“How I would love to be like you, Luciano. So unconcerned with what anyone needs. Flippant about legacies and responsibilities.” Because it felt like she had the weight ofeverythingsitting on her chest, and he acted as if it was nothing.
He didn’t outwardly react to her words. He stood there, a beautiful mountain made of stern jagged edges. She wanted him to flash one of those insouciant smiles. A dagger in its own right.
But he did nothing but speak very carefully. “I am here, am I not?” His voice was deep, cutting. A warning, and she should heed it. She always heeded warnings.
But something was exploding inside of her. And it washisfault, because she could always deal with her mother. Maybe sometimes the barbs landed, but mostly it was just the same old insults and they didn’t matter. They were simply different people, and the great Angelica Valli would never understand understated, introverted Serena.
It was fine.
It had always been fine.
Then Luciano had created this experience where he insisted on being a witness to her mother’s barbs and that had felt…
Terrible. Belittling. Embarrassing and shameful.
Even that she could have withstood with her usual fortitude. But for him to kick her mother out? Insist on an apology before anything else progressed? As though… As though this thing she had spent her childhood telling herself didn’t matter, actually did.
He’d stood up for her, and she’d had to come to the startling revelation over dessert that no one ever had before.
She had clung to her grandfather because he’d understood her, given her space to be herself, but he’d never protected her from the slings and arrows of her parents. He’d told her to endure them. To create a shield through which they could not penetrate.
He had never offered to be her shield. It had never occurred to her that he should.
Until tonight. Until this man, her enemy, her rival, her soon-to-be fake husband had, in just one meeting, done what no one in her life who claimed to care ever had.
Tears stung her eyes. Unreasonable. Unfathomable. She didn’t cry in public. She always,alwayswilled any emotion away, but she was failing in the moment and it was awful.
She couldn’t possibly stay here. She whirled away from him, blinded by those tears. Horrified by them. “I have to go.” She thought nothing of her purse or how she would get home without her keys, her wallet, her anything. She only thought of escape.
She didn’t even reach the entry. Luciano caught her by the arm and turned her around. He blocked the exit and held her there. So her only option was to look down at the floor and hope he didn’t notice the teardrops fall and land on the soft carpet at their feet.
Because, God, how could she ever let him see a weakness, an imperfection such as this?
One of his hands came under her chin. Pressed up. She could have fought it. Could have jerked her chin away, pushed him, a million things she could have done. Instead, she let the pressure move her chin up, and she looked him in the eye, even with tears streaming down her cheeks.
She did not know what she saw in his expression, only that it thundered inside of her like a storm. Only that it made her shudder from head to toe. That it seemed to reach inside her and change the very chemistry of her being.
He brushed the wetness away with the sides of his thumbs as his hands cupped her neck. It was impossibly gentle. This man who’d represented, like his father and her own, everything she hated. Waste and foolish pride and carelessness.
Except in these short days, she’d come to accept he wasn’t that man at all.
It was such a betrayal.
As was him being the only one to ever wipe away her tears.
“Come,cara mia. You must not cry. Particularly not on my shoes. That’s expensive Italian leather.”
Shealmostmanaged a bit of an amused sound at that, but there was nothing to be amused about. If dinner was embarrassing, this was a humiliation she did not know how to bear.Thiswas why she preferred to be alone. This was why she preferred her cats. This was why her icy shieldswereimportant. She could be perfect there.
She could not be perfect when Luciano did not let her go. His hands on her neck, large and warm and like an anchor amidst all the chaos inside of her. A heated center point to the ice she could not seem to muster up.
“You must not let her get to you,” he said, very earnestly. When she wasn’t certain she’d thought him capable of earnest.
But he did not understand, and she could only blame this newearnestnessof his for her wanting to explain it to him. “Shedoes not get to me.Sheis not the problem. She is who she has always been. Selfish and, perhaps it’s fair to say, mean. My father did not marry her for her warmth. I’m not entirely sure why they even bothered to have me.” She shook her head. Hated that even all these years later the thought depressed her. “But I do not…base my worth on what my mother said. I would have given up on success a long time ago if I did.”
“Then why do you cry?”
She sucked in a deep breath, but it didn’t settle the need to get it out. A need bigger than her fear of exposing herself to an enemy.
