by Tara Pammi
“Si. Where did you think this is leading?” he’d thrown back at her curtly, frustration turning his temper ragged.
“Marriage is a big step,” she’d countered then. “And I can’t even think about more kids now.”
He’d barely held back the snarl that rose to his lips. “You would have us continue in this vein, sneaking into bed at night and into closets during the day? For how many days do you think you can fool Isabella?”
For how many more days would she torture him this way?
For days, there had been a compulsion in his blood, a pulsing throb under his skin that he needed to secure their future. That he needed to bind Alexis to him in any way he could.
But she had told him not to rush her, that she was enjoying their learning each other, enjoying the freedom of being his lover without the restrictions and confines of marriage.
Maledizione! He should have dragged her to the church by the hair after that statement.
But no!
Vulnerable in a way he’d never been before, having no experience of this confusion within, he had let her set the tone for their relationship.
After all, he’d manipulated her thoroughly, hadn’t he?
It was the only thing she’d ever asked of him. That they take it slow.
He understood the word sucker that Luca used for some of his friends.
He had thought to make her happy, to gain her trust. He’d taken her to the opera and when she had challenged him, he’d watched a marathon of some cult TV show because she’d called him a traditional, stick-up-his-ass, starchy brute.
He made love to her in the night in her room, like some illicit lover, because she insisted on not confusing their daughter before matters were settled between them.
Dio, she hadn’t even come into his room once. Hadn’t let him take her in his bed. She didn’t let him wake up with her in the morning, shuffling him out of her room at dawn because she thought Izzie would wander in.
And now to find this...
The test, where was the test...he went to his knees. With shaking fingers, he upended the basket.
Maybe it wasn’t positive, the vulnerable, emotionally weak part of him piped up. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t even mentioned it. Maybe he was making a big issue out of—
And the plastic, rectangular tube lay faceup on the white marble, the answer winking up at him.
She was pregnant!
Alexis was pregnant. With his child. Again.
And she hadn’t told him.
Cold chill infiltrated Leandro’s skin, clamped his very bones.
She hadn’t said a word all day.
He had seen her at the lavish breakfast he had arranged in Kairos and Valentina’s honor just for family. She had sat next to him, a little bit lost, until Luca had prodded her.
He did that always, Leandro had realized irritably. Made Alexis smile and laugh. Looked after her in a way he’d never seen Luca do before with another woman.
After the breakfast, they had both gone their separate ways, a hundred things on his mind about the engagement party tonight.
Until he had come upon her, here in this bedroom and asked her point-blank if something was bothering her. If there was something he could fix for her.
She had fed him a white lie that she was anxious about her dad’s health.
Too afraid to examine his own spiraling anxiety about her continued refusal, he had accepted her answer.
Had made love to her in that very bed while the entirety of his family and three hundred members of Italian society had been arriving on his estate. Stroked and tasted and touched every inch of her until his name was a litany on her lips.
Because only there could he strip her defenses, only when she was naked and writhing beneath him, only when he drove away everything else with his hands and mouth and touch, did Alexis belong to him completely, mind, body and soul.
All last week, she had been curt, a little distracted, even with Izzie. Even Valentina, as self-involved as she’d been, had commented on Alex’s appetite.
Which meant Alexis had known, or at least guessed, the truth before this morning.
With a growl, he pushed away the basket, threw the test on the floor.
Hurt and pain were like twin spikes in his sides, stealing his very rationality. Shredding that sense of control he had always needed to handle his world.
Why hide the truth from him this time? What did she fear? Or had she decided she didn’t want to be with him after all?
I would like to visit New York for a couple of weeks, she had said just yesterday, throwing him for a loop.
Why? Why go to New York now?
Why was she pulling away from him?
And what could he do to stop her?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS ALMOST dawn and she still hadn’t come to him, still hadn’t told him. And for the first time since that night when he had made love to her, Leandro kept himself away from her bedroom.
The party had come to an end hours ago and the dense silence, the pitch-dark of the night, suited his somber mood. Somehow, he’d held on to his control. His jaw should have turned to concrete hours ago for the way he’d gritted his teeth and greeted everyone.
His face should have turned to brittle glass for the happiness and normalcy he’d had to fake.
His blood should have chilled to ice at the sight of Alexis in a navy blue silk dress that hugged her curves so gloriously. She had looked strained though he was the only one who noticed.
Like him, she hadn’t wanted to mar the happiness of Valentina’s big night.
If he went to her, he would weaken.
If he touched her, if he lost himself in the sensuality of her body, he wouldn’t care about why she was avoiding him.
If he took her and moved inside her, the hurt wouldn’t lessen when he was done.
Because he would still be outside of the wall she’d erected between them.
It was nothing but a madness and Leandro was through with being this mad, this out of control.
He had to do something to shred this fear. He had to take action.
Only action, only setting things right had always saved him. Had stopped him from crumbling. Had enabled him to take care of Luca and Valentina.
And the right thing was that Alexis belonged with him just as Isabella did.
She was his and he wouldn’t let her go.
He reached his study and slammed the door shut behind him.
Countless times, he had come in here, to swallow his tears. To bury his fears. To shore up his courage so that he could act like an adult when he had barely been one.
Here was where he had lost his innocence and discovered that the man who should have protected them all was an animal instead.
Here was where he had threatened Enzo after he had raised his hand at their mother.
Here was where he had hugged Luca when they’d discovered the horrible truth their mother swallowed.
Here was where he had argued with Antonio, for days, about the rightness of bringing Valentina home.
A growl rumbled through him at the thought of losing Alexis, too.
He had just poured a generous measure of whiskey, something else he’d never indulged in as a rule, when the door opened behind him.
Even in that moment, his breath hitched in his throat, hope flared.
Antonio stood at the door and Leandro turned away from his grandfather’s shrewd gaze. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this.
Not when he didn’t understand himself.
“Drinking, Leandro?” Antonio’s challenge was instant, dry and carried the weight of a thousand questions. Enzo had not only been an alcoholic but an abusive one.
All of them, e
ven Antonio, had felt the effects of that.
Leandro threw back the whiskey in a reckless gesture. It seemed he was finally coming apart at the seams and he hadn’t even realized that he had been holding so tight. That his complacency and his control were this flimsy.
The fiery slide of the whiskey against his throat and chest blunted the edge of his roiling emotions. Just. He faced Antonio and shrugged. “Maybe I have earned the right, Nonno?”
Antonio’s cane was a harsh rap against the gleaming marble floor. “Maybe you have become weak.”
Leandro remained silent, hating to agree with Antonio.
“That woman, what has she done now?”
Brittle laughter escaped Leandro’s mouth. Apparently, the only absolute in his shifting world was Antonio’s black prejudice of Alexis.
“She is pregnant.”
A fierce kind of joy lit up Antonio’s old eyes, so raw that Leandro looked away. He thumped Leandro on the shoulder, the force of it no less for his frail body.
“Marry her soon,” he declared as if that hadn’t been a foregone conclusion from the moment Leandro had seen that Alexis needed him just as much as Isabella did.
Why couldn’t she accept it when Leandro offered her everything?
“The Conti heir cannot be a bastardo—”
“You do not know if it is a boy, Nonno, and she has not told me.”
Antonio missed a beat. “You think she will use this to manipulate you?”
“Alexis doesn’t have a manipulative bone in her body.”
“Then why does it—” Antonio stared at Leandro, then frowned as if he couldn’t fathom the import of this. “This matters to you? That she has not informed you?”
Leandro drove his shaking fingers through his hair. Trust his grandfather to arrive at the crux of it so easily. “Si, it does. It means I still do not have her trust. It means she still has not accepted that we must marry.”
It means that he still did not have her heart. And that clawed through him.
Something dawned in Antonio’s gaze. Whatever it was, Leandro didn’t like it one bit. “She leads you by your manhood, she refuses to marry you and now...she plays with your emotions. I knew this would happen.”
Running a shaking hand over his nape, Leandro bit back his stinging retort.
The sounds of a file slapping the mahogany desk brought his head up.
A grim sort of triumph danced in Antonio’s eyes.
“What is that?” Leandro inquired.
“Read it for yourself.”
A small insignia on the top right corner of the file was Leandro’s first clue—a highly expensive Milanese private investigations firm.
A passport-size picture of Alexis, maybe eight or nine years old, that naive but defiant tilt to her chin, his second clue.
Pages and pages of information on Alexis from school grades to jobs, including the time she and her friends had received a mark on their juvenile record for some minor shoplifting. When she had been fired from a job at an accounting firm when she’d been eighteen—the year after her brother’s death, he remembered.
Facts even he didn’t know about her pregnancy. The loan on her store that had been almost defaulted. And then details about the accident and her recovery.
Nausea barreled up Leandro’s chest and filled his throat. “What in hell is this?” The question was rhetorical yet he couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“It’s a report that I had that firm put together a week after that woman stormed into our home. That shoplifting record, those bad investments, and this accident recently...it is not a hard story to put together.
“I can find a lawyer in two minutes who will label her an incompetent mother. And your children will be yours.”
“I will not separate my children from their mother. I need her in my life, Antonio.”
Leandro’s stark statement echoed around them while Antonio’s mouth tightened. But he did not care. Dio, he did not care about anything.
For the first time in his life, he wanted, no, desperately needed, something to even go on. He wanted Alexis’s heart, he wanted to be loved by this strong woman, he wanted to bask in the generosity of her laughter and passion. He wanted to go to bed with her through countless dark nights and wake up with her to a million sunrises. He wanted to help her heal and see her soar...
Yet he did not know how to keep her from slipping away from him.
She was. Dio, she was.
“I could not hurt her with this, Nonno. I could not forgive myself if I hurt her.”
“Then use it in my name. Use it to scare her, use it to bind her to you.”
Leandro jerked away from the table.
It was so diabolical and yet simple.
Antonio could force her hand with this very file. Even a whisper of a separation from Isabella would send Alexis into his arms. Leandro could reassure her it was not true, but persuade her to the altar with him. And she would be Leandro’s forever.
Once Alexis gave her commitment, once she vowed herself to him in marriage, there would be no going back, whatever way she’d arrived there.
She would be that perfect, adoring wife, her loyalty toward him and their family absolute. He knew that as well as he knew his own mind.
A life with Alexis and Isabella and his unborn child, just as it should be, versus this anxiety, this confusion about her feelings, this desperate chasm that he couldn’t fill no matter what he did.
If he used it, Alexis would be shattered. It was the worst thing he could aim at her, even in the guise of Antonio, the worst that she believed of herself.
But if he didn’t...what if she never agreed to marry him? What if after everything Leandro had done, he wasn’t enough?
He could have the only woman he’d ever wanted in his life this badly.
What, per carita, was he waiting for?
* * *
Alex felt every passing second like a net was drawing in closer around her. Soon it would choke her if she didn’t tell Leandro about the pregnancy. The terrifying anxiety she had felt at seeing the test positive had calmed now, but not the fear of the oncoming fate.
She hated cheating him of this news every passing second, especially as she knew how elated he would be.
A big, loving family, he wanted it. He wanted everything he and Luca and Valentina hadn’t had growing up. He would shower this baby with just as much love as he did Isabella. He had so much love to give, and yet, would he open himself up to feeling anything remotely like that for Alex herself?
Again and again, he talked of duty, of what an exceptional mother she was, of giving Isabella security, of the rightness of all of them together...
And nothing about her and him...
Nothing about why he wanted her with a desperate intensity every night, about the raw fear she saw in his eyes when he didn’t think she was looking at him, about the urgency and anger she sensed gathering in him every time she postponed their talk of future...
Would he ever learn that he had to risk his heart to have and hold hers? Would it all be her capitulation but none of his? Would he only manipulate her again and again, like he’d already done with her parents’ store?
For one question of Luca and five minutes of his time had told her that some offshore branch of Conti Luxury Goods had acquired a tiny health food store in Brooklyn.
Why, why did he need to buy their store and offer that exaggerated price for it?
Was it just to retain control of this situation between them? To arm himself against her?
So every time she had gathered courage yesterday, every time she had firmly put her reasons for not jumping into marriage, fear eroded her courage.
That she would let him persuade her, that he would forever bind her to him without ever openi
ng his heart to her, that she would forever wonder if it was something to do with her that stopped him from loving her... Alex didn’t want to live like that.
She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life like she’d done for so long. Craving her parents’ approval and attention but never receiving it, calling herself inadequate and not being able to help it, forcing herself at things that she’d never been good at and failing...
On and on, the cycle would go on...
God, it would be a thousand times worse with Leandro, for she wanted more from Leandro than she’d ever wanted from anyone else.
She wanted him to want her because he couldn’t live without her. Because he loved her, just as much as she loved him. She wanted him to be desperate for her, just as she was.
Bloodthirsty of her, true, but how could she live with anything else?
When she knew walking away from him would shatter her into a thousand different pieces.
* * *
The morning had started out horrible with nausea churning through Alex’s stomach. She had barely slept, waiting and wondering if Leandro would come to her.
When somewhere around dawn, she’d realized he wasn’t going to, she had cried herself to sleep. The tears felt both like a burden and a relief for she was no closer to deciding what she wanted to do.
She’d desperately wanted to go find him, to sink into his embrace, to tell him how much she loved him. But what would he say? What if he only took advantage of it?
What if he turned the biggest truth of her life into another weakness?
She emptied her glass of orange juice and decided to take Izzie out for a walk when Luca walked onto the terrace, a grim expression on his face.
Fear was a fist in her throat for Alex knew, instantly, that something was very wrong.
Luca threw a file on the table. “I promised I would help.” There was no warmth or charm in his tone. A nerve flicked violently in his temple while that laughing mouth set into a hard, cruel curve.
It was such a change in his demeanor that it took her a few seconds to focus on the file.
Like a snake uncoiling, ready to strike and sink poison, it stared back at her. “What is it, Luca?”
