She’d sought Tommaso’s eyes, she suddenly remembered. While Siena had clung to her, Gabriella had looked for the one she hated the most. And he’d looked for her. The shock and grief she’d found in his stare had lanced her heart so deeply that if she hadn’t been holding Siena so tightly, she would have gone to him.
By the time Valeria had taken her sobbing daughter into her own arms, Tommaso and his brothers had gone. Gabriella hadn’t seen him again until he’d come to Valeria’s suite late that night and curled beside her with his head on her lap. By that point, Siena’s white wedding dress had been discarded in a heap on the suite’s floor. From where Gabriella now stood, she could clearly see the red stain of the wine Siena had poured on it.
The man she’d comforted that night’s laughter was cold. “You think Niccolo would have humiliated my family if he didn’t have a weapon to save his own skin when we came for retribution?”
“He jilted your sister because he hated the whole foul lot of you,” she spat. “He decided the risk of running was worth whatever you meted out if you caught him.”
“There was no risk to him, not when he had you as his shield and weapon to save himself.”
“He would never have given you my name if you hadn’t threatened his lover. Unlike you and your whole foul family, he has decency. He gave you my name to save her skin, not his.”
“You’re a naïve fool if you believe that.”
“Naïve to believe that love exists? Hasn’t Rico’s decision to get out of the family business for Marisa taught you anything about love?” The youngest of the male Esposito offspring had just fallen in love with a woman of such moral goodness that he’d walked away from the family business for the sake of hersoul. Gabriella laughed. “That was a stupid question. As if you know a damned thing about love. You’re a narcissistic bastard who cares only about himself.”
The darkness on his face turned so ugly that she thought he was going to hit her.
When the blow came, though, it was no blow. Tommaso palmed her cheek. His wild black eyes boring into hers, his gravelly voice as silky as she’d ever heard it, he said, “I love my family. I protect my family. Everyone else can go to hell…all except for you, my beautiful, poisonous rat.”
With a cruel smile, he brought his face closer and dropped his voice. “It delights me to know that, for all that you hate me and wish me dead, your body is my passport to making your life a living hell, because the only thing you hate more than me is how badly you want me.” The hand palming her face slid down her neck. Rubbing his bearded cheek to hers, he inhaled deeply. “I can still smell our sex on your skin….” His hand skimmed lower, traversing the mound of her breast until he reached a hardened nipple and lightly circled a finger around it. “I could take you right now,” he whispered sensually. Abandoning her breast, he slid his hand down her belly and abdomen and cupped her sex. “Slide into you and find you wet and ready for me…” He slipped a finger inside her and nipped her earlobe. “Just as you’re wet and ready for me now.”
Moving his hand away, he stepped back and studied her with the same cruel smile on his face. “Shower – you will find toiletries and makeup in the bags on the ottoman – and then put the dress on. We marry in two hours.”
Chapter Six
Tommaso tookone look at his mutinous bride and experienced a spasm of emotion he couldn’t begin to explain. If he narrowed his eyes, he could blur out the wine stain splattered over her dress and the grubbiness of its lace skirt from where his sister had thrown herself on the floor. He could imagine the dress as pristine and fool himself into imagining Gabriella’s eyes glowing with happiness.
The only glow in her beautiful eyes was the same glow he knew was radiating from his. Loathing.
“Let’s go,” he said curtly.
Gabriella had attended mass at the Espositos’ private chapel every Sunday from the ages of sixteen to eighteen. It was the chapel where she and Siena had received their First Holy Communion when they were seven and been Confirmed when they were fourteen. For their First Holy Communion, they’d both worn the traditional white dress and veil. Though Gabriella had always hated being forced to wear anything girlie, that dayshe’d been as giddy and giggly as Siena to be wearing what they’d both called wedding dresses. She remembered them holding hands on the short walk to the chapel, discussing who they’d marry when they wore real wedding dresses.
“I’m going to marry Stefano,” Siena had declared, to which Gabriella had laughed her head off. Stefano was one of Lorenzo’s ‘strays’ as they were called, young men who’d been in and out of trouble with the police and taken under Lorenzo’s wing to make real men of them. The girls had been too young to understand what ‘making real men of them’ entailed or meant. Gabriella had laughed because Stefano was even older than Mattia, the oldest of Siena’s brothers.
“He won’t be too old for me when I’m a grown-up,” Siena had retorted to Gabriella’s observation that Stefano was ancient. “We can get married at the same time: me and Stefano, and you and Rico.”
“Rico?” Gabriella had screamed. “No way. I’m not marryinghim.” Of all the Esposito boys, Rico was the one she was closest to; the son happy to kick a football around with her.
“But if you marry Rico, we’ll be real sisters,” Siena had said earnestly, and for some reason Gabriella’s stare had flickered to sixteen-year-old Tommaso, and her heart had sighed.
Was that when her crush on him had begun, she wondered miserably. Did it really go back that far? She’d always thought it started with those erotic adolescent dreams, but had they just manifested something that had already been there?
There was no time to wonder about this any further for Edoardo stopped the car outside the chapel, and her tight heart lurched.
Siena was waiting outside wearing a black bridesmaid dress.
Gabriella stepped out of the car unaided, determined not to trip over the lace and taffeta, and faced her. Siena’s malevolencewas strong enough to taste. Give her a knife and she would pierce it through Gabriella’s heart without blinking.
They must have made the strangest sight, she thought bleakly as they silently entered the chapel. The bride in her stained dress walking down the aisle with the groom in his black shirt and trousers, no jacket or tie, the pair of them followed by the bridesmaid doing her best impression of the grim reaper.
In the front pew stood Valeria and Mattia wearing the same black outfits they’d worn the day before for Lorenzo’s funeral. Even the priest had got the memo and wore black. But then, he was in the Espositos’ pocket. The Lord alone knew the hoops he’d jumped through to make this wedding happen at such short notice.
If Maria had ever married Tony in West Side Story, would she have faced this level of hostility?
But if Maria had married Tony, it would have been for love, and that love would have been mutual. They would have faced the hostility together.
Fighting back a swell of tears that had risen without any warning, Gabriella swallowed and lifted her chin. Her heart shouldn’t long for the impossible. The only thing she and Tommaso had in common with Maria and Tony was that they were doomed.
