The Sicilian's Surprise Wife

by Tara Pammi

  How could she let her claim destroy what they had?

  He wanted to call it a dent to her pride, a tantrum she was throwing because he had hurt her with offering her money.

  But Clio never threw tantrums and Clio didn’t have any fascination with his wealth.

  Clio didn’t drop hints for gifts, Clio didn’t ask to be introduced to his powerful friends. Clio didn’t flirt with other men to make him jealous.

  Clio didn’t dangle sex as a bargaining chip.

  In only a few weeks, Clio had made him laugh more than he had in a decade. He had lived more and for the first time in years, he had made love to a woman instead of seeking physical release.

  Clio was the farthest from what Serena had been.

  Clio was Clio—generous, kind and vibrant. Clio was the first woman, other than his own mother, who cared about his happiness, who cared that he smiled.

  Clio had walked through the fire of his distrust and Jackson’s treachery and emerged whole.

  And he... Dio, he had treated her worse than he had treated any other woman in his life from the moment she had set foot in it. Had punished her for his own demons, put her through so much because of his own insecurities.

  Because somehow, through her struggle with Jackson, through her struggles with herself, through her determination to remind him of what he had been once, Clio had become a mirror in which he saw what he had become.

  The picture he saw of himself over the past few weeks, he despised it.

  But it was too late.

  He buried his head in hands and growled, a chasm of pain opening up in his gut. The tent reverberated with her words, her pain, with the rawness and purity of her emotions. With the darkness of his own poison, with his loneliness, with his utter desolation.

  He had done just as Zayed as predicted. He had ruined the most wonderful thing that had come into his life, shattered any chance of happiness with his own hands.

  All I wanted was one sentence that you wanted this to be real between us.

  But he hadn’t been able to ask that small thing. He hadn’t been able to give her even a small part of him. He hadn’t been able to take the warmth and generosity and the wonder that was Clio.

  He still couldn’t. He couldn’t take that step and open himself to pain and agony again.

  Wasn’t that why he had offered her that settlement instead, even if he had realized it too late?

  Even after all these years, even as he had found the perfect woman, the woman he had dreamed about his entire teenage years, the woman whom he would have loved for the rest of his life, he still couldn’t take that final step, couldn’t find the courage to be the man who laid out his heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALMOST TWO MONTHS LATER, Stefan was in the midst of a meeting in his Hong Kong office when his laptop pinged. Still listening to his main accountant drone on and on about their Asian holdings, he looked at the screen and stilled.

  The email was from Zayed’s wife, the Sheikha of Gazbiyaa. Wondering what it was that Nadia, the deceptively strong woman his friend had married, would send him, Stefan clicked on it.

  His heart pounding so hard in his chest as he viewed the thumbnail, he clicked the attachment open.

  It was a shot of him and Clio the morning of Zayed’s wedding that someone must have clicked unknown to them.

  They were standing at one of the turreted balconies in the Gazbiyan palace, the morning sun behind them. He remembered the moment instantly.

  Rocco and Olivia, Christian and Alessandra, he and Clio, and Zayed had just finished breakfast. Clio had wandered to the balcony, and as if pulled forward like a string, he had instantly joined her there.

  Had covered her bare arms with his and shuddered as the scent and warmth of her had stolen into him. Had pushed the thick fall of her hair away so that he could see the delicate crook of her neck. Had loved tracing her slender hips with his hands, had loved how naturally she had fit against him.

  An instant surge of yawningly desperate need claimed him and he closed his eyes.

  Dio, how she would respond when he pressed his mouth at that crook...how her long fingers would rake over his skin, marking him, owning him as he pushed into her, how boldly she had looked at him that last time, binding him to her... Drenched in the memories of her, which were at the same time so vivid and yet so distant, Stefan almost reached out for her.

  She hadn’t flinched or pulled back that morning. Burrowing into his body, she had looked up at him and smiled.

  He opened his eyes and stared greedily at the shot again.

  And the shot had captured that smile.

  There had been no hesitation, no artifice, no shadows in it. Everything she felt for him—it was in that smile.

  It spoke of love, courage and the thing that stuck in his chest like an ice pick, open joy. It said so much about their intimacy, about how gloriously perfect that moment had been in his life.

  Life with Clio would be full of such indescribable moments—of love and happiness.

  In that stunning moment between powerlessness and need, it struck him how much he loved her. How he would do anything if it ensured she would always smile like that.

  It was like a lightning bolt, washing away the poison that had festered in him for so long, opening the hurt inside him like an avalanche.

  And that smile, that love that shone so beautifully in her eyes, that was what he had gambled away.

  The voices around him sounded as if they were coming from far off. The view from the fortieth floor faded as he struggled to breathe past the tightness in his chest.

  The ache in his heart, the fear in his gut, was so visceral that he rose to his feet jerkily. That moment brought all the yawning emptiness he’d felt over the past couple of months to the fore.

  She had banished him from her life with such ruthless will that even he was impressed. In two months, he had had only heard from her once—one paltry email that had stripped him of even hope.

  Do not come back to New York, please. This is my home. If you ever valued me for even a minute, leave this city for me. Leave me be, Stefan.

  And so he had. Against his very nature, he had left her to face the media. Left their marriage in a limbo.

  Because his business empire was spread out all over the world, it had been easy to stay away.

  He didn’t know if she wanted a divorce. He didn’t care.

  He had snarled at Christian when the latter had visited him in Hong Kong, told Zayed to leave him the hell alone and had thrown himself into work. Nothing could fill the increasing chasm of his lonely days blending into endless nights, nothing could touch him past the morass of his guilt and grief and emptiness.

  He had spent fifty-six days in a hell of his own making, dying to hear her voice, craving her smile, wondering if he would ever kiss her mouth again, listening to little tidbits about her from Olivia, who, he had a feeling, would love to see if he would bleed.

  She was flourishing in her new position at the charity.

  She had been called in connection to the SEC’s case against Jackson.

  She was looking good.

  Every day, he broke a little more inside until there was nothing. But he couldn’t be this coward anymore, he couldn’t bear another day without seeing her, without holding her in his arms.

  How lost had he been to slap a price on his heart?

  She had been right about everything.

  He had given her everything except himself.

  And the woman she had grown into these past couple of months, she would settle for nothing less than all of him.

  He must have said something because suddenly the conference room was empty around him.

  Picking up his cell, he made a call, his heart in his throat.

&n
bsp; His voice muddled in sleep, Rocco answered. “Stefan?”

  “Where is she, Rocco?” he said without preamble

  His oldest friend understood immediately. “In New York.”

  “I know that. But not where. I know that Olivia knows. I know that Clio went to her. I need to see her, Rocco. Now.”

  After what seemed like an eternity, Rocco sighed. “I’m sorry, Stefan. Believe it or not, my stubborn wife hasn’t told even me where Clio is.”

  “She is your damn wife, why the hell not?”

  “Because she takes standing by her friends seriously. If you want to know where Clio is, you have to ask Liv. Stefan...take care, fratello.”

  Stefan barely heard Rocco’s warning. In two minutes he instructed his pilot to fuel the jet, ordered his secretary to cancel everything indefinitely.

  Nothing in his life had any meaning without her.

  He needed his wife, his friend, his lover back. He needed the woman who had made him live again, smile again, made him feel so much again that he couldn’t breathe for the ache of it. And he would beg if that’s what it took to bring her back into his life.

  * * *

  As Clio stared at Stefan, standing at Olivia’s friend’s doorstep, his face haggard and covered in stubble, his thick hair rumpled, his collar askew, her entire world tilted and shook. Her gut folded on itself, her breath balling up in her throat.

  She pulled the edges of the threadbare cardigan together defensively as his perusal, hungry and invasive, continued.

  Without a word, he entered the flat and closed the door with an arrogant kick of his handmade Italian shoe. Wandered soundlessly through the small flat.

  Every inch of her stilled in panic as he picked up the cardboard box she had discarded carelessly on one of the sofas.

  Anger flashed in his green gaze and then cycled to fury and then to utter powerlessness. He turned the box around and around with those long fingers.

  Her breath quivered in her throat noisily as she stared at the expression she thought she never would see. The box was crushed in his hand, his knuckles showing white.

  “When did you take the test?” he finally said, something so desperately painful in his tone that she just stared at him.

  “Clio?”

  Recovering, she fought the urge to go to him. “Yesterday morning.”

  Another silence ensued, stretching her nerves so tight that a breath of wind could tear them apart.

  “Yesterday morning...”

  A quiet sound fell from his lips, shock marring his features. “And?”

  The tiny room reverberated with the sound of his question, all the more unnerving for the whispered entreaty that it was.

  Clio swallowed and instinctively wrapped her arms around her still-flat tummy. She had expected him to give her a display of that fierce Sicilian temper. This silently obvious conflict rattled her on so many levels. “It was positive. I made an appointment to see a doctor in two days to have it confirmed, but I...I’m pregnant.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me?” came the instant retort. He pushed his fingers through his hair, paced the small room. Let out a string of angry curses. Came to a standstill within touching distance, his features wreathed in torturous agony. “Dio, Clio... Would you have hid this from me if I hadn’t come today? Would you have...”

  Hands tucked in the pockets of his trousers, he turned away from her abruptly. As if he couldn’t bear the sight of her. The tension in his vibrating frame sent her into a panic.

  She knew that final thread of his control had unraveled, the last piece of his armor was broken. Knew that he was hurting and that he would attack at any moment. Knew what families and children and the bonds of kin would mean to his Sicilian blood.

  Knew that his vulnerability, beneath the hard shell he had acquired all these years, lay in the depth and intensity with which he had once wanted love and family and laughter in his life.

  Knew that he was made for it, that he would make a fantastic father. Knew that she was weakening already after facing the truth about the pregnancy, and seeing him so close by, remembering how good it had felt to give herself over to him...

  He was the man she adored with every breath in her. He was the man who showed her to be strong, who showed her what she was made of.

  He would fight for custody, she knew. He would do what he deemed to be right by their child. He would tie her up in clauses and contracts, he would use the fact that she hadn’t instantly told him to tie her to him.

  To achieve what he had wanted two months ago.

  Even as every inch of her thrummed with pain, even as every inch of her recoiled at subjecting her coming child to separate parents living across the globe, Clio made her decision as the woman he had helped her become.

  It was better her child had two parents who loved him, rather than a mother who would forever be in agony, living with the man who would never love her back, a mother who would so easily become a shadow of herself.

  She straightened her spine and faced him. Waited for the hardest battle of her life to commence. “No. I wouldn’t have hid it from you. But I...” she swallowed the tears in her throat, “I would have given myself a few weeks to prepare first.”

  * * *

  “Prepare for what?” Stefan threw back at Clio, finding it unbearable to meet her eyes. How deep and sharp her words cut, how easily she had turned him into this mass of ache and love...

  Her denial didn’t bring him even infinitesimal relief. His gut still ached, his breath rushed out of him unevenly.

  She would have taken a few weeks to prepare herself...that he had driven her to this, it traveled through him like a missile launched specifically to torture him.

  He turned, not sure what he would say, and stilled.

  With her palm splayed against her stomach, her green eyes shining with tenderness and determination, she faced him. The wide curve of her mouth trembled. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen and it only brought home again how much he loved this woman. How fortunate that she would mother his child...

  “Please answer me, Clio. Preparing for what?” he asked again, fisting his hands at his sides, stifling the urge to take her in his arms.

  She shrugged, but the casualness she was going for didn’t come through. There was a wariness in her eyes that he decided he would never be the cause of again.

  “I knew that if I had told you immediately, you would come armed to the teeth with clauses and contracts. That you would want this child and me and the whole family thing. That you would seduce your way into my life and convince me this was for the best. As sad as it sounds, I need to shore up my defenses against you.”

  “You think I will bind you to me in the name of our child? You think me that heartless, Clio?”

  Tears ran over her cheeks and she swayed. Cursing himself over and over, Stefan caught her.

  “What am I supposed to think, Stefan? Two months have gone by and you didn’t call me once. Two months in which I wondered if I would ever see you again. Two months in which every minute felt like an eternity. Two months in which I battled the urge to come to you, to beg you to take me back any way you wanted.”

  He grabbed her hands, willing her to understand him. “I hurt you so much that day. I couldn’t face myself in the mirror thinking of what I had ruined. The minute you had walked out, I realized what I had done, how wrong I was.

  “I have been cursing myself, wondering if I could ever take back what I had done. I was terrified that I would hurt you even more after everything you have been through, Clio. I’m terrified that I might never be worthy of you, bella.”

  He knelt in front of her, wrapped his arms around her. Bent his head, burrowed into her warmth, the love he felt for her unmanning him.

  And even as he trembled
at the thought that he might have lost her, he could feel the rightness of this, feel everything in him slide into place. Striving for control that was out of his reach, he pulled her fingers in his hand and kissed her.

  “Stefan?” she whispered. There was so much pain and hope in it that he ached.

  He raised his head and met her beautiful gaze, poured the emotions flowing through him into words. “I’m desperately in love with you. With every breath in my body. With every cell in my being. I come to you today with nothing but my heart in my hands, Clio.

  “All I want is to be part of your life, a chance to show you how much I adore you. Every moment of my life, every decision I have ever taken, it...it has made me into this. But it also brought me to you, bella.

  “The bastard that I am today, I’m still all yours to do with, Clio.”

  Sinking to her knees, she clutched him. “Oh, Stefan...”

  And just when Stefan thought he couldn’t fragment anymore, that he could feel no more, the sound of her pain pierced him again.

  Wrapping his arms around her gingerly, he pulled her onto his lap. Buried his face in her hair and breathed in a lungful of her scent. Pushed himself to be the man that was worthy of the generous, brave woman that his beautiful wife was.

  “Please, Clio. Do not cry, cara. I will not challenge you over our child. I will walk out, I will sign any paper you want me to sign. All I want is your happiness, even if it will kill me to be away from you.”

  Meeting his gaze, she rested her forehead against his. “You really want me? Me and not just the mother of your child?”

  Hating that she doubted him, hating that he had given her cause to, he hugged her to him.

  “I came today because I couldn’t bear to be apart from you anymore, Clio. I couldn’t breathe for the thought of never seeing you smile again.” His hand moved over her stomach, and his breath caught in his throat. “That you...that you carry a part of me inside you...it’s more than I wished for in my wildest dreams, bella. Will you truly be my wife, Clio? Will you help me be the man you deserve again?”