Her eyes looked too bright, but she stood straighter. “If this is your way of letting me know that it hurt your feelings that I didn’t tell you I was pregnant—”
“I run my family’s business. The only reason you know me at all is because I chose to involve myself in my sister’s personal life. At my own father’s funeral. We are standing in a former monastery where one of my ancestors copied sacred texts onto parchment. I am neck deep in family no matter what I do or where I go. It is the whole of my life.”
“Matteo.”
But he ignored the way she said his name. “You chose to keep it from me that I am soon to become a father, Sarina. That I will have my own children. And yes, it turns out I have some feelings about that.”
She breathed out, a ragged sound. And Matteo reminded himself that this wasn’t what he wanted. He hadn’t come here to fight with her. He was done with that.
He had watched this same cycle a thousand times. More. Nothing ever changed. Nothing was ever better; it was just the same roller coaster running over the same tracks, going nowhere.
“Matteo,” she said again. “I know you think—”
But he held up a hand. And she surprised him by stopping.
“I already know how this goes,” he said, low and dark. “You will talk about blackmail. I will talk about your agenda going into our sessions in the first place. I will talk about your pregnancy.” He nodded at her belly and the children—his children—she carried. The future. Untouched by all these centuries of schemers and brawlers. Unmarked by the ghosts of the past. “And you will tell me that you don’t know whether you would have told me eventually or not, but then again, neither do I. We can fight it out, again and again, until the babies you carry are full grown adults and have turned out just like us. Is that what you want?”
She had never looked more beautiful to him than she did now, literally blooming before him, vibrant and real. Not a ghost. Not a memory he used to torture himself.
Flesh and blood and right here.
“Do I have a choice?” she fired back at him, though her voice was husky. “You already told me you will never forgive me. I don’t suppose that matters, really. Unless what you mean by that is that you plan to thunder and snipe at me every time we meet.”
“Every time we meet?” he repeated, as if he couldn’t comprehend the words.
She made a jerky sort of gesture with one hand. “However it works. Custody agreements. Weekends here or there. I assume there are meetings involved, at some point or another.”
Matteo had recognized something crucially important on that flight. What he’d taken for fury, that bright, red-hot current that had nearly bowled him over in that San Francisco bar, wasn’t fury at all. Or it wasn’t only fury.
It was braided through with far more complicated emotions than that.
Fear, for one, that he was doomed to repeat the mistakes every last one of his ancestors—and particularly his parents—had made. A kind of mad desire to get his hands on her, anyway he could. To touch her. Explore her. Only partly because his children grew inside of her.
And underneath all of that, more terrifying and deeper by far, a fierce and comprehensive joy.
“What if I told you that custody agreements and the odd weekend aren’t what I want?” he asked, his voice more of a growl.
Sarina stiffened. Her hands sneaked over her belly, as if she was warding him off. As if she thought she needed to protect herself from him—and that, too, was familiar. It reminded him of entirely too many nights in his own childhood. Too many rooms heavy with tension and the remnants of the terrible things his parents shouted at each other.
Matteo refused to believe he was doomed to repeat these same dire histories, over and over again.
“If you think that you can take these babies from me, think again,” Sarina shot at him. “I’ll fight you tooth and nail.”
Matteo moved all the way into the room at that, his gaze fast on hers, his heart thundering in his chest.
“I have spent all these months in hotel rooms. Jet-lagged and alone, up at odd hours in strange cities. And the only constant was you.”
She started at that, her lips parting as if she meant to say something. Or fight, then and there. But she didn’t.
He reached over and touched her, running his hand over the smooth ink of her hair, because she was there. Because this was real.
Because he was done with ghosts.
“You haunted me, Sarina. Everywhere I went, everything I did, there you were.”
“You must have nights like that all the time,” she said, and though her words were bold and dismissive, he could see the sheen of vulnerability in her gaze.
“Do you?” he countered.
He fit his hand to the side of her face, holding her there. And for a moment, he felt her melt. She even leaned into his hand.
One breath, then another, and it felt like a gift.
It told him that he hadn’t created his own phantoms, out there in all those hotel rooms that blurred together in his mind. He hadn’t imagined the way they fit.
Or the way she felt.
“Here’s the trouble,” she said quietly, and then stepped back. “I just don’t believe you.” She shook her head when he opened his mouth. “You’re the man who has a video recording of me. Who had every intention of releasing it unless I did what you wanted. And I did, but there’s nothing to prevent you from releasing it when you see fit. And please don’t tell me that it’s been deleted. We live in a distressingly digital world, Matteo. Nothing’s ever really deleted, is it?”
“Surely when you have my babies it might be a clue that our relationship is not strictly professional, no?” he asked, dryly. “I am not certain why it would matter if it was released at this point. Though it will not be.”
“You took such care to make sure that you recorded me in your office. It undercuts my professional reputation and you know it. And you have it. And I can’t convince myself that this...” And as she looked around the room, he saw even more of that vulnerability in her gaze. It kicked at him like his own heart. “A fancy fortress hidden away in the mountains, furnished like a fairy tale, isn’t just another way for you to manipulate me into giving you what you want.”
He fought the urge in him to put his hands on her again. To remind her that if he wanted to manipulate her, he had far more effective weapons in his arsenal. “What is it you think I want?”
“Heirs,” she said immediately, as if that was a curse. “I think you want your heirs. Both of your family lines have been obsessed with their bloodlines since the dawn of time. I think you spent that entire plane ride figuring out how best to maneuver me into handing them over to you so you can make them just like you. However possible.”
“You don’t have to hand them over to anyone.” Matteo watched her face closely, ignoring the tightness in his chest. “I want to marry you, Sarina.”
And the bitter laugh she let out at that was not exactly what he had been going for.
“I bet you do. Wouldn’t that be a feather in your cap. Not only do you marry the woman who tried to take you down—which would also, of course, call into question my assessment of you and potentially ruin me. But you also get to make your children legitimate, which everyone knows is what people like you live for.”
He watched her closely, watching that vulnerability on her face shift to something more like panic when he didn’t rage back at her.
“Let us put this into terms you understand, little one,” he said. “Give me your mobile phone.”
Sarina frowned at him, every inch of her suspicious. And he supposed there was something wrong with him, that he should find that so endearing. Even when all that suspicion was aimed at him.
“So you can sling it off a battlement and watch it splinter to a thousand pieces below?” she demanded. “Why would I do that?
”
“Your mobile, Sarina.”
There was a mulish set to her jaw as she dug into her pocket, pulled it out, then handed it over.
Matteo fiddled with the mobile for a moment, then handed back to her.
“Point that at me,” he ordered her. “It is already filming.”
She stared at him, then down at the phone in her hand. Then back at him. Though he noticed she also lifted the mobile as she did it, pointing its camera straight at him.
“I did not spend that long plane ride thinking of ways to manipulate you,” he told her, grave and certain. As certain as the stones all around them. “I thought instead about what it is I want.”
“You say that as if those are two separate things.”
“My family’s legacy means something to me, I won’t deny it. But so much of that legacy is bound up in things. A company with offices across the globe. Pretty houses and villas and once upon a time monasteries all over Europe, cluttered up with the ghosts of the past. But there is a difference between a living legacy and a collection of monuments.”
“I assumed that for families like yours it was all the same.”
He did not take the defiant tilt of her chin personally, nor the way her free hand curled into a fist. He told himself he wasn’t the only one in this room with ghosts.
“My parents’ marriage was entirely about the past,” he said, and he knew it was true. It was what made it so hard to grieve them. And what had made it difficult to be around them while they’d lived. “There was no forgiveness for mistakes made. There was no future. They returned, over and over and over again, to old slights. Ancient betrayals. Theirs was a marriage entirely based on all the ways they had failed each other from the start.”
He wanted to touch her again, but he didn’t. He had to take notice of the way her hand shook as it held up that mobile phone. He had to look for meaning in the way her cheeks bloomed with heat.
He had to believe in this. In her. In them.
“You are pregnant with my children,” he said, his voice intense but no match for the wildfire inside of him. “You will make me a father. And I am a man who has spent an entire lifetime trying his best to be nothing at all like mine. And yet even so, my first knee-jerk reaction to discovering your pregnancy was temper. And you’re right, I wanted to hurt you in return. But Sarina. Hear this, if nothing else. I don’t want to be that man.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice a whisper again, and he didn’t know if she meant the recording she was making. Or the fact that they were here, so far away from the world and everything in it. But it didn’t matter.
Because Matteo, who had spent a lifetime determined never, ever to surrender to another living soul, or feel a damned thing, sank down on his knees before her.
Like a flesh and blood man taken over by his heart.
“You have haunted me since the day I met you,” he told her, holding her gaze with his the way he wanted to hold her. “One night was not enough and could never be enough. I think I’m in love with you. I hear your voice in my head. I wake from dreams about you every night, then lie awake, reliving every moment we spent together in my head.”
“Obsession is not the same as love,” she hissed at him.
“It seems to me we have a good six months to figure that out.” He lifted his hands toward her, and kept them there, a kind of supplication. Or perhaps it was a prayer. “I don’t want to marry you because you’re pregnant, Sarina. Though that makes it sweeter. You challenge me. You fascinate me. You’re not afraid of me. I have spent months trying to tell myself that your effect on me will fade. That I will forget you in time. But I do not believe I ever will. Did you think I ended up in San Francisco by chance? I wanted to find you.”
“You blackmailed me,” she threw at him. “And you’ve followed that up with abducting me. Where exactly do you think this relationship is going?”
“I don’t know,” he said simply. “I never thought I could feel a thing. Now all I do is feel.”
She made a noise at that, but Matteo wasn’t finished.
“When my mother died, I refused to let it register. She was always so distant. So disengaged. I told myself I didn’t care, because I didn’t want to care. But now, thanks to you, I find myself wondering if that was just a lie I told myself. And if she was the problem all these years—or if I was. I am not certain she could help her moods, but I know I could. I chose to be the way I was. And I don’t have the slightest idea how to be a better man, Sarina. I never have. But I want to try.” His hands were still outstretched between them and he didn’t know if he wanted her to take them, or if he wanted to touch her. Only that he wanted her. “Will you try with me?”
And he saw it then. Moisture making tracks down her cheeks. She dropped the hand holding her mobile to her side, and he had never seen the expression he saw on her face then.
Almost as if she was...defeated.
But this was Sarina. The toughest challenge he’d ever faced.
Still, her voice was small when she answered, and it made him ache. Everywhere.
“I’ve tried,” she whispered. “I really have, Matteo. But I don’t know how.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I DON’T KNOW how to do anything but grieve,” Sarina said, repeating those words Matteo had said to her that she was surprised hadn’t ripped her wide-open. “You said so yourself and you weren’t wrong.”
And she could hear the anguish in her own voice.
She could feel it, everywhere, the way she had for years now. The way she always did and had long understood she always would.
Matteo still knelt there before her, proud and beautiful, and whatever earthquake had wrecked her before kept going. Shaking her over and over, until she wasn’t sure what was left of her. Or who she was meant to be in the aftermath.
“You loved your friend,” Matteo said softly, with what looked like kindness in those storm-colored eyes of his. She wasn’t sure she could bear it. “You called her your sister. Do you really think she would begrudge it if you moved on?”
And Sarina let out a sound then. It wasn’t a laugh, because it was too dark, too filled with regret for that. Maybe it was a sob, torn out from somewhere deep inside.
She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference any longer.
“You have held on to her memory for all this time.” Matteo sounded as if he was trying to soothe her. And there was a treacherous kind of softening, deep within her, that made her imagine he could. If she let him. “You have honored her in every possible way. Surely it’s time to do something other than grieve.”
“I was so angry with her.”
It took Sarina a moment to realize that she was the one who had spoken. That those words were out there now, the deepest, darkest secret she carried inside of her. Those words that were like scar tissue. Disfiguring her, deep inside. And never fading entirely, no matter what.
She had never said them out loud before.
And now she had, she felt...outside herself. Unmoored.
And as if she had betrayed Jeanette all over again.
“I was never nice about that man,” she told Matteo now, because his gray gaze was steady and the words seemed to pour out of her as if he’d called them forth. “I hated him from day one. And I wasn’t shy about letting her know. I thought she was an idiot to imagine he would ever want that baby and believe me, I told her so. And when she called me, sobbing and in tears from that hotel suite, I tried to be supportive. He had done something so awful to her. Unimaginably vile. I hated him even more.” She felt that sobbing thing again, like its own storm lodged deep inside of her. And now, horribly, breaking free. “But what did she expect?”
She shook her head at the sound of that question, her voice cracking as she asked it. The way it always did. The way it had. Images of that morning flooded through her the wa
y they always did, reminding her of who she was.
Exactly who she was.
“Do I seem like a good friend to you, Matteo? A decent sister? Because I’m not.” She shook her head. “I’m the one who fought with the closest person to me in all the world when what she needed was my love and understanding. She was miscarrying and I was furious with her. That’s who I am.”
“What did you expect?” She’d shouted that exact question at Jeanette in the car on the way back home from the hotel. “What did you think would happen?”
“Not this!” Jeanette had screamed right back.
Because they had been the kind of close that came with constant explosions mixed in with all that laughter. Silent treatments that lasted weeks, then ended with a shrug and too much sugar. A harsh word instead of a hug, which they’d called honesty. They had prided themselves on the way they’d cut into each other.
Family, they’d called themselves. Though neither of their families had ever screamed at them the way they did at each other, as that would have required noticing they existed. They’d wallowed in their emotions. All of their emotions. When they weren’t fighting, they considered those emotions their greatest strength.
“I thought he loved me,” Jeanette had cried. “He did love me. I know he did.”
“He never loved you, Jeanette,” Sarina had snapped. “He used you. That’s what men like him do.”
“You don’t know him!” Jeanette had thrown at her. There in Sarina’s car while she sat on a stolen hotel towel and lost the baby she’d carried. “If you weren’t so obsessed with studying all the time, maybe you’d fall in love. Maybe then you’d be a little bit less self-righteous.”
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” Sarina had thrown right back at her friend. Her sister. “But I told you it would. From the very start, I told you—”
“It must be wonderful to be so perfect, Sarina,” Jeanette had sneered at her. “You must be so proud.”
The Italian's Twin Consequences (One Night With Consequences) Page 14
