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His body tautened. “That’s when I realized I had left you behind for good. You wouldn’t be able to come to me, nor I to go to you. My ache for you turned into excruciating pain.” Hot tears stung his eyes. “Gemma—I swear I didn’t know how I was going to be able to handle the separation.”
Hers filled with tears, too, revealing the degree of her pain.
“You and I had grown up together and lived through everything. I was tortured by the knowledge that until the situation within my own family changed, our separation would have to be permanent.”
“When I first heard you’d gone, I thought I was going to die.”
He reached for her hand, enclosing it in his. “I would have given anything to spare you that pain. There was no way to know how soon we’d ever be able to see each other again.”
She gave his hand a little squeeze before removing hers.
“You can’t imagine my panic. I feared you would hate me forever for my inexplicable cruelty in telling you nothing. There’d be no way you could forgive me. But I didn’t know how else to keep you safe from my father’s wrath. To my sorrow, you didn’t escape it entirely.”
“You know what hurts the most, Vincenzo? To realize our teenage love wasn’t strong enough in your mind to handle telling me the truth before you ever left Italy.”
“I thought I was protecting you.”
“I realize that now, but why did you lie to me again the other day about your reasons for leaving?”
“Again, I wanted to shield you from so much ugliness.”
“Did you think I’m not strong enough to handle it?”
“I know you are, Gemma. Forgive me.”
“Of course I do,” she cried. “Finish telling me about New York.”
“It was a different world. I checked into a hotel and called my grandfather Emanuele to let him know where I was, knowing he wouldn’t tell my father. After talking with him, I phoned my grandfather in Padua to thank him for all he’d done for me...all he’d tried to do for my mother.”
“He must have been so thrilled to hear from you.”
“When he knew I had escaped, you should have heard him weep.”
“Oh, Vincenzo. To think he’d lost his daughter at your father’s hands. It’s so terrible.”
He could feel her grief. “It was over a long time ago, Gemma. Later I placed an ad in Il Giorno, needing to talk to Dimi. Four days later the call came. The first thing I demanded was to hear news of you!”
She’d buried her face in her hands. “What did he tell you?”
“Dimi couldn’t give me any information. He said that while an intensive search of the countryside had been going on for me, he’d arranged to leave the castello that morning with Zia Consolata. He realized that if he didn’t get them out of there, he would be my father’s next victim.”
“I can’t bear it, Vincenzo.”
“The news was devastating to me. He’d promised to watch out for you. Instead you were gone, and he had to leave, too.”
“I’m so sad that you and your cousin will always carry those scars.”
He took a deep breath. “I cringed to realize the suffering my disappearance had brought on everyone. And worse, knowing I couldn’t comfort you. Neither could Dimi. He tried looking for you.”
She dashed the tears from her eyes. “I can hardly stand to think about that time, but I have to know more. How did you survive when you got to New York? You’d never been there before.”
Her interest thrilled him, because until he’d told her the truth, she’d refused to listen to anything.
“Don’t forget I’d been making plans for a whole year. As soon as I arrived, I checked into a hotel Dimi and I had picked out, then had my funds electronically transferred from Switzerland to a bank in New York. Two days later I applied to take the SAT college entrance test.”
“You’re kidding—”
His brows lifted. “You can’t go to college without sending in the results.”
He felt her eyes play over his features. “With your education, you must have been a top candidate.”
“Let’s just say I did well enough to get into NYU, but I didn’t receive the results for eight weeks. During that waiting period, I purchased a town house in Greenwich Village.”
“What was it like?”
“The architecture is nineteenth-century Greek Revival, with three bedrooms. I wanted to have enough room for Dimi when he was able to join me. But of course that never happened because he didn’t want to move my aunt, who preferred being in her own palazzo.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry. Tell me about the university. What courses did you take?”
“Business and finance classes. Thanks to my grandfather Nistri, who was my business model growing up, I started buying failing companies with his money and turning them around to sell for profit.”
She let out a cry. “Nistri Technologies is your corporation!”
“One of them. My nonno was brilliant and taught me everything he knew. Little by little I started to build my own fortune and planned to pay him back every penny once I’d made the necessary money. But he died too soon for that to happen.”
“You’re a remarkable man.” Her voice shook.
“No, Gemma. Just a lucky one to have had a mother and grandfather like mine. He had a contact at NYU who taught an elite seminar for serious business students. This revered economics professor formed a think tank for his most ambitious followers and told us to visualize our greatest dreams.”
“Is that where you met your friends?”
“Si. For different reasons, Takis and Cesare came to the States from Greece and Sicily to study and work. Like me, they wanted to make a lot of money. This seminar that brought us together was a complete revelation to the three of us. We grew close, and they went on to become wealthy, highly successful hotel and restaurant entrepreneurs.”
“As did you. Why was this professor so effective?”
“No particular reason except he was brilliant. We learned it wasn’t good enough to want to make money. You’ve got to know how to get it, how to deal with brokers, renovate, assess the value of property, how to buy, sell and secure a mortgage. He sounded just like my grandfather.”
“Was that period of your life good for you?”
“Very good in some ways. Our mentor drummed into our heads how to cut costs, decide how much risk to assume in investments and balance our portfolios in order to impress anyone. His final rule was ingrained on my psyche. ‘You must find out if your friends can be loyal.’”
“You and your partners must be very close.”
“I trust them implicitly. That means everything. When I brought them together with my idea to buy the castello, I hadn’t seen either of them in at least two months and had missed them. They got excited when I showed them pictures.”
“There’s no place like it.” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “After the pain you and Dimi endured at the hands of your fathers, I’m glad you’ve found friends like that.”
“So am I.”
“When I met them, I didn’t know they were owners and your partners. Both of them have made me feel comfortable. Some of the people in the culinary world are hard to deal with, but your friends aren’t stuffy or full of themselves.”
“So you like them?”
“I do. They have a lot of charm and sophistication. Before I knew what was going on, I thought that whoever owned this hotel knew what they were doing to employ them.”
“They’re the best, and they’ll be pleased when I pass on what you said.”
She cocked her head. “Do you mind answering another question for me?”
“Ask away.”
“You may not be married yet, but is there someone waiting for you to return to New York?”
Vincenzo was in a mood to tell her the whole truth. “Yes and no.”
He saw her swallow. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been away from Annette five weeks this time. Yesterday on the phone she told me I sounded different. She wanted to know why. I told her about the Italian girl I fell in love with in my youth, the girl I hadn’t seen or heard from in ten years until two days ago.”
If he wasn’t mistaken, he heard a moan pass her lips.
“I explained that meeting you was a complete accident. Annette wanted to know more. All I could tell her was that a big portion of my past had just caught up with me and I was still reeling. I know she wanted more reassurance, but I couldn’t give it to her.”
She averted her eyes.
“What about you, Gemma? There has to be someone in your life.” He braced himself for what might be coming.
“I dated a little after moving to Florence. But the only important relationship I had with a man was a year ago.”
The blood pounded in his ears. “Did you love him?”
“I tried. My feelings for Paolo were different than those for you, but I felt an attraction. He was a writer for Buon Appetito, a nationwide food magazine, and had covered the school for an article. His interview with me turned into a date, and we started seeing each other.
“After a month he wanted me to sleep with him. I thought about it, hoping it would help me forget you, but in the end I couldn’t do it. He was very upset, so I told him I couldn’t go out with him anymore because it wouldn’t be fair to him. He accused me of loving someone else even though I’d told him there’d been no important man in my life for years.”
Vincenzo’s breath caught. He’d hoped for honesty from her and her confession brought out his most tender feelings. He now had his answer to why she’d come to this particular restaurant tonight. Her ache for him had grown worse, too. They suffered from the same pain.
“Paolo said he wanted to marry me, but I told him no because I didn’t love him the way he needed to be loved. I couldn’t even sleep with him. For both our sakes, I knew we had to stop seeing each other and get on with our separate lives. I’d lost my heart to the man I’d grown up with.”
“Gemma...”
“After this long, it had to be unbearable to relive the ugly truth of your family’s tragedy to me tonight, Vincenzo. Thank you for your courage, for forcing me to listen to the last page in the book. You were right. I needed to hear the ending so I can let go of my anger. Now I can close it.”
This intimacy with Gemma, the knowledge that all the secrets were out, had changed his world forever. They’d been brought together again, and he loved her with every fiber of his being. The rush of knowing she’d been the constant heart in their relationship filled every empty space in his soul.
He grasped both her hands, ignited by the desire to be her everything. “Since we’re past the age of eighteen, I have a simple solution to our problem that has been out there for the last ten years.”
“What are you saying?”
“Marry me, Gemma.”
With those words, everything changed in an instant.
A stillness seemed to envelope the room. Her complexion took on a distinct pallor that revealed more than she would ever know.
“A duca doesn’t wed the cook.”
Somehow he hadn’t expected that response. He’d thought that because a miracle had brought them together at last, they’d gotten past every obstacle. After baring his soul to her, Vincenzo couldn’t sit there any longer knowing she was more entrenched in that old world than he would have believed. She still saw him as the son of the evil duca. Like father, like son?
Cut to the quick, he let go of her hands and got to his feet. “This duca won’t be a duca much longer. Enjoy the rest of your evening, bellissima.”
He flew out of her flat to his car. As he accelerated down the road, he could hear her calling to him in the distance, but he didn’t stop. After believing that telling her the truth would make them free to love each other as man and wife, the opposite had happened.
A duca doesn’t wed the cook. The words that came out of her had been so cold, it frightened him. He felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his world once more. But by the time he’d pulled up to the front of the castello, his sanity had returned.
Vincenzo should have been ready for that automatic response—after all, Gemma had learned it from her mother at a very early age. He’d known how Mirella had always tried to guide Gemma and put distance between them because they were from different classes. But tonight his heart had been so full, he couldn’t take the answer she’d thrown back at him.
The class divide was a more serious obstacle to a future with her than anything else. He planned to deal with that issue soon, but first he needed to leave for New York and take care of vital business. When he returned, he’d be able to concentrate on Gemma and their future. Because they were going to have one!
* * *
No sooner had Vincenzo gone than Gemma’s phone rang. But she was so fragmented after her conversation with him, she ran into the other room and flung herself across the bed. Great heaving sobs poured out of her.
Something was wrong with her. Since the moment he’d entered Takis’s office, appearing like a revenant, she seemed to have turned into a different person, one she didn’t know. Nothing she’d said had come out right. Every conversation after that had ended in disaster. Either she ran out on him or he walked out on her.
Marry me, Gemma.
That’s what he’d asked her moments ago. And what did she do? Throw his proposal back in his incredibly handsome face! That’s because you’ve been on the defensive from the moment he came back into your life, Gemma Rizzo!
No wonder he’d walked out on her. Why wouldn’t he? Didn’t he know she loved him with all her heart and soul? But he was a duca. And that made a marriage between them out of the question, even though it was what she wanted more than anything in the world. While he’d been holding her hands, her body had throbbed with desire for him.
Gemma lay there out of her mind with a new kind of grief. All these years she’d misjudged him so terribly. Now the truth of his revelations burned hot inside her. At this point she knew she was more in love with him than ever.
But the woman who owned the pensione had recognized Vincenzo as the new Duca di Lombardi. That revelation was the coup de grâce for Gemma. His title created a chasm between them that could never be bridged. His marriage proposal thrilled her heart, but she couldn’t marry him. In fact, everything was much worse.
While she worked at the castello, she would have to keep her distance from him. That she’d been crazy in love with him and they’d grown up spending as much time together as possible made it all the more difficult.
He had a potent charisma she found irresistible. Gemma didn’t trust herself around him. Vincenzo had a way of crooking his finger and she’d come running no matter how hard she fought against it.
But she couldn’t allow things to end this way. It was up to her to repair the damage and reason with him so he would understand. She hadn’t told him that her mother didn’t know about her new job yet. If Mirella had any idea he’d asked Gemma to marry him, there’d be even more grief, and Gemma didn’t want to think about that.
Unfortunately it was too late to see him tonight. Tomorrow after work she’d find him and ask him if they could go somewhere private and talk this situation out.
After she’d cried until there were no tears left, she went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, then she returned Filippa’s phone call. Her friend was excited because she’d received an affirmative response from one of the restaurants in Ottawa. “I’m flying to Canada tomorrow for the interview.”
“That’s wonderful.” Gemma was thrilled for her. “Call me when you get there and tell me everything. Just think. You’ll be closer to New York.”
“It’s very exciting. Now tell me, what’s the situation on your end?”
