“If you believed that, why did you leave him?” Marcello asked in a driven tone.
“I did
not
believe it at first. I was hurting desperately. It took me several years to realize that he was driven by guilt and a need to punish himself for his supposed crime. I believe that in the same way, he has spent over twenty years punishing
himself
for the crime of infidelity to me.”
Marcello looked quite stunned. “But…”
“I know he gave you boys that song and dance about
Scorsolini
men only loving once, but really, can you not see how he has protected his heart all these years by never letting another woman get as close as his first wife and I did?”
“I wonder if you are right.”
“You yourself said I am a wise woman, but I am worried about him. If he does not stop the self-punishment, he is going to go into his old age a lonely man.”
Personally
Danette
could never see King
Vincente
as lonely, but she wondered if
Flavia
was right.
“If you believe all this, why in the world are you trying to talk
Danette
out of marrying me?” Marcello asked with angry exasperation.
“Because she must count the cost.
You, too, have decided to protect your heart and refuse to love her.”
“How can you know that?” Marcello demanded belligerently.
“Because if you had told her you loved her, she would have agreed to marry you already. Is that not true?”
Danette
nodded. “If he meant it, yes.”
“You see?”
“Mama, I love you dearly, but this is not something I wish to discuss with you, or in front of you.”
“No doubt.
It is embarrassing to parade your mistakes in front of your beloved mother, is it not?”
“Whether
Danette
and I marry is strictly between us.”
“If you believe that, then you shouldn’t have told your mother that it was a done deal,”
Danette
said, humor at the situation making her lips twitch.
Marcello made the sound of a frustrated lion at bay. “Shall we go into dinner?” he asked from between clenched teeth.
Flavia
smiled a knowing smile.
“By all means, my son.
Let us eat. It is not good to make a pregnant woman wait.”
Danette
didn’t know how it happened, but the subject of her scoliosis came up over dinner and
Flavia
asked numerous questions. “So, really, there is no reason to believe your children would be so afflicted at all, is there?”
“But my mother had it and then I had it…”
“And you were both diagnosed as
idiomatic
which implies that there is no known reason for the condition. Genetics would be a
known
reason, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are worrying for nothing. If your children were to be similarly afflicted, then you would deal with it the same as you would deal with any issue. Your love for them would cover everything you do—and of course, you would have my expert advice for help.”
Danette
burst out laughing as did Marcello.
“When you told me arrogance ran in your family, I assumed you meant from your father’s side, but I see now that you got a double dose. No wonder you have the bearing of the oldest son and heir to the throne.”
Flavia
shook her head, humor gleaming in her dark eyes. “Marcello would hate to be king…the role is much too much in the public eye.”
“This is true,” Marcello said dismissively. “Besides which, Claudio is forced to endure matters of state that would bore me to death.”
“But there is no denying my son did inherit more than his share of masculine confidence and a certain amount of family arrogance,”
Flavia
said with a small laugh.
Marcello just shrugged.
“So, you will be coming to
Tomasso
and Maggie’s wedding, will you not?”
Flavia
asked.
“I invited her,” Marcello said.
“Your most recent invitation was given in the guise of a suggestion we make it a double wedding, if I recall correctly.”
And
Danette
would be the first to admit that her thoughts from earlier were still a little muddled.
“
Idiota
,” his mother said affectionately. “If
Danette
agrees to marry you, there will be no hole-in-the-corner affair to raise eyebrows and prod the paparazzi into speculation. We will have a proper Sicilian wedding.”
“Have you forgotten she is pregnant?” Marcello demanded. “I would prefer to have the deed done before our child makes its advent into the world.”
His mother simply shook her head. “With your money and your family’s influence, you can have a wedding with all the trimmings in a month’s time, though that is pushing the bounds of propriety where invitations to the event are concerned.”
“I do not care who comes to the wedding,” he growled.
“I do,”
Danette
said. “My mom would be devastated if she couldn’t invite all of her friends and our family to my wedding. If I agree to marry you, you’ll have to be okay with that.”
Marcello’s blue gaze burned with impatience. “So what you are saying to me is that if you finally deign to marry me, I will have to content myself with a big, Sicilian wedding that could take months to organize?”
“I did not say that. Like your mom pointed out, when you’re as rich as Croesus and royal in the bargain, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time.”
“So, you are saying you will marry me?”
“I didn’t say that,” she replied with a fair amount of her own impatience. “Stop trying to bulldoze me. It won’t work.”
“I told you that I loved
Vincente
when I married him,”
Flavia
said.
Thankful for the change in conversation,
Danette
smiled gratefully. “Yes.”
“Had I not been pregnant, I would not have agreed to marriage, because I knew the risk was great that he would not let himself love me.
Ever.”
“So you married for my sake,” Marcello said.
Flavia
sighed, her memories not all pleasant by the look in her lovely brown eyes. “Yes. It is hard enough to be born of royal blood in today’s world full of vultures and the paparazzi without being born illegitimate. I paid a price for my folly, but I cannot say that I regret that price. For had I not paid it, you would have until the day you died.”
Danette
got the point and her heart contracted at the thought of her child being hurt by a decision she made. “I see what you are getting at.”
Flavia
smiled, oh so gently. “I knew you would, but still you must make up your own mind. Only keep the thought that life for royalty is not like life for everyone else. You can be dirt-poor and have nothing in your life of interest in the way of accomplishments and still be the target of media attention simply because you carry a title with your name.”
After that,
Flavia
made a determined effort to keep the conversation on less volatile topics and
Danette
enthusiastically aided her in that endeavor.
Marcello
downshifted
the powerful Ferrari and took the turn with neat precision. He and
Danette
had left his mother’s villa five minutes before. He did not know what mood she was in; he’d learned in the last few days to take nothing for granted. That included what he would term peaceful silence coming from the other side of the car.
“You enjoyed meeting my mother,” he fished, wanting to know what she was thinking.
Danette
shifted perceptibly in her seat, as if she’d only now remembered he was there.
His muscles tensed. He was unused to not being the center of her thoughts when they were together. He did not like it.
“What?” she asked, clearly struggling to remember what he’d said.
“Oh, yes. I like her very much. Wasn’t that wild, what she said about your dad?”
“It actually makes a strange kind of sense.”
“Yes, but it sure blows holes in the
Scorsolini
men only ever loving once theory, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? Mama did not say she believed Papa loved her, only that he was punishing himself for betraying her.”
But
his father’s love life, or lack thereof, was not what interested Marcello at the moment.
“Mama made a good point about giving our child legitimacy for the sake of its future.”
“Yes, she did.”
“So, now will you consent to marry me?”
“Are you saying that a paper marriage for the sake of our child legally holding your name is all that you want?”
Where did she get her ideas? “No. I want you to be my wife, not merely a wife on paper.”
“You didn’t want that yesterday.”
“Today is different.”
“Yes, today, you have discovered that you are going to be a father. That’s got to be very emotional for you.” She said it musingly,
like
she was trying to work something out in her head.
“Considering the fact I thought I would never father a child, yes.” He did not want to dwell on those feelings however. They were best forgotten. “I should have introduced you to my mother earlier.”
“That would have undermined the secrecy of our association. You heard her. She knew there was something up between us when she met me in the restaurant and you were pretending you didn’t know me. If you had introduced us before that and tried to pass me off as a mere employee, it wouldn’t have been any more successful.”
“I did not mean that. I meant I should have introduced you as my girlfriend to her earlier.”
Danette
didn’t reply
,
her attention fixed on the darkness beyond the window.
“And I did not pretend I did not know you the other night,” he said for good measure.
“It felt like it.”
“I treated you the same as I treated everyone else at the table.” Which he could now see had been a monumental mistake.
Because she’d taken that to mean she wasn’t special to him and she was. He wanted her in a way he wanted no one else.
She looked at him. “It hurt, because I
wasn’t
everyone else.”
“I did not mean to hurt you. You must know this.”
“Part of me does know it, but the hurting part doesn’t care much what your intentions were.”
How was he supposed to answer that? He could not fix it, which was his natural inclination. All he could do was
try
once again to explain. “I did not know you had grown completely intolerant of the need to protect our relationship with discretion. When we discussed it the night I came home from
Isole
dei
Re, I thought you were angry about the picture in the tabloid, not the secrecy surrounding our time together.”
“The picture destroyed my sense of peace about our relationship.”
“For which I have apologized.”
“But it could not have been taken if our relationship had not been a secret.”
“You have a point, but even you must admit that in the beginning, you got quite a charge out of that secrecy. How was I to know your reaction to it had changed so drastically?”
Surely she had to see that.
“It
was
romantic in the beginning.” She sighed. “We were sneaking around and that added the seductive element of the forbidden to our intimacy. Yet we weren’t doing anything wrong. Not really.”
“Not at all.”
“I’m pregnant and we’re not married. Trust
me,
my mom would say we’d done something wrong. There’s a reason why sex outside of marriage is a bad idea.”
“I am not ashamed that you are pregnant by me.”
“I know. You’re actually pretty proud of the fact.”
An unfamiliar sense of embarrassment assailed him. He
was
proud in a wholly
uncool
way that he’d managed to plant his seed in her body. “Are you ashamed to be pregnant with my child?”
“I can’t be blasé about being a single pregnant woman, I’m not that sophisticated. But no, I’m not ashamed.”
“You do not have to be single and pregnant. You could be married and pregnant. You could be a princess. Does that carry no weight with you?”
“I think every little girl dreams of growing up and becoming a princess, but I’m not a little girl anymore. For me, marriage has to be about a whole lot more than living out a fairy tale.”
“But it is about more. You carry my child in your body.”
She sighed again. He was starting to hate that sound.
“Are we
back
to the paper marriage for the sake of the baby then?”
“I told you, I do not want a paper marriage. I want a real marriage.”
“I don’t like feeling like I’m the extra baggage that comes along with the baby.”
He zoomed through a yellow light, pressing the accelerator just slightly. “I don’t see you that way.”
“It feels like it.”
“I did not want to break up before I knew you were pregnant.” Surely that should count for something. “And I invited you to my brother’s wedding before that as well.”
“You like sex with me. I’ve always known it.”
Anger coursed through him. She was determined to see things in the most unflattering light possible. “And
you
like sex with
me
, but you do not see me accusing you of wanting me only because of it, or for the wealth I can give you.”
“Why in the world would you?”
“Because most women in my life have wanted me for my title and my money…it would be all too easy to put you in the same camp.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Then the comparison isn’t valid.”
“It is. You accuse me of wanting you for sex and the baby you carry, but I have never once said that was all I wanted from you. Nor has our relationship in the past exhibited such a thing.”
“You kept me a secret.”
“Because I hate the intrusiveness of the paparazzi in my life, not because I was ashamed of you, or did not value you.
In the beginning you understood this and while I comprehend how the photo hurt you, I don’t think you can dismiss the fact that up until very recently, you were perfectly content with our status quo. Holding me accountable for a change of heart I did not know about is unreasonable.”