He nodded, lifting his head to stare blindly at the lavish frescoes which decorated the room’s walls and had been so lovingly restored. Finally, he forced his gaze back to his sister and the man he had once loved as a brother.
‘I do…’ His voice broke on the words, shaming him even more. But then he caught sight of Tallulah, over Mia’s shoulder—all the colour had drained from her face. She could not possibly have understood what was being said. Not only had the whole conversation been conducted in Italian, but no one knew of his feud with Sante except the three of them. The pity in her eyes, though, made it clear she knew…somehow…sheknewthat he had been in the wrong here.
The shame blindsided him, that she had witnessed the terrible mess he had made of his only real friendship. It upset him even more, though, that he had never even slept with this woman and yet somehow her opinion mattered.
The nausea rolled through him. He thrust his fingers through his hair and buttoned his jacket, which had come undone during the struggle. Buying time, desperate to control the emotions he did not want to feel.
At last, he made his gaze connect with Mia’s, but he couldn’t make himself look at Sante. He owed the man an apology, for believing the lies his father had told him all those years ago. For letting them fester and grow all this time. Sante had tried to take some of the blame for that, but it was on him, and only him. Mia had tried to tell him all this on the phone weeks ago, and he hadn’t listened. Because he hadn’t wanted to.
Even so, the words he needed to say to Sante wouldn’t come, so he forced himself to say the next best thing.
‘If you wish, I will give you away tonight,’ he said to Mia in English.
His sister’s face brightened like the sun. ‘Dario, yes, yes, that would mean so much to me.’ She glanced at Sante, who seemed taken aback by the offer. ‘To us both.’
She lifted on tiptoes and planted a kiss on his scarred cheek, and the scent he recognised from so long ago—when they had been happy together, as children on Capri, when everything had been so simple—crucified him. Somehow it disgusted him even more that he had been forgiven so easily.
How had he let them get so far apart? But how could he allow that closeness back, when it made him feel so weak?
‘I love you, Dario,’ Mia said softly. ‘It feels good to finally have my brother back…’
He gave a stiff nod. ‘I should wash up,’ he said, desperate for an excuse to get away from the raw emotions battering him.
‘We have put you two together in the summer house. It is secluded and intimate and charming,’ Mia said, her words bubbling out, her emotions clearly as close to the surface as his own. ‘You have three hours before the wedding. Would you like me to show you the way? And arrange for refreshments for you both?’
‘We have already eaten.’ He cut off her offer, not sure he could bear to spend a minute longer in her company—or Sante’s—contemplating how badly he had fucked up. ‘Is it the place on the other side of the orange grove?’ he asked stiffly, vaguely remembering the structure from when the chopper had landed, what felt like several lifetimes ago.
‘Yes, yes,’ Mia said. ‘You should let me show you both to…’
‘Mia, it’s okay. I believe Dario needs some time alone with his fiancée,’ Sante announced.
Dario’s gaze connected with the man he had once considered his best friend. His only friend, really. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to repair the friendship they had lost, wasn’t convinced he even wanted to. But he could be grateful the man knew him well enough to understand he needed some time to figure out what to do to quell the emotions making his chest hurt.
But when Sante strode out of the room and appeared with hismaggiordomo, directing the older man to show himandTallulah to their accommodation, the vice clamped around his chest. Right alongside it, though, was the furious surge of lust as his fake fiancée grasped his hand and squeezed his numb fingers as if trying to reassure him.
He flinched, her pity only making him more disgusted with himself and his loss of control.
The rest of the day was going to be even more torturous if she attempted to talk to him about any of this. He had no desire to confide in her, in anyone—which meant he could not slake this damn lust now. It would have been so simple and uncomplicated to use their chemistry as a means of forgetting all this. But how could he, when his emotions were so unsettled?
But once they were shown into the summer house, she seemed to sense his withdrawal, because she murmured, ‘I think I’ll go for a run, if you…if you want some alone time.’
He blinked back the sudden urge to ask her not to leave him, shocking him to his core.
But then she murmured, ‘Or I could stay? And we could talk.’
He tensed and forced himself to shake his head—despising the moment of weakness but hating even more that she had somehow seen it.
‘Talk?’ he murmured. ‘The last damn thing I wish to do with you right now is talk, Tallulah,’ he said.
She nodded, the blush blazing across her cheeks a vindication of sorts. ‘Right,’ she said, then jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘I’ll go for that run, then.’
She dashed off—treating him as if he were an unexploded bomb which she needed to be careful not to trigger. Her reaction would have been ironic, if it didn’t make him feel so damn pathetic. What the hell had happened to the man who had always prided himself on being able to control his emotions?
What was far worse though, was that after she had changed into some athletic gear in the house’s lavish bathroom, then left him to shower alone…hefeltlike an unexploded bomb. Because the hatred he had fostered for so long towards Sante, even his superior attitude towards his sister’s reckless, overemotional behaviour, was no longer there to bolster his sense of self or make him proud of the man he had worked so hard to become. Instead, he felt adrift, in a sea of emotions he could no longer rely on—ashamed that even for a moment he had needed the support of a woman he had paid to pretend to love him.
Desperate to ignore the still throbbing pain in his leg and the brutal recollection of the scene with Sante and Mia, which kept playing on a loop in his head, and his pathetic reaction to the sympathy in Tallulah’s eyes when she had offered totalkabout it, he pressed a hand to the shower’s glass tiles and imagined his fake fiancée instead, in the summer house’s lavish—and only—bed.
His cock hardened, as he conjured images of her lush body lying naked on the linen sheets, her soft hair fanned out across the pillows, her eyes dark with lust, her turgid nipples begging for his lips, her evocative scent intoxicating his senses—as if she was all his. Andonlyhis. He grunted as the need crested, and the climax powered from his aching body to splatter against the tiles. The sickening shame returned, though, as he watched his seed wash away.
