his family from scandalous ruin and bankruptcy and all that had been missing was the perfect society wife to complete his ascent.
“No, I didn’t love her. And in hindsight, I wreaked even more damage on her than her mother had done with her affairs and her neglect. I should have never married her. She needed someone softer, kinder and I...all I wanted from her was a trophy wife.”
He laid his head back against the headboard. Christo, of all the times to realize his faults. He couldn’t soften toward his ex now.
“Isn’t it good for Alyssa that her mother’s worked through the program?” came Pia’s tentative voice.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I forgave her when she had affairs behind my back. I forgave her when she lied to me about—”
A hard gleam entered his eyes. But Pia was beginning to see beneath that hardness. Beginning to understand that Raphael felt things deeply. More than even he understood. That he was just good at burying it all.
She pressed her face into his chest, feeling an overwhelming tenderness for him. And waited.
“I found her high at the house once with Alyssa barely a month old. Gio and her mother, even mine, they all pled her case. They said that addiction is like a sickness, that she didn’t know any better. But she’s an adult who’s responsible for her actions. I won’t forgive that. She’s not getting her hands on my daughter in this lifetime.”
“That sounds so final,” Pia said, before she could stop. “Are you protecting Alyssa? Or punishing Allegra? Is it even about Allegra, or is it about your father?”
He looked so furious then that Pia braced herself for a cutting reply. She’d gone too far. Worse, they both knew she’d unwittingly struck on the truth.
“Only you could look beneath my anger for a junkie ex, Pia.”
Something in his tone tugged at her. She longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him. To tell him that caring for someone was not weakness. That he wasn’t invincible, whatever the world led him to believe. “I just... I think you’ve never forgiven your father for what he did.”
He looked away but didn’t deny it. “He had been my hero for so long. And then suddenly, one day he was gone, without a word.”
And he’d left Raphael alone with a burden that would crush most seventeen-year-old boys. A burden he’d used to fuel his own ambition. A burden that his mother had continued to put on him.
“Raphael—”
“It’s all in the past, Pia.”
He took her mouth in a hard kiss that sent little waves of pleasure through her body. When he pulled her beneath him, when he rocked into her with the utmost tenderness because he was worried she’d be sore, when he kissed her mouth with warm languorous strokes, she gave herself over to him.
He loved her slowly, gently this time, as if she were breakable in his rough hands. He told her in sweet Italian what she did to him. But as their climaxes hurled them into ecstasy, as he tucked her under his arm, an ache unlike any she’d ever known settled in her chest.
Raphael might think it was in the past, but the mark was still there.
The anger, the hurt, were both still there buried under a hard shell.
He would never let himself weaken, never care again.
Pia knew it as surely as she did that she felt something more than attraction for him. Something more than admiration. And the scariest part was that she didn’t know how to stop it.
PIA DIDN’T SEE Raphael for another two weeks.
He wanted her. But whether he’d have acted on it if he hadn’t been shaken by Gio’s sudden heart attack, if he hadn’t been vulnerable, was a doubt that gnawed at her constantly.
She was more aware of her body now than she had ever been before—aware that anytime she thought of them in that huge bed, her sex became damp and her breasts tingled; aware that anytime she caught even a hint of that aqua-based cologne her skin prickled; aware that when she touched herself when she was showering or when she was finding sleep hard to come by, her body ached for a more purposeful, knowing touch. Ached for him.
He hadn’t forgotten her, that was for sure.
Because for every day she hadn’t seen him, he had sent her flowers, a diamond bracelet by an up-and-coming designer whose pieces had year-long waiting lists, so Gio had informed her. She was determined to return it, but then came a brand-new coffeemaker with endless capsule refills because she’d been complaining that Italian coffee was too strong for her. And then one day, the present that had her heart thumping against her rib cage arrived: a high-end set of carving tools and a particular type of wood that she’d told him she couldn’t source anywhere in the world.
Her heart warmed at the thoughtfulness of his gifts, highlighting the contrast from when it had only been a pretense.
She didn’t want things with Raphael to be over. She wanted more of his kisses and his hot caresses, his warm smile that only she brought out, and just more time with him.
She wanted a relationship with him.
But after the second week of still no Raphael, mild resentment and a gnawing anxiety settled on her. Especially when his mother took it upon herself to visit Pia and slyly let it drop that Raphael was dealing with matters relating to Allegra, who had briefly visited Alyssa two days ago.
More than once, Pia caught a hint of suggestion from Portia as to how hard Raphael had worked to build Vito Automobiles to what it was today. And how much Gio himself owed Raphael.
All she cared about was that he’d been so close and hadn’t dropped by to even say hello.
At least her application to a prestigious online university to get her master’s degree in education had been accepted—a dream of hers for so long. No sooner had she received the email than he had sent her a brand-new laptop, a box of chocolates, a pair of her prescription glasses because she’d told him she kept losing her first pair and misplacing the spare.
When Pia had laughed for two minutes straight, Gio had been utterly puzzled.
So most afternoons, Pia settled down in the veranda with her laptop and lesson plans while her grandfather napped. Afraid of creating even the smallest ripple through Gio’s precarious health, she had abandoned her plans for leaving Italy for now.
So it was fifteen days later that she found Raphael standing in the courtyard with a glass of white wine in his hand.
He cast a tall shadow in the afternoon sun, his broad shoulders tapering into a lean waist and muscular thighs, the very ones that had cradled her. There had been such power, such strength in him and yet he had been so gentle with her. That she knew his body with such intimate knowledge sent a strange thrum of power flowing through her veins.
Not that she had any illusion that he belonged to her.
She doubted Raphael would ever truly belong to any woman. And yet, seeing him stand there, Pia could only feel tenderness for him. As if somehow she could bring a new facet out of this hard man. As if she could give him something he didn’t have or hadn’t known before.
She sighed and trudged up the steep path. His hair, grown overlong, curled over the collar of his shirt. A pang beat through her chest as she noticed the dark shadows he sported under his eyes.
Wineglass raised to his mouth, he froze when he spotted her. That intense stare of his made her pulse flutter, that familiar feeling of excitement and anticipation singing through her veins.
His dark eyes swept over her with such lingering hunger that Pia instantly knew that he felt this thing between them just as strongly as she did.
Sweat had