Catarina didn’t step inside her flat. Instead, she turned and looked up at him, giving him another searching look. But this time, there was heat behind it, too. Massimo’s body roared with the need he had contained all night. Frustration, desire and desperation conspired against him until he couldn’t resist any longer. He leaned over and pressed his mouth against hers, tasting hints of wine and chocolate and, underneath, Catarina. Her hands came around his neck and slid into his hair. She was pulling him closer, kissing him the way she had kissed him in the snowbound house, with the passion and abandon that he couldn’t get enough of. He kissed her like she was an oasis in the desert, one he couldn’t bring himself to leave. She moved closer, pressing her body against his, and the need to take her right there, in the hallway, to make her his, to remind her of everything that he could give her, overtook him.This is what you want, said something deep inside him, ominous and clear. Massimo would never get enough of this woman. He would crave her for the rest of his life. Maybe this was his own twisted version of love, but he could not be a slave to it.
He clung to the last of his sanity as these instincts threatened to overwhelm him. The desire to take her to her bed and spend the rest of the night making love to her would bring him to his knees. But he knelt for no one. It was a matter of survival. So Massimo Carandini used the last of his famous willpower, the strength that he had spent his entire adult life building, to pull away.
He looked into her eyes, half-lidded and hazy with desire. Her hair was mussed, and her lips were parted. He thrust his arms to his sides and clenched his fists, forcing himself not to reach for her again. Not to promise her everything she wanted just to spend the night in her bed.
“This hurts, Catarina,” he bit out, his voice raw. “It’s torturous. How can you want this?”
She lifted her chin, even as her eyes welled with tears. “I deserve love. I will not settle for anything less.”
For once in his life, Massimo Carandini had no idea what to do next, so he did what his entire being was begging him not to do. He walked away.
Two days later, Massimo still had no idea what to do, which was how he found himself in his Ferrari, racing into the Italian Alps, ignoring the awful feeling in his stomach, as if he was in freefall.
He came to the familiar gates, then continued up the winding driveway, coming to a stop in front of his grandparents’ towering country estate. Three rows of windows marked the floors of the main house, a symmetry interrupted by tangled vines of rambling roses that climbed the facade. As Massimo walked up the stone steps, he inhaled the familiar scent, then flashed to Catarina, to the same scent that lingered wherever she went. His mind finally made the connection it seemed to have resisted until now: Her scent reminded him of the only place that had ever felt like home.
Massimo looked up at the center window of the second floor, where his grandmother was almost certainly sitting in her reading room, awaiting his arrival. He climbed the remaining step and banged on the door with the brass knocker, a ghost of a smile playing on his lips as he took in its familiar lion’s-head shape, knowing the housekeeper had likely been forewarned that his grandmother would answer the door herself. He waited, imagining her slow, regal steps down the grand staircase, her aging hands resting on the banister.
Finally, the door swung open.
“My boy,” she said without a hint of irony, despite the fact that Massimo had so clearly left boyhood long, long ago. He bent over to kiss her soft, familiar cheeks.
Isabella Carandini had dressed for the occasion. Her hair was in a neat gray bun at the base of her neck. She wore a well-tailored dress in widow’s black, a tradition she still held to after thirteen years. Around her neck was a simple strand of pearls with matching earrings that Massimo’s grandfather had given her as a wedding gift, before he had made the kind of money that bought them family estates. During his lifetime, Massimo’s grandfather had not been the easiest man, and yet Massimo never doubted the man’s love for his wife.
“Constantina made her famous vanilla bean cake,” she said, leading him through the long hallway, back to the solarium, where his grandmother spent her days tending to her plants. A table was set in the center of the bright room with her favorite porcelain set. There was a silver pot of coffee with creamer and the sugar bowl Massimo used to steal from as a child. The cake was dusted with powdered sugar, and on a silver tray at the side was a thin bottle of limoncello and two aperitif glasses.
He visited his grandmother less frequently than he should. When the thought crossed his mind, he told himself that it was his busy schedule, but there in her solarium, Massimo was reminded that his feelings about this house were complicated. This was the place where he had taken refuge when he was a vulnerable young teenager, and visiting it meant acknowledging a part of himself that he had left behind. Yet, he had cleared his schedule this afternoon to come. Massimo wasn’t ready to contemplate what this meant.
His grandmother gestured for him to sit, and he inquired about her health and the health of her plants as he savored the slice of cake that she had neatly cut and served for him. When they had finished their coffee, she poured him a glass of limoncello and smiled indulgently as she handed it to him.
“I must admit your photo was the last thing I expected to see as I was reading my favorite gossip magazine this week.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Maybe Alessandro’s but not yours.”
Massimo may have taken this as a provocation from anyone else, but there was sympathy and understanding in his grandmother’s voice. She knew the depth of hurt that he had once felt from these kinds of headlines.
“Does your visit have something to do with the whispers I heard of an engagement?” she asked.
The words were perfectly polite, and yet he could still hear the rebuke behind them. He had planned to notify her of his engagement before his original supper plans, of course, but that was before the situation had careened out of control.
“I apologize for not calling you sooner,” he said. “The situation has developed in unexpected ways.”
She tilted her chin in acknowledgment, but he knew better than to mistake it for forgiveness. “Do you love this woman?”
Massimo grimaced. This should have been the easiest question to answer. Overwhelming passion, burning, aching need, possessiveness, even protectiveness— Catarina had wrenched each one of these feelings from him. But he was not capable of the kind of love she deserved. What he felt for her was already tearing him apart. Massimo had no idea what to call this pit in his stomach, this unwieldy heat, this voice that raged inside him, shaking him bone-deep with the wordmine.
“I love her,” he finally bit out. “And it will lead us both to our downfall.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Massimo,” she said with a wry laugh that pushed away some of the dark clouds that hovered over him. “Have you told this woman that you love her?”
“It’s complicated,” he muttered, looking away.
“I see,” she said, and he had the distinct impression she did, in fact, see far more than he wished. She tilted her head a little, assessing him skeptically. “You must allow yourself happiness.”
Massimo swallowed back a new and inexplicable twist of pain. Her words about happiness were so simple, and yet something inside him revolted against them. “And if I am not capable of this? If this feeling is devouring me from the inside?”
“Now you have convinced me that you are, in fact, in the throes of love.” She gave him a smug smile.
“The kind of love my parents have?”
His grandmother’s glass was halfway to her mouth, but she stopped. She set her limoncello back on the table and turned to him. All traces of her smile were gone.
