“I want to see every last Brunetti walk out of this house, their heads hanging in shame.
“I am going to take it all.”
“That’s…” Her eyes wide in her face, Alessandra looked like he had sucker punched her. Her tall body swayed where she stood. When he took a swift step toward her, she jerked away, her beautiful face contorted in shock. “Greta would never do something like that. She welcomed me with open arms when I came here to live with my father, her second husband. She’s more than a stepmother to me. She loved me even more than…”
Whatever defense Alessandra wanted to offer on behalf of Greta died on her lips as she turned to face the older woman. A soft gasp escaped her mouth, her body bowing as if against a sudden, forceful gale.
Truth shone in the older woman’s eyes, the only remainder of an encounter she’d probably never given another thought to. Whereas it had become the foundation of his life.
The dirty accusations. The supposed higher ground of privilege. The utter lack of sympathy.
The entire room filled with a vibrating sense of shock, all heads turning toward Greta with various degrees of accusation. Except Alessandra. Even in the face of the older woman’s guilt plainly written on her face, Alessandra still looked disbelieving. She looked as if she were the one dealt the hardest blow. Something he hadn’t accounted for and should have.
Even the legendary Brunetti brothers looked horrified, their gazes alternating between their grandmother and Vincenzo in a parody that he would’ve laughed at any other time. A string of colorful curses spewed from Massimo’s mouth while Leo stared in numbed silence.
“We could do a DNA test, if you want to lend legitimacy to my taking over what should be mine,” Vincenzo added dismissively. “I’d quite like to keep my mother’s name though. There’s a certain poetic justice in heading the prestigious BFI with her name, si?”
“We will take your word for it, Cavalli, though you’re quite the spiteful bastard,” Massimo said evenly.
“That’s mighty grand of you since your father and grandmother denied my mother even that small decency,” he couldn’t help adding, the very thought of the blankness in his mother’s eyes filling his throat with a corrosive taste he’d lived with for far too long.
“And me, V?” Alessandra said in a soft entreaty. “Where do I fit into this sordid tale?” For all it was asked in a tremulous voice, it reverberated around him as if it had been fired out of a gun.
His gut tightened, a cold, clammy feeling drenched his skin. A feeling he tried to battle and dominate into submission. He found he had no answer to give her right then.
At least, not one that wouldn’t shatter the painful hope glimmering in her eyes.
Not one that he could articulate in so many words.
Not in front of all of them.
She nodded as if he’d given her a clear-cut answer. As if his silence didn’t end up damning him after all. And then she fled.
* * *
Alex suppressed the tears that threatened with a deep breath and a big gulp of water. God, she’d cried enough over him in the last week.
She looked out of the French doors at the neatly maintained acreage around the villa. The greenhouse that Leo had had restored on the grounds. The ancient wine cellar that had been restructured and repurposed to serve as brilliant Massimo’s state-of-the-art computer lab.
The pride and sense of history of this place was in their blood. It was their legacy. Their place in the world.
A place, and a sense of belonging, that Vincenzo had been cruelly denied. Along with his share of the legacy. She’d never forgotten the utter sense of inadequacy, the powerlessness when she’d discovered as a teenager that her mother’s husband, Steve, the man she’d always thought was her father, actually wasn’t—remembered the desperate need to belong somewhere, anywhere, completely.
She could imagine the pain and loss a little boy might feel being rejected by his family, the scars that would carry over to the man. But to destroy Leonardo and Massimo after all these years… She couldn’t abide that. She couldn’t.
“You have to stop running away from me, cara mia.”
The deep, bass voice carried over to her on the soft breeze from the open doors, playing over her spine as if she were a set of piano keys and he the maestro.
She stayed with her face averted from him. Like a coward. No, a woman who knew her own weakness and was assembling her armor. But it was time to decide.
To look into the eyes of the man who’d seduced her so thoroughly that she’d lost all her hard-earned common sense and rushed straight to the altar with him.
“You left me no choice,” she said. Even after she’d learned the truth, even on the long flight from Bali, even the past couple of days until Vincenzo caught up with her, there had been a small part of her that hoped that they’d all gotten it wrong. That the man she’d fallen for and married in secret wasn’t the same man ruining the very people she loved.
“If I’d stayed in Bali, you’d have gotten the boxing match you’ve been asking for and I’d have beaten you to a pulp the way my mind’s working right now.”
His laughter enveloped her. Her spine stiffened, but she was no match for the frissons that husky sound created in her. Or the scent of him that twisted like a screw in her lower belly. Or the memory of the warmth of that tight body covering her like a favorite blanket.
The explosive chemistry between them had been instantaneous, all-consuming, mutual. And apparently, had no intention of abating even when her heart felt bruised inside her chest and her
