They’d walked for miles and talked for hours. Who would have thought they’d share a love for old Hollywood movies? Who’d have believed their top ten movies shared seven in common?
But what had really touched her was the way Ciro had accommodated her dyslexia without being asked and without it even being mentioned. At the American Museum of Natural History, he’d read the exhibit descriptors to her just as he now read menus to her and all without making it obvious and heaping embarrassment on her. He simply took it in his stride and not once did he patronise her.
And now he was going to work and the weekend they’d shared would be officially over.
It scared her how badly she wished he would stay.
She shouldn’t feel like this. One nice weekend with this man didn’t change what he’d done to her or alter the fact that she couldn’t trust him. She was only here for their baby. He only let her be here for the baby.
But still she wished he would stay.
‘Of course,’ she said steadily. ‘And I should shower. I hope your day goes well.’
The violence in her stomach was as frightening as her wayward thoughts and, terrified she really would ask him to stay, she got hurriedly to her feet but, in her haste, her thigh bashed against the table. Before she had time to register what was happening, Ciro’s barely touched coffee toppled over. The lid flipped off and hot black liquid gushed over the table and spilled onto his lap.
Horror spilled through her as quickly as the coffee had spilled. ‘Oh, God, Ciro, I’m sorry,’ she cried, hurrying over to him. ‘Are you hurt?’
He looked more disbelieving than pained. His gaze drifted to his lap. The coffee had spilt over his left thigh and soaked through the fabric of his charcoal trousers. There were splatters of black coffee on his white shirt too.
Guilt and panic set in. ‘You need to take those off.’
He held a hand up to her, an unspoken warning to keep back. ‘I’m not hurt.’
Getting to his feet, he strolled into the bedroom and disappeared into the en suite, closing the door behind him.
Claudia hovered outside the door, wringing her hands together. When she couldn’t stand the wait any longer, she knocked on it. ‘Ciro? Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?’
More long minutes passed before the door opened. Ciro had stripped his clothes off down to his snug black boxer shorts. She looked down to his thighs and was horrified to see the left one marked a bright, angry red.
Covering her mouth, she burst into tears. She’d never done anything to harm anyone before, not ever, and to see the damage she’d inflicted on his thigh was more than she could bear. ‘I’m...so...sorry,’ she gulped between sobbing breaths.
Now a pained look did cover his face. Through the muffling of her ears, she heard him curse and then found herself pulled against his chest, his strong arms wrapping around her and holding her tightly to him.
‘Don’t cry. It was an accident,’ he murmured into her hair.
Trying desperately to control her tears, Claudia tried even harder not to sink into him. Being held like this, Ciro’s warm breath brushing through her hair, her cheek pressed against his smooth chest, his heartbeat strong against her ear, breathing in his woody scent...it all just felt so right.
But, much as she wanted to stay right where she was, Ciro was injured and she reluctantly pulled out of his hold and gazed up at him. ‘We need to get you to hospital.’
He smoothed her hair from her face. There was a tenderness to the gesture that made her want to cry harder. ‘I messaged my doctor a few minutes ago. He’ll be here shortly. I’m supposed to run cold water over the injury while I wait for him.’
‘Then what are you doing comforting me?’ Snatching hold of his hand, she led him back into the bathroom. ‘Get in the bath.’
A wry smile played on his lips as he obeyed her bossy command, a smile that turned into a wince when he lifted his left leg in.
‘How can you say it doesn’t hurt?’ Her heart hurt even more to see his obvious pain. She took the shower head off its attachment and turned the cold tap on.
‘It didn’t...’ His eyes widened as she aimed the shower head on his injury. ‘That’s cold.’
She wiped the last of her tears away with the back of her free hand and attempted a smile. ‘It’s supposed to be.’
Ciro gritted his teeth against the pain, rested his head back and closed his eyes. He knew from experience that concentrating on the pain only made it worse. ‘Talk to me.’
‘About what?’
‘Anything.’ From feeling no pain, his thigh now felt as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it. ‘Distract me. What did you dream of being when you were a little girl?’
‘Working in a pastry shop.’
He opened one eye, about to query this unexpected answer. His attention was immediately taken by sight of her pyjama top. The spray from the showerhead had soaked into it. The white pyjama top had become translucent. Claudia’s cherry-red nipples jutted out in all their erotic glory mere inches from his face.
Oblivious, she elaborated. ‘Our nanny used to take us to a pastry shop every Saturday for a treat. We were allowed to choose one item and it could be whatever we wanted. I could never make my mind up because I wanted everything.’
He managed a pained laugh and dragged his gaze from her breasts to her eyes. Her eyes were every bit as beautiful as her breasts.
Still holding the spray on his thigh, she smiled, showing her small, pretty white teeth. ‘What did you want to be?’
‘A world-famous wrestler.’
Her peal of laughter cut through his pain like balm. ‘And when did you decide that conquering the business world was better than being a wrestler?’
‘When Papà told me it was all choreographed.’ He shook his head in mock-sadness. ‘He destroyed my dreams.’
‘Liar.’ She lifted the showerhead and aimed it at his chest, making him shudder at the unexpected blast of wet cold. Her grin widened at his reaction before she aimed it back on his injury.
‘You have an evil streak in you.’
‘So I’m learning.’
Their eyes locked together and, without any warning, Ciro found himself trapped in the molten depths of Claudia’s beguiling eyes. Her smile dropped in a mirror image of his own disintegrating smile as a powerful charge surged between them. It happened so quickly he was powerless to stop it, powerless to stop the wave of unfiltered desire that crashed through him.
He wanted this woman more than he’d wanted anyone or anything in his life. Torture did not begin to describe how it felt to lie beside her night after night and not be able to touch her.
Why couldn’t he touch her? In that moment, all his reasoning had flown out of the window. Every cell in his body vibrated in awareness of this ravishing woman. And, for the first time since their wedding night, he felt her body’s vibrations of awareness of him too. It was there in the sudden shallowness of her breaths, in the heated swirling in her eyes, in the way she leaned closer to him...just as he leaned closer to her. The charge bound them both. He ached to touch her. To kiss her. To devour her. To mark her as his for ever...
Their faces had drawn so close together that he was inches from claiming those generous lips for his own when the intercom buzzed.
Claudia’s eyes widened and she reared back. The showerhead slipped from her fingers and the cold water sprayed over his groin. The erection he hadn’t noticed form—there had been too many other heightened sensations coursing through him to be aware of something as trivial as an erection—immediately deflated in protest at the frigid spray.
‘That will be the doctor,’ he managed to say as he grabbed the showerhead and saved his groin from frostbite. His words sounded faint inside the drumming of his head. ‘If you press the top intercom button it will open the door for him.’
She blinked
and nodded with equal rapidity, no longer looking at him. Her cheeks had turned the colour of tomatoes. ‘I’ll show him the way up.’
She was halfway out of the door moving at a speed that would have made a short-distance runner proud when he called after her. ‘Claudia?’
She waited a beat before turning back to face him.
‘You might want to change before you greet the doctor.’
She followed his gaze down to her chest. Immediately, she slapped an arm over her breasts. He didn’t think there was a colour on the spectrum that could describe the colour cloaking her embarrassment.
CHAPTER TEN
‘CAN I GET you anything else before I go to bed?’
Ciro’s chest expanded at the melodious sound of Claudia’s voice. He looked up from his book to see her enter the living room carrying two mugs of steaming hot chocolate, and found it expanding even more. ‘I’m good, thank you.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Since the doctor left, Claudia had fussed around him like a mother hen. Her guilt at his burn—only minor, the damage only on the surface of the skin—was obvious but he had a strong feeling she would have looked after him even if she didn’t feel responsible for it. As much as he’d always believed anyone with Buscetta blood’s heart was stone, this day had proven as nothing else could that Claudia’s heart was as soft as her skin.
Ciro’s need for space away from her had been thwarted and they’d spent a whole day and evening together alone, trapped in the apartment. The torture of his nights had spilled over to his day and there had been no relief.
Whether Claudia had been whipping up delights in the kitchen or keeping him company in the living room watching an old movie they’d both loved as kids, he’d never been so aware of another human’s presence. The gentle sway of her walk, the sound of her footsteps, the way she used her hands as an additional expression of speech, the way she pulled her knees to her chest and crossed her ankles when resting on the sofa... Every movement she made, every word she spoke, every breath she took, all soaked through his senses.
For once she wore something other than jeans or pyjamas, having matched one of her preferred loose tops with a short black skirt. Not only did she have the peachiest bottom in the world, but the shapeliest legs to match it.
With a shy smile, she put one of the mugs on the small table beside the reclining leather armchair he’d stretched out on, then drifted past him to stand at one of the living-room windows, cradling her own drink.
There was a long pause of silence while she gazed down at the bustling street storeys below. ‘What made you move to New York?’
‘New York’s an old obsession of mine from when I was a kid. Vicenzu came to university here, I visited, fell in love with it for real and followed in his footsteps.’
‘But it’s so big and so busy.’ She sighed. ‘Every time I step outside I think I’m going to get swallowed up. How do you get used to it?’
He put his book down and reached for his drink. ‘I remember the moment I got out of the cab on my first visit here. I felt like a kid seeing Santa. I never had to get used to it because right from that moment, I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be.’
‘Do you ever miss home?’
Home, he knew, meant Sicily.
He stretched his neck. ‘Sometimes. When I hear a song my mamma likes or catch a movie I watched with my father.’
She looked at him and bit into her bottom lip. ‘How is your mamma doing?’
He gave a heavy shrug and cleared his throat. ‘She takes things a day at a time.’
Her eyes closed as if she were saying a silent prayer. ‘Has it helped her, being back in her own home?’
Ciro didn’t know how to explain things without hurting her. But with Claudia, only the truth would do. ‘She doesn’t want to live in it without my father.’
Her eyes widened and immediately filled with tears.
‘Their marriage...it was solid, you know?’
She shook her head and he remembered she’d grown up without a mother.
‘They loved us, me and Vicenzu, but they adored each other. When I was a teenager I would work with Papà in the school holidays...he always hoped one of us would take the business on...and I remember going into his office. I must have been fifteen, and he was chatting with his lawyer explaining why he didn’t want to merge with an American conglomerate. He’d already turned down their offer of a buy-out. I think he’d accepted by then neither Vicenzu or I would take the business on but he hoped grandkids would come along and one of them would want it. But he turned down the big bucks for the buy-out and then he turned down the offer of a merger even though it would have given him financial stability. The olive industry can be precarious because you’re at the mercy of the weather. One bad summer and the crop’s ruined. He turned the merger down because it would have meant frequent travelling to America. He had a picture of Mamma on his lap and I knew he was turning it down because he couldn’t bear to be parted from her. Mamma hates travelling. She’ll fly to Florence to visit her sister and that’s enough for her.’
‘Are you close to her?’
‘Not as close as I should be,’ he admitted. ‘And it’s entirely my fault. I couldn’t wait to get out of Sicily. It was nothing against my parents, I just had this drive to get out into the world and make my mark. It was always in me. I remember thinking when I overheard that conversation between Papà and his lawyer that he was a fool. How could he turn all that money down? It would have set him up for life. But that was teenage arrogance on my part. I’m happy travelling the world and building an empire. My parents were happy living a simple life. Don’t get me wrong, we had money. We never went without. But it wasn’t a great fortune.’ And certainly hadn’t been enough to protect the business against Cesare’s sabotage. ‘All they wanted was to be together and for their boys to be happy. That was enough for them.’
There was a sharp stabbing in his guts as he thought, for the first time, about what his father would say if he knew his son had married a woman in vengeance. His father’s heart had been big and generous.
He would be ashamed of him.
For the first time, Ciro could admit that he was ashamed of himself.
His parents had raised him well. He’d had love. A lot of love. He’d had their time. He’d had security. He’d had everything a child could ask.
They had raised him to be better than this.
‘Do you have any memories of your mother?’ he asked, suddenly keen to turn the subject away from himself. Claudia’s mother, he’d learned, had died of bacterial meningitis, a swift and deadly disease if not treated early.
She tilted her head, her face screwing with concentration. ‘Her shoes. I remember she had a pair of bright red heels. I remember trying to walk in them. I was so little they swallowed my feet.’
He swore his heart tore a shred. ‘That’s all you remember?’
‘I think I remember her perfume. Sometimes I’ll smell someone’s perfume and it makes me think of her.’
Ciro knew exactly what she meant. In the five weeks Claudia had hidden away in the convent he’d imagined he’d smelt her perfume numerous times.
‘I went in a perfume shop a few years ago trying to find it,’ she said. ‘I spent hours in there, spraying them all. I wanted to find it so badly but none of them was quite right. None of them was The One.’
Another shred tore from his heart. ‘Didn’t you ask your father?’
‘He said Mamma wore lots of different perfumes. Imma doesn’t remember the name of it either.’
‘She was eight when your mother died, wasn’t she?’
She nodded. ‘Sometimes I envy all the memories she has of her. Imma’s five years older than me so had five extra years with her. She remembers everything about her, right down to the softness of her skin and th
e texture of her hair. All I have is a vague sense of her perfume and a clear memory of one pair of shoes.’
‘No wonder you envy your sister.’
‘No, I envy her memories. She has the memories but she also has the pain. I was too young for Mamma’s death to affect me much, but Imma...’ Her chest rose. ‘She never got over it. Her childhood ended that day.’
And, he suspected, Claudia’s childhood had changed dramatically from the one she would have had if her mother hadn’t died. There had been no one to counter her father’s dominance and remove the clips he’d put on his daughters’ wings.
The ideas Ciro had had about her growing up as a pampered princess were nothing but his own preconceived prejudices, just as everything else about Claudia had turned out to be.
As if she’d followed the train of his thoughts, she said, ‘What my father did to your parents...’ Her voice broke. ‘Ciro, I wish I could take it all back. I wish I’d never told Papà I wanted my own house. Every time I think of calling him, I remember what he did to your father and God alone knows who else and I feel sick. How can a man who does the things he does call himself a child of God? How can he sleep at night? I don’t understand it. I don’t think I want to understand it.’
‘Listen to me.’ He straightened in his seat and stared at her, making sure he had her full attention. ‘You are not responsible for what your father did.’
‘If I hadn’t mentioned my wish for a home of my own...’
‘Don’t think like that. None of this was your fault.’ And it made him queasier than the most violent of hangovers to remember how he’d held her equally culpable.
One solitary teardrop fell. ‘You believe me?’
‘Yes.’ Claudia would never be party to anything that hurt another person. If he hadn’t been full of such rage and carried such a thirst for vengeance, he would have recognised that the first time he met her.
A Baby to Bind His Innocent Page 11
