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CHAPTER THREE
HE TOOK her to a small, family run restaurant outside of Palermo. It was a quarter to nine by the time they reached it. She’d learned Europeans often ate late. The owner was more than happy to give them a table.
As a dinner companion, Marcello lived up to every concept she had of him. He was charming, attentive and so sexy that her body thrummed with an awareness she’d never experienced with another man.
He poured her a second glass of the rich red wine he’d ordered with dinner. “So, Angelo said you were ready for a change and that is why you came to Sicily.”
She’d noticed since coming to Palermo that Sicilians made a distinction between themselves and other Italians, as if they were their own separate country. Marcello did the same thing even though technically, he was from another country altogether. She had heard that his mother was Sicilian. Perhaps that accounted for it.
“Yes, I needed a change.”
“Was there a man involved?”
Strangely she did not find his question intrusive. In an inexplicable way, she felt she could tell him almost anything. “Yes.”
“What happened?” he asked with an expression that compelled her to share her deepest secrets with him.
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Make me feel like I should tell you everything in my head.”
“Ah…there is a lot more to being the head of an international business than being able to count money.”
She laughed. “I know that, but I wasn’t aware that playing the role of father confessor was part of it.”
“You would be surprised. Now tell me about the boyfriend.”
“I thought he loved me, but he used me to get pictures of Tara and Angelo so he could break into tabloid journalism.”
“He was the one responsible for those stories about them in the scandal rags last year?”
“Yes. They hurt Tara, a lot. She’d been savaged by the press once before and Ray’s antics got her fired before Angelo found out what had happened.”
“I hate the tabloids.”
“But you’re in them so often.”
“Like I told you, I create a facade for them to latch on to so they leave my real life alone.”
She’d done the very same thing as a small child. She’d created an image of an outgoing, confident girl that hid her private thoughts and feelings. No matter how intrusively doctors, or even her own parents, played their roles in her life, there was an interior Danette who remained sacrosanct to her alone.
Knowing they shared such a coping mechanism made her feel close to him in a way she would not have thought possible.
“Tell me more about Ray,” Marcello said.
“There isn’t much to tell. He was looking for the main chance and took it, not caring who he hurt or how much he hurt them. I think that’s what devastated me the most. He couldn’t have known my best friend was going to get involved with a media interest like Angelo Gordon, or that her notoriety would be so easily revived.”
At least that’s what she’d thought. “Our relationship started out for the usual reasons…I think. My family is wealthy and maybe he figured all along that I might take him into circles he could use to advance his career goals, but I really think that he saw the main chance and just went for it.”
“And this hurt you?”
“Very much, but I’m over him now.” And she was. It had happened faster than she’d thought it could.
The move to Italy had been the right choice.
“The betrayal by a lover is the most devastating.”
“He wasn’t my lover, thank goodness.”
“So, the relationship wasn’t very old?”
“That depends on how you define old. We were together for a few months.”
“And he did not take you to bed?”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying on his part,” she said, stung that Marcello should think that she wasn’t fanciable.
“No doubt. Why did you hold back from him?”
“It never felt right. It made him angry, but I didn’t realize how much. He said some very cutting things when we broke up.”
“I see.”
“Do you? What do you see, Signor Scorsolini?”
“First that you must call me Marcello when we are away from the company.”
She smiled despite the heavy feelings in her heart from her trip down memory lane. “All right.”
“Second, that the man was a fool and obviously not very good in the seduction stakes.”
“Or I’m not easily seduced.”
“Be assured, I love a challenge.”
She gasped at his blatant claim and the implication of it. “I’m not looking for that right now.”
“But you have found it, as I will delight in showing you. I want you and I intend to have you.”
But he didn’t push for even a good-night kiss when he took her home that night. And it was the same on the three dates they had after that over the next two weeks. No matter what he had said, he seemed perfectly happy with a platonic friendship, while her physical awareness of him grew with every moment spent in his company.
She even started having sexy dreams about him. She would wake up feeling embarrassed by her obvious desire and disturbed by the strength of it…not to mention how easily he’d infiltrated her subconscious as well as her conscious life.
He’d asked her to maintain their status quo at work and to keep their time together strictly confidential. She’d agreed without pause. No one was going to accuse her of trading on a relationship with a man to get ahead in her career. Besides, there was something really alluring about clandestine meetings with the super sexy Marcello.
She loved talking to him on the phone and knowing that they were carrying on a conversation on a whole level that the people around them knew nothing about. Then he had to go away on a business trip and she missed him like crazy. He only called once and it was a short conversation. It had to be…she’d been at work.
They had plans to eat out the night after he got back, but when he came to pick her up, she had made dinner. She wanted time with him, to be completely natural together and the only way for that to happen was behind closed doors.
He sniffed appreciatively when she ushered him inside. “It smells so good, I almost want to beg to stay in and have leftovers.”
“We are staying in, only they aren’t leftovers. I made dinner.”
“Is it a special occasion?”
“I thought I could teach you how to play Golf.”
His brow drew together in puzzlement as he looked around the cottage’s small living room. “I am already a competent golfer.”
She laughed at his incomprehension. “It’s a card game and one of the few that is as much fun with two people as four.”
“Oh. Cards?”
“I thought you might be happier eating in and relaxing than going out to a restaurant, but if you’d rather…I can just wrap dinner up and get my coat.”
“Not at all. I have never had a woman cook for me.”
“Not even your wife?”
He rarely mentioned Bianca, but she knew he’d married young and his wife had died in a tragic accident.
“To my knowledge, Bianca did not know how to cook.”
“Was she a princess?”
“To me? Yes, but she was not born to royalty. She was from a very wealthy Sicilian family. Her mother was my mother’s best friend.”
“It sounds like a match made in heaven.”
“It was, but I lived in hell on earth when she died.”
Why that should hurt so much to hear, she didn’t know, but she did realize it wasn’t all pain on his behalf. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. They say time heals all wounds.”
“I don’t know about healing, but it does dull the pain…or makes it easier to cope with.”
“Are you talking about Ray here?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Funny, how she’d told him so much about herself, but never about her corrected spinal deformity. It was too painful to talk about even now. The wounds it had visited on her life were too deep to expose to him or anyone else, for that matter.
She’d never told anyone about her decision not to have children because of it, or how alienated she’d felt from the world around her and even from her own body. Her brace had acted as a barrier between her and the sensation of touch for thirteen years. It had also distorted her view of her body. How could she explain what it was like to look into the mirror and see a figure that was defined by an expensive plastic encasement? She could not even be sure whether the curves were hers, or the result of the brace.
When she’d finally stopped wearing it, she had been afraid her body would change back, that her spine would curve once again and that the female curves she saw in the mirror would disappear now that their plastic encasement was gone. She’d been twenty-one before she’d finally decided her body really was hers again.
And even then, she often saw the brace when she looked in the mirror, rather than the actual woman looking back at her.
She shrugged. “Everyone has pain in their lives, Marcello. I’m no different, but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t ask you about Bianca to hurt you.”
He touched her hand—nothing sexy, just a small brushing of their fingers—but her entire body felt like it had been electrified. “You did not. You never dig for juicy details or push me to bare my emotions. I appreciate that.”
She laughed. “You would. The only person I know who is more private about their feelings than myself, is you.”
“I would not have guessed you were such a private person at first.”
“Protective persona. Most of us have them.”
“Not my brothers. What you see is what you get with them.”
“Are you sure about that? I bet even your father has an image he allows the rest of the world to see that protects the man behind his skin…the man who isn’t a king.”
“There, I know you are wrong. King Vincente is exactly as he appears to be. A sovereign to the marrow of his bones.”
“Or he’s just very adept at hiding any weakness, even from the people he loves the most.”
“Trust me, his weaknesses are in no way hidden.”
She had a hard time believing the son could be so very different from the father, but she didn’t know either well enough to argue the point. “Whatever you say.”
“I say that I am very appreciative that you chose to cook for me.”
She smiled and led him to the small dining room, where she’d set the table with candles and her best dishes.
“It looks like a scene set for seduction.”
“Maybe it is,” she joked.
He turned to face her and put his hand on her face, the warm fingers sending more tingles of sensation zinging through her body. “I would not mind.”
“I was only kidding.”
“I am not.”
“Um…maybe you had better sit down.”
He sat and he said nothing more, but he kept giving her looks throughout dinner that were as effective as any caress.
Afterward, they took dessert, a homemade lemon sorbet, into the living room.
He pulled her to the sofa beside him, their hips touching. “Dinner was fantastic. Thank you, cara.”
“You…you’re welcome.”
