Chapter Seven #2
She wasn’t sorry about any of it, although she couldn’t help wondering… Had he not seen her dancing with Rocco, would it have been the same? Did Leo do it just because he really wanted her, or, like Jace, because he felt he had something to prove?
Leo’s hand flexed over her belly and pulled her close. Hard against him, her back to his chest.
‘I can hear you thinking,’ he murmured into her hair. His voice was rough with sleep. ‘If you can string together any thoughts this early in the morning, I must not have done my job well enough last night.’
And there it was, like walking from central heating into a frigid winter’s wind. Because that’s what this was, a job. Did Leo believe he’d done his job well? Was he congratulating himself?
‘Hey, hey,’ he said, releasing his hold on her and easing her onto her back. He propped himself onto his elbow and looked down at her, his eyebrows raised. ‘Any regrets?’
No regrets for the passion. It wasn’t like she was an innocent girl. She was an adult, making her own choices. Her regrets were for the fears.
‘Why would you say that?’ she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘Your whole body was tense and when you worry you have this little crease…’ he held out his finger and stroked it gently between her eyebrows, ‘…right here.’
Of all the things he could have said, this was the evidence he was trying to understand her. It was an insignificant thing about her and yet he’d still noticed it.
Her mother’s voice immediately rang through her head. Stop frowning, Simone. You don’t want lines that injectables won’t take away. Perhaps we should end that line before it really begins?
She’d tried to book Simone an appointment with her own plastic surgeon the next day.
Simone had been eighteen.
More power to anyone to whom that appealed.
Simone didn’t judge. It was every woman’s right to feel good about themselves, however they wanted to.
But at a time when she was still trying to find herself, growing into her gawky limbs and foreign curves, it had made her feel insecure about everything.
It had taken another few years for her to stop caring, once she’d realised that how she looked and presented herself wouldn’t make anyone love her any more than they were ever going to. And love could be bought, anyhow.
It was all meaningless.
‘No regrets,’ she said.
‘Then what’s troubling you?’
‘Do you really care?’
The words simply blurted from her mouth, all too needy. Yet she was lying naked here, both physically and emotionally, and part of her, the one that still carried her wounds, needed to know.
Leo’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Why would you even think to ask that question? Of course I care.’
Simone believed him. Now, questions churned inside her.
So many. Leo appeared to be an open book because there’d been so much written about him.
But he’d mastered the art of disclosing only what was on the surface, whilst making people believe he’d let them into a deeper part of his soul.
She saw it now. Whilst she couldn’t say why, she wanted to unlock that part of him that he held on to so tightly.
She asked the first thing that came into her head.
‘Why the rivalry with the Silvestri family?’
It was Leo’s turn to frown. She reached up her own hand and stroked at the line with her forefinger, like he’d done to her.
His eyes drifted shut for a moment, then he rolled over onto his back, carrying her with him.
She lay, her head on his chest, palm splayed on one of his pectoral muscles dusted with dark hair, as he held her tight.
Like he was a man lost at sea, holding onto her as a life preserver.
‘That’s a long story.’
‘We have late checkout.’
He chuckled but there was nothing happy about the sound.
‘We do.’ Leo’s chest expanded as he took in a deep breath, blew it out. His body tensed.
‘Rocco Silvestri…’ Leo almost spat out the name like it was poison on his lips, ‘…is my half-brother.’
Simone sat up, almost wrenching from his grasp in her rush to do so. Heart pounding.
‘What? But I thought you didn’t know who your father was?’
‘I’ve always known who my father was. I simply never acknowledged him as such and nobody ever asked.’
‘And does he know who y—’
‘Whilst I took my mother’s name, he knows exactly who I am.’
She had trouble believing what she’d just heard. Everything written about Leo’s life…where did the fiction end and the truth begin?
‘But the story of you on the streets…’
‘All true. My mother and I weren’t wanted. He started another family and left my mother destitute. Vito Silvestri is a liar, a cheat and a thief.’
Simone couldn’t comprehend what she was hearing and yet she was sure Leo spoke the truth.
All of him was so tense. His lips a thin, hard line.
He wouldn’t look at her, his gaze somehow distant, lost in a past where the memories were clearly unhappy ones.
This was a secret that he’d carried, clearly weighing on him.
She wanted to purge him of it, ease that burden somehow, if she could.
Heaven knew how her own had weighed on her.
‘Does Rocco know?’
A dark look cast over Leo’s face, like a thundercloud passing over the sun.
‘That name is never to enter our bedroom again.’
The words were a growl and she shivered at the possession threaded through them. At the suggestion that they had a bedroom, and they’d be in it together once more.
‘Of course he knows. He must.’
Simone guessed what Leo said made sense, even though she wasn’t so sure what with the conversation she’d had with the man last night. But she wasn’t on the Silvestri side, she was all on Leo’s. Simone reached out her hand, stroking the soft whorls of dark hair on his chest.
‘You want to know the story,’ Leo said. It wasn’t a question. The words were almost a capitulation, although uttered with a hardness that coloured them with a hint of defiance. She glimpsed in that moment what a proud man he really was.
‘If you want to tell it…’ She didn’t say she believed he needed someone to hear it, even though that’s exactly what she thought.
He turned to look at her, his gaze boring deep. Almost to her soul.
‘I’ll have questions of my own for you.’
Simone had little doubt but if he was giving her some of his truths, then Leo deserved some of hers, no matter how little she might want to tell them.
‘Sounds fair.’
‘So magnanimous,’ he said, his voice droll.
‘Yet it’s a simple enough story. My mother and father were furniture makers and designers.
They were in business together. They weren’t married, something I didn’t know till much later.
I believed that we were a family. That’s how it seemed to me, as a child. ’
‘Did you get your interest in design from them?’
‘From my mother.’ Leo’s jaw clenched. ‘I liked seeing how something plain, with what appeared to have little potential, could be turned into something beautiful.’
‘What happened?’
‘A tale as old as time. My father had an affair with a client who was, by all accounts beautiful, but also extremely wealthy. She convinced him, or perhaps he convinced her, that he’d be better in business on his own and that she could fund it.
One day, he packed up and left. Took everything. Left us destitute.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seven.’
She imagined him as a little boy. Whilst no photographs existed online of him from that time, she had no doubt he would have been a beautiful child.
What would it have been like for him to have had a happy life, then have it ripped away from him, without warning?
For his father to simply give him up. Then she considered the mathematics of it all.
‘You’re thirty-five.’
‘Mmm.’
‘A-and…’ she wouldn’t mention the name, ‘…he’s not that much younger.’
‘The affair had been going on for some time. My father led two lives. Apparently, it took time for his lover to reach an age where money held in trust for her became unencumbered. When it did, he left.’
‘I don’t know what to say. He just…abandoned you.’
‘I accepted that my father didn’t want us.
’ Leo laughed darkly, a bitter sound. ‘But it’s worse than you could imagine.
I was just seventeen and I left my mother to seek my fortune in Rome.
What a fool. I was young and angry but I saw and learned a lot in my two years on the streets.
Everyone there had a story. Broken families, alcohol, drugs, infidelity.
It was my life and that of so many other wandering souls.
Then, when I was nineteen, my mother died and I had to go back to Milan and clean out her flat. And I found…’
He turned his face away from her and she knew that this hurt him. That this was where his pain lay. Something deep and ingrained like an abscess poisoning him from the inside out.
She simply sat with him, stroking his chest, saying nothing and waiting.
‘…I found furniture designs, sketches. All in my mother’s hand. My father wasn’t the genius behind what they made. He might have been the craftsman, but the designs themselves…’ Leo turned to look at her, his gaze bleak, ‘He stole them from my mother.’
The acid burned in Leo’s gut. His mother had never said anything to him about his father taking her designs as his own.
However, the evidence was clear. He knew his mother’s writing, how she drew when she’d do little sketches for him occasionally.
It was her work. He was sure of it. All the pictures of furniture, the designs his father had taken and turned into his own, had been stolen.
‘Did she ever try to get them back?’
Leo shook his head. ‘He left her with nothing but a child to feed.’
All he could remember was her trying to keep a roof over their heads and something on the table, meagre though it was. She’d worked herself to the bone doing so. There was no time for anything else.
‘With the drawings, could you prove this?’ Simone asked.
At the time he was simply a young man, angry and grieving and a solicitor had said he couldn’t help, not without more proof.
By then, the designs had already been trademarked and registered by his father.
Later, even with all his resources, there was still nothing he could do.
He’d been advised that the sketches would prove nothing in a court of law.
‘Not with my mother dead. Perhaps if she’d been alive, with her word against my father’s and the drawings, then maybe. But with her gone and all the money behind him, there is no proof conclusive enough. Though I know. He became famous by building his wealth from lies and theft.’
‘And that’s why you hate him,’ Simone said. ‘For leaving your mother. Stealing from her and leaving you.’
Leo closed his eyes not wanting to see the look of pity on Simone’s face. This was the part of his story he’d divulged to no one.
‘Your mom must have still been young when she passed away.’
‘She was in her forties.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simone said, leaning over and kissing the centre of his chest, right where his aching heart lay.
‘She gave up all her dreams to keep me fed, to look after me as a child and then I left, searching for my own dreams. I should have been there for her. I should have sent more money home, so she didn’t have to work so hard.
Then one night when coming back to her apartment from a cleaning job in winter she slipped on ice on some stairs and she died. ’
He shut his eyes, fighting the burn of tears he refused to shed.
He wasn’t worthy of the grief. When he’d seen Simone lying broken at the bottom of those stairs, it was like his life had flashed before his eyes.
History repeating itself because he’d been thinking about himself and what he’d wanted, instead of her.
‘Oh, Leo,’ Simone said. ‘You’ve carried so much grief on your own.’
‘Yet here I am.’
‘Here you are.’
Still, he’d carried on. For so long he’d been so angry about everything.
In his teens, before he’d left for Rome, it had been because he’d wanted more than the threadbare life they’d led, the constant struggle.
Then trying to assuage that anger on the streets and ending up getting involved in organised crime, which was another secret he’d managed to keep hidden from the world.
He’d been trying for years to help the families he’d once hurt, although it never felt like it was enough. He had to atone for his mistakes.
Simone cupped his cheek, her expression soft and full of care. ‘Are you going to do anything more with what you know?’
He didn’t want to talk any more. Right now, it was as if Simone had cracked open his chest and asked him to show her his heart. Although he had to admit something about the weight of all he’d been carrying, had lifted a fraction.
He didn’t deserve the respite, the relief, but he’d take it, nonetheless. Take whatever else she might offer him. Herself included. But for now, he was going to share the reason for their marriage. It wasn’t merely that Tessitore was a heritage brand he wanted for himself. It was so much more.
‘I’m going to buy Tessitore. The Silvestris want it, badly, and they will never get it. I’m going to take the company right from underneath them.’