He had denied her in the restaurant, but he could not deny her on an instinctive level. Ramon had seen Marcello’s claim on her and so had
Flavia
.
Danette
had been too hurt to recognize it, but she knew it had been there. Just as the pain of seeing
her
with another man had been there.
“I didn’t go out with Ramon to prove a point,” she said against his lips.
Marcello reared back as if she’d struck him, his hands dropping from her
face,
his eyes for once perfect reflections of the maelstrom of emotion going through him. “What?”
“I wasn’t trying to teach you an object lesson. How could I be? I didn’t even know you would come to the restaurant that night.”
“You
wanted
to go out with him?” Marcello asked in a hoarse voice that hurt her to hear.
“No.”
“What are you saying then?”
“
Lizzy
tricked me into meeting them. I thought it was just going to be her and me, but she’d invited her boyfriend and Ramon along. She thought I needed to get out more. She didn’t know about you. She thought I was lonely and she cared enough about me to try to fix that, but she knew I would have said no if she’d asked.”
“She knew that because you’d said no before,” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“Our secrecy hurt you more than I knew.”
“Yes.” She couldn’t deny it.
“I did not know that it hurt you at all. Please believe that.”
“I do.” She sighed. “You’re not a sadist.”
“It goes far deeper than that, if you could but see it. I never wanted you to be hurt by your association with me, but I could not walk away from you. I tried. It did not work.”
“Rampant lust gone mad.”
“It is more than lust.”
She smiled, agreeing.
Much more than lust now.
“Yes, I am pregnant with your child.”
“It was more than lust before you told me of your pregnancy.”
She turned away, suddenly hurting in a way she didn’t want him to see. She loved him. She would always love
him and whatever he felt for her, no matter how much more it was than simple physical passion, it was not love
. It never could be. She was not Bianca.
His hands curled around her waist and his mouth pressed against the sensitive skin of her nape. “I love you,
Danette
.”
She tore from his arms, stepping back and turning on him, her heart slamming in her chest. “Don’t say that! You don’t mean it!”
His expression was fierce. “I do mean it.”
“You can’t. You just think you have to love the mother of your child. That’s all it is, misplaced chivalry, but I don’t want it. I can handle honesty between us. I can’t handle that.”
He glared and crossed the room with the speed of a predator, grabbing her wrists and pulling her body close to his. “You say you can handle honesty,
then
let us be honest. No woman has shared my bed for longer than two nights since Bianca’s death and there were very few that made it that far, but you have had my heart and my body at your feet for six months, you faithless little termagant.”
“I’m not…”
“You are. You take everything I
do and say
and interpret it with the worse possible connotations. You do not trust me. You even reject my declaration of love. You have no faith in me at all!”
“I…” She couldn’t think of what to say in her own defense, which was an awful admission that she didn’t have one.
He glared down at her. “I thought I could not get a woman pregnant. You cannot know what that did to me, but I believed I had nothing to offer a relationship of longevity.”
“Babies aren’t the only thing that matters in marriage.”
“That is easy for you to say. You don’t know the pain of wanting and never having. Bianca knew and it tore her apart.” He stopped speaking and swallowed as if the pain was too much for him to bear. “She killed herself rather than face a future without children. I was not enough for her. I could not give her what she wanted most.”
“No…if she’d killed herself…” It would have been all over the press. “You’re wrong. You blame yourself, but—”
“She did a pregnancy test that morning. It was negative…they were all negative.” He took a deep breath, his big body taut with pain. “She went walking along the cliffs.”
“And the ground gave way beneath her. That isn’t suicide, Marcello.”
“She could have thrown herself to safety…if she had wanted to.”
Horror gripped
Danette’s
heart. “You don’t really believe that. It’s not true.”
“You were not there.”
“Neither were you. She fell, Marcello. She didn’t jump. She wouldn’t have jumped. She had too much to live for.”
“What had she to live for? Her dreams were in ashes in the waste bin of our en suite.
One more pregnancy test.
One more disappointment.”
“If she wanted to be a mother that badly, she would have tried in vitro, or adoption.”
“She said we were young, that we had time.”
“And she meant it.”
“You did not hear her crying at night when she thought I was asleep.”
“I’m sorry if this hurts you, but those tears were probably for you. She knew how proud you are, how much not being able to make her pregnant hurt you. She loved you, of course she cried. She shed the tears you would not shed for yourself.” She groped for corroboration. “If she’d been as deeply unhappy as you think she was, don’t you think the press would have picked up on it? They would have had a field day with that kind of grief.”
“They printed plenty of pictures of her looking unhappy.”
“And you believed the pictures?”
“They do not lie.”
“The camera lies all the time. If you get a picture of me first waking up in the morning, I look unhappy. I don’t wake up for at least an hour and two cups of coffee. You scowl when you read the stock reports, but that doesn’t mean you are unhappy.”
“You don’t know what it was like.”
“No.
But
I can guess. Bianca loved you,
like
I love you. It hurt her to see you hurting.”
He snorted at that. “You cannot say you share that affliction.”
“Oh, yes, I can. I would have walked away from you rather than trap you in a relationship you didn’t want. I finally agreed to marry you when I understood it would hurt you more for me to say no than to live in a marriage thrust on you by my pregnancy.”
“But you said—”
“Some face-saving stuff, some stuff that was true, but wasn’t the whole picture. Marcello, you aren’t at fault for Bianca’s death.”
The ferocious tension in him arced higher rather than depleting. “Maybe you are right.”
And
she understood the increased tension. Marcello needed a catharsis for his pain, but he would not let himself cry. He was too strong, too macho for that outlet.
She brought his face down to hers and pressed her open mouth to his, taking the kiss to a level of hungry desire that could only be satisfied by two naked bodies writhing together on a bed. They made love in a firestorm of need and she screamed her love for him when she reached orgasm, only to have the words repeated fiercely back to her as he shattered.
He collapsed on top of her. “That was amazing.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You do not think we hurt the baby?”
“No, but he’s probably going to be born with a love for storms after that.”
Marcello laughed softly, but then he met her gaze, his own so serious, she ached for him. “I’ve carried that burden of guilt for four years.”
“But it was a false burden.”
“She was too young to die. I thought it had to be someone’s fault.”
“And you were already busy feeling like you’d let her down in the marriage stakes. It was easy to take the blame.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t your fault and you didn’t let her down. Marcello, she was still young. She was probably glad in some ways she hadn’t conceived yet.”
He carefully disengaged and rolled off of
Danette
and then propped himself on his elbow at her side and laid his other hand possessively over her womb. “She refused to try in vitro.”
“Maybe she felt guilty about that, too.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you feel better?”
“When I am with you, I always feel better.”
“I’m glad.”
“There was a lot of miscommunication in my marriage with Bianca, or maybe lack of communication is the better term, and it hurt us both. I don’t want that with you.”
“I don’t, either.”
“I refused to believe you loved me when you told me the first few times.”
“I remember. Are you saying you believe me now?”
“Yes. I have to. You were willing to marry me believing I still loved a dead woman.”
“It’s okay that you still love her.”
“But that love is in my past. You refuse to believe my vow of love today.”
“I—”
“I do love you, more than life itself. I am sorry I was so messed up about marriage, but I want our marriage to be based on honesty and true understanding.”
“Yes…”
He nodded, took a deep breath and then said, “I want to wait to get married until I have convinced you of the reality of my feelings.”
“What?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What if that took a long time?
What if I didn’t believe you until after the baby was born?
This is crazy.”
“Then so be it. I will marry you,
Danette
, make no mistake, but I will not build the foundations of the rest of our lives on mistrust.”
His words went through her heart like a blazing sword. He had to love her to be willing to risk the illegitimacy of his child. He was telling her in an unmistakable way that there was nothing more important in life than she was to him.
Her eyes filled with tears as a glorious smile spread across her face. “I do believe you. I do.”
He gave her a narrow-eyed look. “You are sure?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything.”
He breathed in a sigh of relief as if the weight of the world had finally been lifted from his shoulders.
“
Te
amo
,
amante
.
I love you with all my heart.”
“And I love you.”
They made love again, this time finishing the tender beginning they had had when they first came into the room. He took a long time arousing her and reveled in every touch she directed at him. When he penetrated her softness, he set a slow, love-filled rhythm that brought them to a mutual climax that shattered them both.
Tomasso
and Maggie’s wedding went off without a hitch and
Danette
finally got to meet the other sister-in-law, Therese. She’d been staying with Maggie, helping her with the wedding preparations.
Danette
stood beside Marcello while
Tomasso
and Maggie spoke their vows under the pavilion on their private beach. It was a beautiful ceremony and
Danette
found herself wiping her eyes several times as the couple spoke their vows with obvious love and devotion.
Marcello’s arm came around her and he whispered in her ear. “Soon, that will be us,
amante
mia
.”
She nodded, swallowing back more tears of poignant emotion.
He kissed her temple. “I love you.”
She turned her head and kissed his shoulder, giving him her love silently.
Afterward, the family teased her about being emotional because she was pregnant, but Therese smiled and laid a gentle hand on her arm. “I think it is very sweet.”
She smiled back at the sister-in-law she knew she would love despite the fact she barely knew her and the other woman’s background was so different
than
her own. Therese
Scorsolini
was far too kind and friendly to intimidate
Danette
.
“It’s just so neat to see
Tomasso
and Maggie so happy together. It’s the way marriage should be, you know?”
Therese’s beautiful brown eyes filled with a sadness that
Danette
did not understand. “Yes, that is how it should be,” was all she said, however.
Flavia
sighed and the look she gave King
Vincente
accused without giving a clue as to what she was holding him accountable
for
.
“What?” he asked, sounding bewildered and very much like a man and not a
king.
Flavia
shook her head. “I can see I should have taken things into hand years ago, but pride is a hard barrier to overcome.”
After that incomprehensible speech, she asked
Tomasso’s
children if they wanted to go for a walk on the beach. Upon receiving enthusiastic agreement, all three removed their shoes, left them under the pavilion and headed toward the waterline.
She stopped just as she was leaving the pavilion and turned her head back to catch King
Vincente’s
eye. “Are you coming?”
“I am invited?” he asked, sounding as stunned as his three sons looked by the comment.
“But of course. Didn’t I just say so?”
The king
went,
his expression one of a man totally bewildered by life.
Danette
couldn’t help laughing. “I wonder if she’s decided to take a personal interest in him not growing into a lonely old man.”
“You cannot be serious. For years, she wouldn’t even allow his name to be spoken.”
“Well, she’s speaking it now, isn’t she?”
Danette
asked and then added, “She loved him once.”
“She stopped loving him years ago,” Claudio, Marcello’s oldest brother, said.
“True love does not die that easily,” Therese said with an edge in her voice.
Marcello agreed. “No, it doesn’t.” He looked down at
Danette
, his eyes filled with fierce emotion. “I will love you forever.”
She stared at him, her heart squeezing so tight, she could barely breathe. “And I will always love you.”