“I know that your family and mine always seems to be front and center of our lives, but this is the last time I bring her or Pia up, I promise.”
He took her hand in his and traced the knuckles gently. “I’ll listen to whatever you tell me,bella. Especially if it means it will remove the shadows from your eyes.”
“I…she raised me when she was single, and my deadbeat father had already fled. But she wasn’t…the maternal sort. She loved her acting career the most, and I…” She swallowed and looked at her hands in her lap. “Even as a child, I hated being the center of attention. She wasn’t cruel or negligent, Renzo. She was just…not overtly loving.”
Renzo grabbed her tightly clasped hands and kissed each knuckle. “Stop excusing her behavior toward you,bella.”
“I’m not. The last week I spent with her, I reexamined it all. With the perspective of an adult and as a new mother myself. She had no support of any kind, and she did her best. We would have muddled through somehow…”
“Except she married John, and Pia came into your lives.”
Mimi laughed. The tip of her nose was red, and her eyes were still damp, but she was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. “Pia…” she whispered and sighed. “I adored her from the beginning, you know. She was everything I wasn’t. Beautiful, bright, witty…and petty and manipulative as hell.”
Renzo laughed too.
“She and Mom got along like a house on fire from day one. I didn’t mind it one bit. John was lovely and kind to me. Until Pia told me that he was her father and not mine, and she wasn’t going to let me steal him from her. And yet I never doubted that she loved me too. She was the one who bought me my first camera, did you know?”
Renzo shook his head.
Mimi smiled. “I…see now that for all that she was, she was also very insecure. It made her needy and manipulative. She wanted Mom and John and even me all to herself. We weren’t supposed to want or love each other or anyone else. But I didn’t understand it as a teenager. When I…” her throat bobbed “…found her kissing my boyfriend, my best friend of years… I lost faith in myself. And yet I’m not sure if I would have believed her if she had told me that he had been hitting on her for a long while. She made me see the truth even though it broke my heart in the process.”
“You’re making her out to be better than she was, Mimi.”
“No, I’m seeing her clearly for the first time. I’m seeing her not as this girl I desperately wanted to please and love, but as a whole person. I needed to sort this all out in my head, for myself, for Luca. I needed to realize that she loved me in her own way, and I loved her. Because one day, far into the future, I want to tell him about her and Santo. They deserved to be known to him, don’t you think?”
His own eyes damp, Renzo nodded. How expansive and strong his fragile wife’s heart was, and he had tried to buy his way into it.
“I had to see the past clearly for the last time, see how she and Mom shaped me, so that I can be free. And you…tasting what life could be like with you gave me the courage.”
“Free for what,bella?”
“To dare to want you for myself, Renzo.” Fresh tears drew tracks over her cheeks. “To have the courage to tell you that I fell in love with you, despite my every effort to resist you. I love you so much that it’s like carrying around an ache. To trust in myself and you, enough to know that after helping me see myself in this new way, you love me too.”
Nothing in the world would have stopped him then. Renzo climbed into the bed and pulled her to him.
Their kiss was salty and swift and clunky butCristo, he didn’t want to live another moment without tasting her. Without holding her.
He pressed her back into the bed and let her feel his weight, his need for her. He trailed frenzied kisses over her forehead, her eyes, her temples, her cheeks, and finally he found her lips again.
This time their kiss was soft, slow, even as her hands wandered restlessly over his back. “I love you,cara mia. With all my faulty heart. The idea of you leaving me at some vague point in the future twisted me out of my head. I…distanced myself from you because I knew I was failing. And all along, all I had to do was tell you that I love you.”
“Please, never do that to me again. Never pull away after you’ve shown me what love can be, how colorful and happy I can be with you.”
Renzo pressed their foreheads together, his own breath shallow now. “Never again,bella. You’re mine. Your smart brain, your tart mouth, your curvy body, your generous heart, your sparkling soul…you are all mine, Mimi. And I’m never letting you out of my sight ever again.”
It was a while later—although not too long, since Renzo had been in frenzied need—that they went to collect their son from John and her mother.
Legs thrown into his lap in the back seat of the Bentley, Mimi clung to her husband as he talked about how they would return to Venice that very night and celebrate Christmas by themselves.
No one was allowed to interrupt them, he decided.
“Maybe just Massimo?” she asked, knowing how attached her son was becoming to his uncle.
Renzo growled that he would not share her with anyone, not even his charming brother.
Mimi called him a jealous, overbearing brute, and he kissed her.
And she decided she didn’t care how Renzo acted as long as he kissed her and held her and loved her like he did.
Like she was the sun, and the stars, and the sky all combined.
