CHAPTER TEN
VINCENZO CAME AWAKE with a start.
Falling asleep anytime before predawn was such an unusual thing for him that he felt disoriented for several minutes after opening his eyes.
Restful sleep had always been impossible for him. For the longest time, he had forced himself to stay awake to keep an eye on his mother, afraid that she might do some irreparable damage to herself if he fell asleep.
Once he had achieved a measure of financial freedom to hire a round-the-clock nurse to ensure his mother’s care, it had been too late. His insomnia by then had been entrenched, a by-product of the numerous nights he’d spent through relentless years, building his fortune.
After that, he had a financial empire to rule.
But now, after only a few nights here in the villa, he was so used to the warm, languorous weight of Alessandra’s limbs vined around him that sleep came easily. To go to bed without her now seemed like a dreary prospect, even temporarily.
The thought disquieted him enough to rouse him completely. With slow movements, he disengaged her long limbs from his.
He swept a lock of hair away from her face and ran his fingers lightly over those blade-like cheekbones, his heart a strangely weighty thing in his chest. She moaned and rolled and the duvet slipped, offering glimpses of a smooth silky shoulder and the upper curve of a breast.
Instantly, he felt the answering tightness of his own body. Cristo, it had been six days since he’d found her in that conservatory, and they’d spent most of those six days burning through the heat between them.
It showed no signs of abating. He had been insatiable, and she’d been there with him every step of the way. Wrenching himself away from the temptation she offered, he pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt, made his way out of the bedroom.
The long corridors were quiet, the marble cold against his feet. He was not surprised when he arrived at the huge study, the seat of Leonardo’s power, the seat from where centuries of the masters of this revered dynasty had used their power.
To this day, Vincenzo still hadn’t figured out the older Brunetti, the true heir to all this. Massimo was more open, full of a caustic wit that made even Vincenzo smile. But in Leonardo… He could see shades of himself.
“Imagining yourself here?” came a voice behind him.
He turned to find Greta Brunetti standing just inside the door, her shoulders stiff.
“Imagination is for dreams out of your reach. This chair, this study, this house…it’s all within my grasp already. If you must know,” he said, surprised at his own rancor spewing into his words, but continuing anyway, “I was wondering what I would wreck first. This study, or the tall towers of BFI.”
She paled, and he felt a glimmer of regret. Only a glimmer.
“What do you want, Mr. Cavalli?”
Her formal address raked at something inside him, but he refused to show it. “The time for action is long past for you,” he said, leaning against the massive dark oak table and crossing his ankles.
Her claw-like hands folded tightly against her midriff. “It’s never too late to realize one is wrong. Never too late to make amends.”
Shock drenched him, stealing away his anger. “Ah…it’s your fear of destruction speaking.”
“No, it’s not. Whatever you’re planning, it has little effect on me at this stage in life. But Alessandra, if I could do anything to—”
“She’s mine. I won’t give her up for anything in this world. She made her choice again not six days ago. She makes the choice to be mine every night,” he threw at the old woman shamelessly.
“I know that. I’ve already lost her respect, and that’s worse than anything you can do to me. But I ask you to remember that she’s an innocent in all this.”
“My mother was an innocent too.”
“I did what I thought was right at that time for my family. For years, I put up with my son’s antics. Tried to patch up his actions, dealt with the consequences. I had become hardened to everything else—I had no mercy or kindness or even love left in me, because he drained it all away.
“I only did my duty by Leo and Massimo. I…starved them of affection—”
“They had a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, shelter against storms. I had nothing,” Vincenzo threw at her, his chest rising and falling.
Not even a childhood. That was the price he had paid for her mercilessness.
He had never been allowed to be a child.
Her chin jerked down, and the old woman looked away for long, painful minutes. He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I will grant you that your grandsons are not the monsters I thought them.”
Alessandra’s faith in Leo and Massimo had not been bought with all this wealth or by favors, Vincenzo was learning with each day.
It was a hard pill to swallow: the genuine affection she shared with both men, being here in the seat of the family’s power for generations, being the outsider.
But worse was the realization—like a shard of glass stuck in his throat—that that affection, that bond with the Brunetti brothers, should have been his too. To see them over the breakfast table, to understand the easy camaraderie between them, to feel like the outsider when he had just as much right to that bond with them… It was a special kind of torment.
Alessandra’s hope that somehow he could cross the divide between them and build that bond with them—now, after everything he’d done to bring them down, after all the bitter hatred he’d nursed for them for over two decades… It was just that—a naive, pathetic hope that he refused to indulge in.
“That was despite my presence in their life,” Greta added softly, and Vincenzo turned to her with a frown. “You are under a grand delusion if you think Leo and Massimo had a nurtured upbringing in this home.
“After
