by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
Salvatore just looked at her, his face set in granitehard contours.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll give you the list. I don’t even know why I bothered arguing.”
Salvatore had given her complete reign regarding the auction plans, but he had been intractable on the issue of her security from day one.
“Is Adamo Jewelers ready for business again?”
“Sì. Your boss is happy with his new security.”
“I’m sure he is.” She’d spoken to Signor di Adamo, but their conversation had centered on the upcoming auction.
The old man was very excited about the influx of capital their fee for hosting the auction would give the store.
She ticked an item off her list and then looked up again. “Salvatore?”
“Sì?”
“Milan is too far away for me to commute to work.”
His expression turned wary. “This is true.”
“I don’t like leaving my boss in the lurch. He’s depended a lot on me over the past few years. It would break my heart if he lost the store after all this because he didn’t have the manpower to run it.”
She didn’t know what the answer was. Salvatore could not transfer his office from Milan. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to go on working after the baby was born. She wanted to be a mother first and foremost. Her passion for gemology was secondary for the time being.
But the thought of Signor di Adamo relying on her and her not fulfilling her obligation to him left a hollow place in her tummy.
Salvatore’s silence clued her in that something was not right. She examined his face. The wariness was even more apparent in his dark eyes, but his mouth was set in a grim line—as if he was prepared for some kind of argument.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.”
She narrowed her eyes, trying to interpret the nuances of his expression and tone. “What aren’t you telling me?”
His spine stiffened and his expression went even more stone-like. “I procured a new assistant for Signor di Adamo.”
“You what?” Startled, she stared at him. “When?”
Looking as uncomfortable as an overly confident, gorgeous Sicilian male could look, Salvatore gave a minimal shrug. “I began the search for candidates the day we returned to Sicily.”
Perhaps she should be angry, but she knew this man too well to be truly shocked by what he had done. It had been his intention all along to marry her and he knew her boss’s dilemma weighed heavily on her. He was just taking care of all possible obstacles to the path he wanted to pursue.
“Signor di Adamo said nothing about it.”
“I asked him not to,” Salvatore said, with the air of a man intent on confessing it all.
“I see.”
She looked back to her paperwork and made a note about a question she wanted to ask the caterer. Then she pulled out her notebook she was using to organize details for the wedding and put a similar question on the caterer’s page.
“You could not work at Adamo Jewelers and live in Milan.”
“True.” She clicked into her e-mail program on the computer and downloaded her mail.
There were three more replies that she took note of before skimming a message from Therese regarding flowers at the wedding.
“It would be an impossible situation. Surely you must see that.”
“Impossible situation. Yes.” She wasn’t really paying close attention because it suddenly struck her that she wanted a traditional, over-the-top wedding gown and she didn’t know if she could get one on such short notice. “I bet Shawna would know someone,” she muttered as she pulled up the address file for her mother’s entourage.
She would call Shawna’s secretary. The woman knew every fashion designer in New York on a firstname basis.
“You have no reason to be angry with me.”
“Angry?” She picked up the phone to dial the secretary, but then realized the timing was wrong and put it back down.
Making a quick note to call later, she went back to her work.
“A pregnant woman should not be working in such a dangerous environment. You were shot at.”
The urgency in Salvatore’s voice finally got through the haze of thoughts competing for her attention and she let her gaze lift to him. “What?”
Dark chocolate eyes snapped with determination. “It is for the best.”
“What is for the best?” Had she missed something here?
“Signor di Adamo taking on a new assistant.”
“Did I say it wasn’t?”
“You could not continue after our marriage. It would not be practical.”
“I agree.”
Rather than soothe him, her acquiescence seemed to spur him on to more arguments in favor of what he had done. “You are no doubt pregnant with my child. Suppose you were shot at again. The stress would be too much for you.”
“You’re really worried about the stress thing and my being pregnant, aren’t you?”
“It is a concern, sì.”
“Salvatore, have I somehow implied I was unhappy about you going to the effort to find my boss someone to replace me?”
“No, but you are too independent and no doubt see it as overstepping bounds on my part.”
“I haven’t said so, have I?”
“No.”
“You did it because you knew you were going to marry me, no matter what, didn’t you?”
“Sì.”
“It never occurred to you that I might stand firm in my refusal?”
His sheer confidence amazed her even as she found it somewhat comforting.
“No. And you probably find that arrogant on my part.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t mind.”
“You do not?”
“No.”
“You are not upset about the assistant.”
He said it as a statement, but she answered anyway. “No. You wanted me to be comfortable leaving Signor di Adamo and I appreciate that.”
“You do?” He looked and sounded shocked.
She laughed. “I’m not that independent.”
“Excuse me, but you are.”
Laughing again, she shook her head. “Maybe I am changing.”
She wanted the ties of family and that meant allowing a certain amount of interdependence. Not that she had a hope of remaining independent of Salvatore anyway. She needed him on a fundamental level that made her more vulnerable than she had ever been, even with her parents. It scared her a little, but she was learning to accept the feelings he evoked in her.
“And this change allows you to rely on me?”
“Uh-huh.”
He leaned down and kissed her hard and slow and deep. She was a puddle of sensation when he stood up. “I like this change.”
She was too muddled by his kiss to answer.
Annemarie came home early from her trip to help with wedding preparations. The three women were in a war conference around the dining-room table when Salvatore and Francesco came in two nights later.
Salvatore leaned down and kissed her full on the mouth, making Therese smile and Annemarie blush. “All is arranged for the security of the auction.”
“I do not understand why you must attend. Everything has been seen to already.” Francesco frowned at Elisa.
She gritted her teeth. She’d wanted this closer relationship but she was learning it had both benefits and drawbacks. “I am in charge of the auction. I cannot let Signor di Adamo down.”
“He has a new assistant.”
“Who knows nothing about putting on an event of this magnitude.” She’d gotten something from her years of being Shawna Tyler’s daughter. “I will be fine. Salvatore will be there watching over me.”
Francesco turned on his future son-in-law. “Why can you not speak sense into this daughter of mine?”
“I have tried,” Salvatore ruefully confessed, “and failed.”
“Do you really think I’m going to spend my e
ntire married life letting Salvatore dictate to me?” she asked the room in general, but with a pointed look at her father.
“This I cannot imagine,” Therese remarked with a smile.
“You are so strong, so self-sufficient.” Annemarie’s expression said she wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
Elisa closed her notebook and slipped her pen in its pocket. “I don’t believe a woman’s intellect or common sense is inferior to a man’s, that is all.”
Francesco walked around the table and patted Annemarie’s shoulder. “You are my Sicilian kitten and your sister is my little American tigress. Each of you has a beauty inherent to your nature, though they are very different. A father could not ask for better daughters than mine.”
Annemarie blushed again and Elisa felt heat climbing up her own cheeks. “I’m not exactly a tigress.”
Salvatore’s eyes heated with reminders of how they spent their nights. “Are you not, cara?”
She couldn’t begin to answer the message in his expression in front of her father and she glared at him for making her think inappropriate thoughts that had her blushing as fiercely as her shy sister.
Her father did not miss the byplay and slapped his thigh, chuckling. “Elisa is a good match for you, eh, Salvatore? Her sass, it warms the blood, no?” He winked at the younger man and then turned his attention to Therese. “Can you imagine a year ago this man believed he would be happy married to our kitten? He would have overwhelmed her a week into the courtship, but my Elisa…she will give Salvatore a run for his money, no?”
Francesco laughed uproariously at his own joke while Therese smiled and Annemarie blushed, but Elisa was confused.
“He wanted to marry Annemarie?” She looked at her younger sister, who shrugged, looking very uncomfortable being the center of the conversation.
“It was something I considered. That is all.” Salvatore’s expression revealed nothing of his thoughts.
“Sì. He spoke of it to me during your visit here last summer.”
It was positively arcane, what her father was implying, that he and Salvatore had discussed marriage between him and Annemarie without her knowledge.
“While I was here?” she parroted, grasping immediately on to the fact that meant Salvatore had been considering marriage to the perfect, virginal sister while using flirtation to seduce the one he believed to be a tart.
“I sensed a rapport between you two that made me wonder at his choice of my daughters, but I said nothing. A man cannot interfere with young love.”
“Love had nothing to do with it,” she said, pain blossoming in her heart like a poisonous flower.
“Of course, the feelings, they come with time, but still, I was right. The attraction between you two bore fruit.”
More fruit than her father would ever know about.
A baby that had been lost and a relationship that would never be the same.
She turned to Salvatore, feeling a yawning pit growing inside her. “You spoke to my father about marriage to Annemarie last summer?”
She needed confirmation, to hear from his own lips that he had been thinking of marriage to her sister while contemplating her own seduction.
“Sì, but it was nothing.”
She wondered how he defined nothing. To her this revelation was something powerful, something painful.
She didn’t believe he could be so cavalier about it, as if it did not matter. Didn’t he realize how ugly such a circumstance made everything? It denigrated her to the level of bimbo for a short affair, but then when had she convinced herself what they had shared before had been anything else for him? Had she not gotten pregnant with his child, he would have broken up with her and married her sister.
She had to lock her jaw to hold back the cry of pain that thought evoked.
Salvatore was no longer smiling. “As your father has said, nothing came of it.”
“Sì. I knew it would not and I was right.”
Annemarie continued to look incredibly embarrassed while her father was so tied up in his typical male pride in being right that he had not caught on to the fact his disclosures were less than pleasing to either daughter’s ears. And if Elisa controlled herself, he never would. This wasn’t something she wanted made the subject of a family discussion.
“Obviously.” Therese sighed, but smiled. “You do not need to crow about it, Francesco. We can all see for ourselves how right you were.”
Elisa forced herself to laugh along with the others and managed not to flinch away when Salvatore touched her to help her from her chair and lead her out to the patio for before-dinner drinks. And somehow she kept up the pretense of happy bride-to-be for the rest of the evening, her heart as good as dead in her chest.
Chapter Eleven
THE minute they got home, Elisa peeled away from Salvatore and headed for the stairs. “I’m sleeping on my own tonight.”
“Che cosa?”
She paused in her headlong flight up the stairs and turned her head so she could glare at him. “You heard me. I don’t want to sleep with you.”
“What is the matter with you?”
That perfectly gorgeous face was set in lines of genuine puzzlement and that made her even angrier. How could he not know what was wrong? Was he that insensitive?
“I’m not sleeping with a man who thought I was good enough to screw, but not good enough to marry!”
He gasped. “Do not speak like that of yourself!”
“You’re allowed to think it, but I’m not allowed to say it? Get real, Salvatore.”
He looked completely taken aback by her words. “I do not think this thing.”
“Yes, you do, and don’t you bother denying it.” The tears were burning her throat and eyes, but she would have her say and get to the privacy of the guest room before she let them fall. “You spoke to my father about marrying Annemarie while you were busy flirting with me and seducing me, and why did you do that?”
“Because—”
She didn’t let him finish. “You thought I was a slut you could sleep with and leave, but you had no intention of having any sort of future with me.”
“Perhaps I tried to convince myself of that, but—”
“But nothing! I can’t believe you think I’ll go to bed with you after finding this out. You’re only marrying me out of misplaced guilt. If I hadn’t had the bad luck to get pregnant the first time, you would be married to Annemarie by now.”
A sort of dawning horror was reflected in his eyes. He was probably appalled she knew the truth. “You cannot believe this.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to tell me otherwise. I may have acted like one with you, Salvatore, but I’m not a fool.”
Did he think she couldn’t put two and two together? With that she spun on her heel and rushed up the stairs.
He shouted her name, cursed in Italian and then yelled at her to be careful. She ignored all of it and slammed into the guest room, locking the door and then falling against it as she let the burning tears track down her cheeks.
Seconds later he pounded on the door, making it reverberate against her. “Elisa, let me in.”
“N-no.”
“Be reasonable. Open up.”
“I—I w-won’t.”
The pounding stopped. “Are you crying, amore?”
“Wh-what d-do you c-care?” she choked out between deep, gasping sobs.
It hurt so much.
She felt used.
She felt betrayed.
And she felt scared.
Because she was sure she was pregnant with the baby of a man who could think so little of her that he could plan to seduce her while courting her sister for marriage.
“I care. Please, cara, open the door.”
The unaccustomed pleading had no effect on her. She was in too much emotional pain.
“G-go away!”
“I cannot do that.”
“Then I w-will.” She pushed herself away from the door
and trudged across the floor to the en suite.
Her body shook with crying, her stomach hurt and she couldn’t breathe through her nose, much less see a clear path through her tears. Disoriented, she bumped into the doorjamb on her way into the bathroom. Stumbling back, she cried harder.
She finally made it into the bathroom and shut that door as well. She also locked it. The extra layer of wood between them muffled Salvatore’s voice, but it did not obliterate it. She turned on the shower, climbed in the stall fully clothed and sat on the floor, letting the hot water cover her while she cried out her grief.
She hadn’t cried after the baby died. She’d had no one to share her grief and somehow that had made it impossible for her to express it, but now the tears came. She let the pain of its loss wash over her right along with the agony of this fresh betrayal by Salvatore.
He was a cold-hearted snake. How could she have forgotten that fact?
He didn’t want her. He wanted Annemarie. The shy kitten. Perfect wife material for a traditional Sicilian male.
The physical ache inside her grew until she turned onto her side on the floor of the shower stall, curled up like an infant. She tried to hold it in, this pain that splintered through her, shredding her heart, her very soul, but it would not be contained.
Once released, she could not contain her grief. It was all mixed up inside her, tonight’s revelations and her miscarriage. Feelings she had been denying for a year washed over her drowning her in their sorrow. Tears poured out of her while her muscles cramped in physical response to her mental agony.
“Santo cielo!” Strong hands curved around her shoulders, pulling her toward a big male body. “Elisa, do not do this to yourself.”
“I hate you, Salvatore. You hurt me.” She said more muddled things, few of which even she understood. Most of which had nothing to do with her father’s revelations.
He didn’t respond with words, but picked her up, taking her from the shower, and turned off the water. She tried to fight him, but her grief drained her and she ended up lying against him like a soggy, acquiescent child.
He stripped her and dried her off, all the while remonstrating with her for getting into such a state. She ignored him, crying silently, but still crying.
He groaned when he touched her face and brushed away tears, only to watch as her cheeks became drenched again. “Cara, please, dolcezza, you will make yourself sick.”
