Alessandro was at the piano. Back bare, spine erect, sweatpants sitting low on his hips, playing another heart-wrenching tune.
Sam stood at the door and listened, loath to disturb him. Even to her untrained ears, it was clear that he was a gifted pianist. It was his one addiction he didn’t smother. The music soared through her, filling her, saying things she knew Alessandro would never put into words.
She loved seeing him like this, knowing him in this moment. More intimate than sex. Knowing without doubt that no one else crossed the barrier he put between himself and the world. Not even his family.
And yet he had let her in.
Despite all his warnings, he’d opened himself to her. He’d made the last few weeks the best time of her life, even when they’d been fighting, even when he’d been rejecting this thing between them.
“Sam?” he said, turning around.
“FYI,” she said, swinging the basket onto the coffee table, “not my fault if people ask you later about planning a wedding.”
The shutter fell down so hard in his eyes that he might as well have slammed a door in her face. “Sameera…”
“It’s a joke, Alessandro.” Her laughter released with a hard edge she couldn’t hide. “I wouldn’t be able to tolerate your controlling personality beyond this tawdry affair.”
Something tightened in his face, giving his features that saturnine cast. “I did not realize this wastawdryto you.”
And she realized, with dawning dismay, that she had just hurt him. Worse, she had done it to see if she could. “Okay, maybetawdryisn’t the word. But I definitely fit the label of amistress. You have spent a fortune on just my painting supplies, and we rarely go anywhere.”
“All you had to do was ask to go somewhere,bella. And you’re not my mistress,” he said, looking down his nose. As if the very word was offensive to his entire being. “What put you in such a mood?” he said, his anger already under control. As if she were still that puzzle.
Sam sighed. “Your entire family, extended included, is in the kitchen, overflowing into the patio.” She tugged at the neckline of her T-shirt. “They’re celebrating Matteo’s progress to the wheelchair.”
“He’ll tire himself out.”
“Angelina’s watching him like a hawk.” She gathered her tangled hair and redid her messy bun. “I wish I hadn’t walked into the kitchen looking like this. Honestly,” she said and something ugly and hot crawled into her throat and refused to dislodge, “I don’t like attention, and I definitely don’t like being looked at as though I—”
“How do you think you look, Sameera?”
“Disheveled. Like I just crawled out of bed after a week-long sex session. Like I’m not good enough for you.”
“Maybe it’s the other way around,bella. Maybe they think I’m too old, too jaded, too much of an arrogant asshole for someone like you. As for how you look…” his lashes fell and rose “…you’re beautiful.” It wasn’t what he wanted to say. “As to my family, they have no boundaries.”
She shrugged, that angry itchy feeling persisting under her skin. “If you want to join the party, please go ahead. I might catch a nap.”
“Not interested.”
“Won’t they expect you?”
“Not even if I didn’t have you here with me,” he said, a small smile wreathing his lips. “I’m not into parties or crowds either. I don’t go to clubs. I don’t spend hours with friends. I’m…sort of a loner.”
She nodded, struck again by how alike they were. “I met your great-aunt Lucia. It was interesting.”
Sam was sure his aunt had said Sam could never be Violetta. And that was it—the source of her sudden, unnamed distress.
The woman had Alessandro had loved and lost. The one that Angelina had accidentally dropped into their conversations more than once. The one he clearly still loved after all these years. “I think she also mumbledIndian,too thin,too Americanand something else before she turned up her rather beaky nose at me. Apparently, no aspect of me lives up to her standards.”
Violetta…the name pinged around in her brain, hitting the walls, out of control, the echoes increasing and spiraling and amplifying until it was all she heard. She even raised her hands to close them over her ears. As if she could shut it out.
And Sam knew, like she’d known that first moment when she’d seen him that something was changing within her, with that intuitive certainty, that Violetta had meant everything to him. That the Alessandro Sam had got was the after-Violetta version. That she’d only got a part of him, not the whole.
Loving Violetta and losing her had changed him. And suddenly, it felt unbearable that he still belonged to that ghost from the past. That he wasn’t hers completely. Even the splintered version of his heart that was left wasn’t hers.
He wasn’t offering it to her.
But she wanted it.
