‘I think that, whatever my feelings for Kate, it may be too late for us now.’
Aunt Maria frowned. ‘Too late? How can it be too late? Why is she here with you if it is, as you say, too late?’
A torrent of emotion seemed to well up like a tide inside him and his mouth twisted with pain.
‘Tell me, Giovanni,’ prompted his aunt softly. ‘Tell me.’
There was a long, painful pause. ‘She was having my baby!’ he burst out at last. ‘My baby, Zia Maria.’
Aunt Maria went very still. ‘Was?’ she questioned quietly.
He nodded. ‘I had only just found out. She told me, and I was…’ His words tailed off.
‘What were you, Giovanni?’ she prompted quietly.
‘I was so angry!’ he bit out. ‘Angry with her, and with myself—we had not planned a baby, you see!’
‘That is the way these things sometimes go.’ She smiled gently, but then her face grew serious. ‘What happened?’
Could he bring himself to tell his aunt? To confess to his sin? ‘I made love to her,’ he said, in a cold, empty kind of voice. ‘And within the hour she…she lost the baby.’
‘And you blame yourself—is that it?’
‘Jesu, Maria! Of course I blame myself!’ he exploded. ‘If I hadn’t done that then she would still be pregnant!’
Aunt Maria shook her head. ‘Oh, Giovanni, don’t be ridiculous!’ Her face was very candid as she laid a hand gently on his arm. ‘Giovanni, think about this logically. Do you imagine that once a woman is pregnant, she and her partner never make love again until the baby arrives?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Well, then…what happened happened, and no one is to blame. It could well be,’ she hesitated, ‘that she would have lost the baby anyway. It would have occurred whether you made love to her or not. Sex does not cause miscarriages.’
‘I’ve made her so unhappy!’ he declared hotly.
‘And yourself, by the look of you,’ observed his aunt. ‘The question you must ask yourself is whether you are going to let this ruin what you have between the two of you.’
And what did they have between them? He didn’t know. He had never got around to asking her. Or telling her. He had been locked into a part-time relationship which was full of passion, but low on commitment. He had imagined that things would continue in their sweet, blissful way—but nothing ever remained the same, he realised now. Especially feelings. His own had changed somewhere along the way, but had hers?
‘You must talk to her!’ declared his aunt urgently. ‘You must!’
‘I know I must,’ he echoed quietly.
The following morning he drove her into central Sicily, and Kate tried very hard to concentrate on the scenery and not the count-down happening inside her head as the hours before going home slowly ticked away. Tomorrow she would be on a flight back to England—her stay with Giovanni nothing but a bitter-sweet memory.
She had spent nights aching with the anticipation of how this moment might feel. She had imagined pain—a harsh, intense pain—but in that she had been wrong, because she felt numb. As if nothing could touch her. Please let me stay this way, she prayed, let me be strong when we say our goodbyes.
At least the scenery was spectacular enough to take her breath away as they drove up through the narrow, tortuous bends of the mountain roads. She saw forbidding rows of terracotta-roofed villages which seemed to hang in the air, and she shivered.
‘They were built up there to keep out invaders from long ago,’ mused Giovanni as he shot a glance at her frozen profile.
Kate thought that their very isolation and aloofness must be successful at discouraging modern-day tourists, too.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To Lake di Pergusa,’ he said, and paused. ‘The very spot where Persephone was abducted, all those years ago.’
Memories of the famous Sicilian myth came drifting back to her as he skirted the lake which was, rather disappointingly, skirted by a motor speedway. And the lake itself was noisy with waterskiers and motorboats.
He switched off the ignition, and they sat there for a moment or two in silence, while Kate’s heart thudded with dread.
‘So what do you think of my island, Kate?’ he asked softly, wishing that she would look at him instead of presenting him with that unfathomable profile.
She tried hard not to imagine what this would be like if it was the beginning and not the end, but it took some doing. Resolutely, she kept her eyes fixed on the lake and tried to think what the old Kate would have said.
‘Well, the circumstances of how I came to be here wouldn’t have been my first choice,’ she managed drily.
He recognised just what it must have cost her to say that, and his heart turned over. ‘And are you recovered now?’ he murmured. ‘At least a little?’
Until she recovers. Like a bad dream, the words came back to haunt her, but her heartbreak was her burden to carry, not his.
She nodded. ‘More than a little. You see—I barely had time to realise I was pregnant, before…’ Her voice wobbled, and she took a deep breath before she spoke again. ‘Maybe that helped a bit.’
He felt the knife-twist of bitter regret. ‘I wish I could undo the past, Kate.’
She turned to him then and her green eyes were huge in her face. Her words came out on a tremble. ‘What, all of it?’ Was he saying that he wished he had never met her, was that it?
He shook his head. Had she misunderstood him so badly, or had his actions caused her to do so? ‘The bad bits—the times when I was angry, when I spoke so harshly to you.’ His eyes imprisoned hers with their blue fire.
Something akin to hope flared in her heart, and, no matter how hard she tried to quash it, it stubbornly refused to die. ‘And the good bits?’ she asked tremulously. ‘What of those?’
He had spent a lifetime keeping his feelings hidden, locked away inside his secret Sicilian nature, but suddenly he found himself wanting to tell her—needing to tell her. ‘I would relive them over and over and over again,’ he said softly. ‘The very first time I saw you, what I felt for you—’
‘Lust,’ she forced herself to say, and bit her lip.
He saw the uncertainty on her face and shook his head. ‘Passion,’ he corrected gently. ‘Not lust, cara, but passion. Something which had never entered my life before I met you.’
‘Not even with Anna?’ The words were out before she could stop them.
‘Not even with Anna.’ He sighed, knowing that he owed her everything, but the most important thing of all was the truth. Even if she did not want him, he owed her that.
‘Anna and I had all the right ingredients for a relationship. We had mutual liking and respect, and we both wanted a perfect marriage, I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘But life doesn’t always conform to the ideals you set yourself. The moment I met you, my subconscious must have been telling me that there are emotions which go beyond reason, beyond understanding, even.’
Her heart began to thud. ‘And what emotions are they?’ she questioned painfully.
There was a long pause, and his blue eyes were luminous as he looked at her. ‘Why, love, of course, cara mia.
Just love.’ Just love? Just love? She stared at him, her heart not daring to believe the words he had just said to her.
‘I love you, Kate. Ti vogghiu beni. I want you and I need you…by my side, and in my heart. Forever.’
‘Oh, Giovanni.’ Words she had longed for, prayed for. Tears began to slide down her cheeks. ‘Giovanni,’ she said brokenly.
‘Don’t cry, cara mia,’ he beseeched. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘Because…’ She thought of his honesty and at last allowed her own true feelings to come flooding out, like a river which had burst its banks. ‘Because I thought you didn’t want me any more—’
‘Not want you?’ he demanded incredulously. ‘Not want you?’
‘You haven’t come near me since…’
‘
Since the baby?’ he prompted painfully, his mouth twisting. ‘You want to know why? Because I blamed myself! If I hadn’t made love to you—’
‘But it could have happened anyway!’ she told him fiercely.
‘I know that. Now.’
Tenderly he wiped the tears from her cheek and she looked up into his face. ‘You d-do?’
He nodded. ‘My aunt Maria helped me see things in perspective.’
‘You told her?’ asked Kate in surprise.
His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t mind?’
How could she mind about something that had absolved his guilt? It was just the thought of her aloof Giovanni confiding in something as personal as that to his aunt!
He saw her look of confusion.
‘Aunt Maria realised that I was hurting,’ he told her. ‘And she also realised that what you and I had between us was strong—much too strong to be broken. She made me realise that some things happen just because they are meant to. That men have been making love to pregnant women since time began—and there was no earthly reason why we shouldn’t have done the same.’
‘I shouldn’t have let you shoulder the burden of guilt,’ she told him falteringly. ‘But I was hurting too much to be able to reach out and help you—and you seemed so proud and remote. You wouldn’t come near me afterwards—you wouldn’t even touch me.’
‘I thought that you would push me away,’ he admitted. ‘As well as feeling I didn’t deserve to touch you.’
Kate shook her head wonderingly. ‘And I thought that you just didn’t want my help. Or my body.’
He gave her a searingly honest look of total capitulation. ‘I want everything you’re prepared to give me,’ he said simply.
‘Then you’d better have my love, Giovanni—because it’s yours.’ Her voice trembled with emotion. ‘Only yours.’
He was filled with the urgent need to kiss her, but he wanted to vanquish all the remaining shadows that lingered between them.
‘Does it still hurt?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘About the baby?’
She nodded. The truth was painful, yes, but out of pain grew healing, and a new kind of maturity. ‘A little. But it gets easier day by day.’
‘I want to give you more babies,’ he whispered. ‘As many as you want. And I want to marry you. Mi vo spusari, cara?’
She didn’t need to speak fluent Sicilian to understand what he had just said. ‘Sí, caro. Sí.’ Her eyes grew misty as she gently ran her fingertips lovingly around the hard, proud line of his jaw, just as she had been longing to for days and days.
‘Now kiss me, please,’ she said shakily, and he took her in his arms and held her for a long, restoring moment and then did exactly that.
EPILOGUE
THE lusty cries had abated at last, and Kate slanted Giovanni a rueful smile as she sank down onto the sofa next to him.
‘He has lungs, our baby!’ she murmured.
‘He will sing opera one day,’ predicted Giovanni with the kind of expansive pride he always used when talking about his son.
‘I thought he was going into parliament?’ teased Kate.
‘Maybe.’ He reached his arm out and pulled her close to him, absently and tenderly kissing the top of her head. ‘Shall I make dinner now?’ he murmured.
‘Oh, if only your mother could hear you say that!’ she giggled. ‘She once told me that you had never set foot inside the kitchen in your life!’
‘Ah, but that was before I married my independent Kate who taught me everything I know. Well, nearly everything!’ His blue eyes glittered as he planted another kiss on top of her fragrant red hair.
‘Two years ago tomorrow we’ve been married,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Can you believe it?’
Two years? They might as well have been two minutes, they had swept by with such sweet, glorious abandon. A wife, and now a son. Giovanni closed his eyes. Contentment and passion—an unbeatable combination, and one which seemed just as easy as breathing, such was his life with Kate.
Their time together had not been completely without some tensions—but then life was never like that. During the early stages of her pregnancy, he had treated her as he would have a delicate piece of porcelain, and Kate had not objected, not once. As each week had passed, they had breathed sighs of relief that the baby was growing safely, and as her body had burgeoned with the new life, so had their love for each other. Deeper and deeper, so that some mornings she had felt she really ought to pinch herself.
The wedding had been in London and afterwards there had been a big post-wedding party in Sicily for all Giovanni’s family and friends. Kate had met Anna for the first time, then already pregnant by Guido. She and Giovanni’s brother had been married the previous summer, and their happiness was evident for all to see.
Anna had sought Kate out in what had proved initially to be a rather nervous meeting on both sides, but all bitterness had been forgotten when her new sister-in-law had admired Kate’s wedding band.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ she had said. ‘I understand that Giovanni designed it?’
‘Yes.’ Kate’s smile had faltered, knowing that she must say something about the past. ‘Anna, listen, I’m sorry—’
‘No!’ The dark-haired beauty had shaken her smooth head firmly. ‘It is all in the past and the only memories I have of Giovanni are good ones. I am happier now than I could have ever been with him; I realise that now. Guido,’ she had added, with a slow, luminous smile, ‘he is the right man for me—and I am the right woman for him.’
Guido and Anna were installed in their home in the hills outside Palermo, Guido having taken over the running of the factory, whilst Giovanni now masterminded the international side of the business from his brand-new offices in central London.
He and Kate had decided not to settle in Sicily—the dramatic change in culture would not have suited his wife, he had decided. Nor him. His aunt had been right—his trip to America had made him truly cosmopolitan—although in his heart he would always be a Sicilian.
Instead, he and Kate would spend as many holidays as possible in his homeland, and especially in springtime, which held such tender memories for them both.
‘Kate?’
She turned her head up to look at him lazily, basking as always in the glow of love from his eyes. ‘Mmm?’
‘Do you want your anniversary present now?’
‘Shouldn’t I wait?’
‘Have one today, and something else tomorrow,’ he said, smiling as he remembered the glittering diamond cross which lay in a small box in his sock drawer. ‘Look over there.’
She followed the direction of his gaze to a low table that stood in the window of their airy town-house and saw a small box standing next to the fruit bowl. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?
She walked over and picked it up, and turned to face him, a soft smile curving her lips. ‘You buy me too many presents,’ she protested, but only halfheartedly.
He shook his head, admiring the way her silk skirt clung to the slim swell of her bottom. His beautiful Kate! ‘Never enough,’ he murmured indulgently.
She flipped the box open, and inside was a ring—a circlet of bright, glittering diamonds—and she stared at him. ‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered. ‘It’s exquisite.’
‘Come over here,’ he instructed throatily. ‘And let me put it on.’
She walked towards him, almost dazzled by the blaze of love from his eyes, perching next to him on the sofa, aware of the warm male scent of him, and of how much swanted him. Always wanted him.
He slipped the ring onto her finger above the plain wedding band she wore and it fitted perfectly, as she had known it would.
There had been no engagement ring—they had both quietly decided that to have one would be disrespectful to Anna.
‘It’s an eternity ring,’ he told her softly. ‘It means that you are mine for all eternity, cara—as I am yours.’
She sighed with pleasure. ‘Oh, Giovanni, you say the most beautiful things—
promise me you’ll never stop saying them!’
‘Never!’ He smiled as he watched her hold her hand up to the light and the ring threw off rainbow rays. ‘The first time I saw you I wanted to see you in diamonds,’ he admitted.
It was like a fairy story she could never hear too often. ‘What else?’ she questioned throatily.
‘I wondered if you wore silk next to your skin.’ His voice was husky now and his eyes alight with promise as they lazily scanned her body with proprietorial air. ‘And now I know that you do.’
‘Mmm.’ The promise in his eyes was reflected in her own. ‘And do you know what I thought the first time I saw you?’
He loved this game. ‘What?’
She gave him a smile which was pure provocation. ‘How much I’d like you to undress me.’
His eyes glittered. ‘Did you?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Then I think I’d better fulfil your every wish, don’t you, cara?’ he murmured, and pulled her into his arms.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1661-7
THE SICILIAN’S PASSION
First North American Publication 2011
Copyright © 2001 by Sharon Kendrick
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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