by her own body.
“I’m done,” she said in a clipped tone after they’d been in the office for a good three hours.
He stretched his neck. “Where to next?”
Her lips tightened.
He smiled. He knew damned well that when Siena had said she had a busy day, it was all bullshit to get away from him. She rarely worked on Sundays. “I’d like to take you somewhere to eat.”
Hostile eyes met his.
“If you want to keep finding work for yourself to get through the hours until evening, then carry on, or we can go and eat. Either way, you’re stuck with me.”
Closing her eyes, she breathed in through her pretty nose before jerking her head. “Fine. We can go eat. Where do you want to go?”
“Carlo’s. Do you know it?”
She shook her head, sliding the strap of her handbag over her shoulder.
“They do the best carbonara in Naples.”
“Every restaurant in the city makes the best carbonara.”
He grinned. “In Carlo’s case, it’s justified.”
She strode to the door. “I’ll take your word for it.”
* * *
Carlo’s turned out to be a very narrow, very long, dimly lit restaurant even more tucked away than the café her family used as a front for their gambling hub.
Everything from the décor to the music being piped out gave it an old-school vibe, like something from a movie set decades and decades ago.
It didn’t surprise Siena that they were by far the youngest people in there.
It was so busy she thought it unlikely they would get a table.
A man in his sixties with a bald head and pot belly just like her grandfather’s, and the thickest moustache she’d ever seen, bustled out of the swing door separating the restaurant from the kitchen and strode over to them with his arms spread wide.
“Elio!” he cried when he reached them. “How good to see you, my friend.” He planted loud, smacking kisses to Elio’s cheeks. “Where have you been?”
“Busy,” Elio answered, returning the kisses. “I got married.”
Outraged, the older man clasped Elio’s forearms. “Married? Without telling us? Where was our invitation?”
“Meet my wife,” he said. “Carlo, this is Siena.”
Any thought Siena had that Elio had avoided the man’s question was abandoned when Carlo finally looked at her properly, and his eyes widened, first in recognition and then in understanding.
“You are Lorenzo’s daughter?”
Although the man asked the question in a kindly enough manner, she sensed hostility towards her father. On edge, she nodded. She was indisputably in Elio’s turf.
“My condolences on his death,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He held her stare another moment before he nodded and smiled. “I’ll take you to your table.”
To reach their table, they had to walk the gauntlet, and it really did feel like a gauntlet.
Carlo’s effusive welcome had attracted the attention of the other diners, and every one of them was watching them.
A significant number called out greetings to Elio, which he responded to with handshakes and more kisses, leaving her alone and feeling exposed for long seconds at a time.
Their table was the furthest from the entrance, close to a door marked private.
It didn’t surprise Siena that Elio took the seat with the best view of the entrance.
Her father had never sat with his back to a main door, a habit all his children had adopted.
In this restaurant, her view of the entrance partly obscured, she instinctively knew any hostile stranger who entered would be a friend to her.
“Two carbonara?” Carlo asked once they were both seated.
She flicked her eyes to Elio, whose lips curved knowingly at the corners.
“Do you put onion in it?” she asked tentatively. She could not bear onions in dishes where it wasn’t cooked down.
Carlo looked at her as if she’d asked if he put diced children in it. “Anyone who puts onion in carbonara deserves to be shot.”
She smiled, agreeing wholeheartedly. “Then I would love a bowl, thank you.”
He returned the smile before bustling off, reappearing moments later with a bottle of Valpolicella and a jug of iced water. He poured them a glass each of both, then bustled off again, this time into the kitchen.
Siena reached for the bottle of wine that had been placed between them and studied the label with a wry shake of her head. It came from the chateau her cousin Francesca had worked at.
“I noticed that the last time I was here,” Elio, the man who’d chosen Francesca from all Siena’s cousins for the precise reason that she was a virgin, commented idly. “It’s a nice wine.”
She put the bottle back and drank some of her water.
A platter of antipasti was placed between them. Elio put his fork straight to it.
“You need to eat,” he said after he’d eaten a chunk of mozzarella and tomato.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since our wedding buffet, and you ate very little of that.”
“I wonder why,” she muttered.
“Starving yourself isn’t going to make our marriage any more pleasant for you,” he pointed out as he stabbed a thinly sliced fried aubergine. “Also, Carlo and Rocco will be insulted if you don’t make an effort to eat.”
With a tight sigh, she drove her fork into a plump green olive and popped it into her mouth. He was still watching her expectantly when she swallowed, so she tried an arancini ball. One bite and her taste buds exploded.
“It’s good?” Elio asked, his eyebrow raised in anticipation.
Unable to help herself, she made a noise like a muffled laugh and nodded. “Yes. It’s good.”
“Now try the aubergine.”
“I hate aubergine.”
“So do I, but not the way Rocco cooks it. Go on, try it.”
Her nose wrinkling with the opposite of anticipation, she quickly popped the slice of slime into her mouth and found herself chewing on something that zinged with garlic and mint and was nothing like the slimy texture of the last aubergine she’d eaten when she’d sworn off it for life.
Just like that, her appetite roared to life.
“You and Carlo seem to be good friends,” she said when they were halfway through the platter, and her tensed muscles had relaxed.
He nodded and drank some wine. “He’s always been good to my family. He gave me my first job.”
“You used to work here?” She couldn’t imagine it.
“I did. He took me on when I was twelve.”
“At twelve? I thought you had to be sixteen to get a job?”
“It wasn’t on the books, princess.”
She didn’t know if she disliked him calling her princess or wife the most. His princess was as mocking as his wife was proprietorial.
“Rocco, his partner, was an old friend of my mother’s,” he explained.
Unsettled by his mention of his dead mother, Siena finally took a sip of her wine.
“Your father’s war left us poor,” he told her bluntly. “Out of love for my mother, Rocco and Carlo gave my grandmother a job and let me bring my siblings and cousin here when we finished school. We would sit at this table and wait for her to finish her shift.”
“This table?”
He nodded. “They always fed us. Always. They doted on us. I started helping out, mostly because I was bored, but also as a thank you. When I was twelve, and my brother was old enough to watch the younger ones, they offered me a job in the kitchen, strictly off the books.”
She didn’t like to imagine Elio or his younger siblings and cousin as children, but couldn’t stop the image forming of four orphaned children sitting around this table, their little legs dangling on the chairs they sat on, waiting for the only adult left in their lives to finish working.
It was an image that made her heart twist painfully.
At twelve, Siena had been collected from school by her mother and driven home by one of the men who worked for them, and then fed a snack by the chef they employed.
She would do her homework or go for a swim in their pool or, if Gabriella or another friend had come home with her, sit in her room and listen to music, paint their faces with makeup and talk about boys.
She’d never known a day of suffering. Not until she was fourteen. Compared to what Elio and his siblings and cousin had lived through, her suffering had been nothing. Less than nothing.
He wasn’t that child any more, she reminded herself. She was no more responsible for his suffering than he had been, but it was her he’d chosen to exact his vengeance on.
“What did you do for them?” she asked, keeping her voice steady.
This was the closest they’d come to being cordial with each other, and while she’d prefer not to have to talk to him at all, she was curious about him.
Elio, it seemed, knew everything about her and her life, whereas she knew him only by reputation.
She’d known him by reputation long before her brothers had, but even that had only been his reputation with women. She’d sensed the threat he posed, but had underestimated how great that threat was.
“Pot washing, unloading deliveries, that kind of thing,” he answered. “But over time they trained me on everything.”
“Even cooking?”
“My carbonara will never be as good as Rocco’s, but I learned from the best and can feed myself.” His stare became speculative. “Maybe one day I will cook for you.”
She gave a quick smile to hide the fact that the thought of Elio cooking for her made her feel more disjointed than she already was. “As long as you don’t expect me to return the favour. I don’t know one end of a cooker from the other.”
The eyes that frightened and fascinated her gleamed. “You can pay me back in other ways.”
Knowing exactly what he was insinuating, she drank more of her water, and was immensely grateful when Carlo chose that moment to clear their table
Every reminder of sex was a reminder of what she would have to endure only hours from now.