Chapter Six #2
“This is happening to me, Luca. I feel more alone than I ever have in my life and believe me when I say that I know isolation and feeling as though I have no one I can rely on but myself.” Her voice scraped across those last words and her chest filled with bees.
“I want to believe this means we’re in this together.
” She fisted her hand and turned it so the ring flashed.
“But all I can think is that yet another person wants leverage over me. I’m so tired of feeling controlled by other people.
Like I have no choice but to buckle.” A fresh well of frustration rose in her, thickening her voice.
“It was only once. How did this even happen?”
Why am I being punished so severely for one moment of pleasure-seeking?
His stony expression flickered with emotions too quick to interpret, but they were intense enough to tug at his brows and push a muted noise from his lips, one that was both an exasperated laugh and a defeated exhale.
He cupped her face, dipped his head, and caught her pouted mouth with his own.
She stiffened in surprise. Then closed her hot eyes as his lips enmeshed with hers.
Right. This.
The kiss blew a gust of oxygen on the embers she had been pretending weren’t sitting within her like banked coals.
Sparks flared through her limbs, drawing her arms up to cling around his neck while he drove his tongue into her mouth, nearly buckling her knees at how blatantly sexual the action was.
How erotically enticing and irresistible.
His hands slid down her back, pulling her into his hard frame, claiming her backside to tilt her pelvis against his. He was hard. So hard.
Desire shot through her, making her shudder in pure want. She turned soft and hot and wet. Aching for—
His hands came to her shoulders and he drew her arms down as he pressed her away. He took a steadying breath. Her own breath was gone, leaving her trying to catch it.
“That is how it happened.” His eyes blazed, but there was hardness behind that flare of lust. “I don’t like it, either.”
She jerked back a step, but his hands tightened on her arms. Her skin felt scored as though she’d been adhered to him, leaving her cold and stinging, heart thudding painfully while her mind tried to catch up to the fact he could overwhelm her and stop at will.
“Why do you think I’m trying to control every other variable?” He skimmed his thumb across the crest of her cheekbone, then down to the corner of her mouth, leaving a trail of fire under her skin.
“You want to control me,” she accused with a pang in her throat.
“Sì.”
She flinched and looked away, blinking at the heat that rose behind her eyes.
“Because you are nothing but resistance and mistrust of my motives.” He settled his hand at the side of her neck. “You’re nervous about taking responsibility for another human? I’m taking on three. Four if you want to count your mother’s nurse.”
“No. Mum and Kandili are my—”
His thumb sealed her lips. “You are mine so they are mine.”
Her heart took a nosedive inside her chest. His unyielding tone shook her to her core. Her lips felt imprinted by his thumb even as his touch dropped away.
“Not because I want leverage over you, but because the more I learn of your father, the less I want him thinking he has any power over you whatsoever. If you don’t want to be alone in this, you have to trust me to carry what I can.
We are in this together. That’s why I brought you into my home.
That’s why I’m putting my ring on your finger, to show him that you are not alone.
You have options. An ally.” He pried open her fist and kissed her finger near the ring.
“At the very least, keep this so you can sell it if you need to.”
“I’m not like that!” She defensively tried to yank her hand away.
He held on until she met his eyes and read the glint of humor there. He was joking.
Her few shaky defenses against him trembled even more, buffeted by a sense that she could fall for him very easily and where would that get her? Rejected and nursing a bruised heart again? While still being at her father’s mercy in one way or another?
“Come. We have a full day and you’ll need to rest before we go out tonight.”
Luca had become the man of the house at eleven—far too young, but old enough to feel the crush of responsibility when his grandmother, whose husband of thirty-eight years had passed the year before, lost her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter in one nightmarish crash.
He had been as devastated as she was and also consumed by guilt. He had exchanged angry words with his father as the family was leaving that evening, saying bitter, disillusioned things.
Go to your room, his father had bitten out. Don’t come out until I come home.
They had never come home. Instead, the sound of the telephone had pulled Luca out of his gaming headphones to hear the sound of his grandmother’s agonized wail.
He had grown up overnight, becoming her support as they put three coffins in the ground.
She had not been so lost to grief that she couldn’t be kind, however. One of the first things she’d said to him once she could speak was that he shouldn’t let it eat at him that his last words to his father had been angry ones.
Boys argue with their fathers. It’s part of becoming your own man. One day your son will shout at you. It doesn’t mean you love each other any less.
It had been a confusing thing to say to him when she knew what they had argued about. He had loved his father less, once he learned that Severo wasn’t just an accountant. Or rather, for whom he kept books.
Of course, it was more complicated than that. Nonna had explained more clearly later, but Luca couldn’t imagine arguing with his son in the same way because he would never work for the people his father worked for.
Even so, Nonna’s prediction had inched closer to reality when Luca had been engaged to Trieste. Luca had wallowed in that old soup of guilt and resentment and grief, wondering how his conflicted feelings about his own father would affect his ability to be one.
When he learned that Trieste’s baby wasn’t his, he’d put all those demons back in their bottle, planning never to examine them again.
Yet here they were, seeping out like specters and surrounding him as he introduced Jade to Filomena.
“This time I’m sure,” he said in Sicilian.
“You would have been sure last time if you’d been sure about the woman.” Filomena also spoke in Sicilian, having only Italian as a second language and speaking very little English.
She was a tiny woman with a body further reduced by age and her recent stroke. One side of her face drooped, affecting her speech, but her gaze was lively and, as always, she saw into his soul.
As his chest began to itch at her comment, she smiled warmly at Jade and took both her hands, calling her “Little Mama.”
Jade’s smile had faltered as she tried to interpret what had caused that brief moment of charged silence between him and his grandmother, but warmed into something shy and soft that was pretty enough to make his eyes hurt.
Luca would have preferred a few minutes to process what Filomena was suggesting—that he would have accepted another man’s baby if he’d loved Trieste—but Jade’s Italian was limited to the “I’m pleased to meet you” that he had taught her in the car.
He was needed as an interpreter.
They sat for a relaxing meal. This private clinic was as comfortable as a five-star hotel with only a dozen long-term patients, a shaded terrace overlooking a manicured garden, an indoor pool for rehabilitation and other amenities like a nutritionist chef.