by Olivia Gates
She giggled. “Nothing so exalted. I used to be my school’s diving champion, got so far as the regional competitions. Won me some gold medals in those. But the last time I saw a springboard was seven years ago. I wanted to show you one of the few things that made me feel alive. I practiced while you took care of your business so I wouldn’t disgrace myself. And it’s true. It is like riding a bike. My body will curse me tomorrow, but it was worth it.” She yelped with the excess adrenaline still coursing in her blood. “It felt great! I thought I’d grown old and creaky.”
“You will never be that. And you will never again neglect your passions and your talents, Gabriella mia. Promise me.”
She nodded, her eyes blasting him with unadulterated appreciation, for his solicitude, for everything that he was. She made him feel treasured to his last cell. Just as he treasured her.
He swept her into his arms, swam on his back in leisurely strokes with her nestled at his side, the largest part of his soul. His gaze swept through the now-open plexi roof at another moonless, star-blazing night. Exotic plants teemed at the pool’s periphery forming an oasis in the middle of the ocean. Their oasis. He’d changed his mind about donating this boat. He was going to re-outfit it for them. He reveled in being with her in the freedom of such a setting, such a huge personal space.
He luxuriated in feeling her this way, through the silk medium of perfect-temperature water, her satin resilience and strength tapping into and feeding his own in a closed circuit of harmony. This had long surpassed any heaven he’d ever heard about.
What they shared was something he’d never imagined there was to be shared. He’d witnessed family and friends finding their soulmates, but he’d never believed he’d find his own. Now, he hadn’t just found his in her, he’d also been given a second chance when he’d wasted the first that fate had handed him. He still woke up in cold sweat thinking he’d forever alienated her only to subside, nerve-wracked and kissing-the-floor thankful at finding her curled up next to him.
Only one thing disturbed him. Every now and then he felt some reticence from her. He could think of only one reason for that unease. The speed with which everything had happened.
He didn’t feel that they’d gone too fast. He felt everything had unfolded in total leisure. Time stretched, widened, deepened when they were together. The month since they’d met felt like a year. More. He couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t know her. Didn’t want to remember. For what was there to remember before her?
But he forced himself to let her set the pace. It might look like he’d rushed her to move in with him in ten days. But in his view, he’d waited ten days. He’d wanted her to stay from that first night. He didn’t have the least doubt. He knew. She was the one he’d thought he’d never find. The one he’d been made for.
He kissed her again. “Thank you for sharing your dive with me, bellissima. Share everything with me, always.”
She enveloped him in the contentment, the serenity and certainty only her embrace had ever imbued him with. Then she suddenly wriggled, broke his hold, kicked away.
She giggled as he gave pursuit. She was such a strong swimmer he almost didn’t need to slow down for her to beat him to the other end of the pool. She pulled herself out in one agile move, stood there in her flame-colored, one-piece torture device of a swimsuit, grinning down at him, before she ran to the dinner table he’d had set for them before he’d sent everyone off the yacht. He never wanted anyone around when he was with her.
Tonight of all nights, it had to be just them.
He followed, taking his time to get his fill of watching her as she dried herself in brisk movements that grew languid, sensuous as he neared. He kept walking until he imprinted her from breast to calf, gathered her to him, cherished her with caresses and kisses as she stroked him dry.
“About sharing…” she purred against his neck, rubbing against him, stoking the fire perpetually raging for her. “I keep realizing I told you my life’s sob stories in embarrassing detail. Whereas you told me outlines. Very unbalanced, if you ask me. I feel fully naked, with you with only your tie undone.”
“But you love it that way.”
“That is a supreme truth only equaled by the fact that I am just as addicted to watching your mind-blowing stripteases.”
He raised an eyebrow, pseudo-suspicious. “You want to get everything out of me so you can help me sort through my issues, don’t you?”
Her eyes melted with tenderness. “Got me. Is it so bad to want to do for you a fraction of what you did for me?”
He stared at her. Would she ever cease to surprise him? To do and say exactly the right thing, at the right moment?
He sat down in one of the chaise longues where they sun-bathed in seclusion, brought her down straddling him, wrapped her in his arms, rested his forehead on her bosom.
Sì, it was the right moment to share all of him with her.
Durante nuzzled her like a lion would his mate before resting his ear on her heart. The poignancy of the revealing gesture swamped her, the so freely demonstrated admission that he needed the solace of her.
He stroked her back rhythmically, making her insides quiver with bliss. Then he started talking.
“Everything was perfect, or so I thought, until I was eleven. Looking back, things were never anywhere near perfect between my parents. Or with my mother. She had this…irrepressible energy. It was sometimes painful to watch her, like…looking at the sun. But she always dimmed around my father. I didn’t give it much thought until she dimmed all the time, during her pregnancy with my sister. After Clarissa was born it was like she forgot she had other children. I was hurt by her neglect, more on my brother Paolo’s behalf. She explained that I was a big boy, could take care of my brother, and I needed to be with my father more, while her baby girl needed her. I conceded that, thought it the natural order of things. And for years I got involved in my own life. But by age eighteen I could no longer overlook it. My mother had become unbalanced, one day manic, the next in a stupor. I thought my father was not doing enough—or anything—to stop her decline.
“Then I walked into her apartments unannounced one day and saw her…hitting Clarissa. Really hitting her. Clarissa had curled up in a ball on the ground as my mother beat her. But what really horrified me was that Clarissa’s cowering felt habitual. This wasn’t the first time. I charged in, overpowered my mother, and she kicked and writhed in my hold like a madwoman. I could no longer find my mother in her eyes. She spat in my face, told me I was so like my father she couldn’t bear to look at me. I was…devastated. I…hated her at that moment.”
A gasp tore through her. He pressed her closer, lost in the past. “But what I felt didn’t matter. Only Clarissa did. I faced my father. I didn’t care what was going on between him and my mother, but I wouldn’t see Clarissa hurt. He swore he’d been ignorant of this, that he’d never let my mother lay a hand on Clarissa again. I left Castaldini the day Father took Clarissa to his apartments. I returned periodically to check that she remained safe from our mother’s mood swings.
“She was. For those moods stopped swinging, became a steady downward descent. Until the day she died. I came home for her funeral, almost didn’t recognize the woman in the coffin.
“After the funeral I had a long conversation with my father. He said he’d tried his utmost to help her over the years, but she’d been unapproachable about undergoing therapy, had accused him of trying to make her admit that she was crazy.
“I went to her apartments looking for jewelry and personal items that I thought Clarissa should have and would never think of taking for herself. After the abusive period passed, Clarissa had become closer to our mother, sort of her keeper, and I wanted her to have some reminders of better times before mental illness took our mother away from us, to equalize the anguish and sadness that had taken over Clarissa’s memories of her. And I found my mother’s diary.
“The entries started with her discovery of her pregnancy with C
larissa. Some were written in…blood.” Gabrielle gasped, squeezed him as hard as her heart contracted. “Page after page, year after year of agony, of obsession, of unbearable feelings of betrayal. I could almost hear her laments blast me from the pages. How she’d given him her life, her soul, her heart, given birth to the flesh of his flesh, and he’d told her she’d always been a convenience, a means to an end, that his true love was a woman who might not be a queen but was the queen of his heart, a woman she wasn’t fit to be a servant to. The last entry made it clear that my mother intended to end her life.”
Gabrielle panted, her heart threatening to punch a hole in her chest.
“I stormed to my father, hurled the diary at him. It had been him all the time. He had systematically destroyed my mother while he earned our sympathy for suffering such a wife. I demanded to know who the woman was whose comparison he’d used to dismantle my mother’s soul. He said it had been her delusions talking. But I saw the lie in his eyes. And I told him he’d taken my mother from me, from all of us, pushed her until she’d killed herself, that I’d leave Castaldini and I’d return only when he was dead.”
She crushed him to her as if she’d take him into her, hide him from hurt, and sobbed. Until she felt she’d come apart.
“Shh, don’t cry, preziosa mia, it’s all right.”
She hiccupped a syncopation of incredulity before bursting into even more hacking sobs. He was soothing her?
He was, kept gentling her, murmuring to her as if she were a frightened child, until his caring and consideration became too much to bear.
She pushed away, wiping angrily at the tears blinding her, winced when her vision cleared. She’d soaked his hair and face.
She blotted them frantically. He caught and kissed her hands. She surged to him, raining kisses all over his face, quavered, “You’ve got this wrong. I’m supposed to comfort you.”
“And you did, amore mio. With every beat of your heart as I recounted the story, as it pounded, tripped, held its breath then burst with empathy and compassion.”
“But what good is that when you have all this pain inside you? This way you’ve lost both your parents in ways worse than death…”
She stopped, couldn’t breathe. King Benedetto couldn’t be guilty of such cold-blooded abuse at all, let alone to the woman who had loved him to the point of self-destruction, his queen and mother of his children, could he? If he had, then he wasn’t the man she’d believed him to be, didn’t deserve to get Durante back. Worse, if that was how he treated those who loved him, what if he did the same to Durante? And he’d wanted her to convince him…
Sobs wracked her. “I can’t bear it.”
He took her face in his hands, stroked both thumbs over her cheeks, wiped away her tears and anguish. Then he began to sing.
“Vorrei che i tuoi occhi siano la mia prima luce al risveglio…”
I want your eyes to be the first light I see when I wake up every morning.
Everything stilled. The air filled with the magic that emanated from his lips, potent, unstoppable, the sound of power and virility and wonder. Of love.
Quakes started again, different in origin but just as devastating, as consuming. He continued his spell, deepening its destruction, spreading its restoration.
“E il profumo della tua pelle accompagni ogni mio passo…per sempre.”
And the perfume of your skin to accompany my every step…forever.
“Vuoi percorrere il sentiero della vita insieme a me, amore?”
Will you walk your life’s path with me, my love?
Then he fell silent. And she wept. Her first tears of wonder, of being moved by beauty to an extreme surpassing any pain.
Suddenly trepidation pushed aside the tenderness in his eyes.
She couldn’t let him think her reaction wasn’t one of extreme joy and enjoyment. She blurted out, “That’s the most unbelievably, almost painfully beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. How did something like that not become an immortal hit?”
“Maybe because its writer wanted only one woman to hear it.”
“You…?” Shock hurtled through her. “Dio…Durante…”
“Sposami, anima mia.”
Marry me, my soul.
“Gabriella mia, mi vuoi sposare?”
Durante asked again. Will you marry me?
And nothing. Gabrielle was staring at him as if she’d suddenly stopped understanding Italian.
His certainty wavered. This didn’t look like surprise. Not the pleasant kind. But…why? What could be so…shocking? Surely she’d known where all this was leading? But if she was…unpleasantly surprised, did that mean she didn’t…?
No. He wouldn’t speculate. Never again. No doubts. He’d ask, and she’d tell him the truth. She always told the truth.
“Gabrielle? Don’t you have anything to say, bellissima?”
“Say? I-I can’t think of anything…can’t think…”
“Then tell me the first thing that jumped into your mind.”
Her eyes were enormous, shock still expanding. “I-I thought I heard wrong, then I thought, it’s only been a month. Three weeks, if you take away your famous Ten Days of Tantrum.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then he hooted with laughter. “Ah, preziosa mia, I never laughed for real before you.”
Her eyebrows shot up, her shock receding, her effort to match his teasing evident. “You want to marry me and make me your jester?”
“I want to marry you and make you my everything. My lover, my confidante, my friend, my ally, my psychoanalyst, my conscience, my perspective. As for how long we’ve known each other, you’ve known many people for years. Did that make you need them? Even like or tolerate them? Time isn’t a factor here and you know it.”
She nodded, shook her head, looking lost. “So time doesn’t promote involvement, but lack of it makes said involvement’s validity iffy. If…if in a few months’ time, a year’s, you still feel the same…”
“I will feel the same in sixty years’ time. This is only going to deepen, as it has every second of the past month.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You mean because no one knows what will happen in the future? But anything the future brings is irrelevant, because I am positive of one thing. Myself. In my thirty-eight years I have never even fancied myself in lust with any woman. I was waiting for you. From the first moment, it was like finding the missing parts of m’ anima e corpo—my soul and body. You think I can go back to living without what makes me whole?” Pain streaked across her face. His heart compressed, the world going lightless. He groaned the unbearable fear. “Don’t you feel the same, Gabrielle? Are the doubts yours?”
His heart almost ruptured in the moments before she gulped the breath she needed to cry out what made him breathe again. “No! God, no! I love you so much I have panic attacks with it sometimes. I-I just can’t imagine having this, you, for always. I never thought happiness like this could be anything but temporary. I was waiting for you to…to have enough of me and…and…”
“Can I have enough of bliss? Of sustenance? Of air?”
“Durante…this is too much…too much…”
“Nothing is too much for you. My life, the whole world, they’re yours, if only you’ll take them. Will you, alma mia?”
She looked as if something was tearing her apart. Before he could blurt out his demand that she reveal whatever burden she had for him to bear, she surged into his body. “Yes, please, please, Durante. I want to never be without you again. I want to live my whole life enriching yours, if only you’ll let me.”
He groaned as if his soul had been dragged out and suddenly left to return to its sanctuary deep within him. He crushed her in his arms, moaned the ache of relief. “You have already enriched it beyond imagining, mia cuore. You healed me, purged my anguish. Now I owe you, us, myself without bitterness or shadows anywhere inside me. I owe you the best man I can be. And you were right, as you always are. This can only happen
if I let go of my anger. I also need to give you the wedding that you deserve, and all of that can only happen one way. By going back. To make whatever peace I can with my father, to marry you on Castaldinian soil.”
Thirteen
With every mile deeper into Castaldinian soil, it rose.
The suffocating feeling of being dragged into the worst days of her life, of feeling that they would start again, and this time, they would never end.
Gabrielle had spent what she remembered of her childhood on a Mediterranean island. Although that childhood had been turbulent, the sheer beauty and brightness of the backdrop it had played against had ameliorated much of its anxieties and heartaches. That had been reversed during her last stay in Cagliari.
Witnessing her mother fade away in that sun-drenched, olive grove-ensconced villa, watching her eyes empty of life on that veranda overlooking her beloved white-gold beaches and azure bay, burying her in the embrace of the land she’d called home, had forever linked this magnificence of nature, this balminess of weather, with irretrievable loss and bottomless grief.
Now similar scenes unfolded before her eyes, the influence of another ancient, blessed-by-the-gods land permeating her senses.
She took what comfort she could in the differences she’d been discovering since they’d started their drive to the capital, Jawara, from the private airfield Durante’s jet had landed in.
Castaldini’s landscape was wilder, more varied, segueing from mountain chains with rivers traversing them to plains with lakes and ponds that softened the harshness of the craggy terrain they rolled from. Then, at the very edge of the island, the land gave way to dense maquis followed by miles-deep expanses of powdered gold lapped by what seemed to be liquid turquoise.
Durante embraced her, as if feeling her turmoil. “This is your first trip here, isn’t it, bellissima?”
Tell him. Tell him now.
The urge almost burst her heart. It had been doing so ever since he’d asked her to marry him two days ago.
