“My life is not a democracy for them to vote on.”
A frown tied her brows. “It sure sounds like it is.”
“You’re my wife, Alessandra. If Anna can’t realize how important that is, she will have to be let go. I’m sorry she made you uncomfortable tonight.”
“How about you’re sorry for all the things you hide from me? How about you’re sorry that you ever conceived those plans in the first place?”
“Again, they were in place long before I met you. These people have been in my life for many years while you…”
“While I what, V?”
“While you flit in and out of it. While you run away from me the moment the fantasy falls apart.”
“And if I do stay in this marriage? When you take over BFI and break it down into parts, when you raze that villa to the ground and build a new one in its stead, is that where you expect me to live?
“Is that where we’re supposed to start our new family? Our new life?”
“Si.”
“Leo and Massimo will never give up their home.”
“We shall see about that.”
“Love cannot grow where there’s so much hate, V.”
“But I’ve never asked you for love,” he bit out, and she flinched. A wet sheen coated her eyes and Vincenzo wanted to believe it was caused by the suddenly cold breeze. “Is that why you married me, bella? Because you fancied yourself in love with me?” Neither could he take the bitter edge out of his words.
It was high time they discussed their expectations. High time he set the record straight that he wasn’t going to change his mind about his course of action just because she was in his life. “Was it love that made you run at the first hurdle? That made you abandon our marriage when it had barely started?
“That makes you imagine I should give up things I’ve set into motion years before I met you?”
He reached for her and set his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened but didn’t push him away, those gorgeous brown eyes of hers drilling into him. “Love is for fools who don’t realize how it can turn to poison in a minute. It pushed Anna into jeopardizing her position with me.
“It drove my mother into believing falsely sweet promises from a monster and breaking the heart of a simple man who respected her and admired her.”
“Antonio?”
“Si. And when he demanded Silvio Brunetti do right by her, when he dared take him on, Brunetti crushed Antonio, as if he were an ant. He came for his business, for his family. He ruined everything Antonio had and anyone who dared helped him.”
She looked around the empty terrace, her eyes widening. Comprehension twisted her features into horror. “All these people you’ve collected, you’ve surrounded yourself with…they are all—”
“They’ve all been harmed one way or the other by the mighty Brunetti family, si.”
“By Silvio Brunetti,” she amended. “Not by Leo and Massimo.” She stepped back from him, her mouth compressed. He’d never seen her look more defeated. “They’re all equally invested in the path of destruction they want you to take. Even if you wanted to walk away from it now, they won’t let you. That explains their chilly attitude toward me. They think I will turn your head.”
“You won’t,” he reiterated so forcefully that she flinched.
“Well, that’s put me in my place,” she added with an empty laugh. “But in the end, you’ll be the only one who pays the price, V. Not them. You’ll be the one who stands on the ashes of your family’s happiness, ruining any chance of a relationship with them.”
“My family? If you think even for a moment that I will ever consider Leo and Massimo to be my family at the end of all this, that somehow we will become brothers in truth…then you’re even more naive than I’d ever thought.
“They are not my family. They were not there for me when I struggled to fill my belly. When I saw Mama become a shadow of herself. When I had no money to pay for treatment for her.”
“But you—”
“This is not your fight, cara. Let it go.”
“And if this fight ends up hurting us, V? If it ruins any chance of happiness that we might have had?”
He stared into her eyes, the answer jolting out of him. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Alessandra had gotten under his skin. Had begun to matter to him more and more.
But only so much. It could only ever be so much that he could give her. Only so much he could feel. He didn’t know how to be vulnerable. To remove the very defenses he’d put up for sheer survival.
He couldn’t give voice to that yes that whispered in his chest. Couldn’t let himself become so caught up in her that he forgot all the years of loneliness and fear and pain. Forgot what he’d set out to do. To prove.
To the world. And to himself.
“Whether my actions hurt you is not in my hands, Alessandra. It’s in yours. In the end, we all have to make choices.
“Whether you want this marriage only for Charlie’s sake or for yourself, you have to decide. You need to decide how much of this is just a deal and how much is real.
“Because for me, nothing has changed. Not since I slipped that ring on your finger.”
The stricken look in her eyes told him she more than got the message. And as much as it bothered him to leave her like that, he walked away.
A strange tension gripped him but he refused to give it a name. He could have used the attraction between them, the constant tug of awareness to nudge her over into acceptance. But Vincenzo needed her to come to him. Needed her to choose him.
Like he wanted nothing else in his life.
He didn’t examine the urge, didn’t rationalize it. It was just there.
And yet as he joined Antonio and the
