Rocco cleared his throat. “The woman who delivered me. Those were her favorites.”
My eyes lifted to his. “Oh, Maggie Beautiful, you mean?” I’d never heard him call her mamma, or anything, really, and it struck me as odd, but…I’d never really heard any of her sons call her anything. I just chalked it up to not spending a lot of time with the Faustis yet.
He shook his head. “The woman who delivered me.”
I blinked at him. “Maggie Beautiful isn’t your mamma?”
“No.”
“Oh.” I’d just assumed…Luca looked at her like Rocco looked at me. Like Brando looked at Scarlett. Like all of Luca’s sons looked at their wives. I just couldn’t see Luca…lovinganyone else. But maybe he had been married before her? It didn’t seem like Rocco was going to go on, so I asked, “Was your father married before Maggie Beautiful?”
“Sì.”
Okay.
I sensed a powerful emotion creating a tornado inside of him then. Actually, I sensed a lot of different emotions swirling in him then. Whatever truth this was, he was keeping it close to his chest, and it was bothering him, but he refused to let on that it was.
My Spidey senses toward him were buzzing.
“Want to tell me the story? I…shared with you about my conception. It sounds romantic, at first, but it’s really not—not the ending to it.”
He stood taller, like a soldier, his eyes hard and faraway, like he was waiting for me to command him into battle.
“Tell me, Rocco,” I whispered. “You’ll…get it off your chest, if you do. I’m a sacred place. A place where all your secrets can go to hide.”
His hands balled into fists at his sides. “The woman my father was married to, annulled by my father to wed Margherita Granchio with a clear record, is not my mamma either. My mamma was chosen to create a solider for the Fausti family. No more. No less. The first wife could not carry sons of the blood—any child. She was infertile. She knew this and did not state this before the arrangement was created between her and my father.”
I forced the lump in my throat down. I refused to allow him to hear any pity in my voice, only tenderness in my touch when it was time. But not then. Not when he was so vulnerable to this truth that was visibly eating at him.
“I was not created out of love,” he continued. “As my sons were not created out love. They were created out of understanding—loyalty to myfamiglia.”
An offering—something that went deeper than breath to pledge fealty. Blood.
“I get that,” I whispered, holding the stems of the fennel in my hands, crushing them—I wasn’t sure if I should hold onto them tighter, or fling them in the opposite direction. “But you still love your sons. I’ve seen the way you look at them, Rocco.”
“Sì.”
“Your brothers?” I asked, just to send some relief toward him. The wind had stopped howling, and the field was still. So effing still. It was like my heart had held its breath, and the world around us reflected my feelings.
“Brando was created out of love. My brothers and I were not.”
This explained a lot. So much.
I forced down the urge to sob—sob for all the years hethought that he wasn’t a product of love, but a product for the family to command into battle, and every time that thought crashed into him, it stole blood from him.
He had been so lonely.
So fucking lonely for so long.
“Your father doesn’t have a…warm way of expressing it,” I whispered, thinking Luca was probably raised the same way. It was just that Luca had found love with Maggie Beautiful, and Rocco hadn’t found his until me—too many years later.
He watched all his brothers have legendary love stories. And his father, whose marriage was arranged to the first woman, would go on to clear the record—annul it in the eyes of the church, therefore their world—and marry for love instead of duty.
“But he does love you, Rocco,” I continued in the same tone. “I see it. I can feel it.” I stood, dusting off my clothes, and left the fennel in the field where it belonged. I went to touch him, but he turned from me, like he wasn’t deserving of my touch.
My love.
My care.
