However, Rosaria’s death had affected my father as well. He went on about her truth, how she had claimed our love for women could make us weak, but damned if he did not love how our weaknesses for our women made our women that much stronger. A woman took her man’s weakness and made it her own, protecting his vulnerable heart as though her life depended on his for both of their survivals. She would carry his heart and shield it from the world.
I did not understand this.
How could I when I had never known a love like the one he shared with Margherita? A love like Brando and Scarlett’s? Dario and Carmen? Romeo and Juliette? Mac and Mariposa? Or any of the fated matches in my close inner circle. I had always gazed upon these unities, attempting to learn what made them tick, what made them whole only together.
I had always gazed upon them with, what I realized now, a starved heart. As a pauper would do to a full meal.
My great love, the honor of my life, as my grandfather had reminded me years ago, was thefamiglia. And I was being exiledfrom it on a fool’s quest to find something that could never be returned or awakened.
The lion in my chest, my second heart, had grown silent.
I had been programmed to serve myfamiglia, and it was expected of me to rewire and become what I did not understand. I was cursed in love. The sins of the father falling on the son, though my father had somehow escaped them. My son was also cursed in love.
Somehow, though, I knew that I would never be the same, even regarding my family. Because the hope that a love greater than thefamigliaexisted had sustained me over the years, even if thin. And that hope had perished with Rosaria somehow.
Eyes were hard on me from across the distance.
My older brother stared at me.
Our eyes held until we dropped anchor, and I stepped off the yacht and onto Aria Island.
The saying goes that no man is an island.
Certainly, I was not this one. This one was a bright aria in the daylight and an entrancing moonlit sonata in the darkness. It was an island created for romance, even if it had its dark history, tales of survival that only made it even more romantic. The men of our family brought their women to the island to fall in love—for the first time or time and time again.
I was the haunted side of the island where thecastelloexisted in front of the sea. Darkness had consumed me—the voice of Rosaria Caffi trapped with me. We were as we always were: two sides connected, but constantly pulling in the opposite direction.
Rocco Piero Fausti was the area of the island where no soul dared to tread. Internally, I was as haunted as the halls, where visitors claimed they heard voices screeching and singing. I was the water surrounding it, beautiful on the outside, but deadly below the surface.
Love came to me to die.
Chapter 11
At First Sight
Aria Island, I had decided as soon as I stepped foot on it, was the remedy to all frigid winters. It could melt even the most hardened ice and chase away the blues. It was bright, enchanting, almost surreal in its beauty. I could hardly believe my eyes, even after arriving a few days ago by private boat, whenever I took in my surroundings for the next few months.
I never imagined a place such as this could exist in real life.
The grandeur of it came from the stacked villas in all colors that reflected the natural surroundings.
The sloped and twisting roads overrun by shepherds with their canes keeping their livestock in line, bells dinging as these well-treated animals attempted to keep up. It seemed as if the herding dogs had an Italian accent as they barked out a song ofkeep-a up-a!
The roadside vendors who sold their fresh fruits and produce.
The air that smelled of healing salt from the sea and zesty lemons straight from the tree. It was as if the sun warmed them and enticed their essences to perfume the air.
The cats and kittens that loafed around most of the time. It was amazing to watch one area of the island where they would go to catch fresh seafood for dinner.
And the Mediterranean Sea?
Closing my eyes, I turned my face up to the sky, allowing the sun’s heat to touch my cheeks and neck, slide over me with hot fingers, go deeper than skin, as if I were a lemon myself. I took a long, deep breath before I opened my eyes to the view from my balcony.
If I had never understood what a man felt when he saw his bride for the first time, I did then.
It was a breath-trapping, heart-stealing, vow-inducing view that gave me a slight frisson of fear at how small it made me feel, but it also gave me soul-soothing peace that I had never found before. It was as if my entire life was aligning. I could feel it down to my core.
This place gave me butterflies. That intense rush to the heart that made it seem like I was floating, rising above the world. Dopamine flooded my system.
