by Tara Pammi
Something flashed in Leandro’s gaze. Leandro seemed to have frozen as if he could not believe it. As if it was impossible that Luca had finally, irrevocably fallen in love. “She has also already turned around Rossi’s stock. According to some of my sources—”
“Your sources?” Luca demanded. “You are having her watched? Guarding your company?”
“I was worried about her, Luca. So is Salvatore. She works like a demon, she... The news about you that has reached us, she...she has not been the same. Salvatore appointed her CEO of Rossi Leather.
“Her idea for a flagship design store in the midst of Milan’s fashion district made the CLG board salivate. The store will display every new product line weeks before they actually hit the market. It will become the center of every designer event in the city. But she fought for her stepfather like a lioness, said it was her family’s legacy and they finally voted to call it Casa Rossi. Ten designer brands, including Maserati, are going to be part of her inaugural event tomorrow night.”
Despite fear beating a tattoo in his blood, Luca nodded. He had no idea if Sophia would take him back, but he meant to spend the rest of his life begging, hounding her, chasing her, generally turning her life upside down. Like she had done with him. If he had to spend the rest of it on his knees, naked and shivering, he would do it.
If he had to spend the next hundred years waiting for her forgiveness and her love, he’d do it happily.
“I have never met a woman quite so ferocious,” Tina added with no little pride in her voice.
Ferocious and funny and far too softhearted, the woman he’d fallen in love with was too good for him. “You take her side over your gorgeous brother’s?” Luca threw at Tina.
“Since I have discovered that my brother is a donkey’s behind, si.” Tina waited for Leandro to stop laughing, a serious light in her eyes. “Since she has done me the favor of telling me the truth. Since she’s the only one who treats me as a grown-up woman and not a commodity to be protected or controlled. Or used as a bargaining chip in blackmail.”
Instantly, all humor evaporated from the air. Tension rippled across his shoulders and he saw the same in Leandro’s face. Anguish danced in his brother’s face and for his sake, Luca hoped Tina would forgive Leandro.
She threw the last words viciously at Antonio, her voice breaking. Antonio, whom Tina had loved so unconditionally, had the grace to look ashamed.
“What truth?” Luca finally managed to say. It seemed Sophia had left no stone unturned in opening their family’s vault of secrets.
“That I am not a Conti. That my father was a poor chauffeur Mama fell in love with after she left you and Leandro. That my older brother, the Conti Saint, set up my marriage to Kairos because he thought I would fall apart if the truth ever came out and a powerful, handsome husband could make up for it. That my second brother, the Conti Devil, married her to keep my power-hungry husband from breaking my heart. I think I prefer your way, Luca. If I had to choose between one of you manipulating my life as if it were a chess board.”
“Tina, tesoro, I’m so—”
Tears rolled down Tina’s cheeks as she cut off Leandro. “I’m not angry, Leandro. At least not anymore, now that I have had time to recover from the shock. All you and Luca have ever done is love me, si? You could have hated me for Mama’s abandoning of you. You could have left me to my own fate when she died. I am your sister and nothing could change that. But I look at Sophia, I look at the state of my marriage, and I realize what a naive fool I am. I am leaving Kairos. And Milan.” She was leaving them both.
Luca reached her the same time Leandro did. He held her tight while she sobbed. Luca had never been more proud of his little sister.
Fear danced in Leandro’s eyes, and Luca shook his head in warning. His brother’s job for years had been to protect Luca and Tina. But it was Tina’s life now.
Luca kissed her cheek while Leandro compulsively said, “Where are you going? Will you stay with friends? You will tell us if you need help, si?”
Tina laughed at Leandro and hugged him tight. “I am an adult, Leandro. I can take care of myself. You’re to stay out of this thing between Kairos and me. But si, I will keep in touch, although only if you tell me what state Sophia leaves Luca in when she’s through with him.”
A weight lifted from Luca’s chest and he hoped Tina would find happiness in her new journey. He found himself frantically praying to a God he had only ever hated before.
“You’re a genius, si?” she said to him, exaggerated doubt in her teasing tone.
Luca nodded.
“Then, per piacere, do not lose the most wonderful thing to ever happen to you.”
* * *
Casa Rossi, the first major designer store of Rossi’s after its reinvention and the lounge bar on Piazza San Fedele, glittered on its opening night. Creamy white carpet and sofas, with different designer pieces from every noted brand on the shelves, made the space an intimate, exclusive event.
Pink champagne flowed freely, designer-clad men and women walked around and talked and got noticed by people they wanted to be seen by. More than a few people had approached her. Sophia had no doubt it was more to feed their own curiosity than anything else.
Because she’d dragged the venerable Contis into an out-and-out war. She refused to let Luca hide. She had been terrified when Leandro had come to see her but refused to back down.
Already the list of people who wanted to be invited to the next event was growing exponentially according to her assistant. Sophia had quickly looked through and struck off some of the men who’d called her quite a range of names over the past few years.
She adjusted a buttery-soft white leather clutch, still amazed at the success of her idea. Where Conti Luxury Goods entered, the entire range of companies who had once turned away from Rossi’s joined in. The gray wolves were all walking behind her now, like domesticated dogs, following the line of meat to Rossi’s.
Luca would so totally get that, she realized with a laugh. She’d have to tell him and then they would make fun of... And just like that, the painful knot in her stomach returned.
Two months since that night. She’d been pitied, smirked at, laughed at, that she had thought herself good enough to take on the Conti Devil. She’d turned her very life into a circus, herself into a cheap act for him. To make their marriage, its failure and Luca the focus of every rabid gossip in Milan.
Already, so many things had come out about him. Luca had to face himself. Accept himself. Only then was there a chance for them...
Having given up even a pretense of pride, which was all she had these days after making such a thoroughly public and humiliating spectacle of herself, of manipulating everything to lure him out, she’d begged Tina to tell her if she’d heard anything from him.
Hysterical that their fates had reversed. Now Tina was the stronger one, the one who told Sophia her brother wasn’t worth it while Sophia became a shadow of herself.
She lay awake at night, aching in mind and body, worked like a demon during the day...and it was taking its toll on her. This...faith in him, in her, in their love, the laughter they’d shared, it was burning out now.
What was she going to do if he never returned?
And then she heard it, the soft strains of music coming from the lounge bar beyond the foyer. It had a piano but she had actively looked away from it, for it had the power to send her to her knees now.
This was what he’d made of her. She, who had never been afraid of anything, was now scared of pianos, and music, bikes, the streets leading to the Piazza del Duomo, and couldn’t look at chocolate truffles without breaking down into sobs.
Suddenly, a strange silence replaced the soft chatter. And in that silence came that music again, the point in that vicious circle where it was trapped. Sophia felt like she was living the song.
Heart in her throat, she walked to the lounge.
There he was. He sat at the piano, his head bowed, his fingers flying ove
r it. White shirt and dark trousers, hair wet and gleaming, shoulders fluid. Soft pink light filled the room, casting flashes of light on him. Teasing and taunting her. Driving her utterly mad.
Sophia blinked.
It had to be one of her feverish dreams in which she heard that tune again and again, in which she saw him look at her with that hunger and desire, in which she felt his hands on her, holding her, touching her, driving her out of her own skin. In which she saw him poised over her wet sex, his expression one of utter reverence and wicked desire.
She could feel him between her legs now and she clutched her legs closed tighter.
Her heart thumped. Her breath stuttered. She felt feverish. Tears threatened to spill over. She leaned against the far wall and closed her eyes. She was so cold, exhausted. Like she was breaking apart again and again.
And then the tune rose to its pinnacle, hope and life twisting together.
“Stop, please,” she yelled. It did.
A frisson went through her and then she felt him in front of her.
His warmth. The scent of his skin. The air charging around him.
Her eyes flicked open.
Dark shadows under jet-black eyes. Wide, wicked, sensually carved mouth. Blades of cheekbones. Perfectly symmetric planes of his face.
The most beautiful man she had ever seen.
The man she loved beyond bearing.
She extended her arm, fluttered her fingers over his cheek. Ran her thumb over the sweep of one cheekbone and then over the defined curve of his upper lip. Her fingers kept sliding away from his face, so violently was she shaking. She felt his fingers clamp her wrist and hold her hand there against him, leaning into his touch.
She felt the pulse in his neck against her hand, frantic and hurried.
She felt his breath on the back of her palm, frenzied and rough, as if he had run a great distance to find her, instead of prowling from one corner of the room to the other.
She felt him, all of him and she shuddered violently. Her heart slammed against her rib cage.
He was standing before her. He was finally here. He had returned.
Sophia drew her hand back and slapped him across the cheek. So hard that his sculpted jaw went back and shock jarred up her arm. The sound of it reverberated in the silence, propelling her out of her nightmarish state. “Leave me alone,” she whispered, her voice on the verge of breaking.
He didn’t move. Didn’t utter a word.
Only gazed at her with glittering eyes. Even in the pink light, Sophia could see the mark she’d left on his cheek. Desperate, panicky, words came and fell away from her lips.
Please stay. Please want me. Please love me.
Please don’t ever leave me like that again.
No, she wouldn’t beg.
She made to push away from him but he moved faster. Trapped her against the wall, his arms bracketing her on either side. He said nothing, though, only stared at her, held her like that as if he was completely complacent in that position. As if he was content to hold her in place and gaze at her for eternity.
She kept her gaze at some far point in the distance. If she stared into those eyes, she would break permanently.
“Will you not look at me, Sophia?”
“I hate you. I...despise you. You...are exactly what I always thought you were,” she spat at him, her dignity, her self-respect, everything in tatters. Her strength nothing but a shadow in the face of her love for him. “A heartless bastard who can see nothing past his own bloody genius, nothing past his own demons. You were partying with your...damn groupies while I...I...” And then she fell against him, hate and love inseparably twining into a rope, binding him to her. “If you kissed a single one of them, Luca, if you have even touched one with a long pole... I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” Only then did she raise her eyes. He had never lied to her, but this... She needed to see the answer for herself. “If you so much as... This is over. We are over.”
“Non, cara mia. I couldn’t even look at another woman. I...was a bastard. For those first couple of weeks, I wanted to make sure you hated me. Your words that night, they haunted me. They hurt me. They mocked me. I thought I would give you all the reasons in the world to hate me. I thought I would shake that resolve in your eyes, show you what I truly was.
“But, Dio, I couldn’t go through with any of it. For the first time in my life, I realized what I had lost and that it had nothing to do with being my father’s son. That it was I that was ruining my life with my own actions. I promise, cara, I could not look at another woman but you.”
Something small and tenuous built inside Sophia again. Hope had never terrified her like that. “I did hate you. But I couldn’t shake off that faith in us. Is that what love is? This blind, illogical, irrational faith in the man who tears you apart so recklessly when all you’ve done is love him? I have no more, Luca. I’m done loving you.”
He shuddered around her, like a flash of lightning in the sky. His lean body jerked and settled around her again. “You did all this to make me face myself. You would give up on me now?”
She felt his hands move through her hair, his nose buried in it, her name a mantra on his lips. He held her gently as she sobbed her heart out. Two months of tears, two months of fears...two months of staying strong for him. “Sometimes, I feel like you have taken everything from me. Like a bus carried me away from everything that I loved. Like I will never breathe properly again. Like I will never be free again.
“I hate being in love. So much. I... It hurts so much.”
“Shh...tesoro mio. Shhh...please, Sophia. No more. I can’t stand the sound of you crying.” She heard the tension rise in him, too, heard the catch in his voice as if he, too, was breaking down.
He pushed away her hair from her forehead, wiped the remaining tears from her cheeks. Gently, oh, so tenderly. “I...ran so far, so fast, that night. But you...you were already a part of me. You... Everything was so colorless, Sophia. Even music could not soothe me. And then I saw myself. As you saw me. And I realized this life that has brought me to you, I could never hate it. Ti amo, tesoro. With every breath in me. Will you let me love you, Sophia? Will you give me the chance to be the man you deserve? I swear, cara mia, I will never hurt you again.”
Sophia threw her arms around his neck and held him tight. Breathed in the scent of him. He was solid and male around her. “Yes, please, Luca. Love me. Spend eternity with me.” He breathed a sigh, relief maybe, and held her tightly back. She gave herself over to Luca’s love. Her heart was his already.
EPILOGUE
Three years later
“I’VE BROUGHT SOMEONE to see you, Mrs. Conti.”
Sophia whirled around at that voice so fast that her head spun, her heart climbed up into her throat. She had seen them only this morning before she left for work, but her heart still ran away from her at the sight of them.
It was only three weeks since she’d returned to work after a six month maternity leave. But she missed spending those lazy mornings in bed when Luca would bring their bawling bundle into their bedroom and all three of them would cuddle, play and sometimes just fall into exhausted sleep after a cranky night.
Luca stood at the door, with the baby basket in hand, wicked mouth curved wide in a smile.
Her assistant, Margie, was faster than Sophia in reaching the new arrivals. She took the precious bundle instantly away from his father and cooed over him, before Sophia had even managed to breathe normally. “You’re lucky, Mrs. Conti,” Margie said in between the baby gibberish she spouted to their seven-month-old son. “You’ve got the two most gorgeous men in Italy chained to you.”
Sophia looked at her beaming son, gave him a cuddle and a quick kiss before Margie stole him away from her again. “I do, don’t I?” Laughing, Sophia met Luca’s gaze.
White shirt and blue jeans hugged her husband’s lean figure. Blue, ever-present shadows under his eyes. Stubble on his jaw, because he wouldn’t have found time this morning to shave
. He looked thoroughly disreputable, for once, the very image of the crazy genius he was, and heartbreakingly gorgeous.
“You left without saying goodbye this morning.”
Her heart still racing, Sophia sighed. “You looked dead to the world.” She knew how little sleep he managed.
“Yes, but I don’t like you leaving for the day without kissing me goodbye.”
Reaching Luca, she threw her hands around him while he took her mouth in a fast, scorching kiss full of frantic hunger. The same desire flooded her limbs and all she wanted was to steal away with her man for an afternoon of pulse-pounding sex, like they hadn’t indulged in a while. Her sensitive nipples peaked when he stroked inside her mouth with erotic expertise that to this day stole her breath. That made her want to be just this wanton creature who made the sexiest man rock hard, and forget all her other roles—daughter, aunt, CEO of a multinational company and even a mother.
Pulling back slowly, he sank his fingers into her hair. Eyes glittered full of wicked invitation. “Take the afternoon off,” he said, mirroring her very thought.
Sophia kissed him and drew back quickly before he could ensnare her again. “Even if I did, what about your son? He gets crankiest before his afternoon nap, remember? Takes after his father, the devil.”
“He’s an angel. Just look at him.”
Dark-eyed, dark-haired, with a charming toothless grin, Leo was a mirror image of his father. The look in Luca’s eyes when he had held their son for the first time had almost crushed Sophia’s heart.
There had been fear, and wonder and hope and so much love. He had lifted the squalling infant in his arms so tenderly, tears running down his cheeks. And then he’d met her gaze. “He looks like me,” he’d said then, a sort of helplessness in his voice. As if it broke his heart a little, all over again. “Dio, Sophia, what if he...he is like me, too?”
Luca’s scars had healed, but not vanished.
Sophia had been crying, too. But she had stayed strong for him. She’d clutched Luca’s free hand with hers and squeezed tight. “Does it matter who he looks like when we love him so much? He’s a piece of our hearts, isn’t he?”
