Chapter Twenty-Five
Outside the dressing room, I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. I had to get out of there before I did something stupid. Like tell him…
Shit.I needed to get my act together. I rubbed my face with my hands.
“Frisco?”
The deep voice in my ear sent a jolt of over twenty years’ worth of memories through me. I opened my eyes to see Luca standing in front of me. I closed them briefly, hoping it was a mistake, but when I peered through my lashes, he was still there.
“Excuse me. Do I know you?” Oh, I could play this game. I was a master.
His eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared. “You know who I am. You don’t forget someone you let inside you. Especially your first.”
At sixteen I might’ve fallen for the lilt of his sensual Italian accent, but I hadn’t been that starstruck fool, so crazy in love, for years. I’d lived a thousand lives since that night he ran past me half-naked and still warm from my mother’s bed.
“What do you want, Luca?”
“Ahh.” His dark-brown eyes lit up, and his lips curved in a proud smile. “I knew you recognized me.” He crowded into my space, and I felt overpowered by the smell of his heavy aftershave. “You’re one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen. Even more so now that you’re a man and not a boy.”
“No doubt.” I turned my face away and inhaled deeply, needing fresh air. While I couldn’t stand near Torre without wanting to taste his skin and fill myself up with his scent, being so close to Luca suffocated me.
His white teeth gleamed as he laughed. “I see you’ve grown into your self-confidence. Your independence was always a turn-on.” He touched my cheek, and I jerked my head away. “It still is.”
“Hands off. I have my doubts about where they’ve been, and I don’t let just anyone touch me.” I licked my finger and deliberately rubbed the spot he touched. “Now, do you mind? I’m busy and I have places to go. So if you’ll excuse me.” My outward facade remained calm and detached, but inside I quaked with long-forgotten pain.
Luca’s eyes narrowed at my obvious slight. “There used to be a time,amore, when you couldn’t wait for me to touch you. Do you remember?”
I’d stood up to bigger men than him and had always been proud I feared no one, but Luca reduced me to that sixteen-year-old boy again, unsure of himself and searching for acceptance and love.
“I remember. And you should have said no. I was a child.”
“You were no child. You knew what you wanted, and you were so insistent.”
“I was a sixteen-year-old boy. You were the adult. You should’ve known better. I didn’t know a damn thing.”
“You loved it,caro mio. You loved me. Something tells me you still do.” He ran a finger down my cheek. “Come with me.”
“You know what I also remember?” I snapped at him, pushing him away. “I also remember you running almost naked out of my mother’s bedroom in the middle of the night. I remember discovering you’d been fucking her after leaving my bed. Imagine how that made me feel. And then you married her.”
“I made a mistake.”
Recovered now, I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall. “Only one?” I drawled, curiously anxious to hear his lies and excuses. “I can’t wait to hear. Do tell.”
“I never should’ve married your mother. Being with her was hell.”
Oddly enough, I leaped to my mother’s defense. “I’m sure you were a perfect husband.” I snorted, then grew serious. Almost deadly so. “That’sthe only mistake you made? Not fucking your sixteen-year-old virgin student while at the same time fucking his mother?” I gritted out between clenched teeth. “Thatwas okay, to be in bed with me in the afternoon, telling me how much you loved my body, and a few hours later sticking it to my mother?”
“It was wrong.”
“What was? For once in your life speak the truth, goddamn you.”
“I never should’ve started up with you. You were a child, and it was wrong of me. A mistake.”
My insides, so tense and tender, broke apart with his words. Since that night, I’d spent years creating a hard yet brittle shell around me to keep others away, but it had kept me from living life, no matter how much of a front I put up for people. And yet…no one wanted to be remembered as a mistake.
“It was all a mistake. Meandmy mother. She was married, and you had no right to be in her bed. You should’ve left us both alone.”
“Bello—”
