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‘A business can be started right now if you want. Your knowledge of the subject is more than enough.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I’m sure it’s sufficient, at least. How far into your degree were you?’
‘I’d nearly finished. I was in my last year when my father got sick. I only had my final exams to do, really. I meant to go back, but...’
‘That’s more than enough to start with. And a commission from D’Antonio would set you up—if that’s what you want.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
The reservation in her voice made him want to hold her and tell her he’d help her. Why did he want to do that? Why did he feel the need to tangle himself up emotionally with this woman more than he already was?
He shrugged, letting her hand go, and sat back, studying her pensive expression. There was more—much more to her reservation. He could feel it.
‘I have other things to do first.’
She looked up at him and he held her gaze, challenging her to speak her mind, say what was bothering her—because something was.
‘What is so important, Piper?’
She looked uncertainly at him and apprehension settled over him, suffocating the relaxed peace he’d found.
‘I’d like us both to go to London.’ After holding his gaze for the briefest of moments she looked down, her long lashes shutting him out.
‘Is there something in particular you wish to do there? Somewhere you want to be seen to validate our engagement?’ He kept his voice light, but inside the fingers of dread were closing in, threatening to choke him. This woman, who’d claimed to want nothing from him, now seemed to want much more than he could ever give.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I’d like us to see my mother.’
The thump to his chest as the reality of his fears hit him was hard. ‘No. This engagement is to secure a business deal and to legitimise our child. There is no need to bring family members into it.’
Unease shrouded him. What would his mother think when she read in the papers or the glossy magazines that he was to be married? Worse still, that he was to be a father?
‘Surely your mother will want to know? Even if you can’t tell her the sordid truth.’
The spike of hurt in her voice should have made him feel guilty, but already he could feel his emotions closing off, feel himself withdrawing. They’d shared a night of passion and it should have changed nothing, but somehow it had changed everything.
‘My mother will know only what she has to, and I suggest you do the same with your mother. This is not a real engagement and there isn’t any need to complicate it further.’ Anger surged through him as he fought back the fear of what his mother would think of his latest deal, of the false hope he might give her that he’d finally left the past behind.
‘Haven’t we already done that with last night?’
She hurled the accusation at him, her green eyes wide and full of hurt. Already he was upsetting her, causing her pain. As soon as he became close to anyone he did something to hurt them or turn them away, until ultimately they left his life.
‘You complicated things in London, leading me to believe protection wasn’t required.’ Immediately he took his usual stance of self-defence, angry that she’d made him feel and, worse, that he cared how she felt.
‘No wonder your brother left home as soon as he could!’
Dante saw a mist of red descend at the mention of Alessio. As if he didn’t already have enough to worry about, she’d opened that wound too. ‘Never bring my brother into this. He and my mother are the reason I fought to make a living, the reason I had to make something of myself. Everything I did, I did for them. I wanted to give them a better life, but it was too late for my brother.’
She looked up at him, her earlier prickly demeanour evaporating. ‘Too late? Why?’
The questions filled the void which had opened up between them, connecting them once more in a way he wasn’t sure he could handle.
‘My brother kept the wrong company, and after he became a teenager he was always in trouble.’ Dante felt the pull of the connection between him and Piper just as surely as he felt her sympathetic gaze on him. He sensed the danger in opening himself up, exposing emotions he’d buried many years ago.
‘What happened?’
She looked as beautiful as he’d ever seen her. But something inside him had changed. She’d opened a door he’d closed and forgotten about. A door that couldn’t be closed again now.
Mentally he shook himself. It wouldn’t do either of them any good to be weighed down with emotions. ‘He resented my authority over him and rebelled against anything I said.’
‘But isn’t that what all teenagers do?’
Her smile was warm as she leaned closer. He inhaled her perfume, the same scent which had tormented him in the elevator at his office the morning after his meeting with Xander, Zayn and Benjamin. His life was unrecognisable now.
‘Not all teenagers run away, leaving behind a distraught mother.’ He gritted his teeth together as the sound of his mother’s sobs filled his mind. Piper had opened up the memory and now he couldn’t stop it coming back.
‘Did you find him? I mean...he did come back, didn’t he?’ She stumbled over her words, probably due to the anger that must be clearly etched on his face. Damn it, he had no wish to talk about this with anyone—least of all this woman.
The pain of those first days after Alessio had gone still haunted him. Every time he’d looked at his mother he’d known she blamed him, known it was his fault. He’d driven Alessio away. He’d tried to be a father figure before he had really become a man himself, taking on the role of disciplining his wild brother when he had been only seventeen. For three years a battle of wills had raged between him and Alessio—until his sixteenth birthday. The day he’d walked out of the small house where his mother had struggled to bring them up. It had been the last time they’d seen him alive.
‘We had no idea where he was for four years.’
‘So you did find him?’
Dante recalled the horror of the day he’d found out the truth of Alessio’s disappearance. The fact that his brother had died alone years before was something he could never forgive himself for.
‘I found out that he’d died alone at the age of eighteen.’
The gasp of shock which came from Piper told him what he already knew. It was shocking, and it was his fault. He stared into the flames of the fire which had cooled to a gentle orange glow, wrapping around the logs. He couldn’t look at Piper. He didn’t want to see the shock or the blame on her face. It would only confirm what he’d believed ever since that day.
‘That is so sad,’ she said in a whisper, but still he couldn’t look at her.
‘He died at the hands of a rival street gang. It was my fault. I should have made him come home when he first left. It was my job to keep him safe.’
She touched his arm and he looked at her. The compassion in her eyes was too much. ‘It’s not your fault, Dante.’
‘I failed him, Piper. I failed him and my mother. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. I didn’t protect and care for them.’
When Piper had told him she was carrying his child he’d appeared to give more importance to the deal and salvaging his reputation, but it was the need to look after her and his baby which had driven him to such drastic action. He’d never thought it would be possible for him to care, to want to put himself in a vulnerable position again, but as soon as he’d known why she’d come to Rome it had been the only thing he wanted to do.
* * *
Piper looked at Dante. The pain in his eyes was too much to bear and she wanted to hold him, tell him it wasn’t his fault and try and ease his pain—just as he had done for her when she’d finally confessed to the blindness which had affected her left eye since birth. That hadn’t mattered to him and this didn’t matter to her. She wanted him to see he wasn’t to blame—not when he’d been so young himself.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ she said, and gently squeezed his arm, wanting to offer some kind of comfort.
‘You don’t know anything about it.’ He pulled his arm free of her touch, and the rejection stung her far more than any icy words.
‘I want to know.’ She watched as he pressed his thumb and finger against his signet ring, just as he’d done whilst she’d read over the contract he’d drawn up. He’d stood over her then and tension had crackled in the air, just as it did now. ‘What if I meet your mother? Shouldn’t I at least know something?’
He swore harshly in Italian, but she resisted the urge to step back and drop the subject. She needed to know about his past. Not only because she might meet someone who knew, but because she wanted to—for her child. His mother was her child’s grandmother. Could he deny her that?
‘There will be no meeting between you and my mother. I will explain the true situation to her, and I suggest you tell yours. That way neither of us will give false hope to anyone.’
‘False hope of what? Love and happiness?’ She tried to keep the hurt from sounding in her voice, but his rejection of her cut deep. Even so, what he said made sense. Maybe telling her mother the truth, instead of dressing it up as a fairytale romance, would be best. At least that way she wouldn’t have to explain when he walked away from her, leaving her a single mother, alone in the world except for her own mother.
‘Love and happiness are for fools,’ he said, and scowled at her, reminding her of that morning in his office when she had been positively the last person he’d wanted to find waiting for him. He touched his ring again, drawing her attention back to his brother.
‘Whatever happened to your brother, it’s not your fault.’ She moved towards him again, desperate to know more and understand.
‘I wanted to make a better life for my mother. She had a tough time bringing up two boys alone and in poverty, and Alessio was wilful and rebellious even as a child.’
Piper recalled the article she’d read in Celebrity Spy! Whilst going to great lengths to expose his playboy lifestyle, it had credited him with having made his own fortune. Had he really been motivated by the need to provide for his brother Alessio?
She looked at him, then at his hand. ‘Was the ring his?’
The question was out before she could think, before she could stop it, and for a second the air around her froze as he looked at her. She bit her bottom lip and watched as he looked down at his right hand, at the gold signet ring she’d studied as he’d slept beside her that morning.
‘I bought it for his sixteenth birthday and planned to give it to him that evening, after a family meal, but Alessio had other ideas and he’d long since gone. I spent the night consoling my mother and being angry with him, wanting only to banish the selfish youngster from my mind and my life.’
She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp of shock, but it still slipped out. ‘That must have been terrible for your mother.’
‘I have never forgiven myself for doing that to her.’
‘You?’
‘If I hadn’t ruled Alessio so hard, trying to shape him into the man I wanted him to be instead of allowing him to find out who he was, this conversation wouldn’t be happening.’
‘I still don’t see how it’s your fault,’ she said, exasperation getting the better of her.
‘That, cara, is because you do not know me. Nothing good will come of you being entangled in my life.’
‘Our child will come of it, and to me that is good.’ She flung the words at him, angry that he wouldn’t let her close, wouldn’t let her past the invisible barrier he had around him.
Slowly he moved towards her and reached out, touching her face. Her anger melted away and she yearned for more than a caress to her face.
‘You have a very generous nature. Never let anyone change that. Least of all me.’
Before she could say anything else he brushed his lips over hers and her eyelashes fluttered down. As he moved back, away from her, it was as if he was going behind a barrier of ice. She could still see him, but the coldness in his eyes, the frozen set of his shoulders, warned her that what they’d shared during the weekend was finished.
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