His loud exhale and muttered curse cut her off. “Where are you?”
“In Accardiano.”
The strain in his voice deepened. She could hear a buzz of noise surrounding him. “Where in Accardiano?”
“On a street somewhere.”
“Don’t move. I’ll find you.”
“You’re here?”
“Yes. I’ve been looking for you… Hold on, I think I see you. Look up.”
She lifted her head. The crowd of people was too thick to see past.
“Stay there,carina. I’m coming.”
A moment later, she saw him in the distance, at the crest of the hill, a head taller than anyone else.
Her heart a heavy thud in her chest and throat and a roar in her ears, Callie walked towards him, winding and elbowing her way through the crowd, not taking her gaze off the figure closing in on her, the crowd parting around him as if he were a deity. And then the crowd seemed to part for her too, nothing but concrete between them, and she pounded it at a run, uncaring about anything but reaching him.
It was when Dante saw Callie break into a run to reach him that the painful tightness in his chest finally loosened, and then he was catching her as she threw herself into his arms and holding her tightly, her face buried in his chest, his face nestled in her hair, embracing as if they were the other’s life support.
He had no idea how long they stood there, embracing in the middle of a bustling street filled with Italians determined to stake their place for a view of the biggest wedding to hit their country since an American music mogul had married his supermodel wife there.
Finally, Dante loosened his hold around Callie enough to cup her face in his hands and gaze down into the large eyes glistening with tears. “I’m sorry,carina,” he said fervently. “I have behaved abominably. Everything you said was true.”
She shook her head and opened her mouth.
He brushed her lips with his thumb. “Please, let me say my peace because I need to say it and you need to hear it. I can use every excuse in the book, but it doesn’t change the truth, which is that I abducted you and held you captive against your will, and all I can do is beg you to forgive me, and forgive me too, for making assumptions about your relationship with your sister and using it as a weapon against you, and all because my pride couldn’t take your rejection.”
“I’ve already forgiven you,” she said shakily. “And as formy sister… Everything you said about us was right. I’ve been smothering her.”
He groaned at the pain in his guts for the hurt he’d caused her. “No, you were just trying to protect her.”
“But youwereright – she doesn’t want my protection anymore. I just refused to see it.” A tear spilt down her cheek. “Icouldn’t. I could never stop seeing Georgia as a six-year-old child crying on the school stage because our mother hadn’t turned up to watch us perform. I think…” She swallowed. “I think I became so protective of her and so controlling of everything as a way of deflecting my own pain from it all.”
Dante breathed deeply to stymie the burst of fury at her parents’ callous emotional neglect.
She gave a wobbly smile. “I deflected my pain so well and focused so hard on Georgia that I hid my own nature from myself –youbrought it out in me. You. It was like you undid all the buttons that were holding me together and brought out the lighter, freer Callie who had been hiding in the shadows, and now I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to go home being the Callie I was before you.”
“So what do you want?” he asked gently. He hardly dared to hope.
Callie gazed into the warm brown eyes alive with such wholehearted emotion, and didn’t have to think twice about her answer. “You,” she said simply. “Being with you makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been. You didn’t take me to hell, Dante, you took me to paradise. You’re a kidnapping bastard, but you set me free, and if you still want me to stay…”
His mouth closed on hers in a long, unmoving, breathless kiss. “You sing to something in me,” he said quietly when he finally pulled away. “What I feel for you…” He closed his eyes a long moment before capturing her in his stare again. “It is what I have spent my life hoping to one day feel. I cannot foretell the future, but when I think of tomorrow and all the tomorrows that follow, I see only you. What I’m trying to say is…” He took a deep breath. “I don’t think a week will be enough for me.”
“Good,” she whispered. “Because I don’t think a week will be enough for me either.”
His mouth stretched into a disbelieving grin before it faltered. “What do you want to do about the wedding? Whatever you choose, know I will support you.”
Callie sighed and attempted a smile. “We both know the wedding needs to go ahead, and you need to be by Niccolo’s side for it. I’ll wait wherever you think best, and we’ll deal with whatever tomorrow brings together.” Then she rose to the tips of her toes and wrapped her arms even tighter around his neck before fusing her mouth to his in a kiss so tender and passionate that when they finally broke apart, it was to cheers and whoops and catcalls from the people still streaming past them.
Epilogue
Asharp tightening in her abdomen woke Callie from the light sleep it had taken her an age to fall into. Beside her, sleeping for the dead, her husband.
Rolling carefully from her side to her back, she pressed a hand to where the pain was most concentrated. Her stomach had sucked itself in. Not a technical term but, for Callie, the term that best described how her stomach wrapped itself almost like clingfilm around her babies when they gave the first signs they were ready to come out and greet the world.
