Her eyes were enormous, shock still expanding. “I-I thought I heard wrong, then I thought, it’s only been a month. Three weeks, if you take away your famous Ten Days of Tantrum.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then he hooted with laughter. “Ah, preziosa mia, I never laughed for real before you.”
Her eyebrows shot up, her shock receding, her effort to match his teasing evident. “You want to marry me and make me your jester?”
“I want to marry you and make you my everything. My lover, my confidante, my friend, my ally, my psychoanalyst, my conscience, my perspective. As for how long we’ve known each other, you’ve known many people for years. Did that make you need them? Even like or tolerate them? Time isn’t a factor here and you know it.”
She nodded, shook her head, looking lost. “So time doesn’t promote involvement, but lack of it makes said involvement’s validity iffy. If…if in a few months’ time, a year’s, you still feel the same…”
“I will feel the same in sixty years’ time. This is only going to deepen, as it has every second of the past month.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You mean because no one knows what will happen in the future? But anything the future brings is irrelevant, because I am positive of one thing. Myself. In my thirty-eight years I have never even fancied myself in lust with any woman. I was waiting for you. From the first moment, it was like finding the missing parts of m’ anima e corpo—my soul and body. You think I can go back to living without what makes me whole?” Pain streaked across her face. His heart compressed, the world going lightless. He groaned the unbearable fear. “Don’t you feel the same, Gabrielle? Are the doubts yours?”
His heart almost ruptured in the moments before she gulped the breath she needed to cry out what made him breathe again. “No! God, no! I love you so much I have panic attacks with it sometimes. I-I just can’t imagine having this, you, for always. I never thought happiness like this could be anything but temporary. I was waiting for you to…to have enough of me and…and…”
“Can I have enough of bliss? Of sustenance? Of air?”
“Durante…this is too much…too much…”
“Nothing is too much for you. My life, the whole world, they’re yours, if only you’ll take them. Will you, alma mia?”
She looked as if something was tearing her apart. Before he could blurt out his demand that she reveal whatever burden she had for him to bear, she surged into his body. “Yes, please, please, Durante. I want to never be without you again. I want to live my whole life enriching yours, if only you’ll let me.”
He groaned as if his soul had been dragged out and suddenly left to return to its sanctuary deep within him. He crushed her in his arms, moaned the ache of relief. “You have already enriched it beyond imagining, mia cuore. You healed me, purged my anguish. Now I owe you, us, myself without bitterness or shadows anywhere inside me. I owe you the best man I can be. And you were right, as you always are. This can only happen if I let go of my anger. I also need to give you the wedding that you deserve, and all of that can only happen one way. By going back. To make whatever peace I can with my father, to marry you on Castaldinian soil.”
Chapter Thirteen
With every mile deeper into Castaldinian soil, it rose.
The suffocating feeling of being dragged into the worst days of her life, of feeling that they would start again, and this time, they would never end.
Gabrielle had spent what she remembered of her childhood on a Mediterranean island. Although that childhood had been turbulent, the sheer beauty and brightness of the backdrop it had played against had ameliorated much of its anxieties and heartaches. That had been reversed during her last stay in Cagliari.
Witnessing her mother fade away in that sun-drenched, olive grove-ensconced villa, watching her eyes empty of life on that veranda overlooking her beloved white-gold beaches and azure bay, burying her in the embrace of the land she’d called home, had forever linked this magnificence of nature, this balminess of weather, with irretrievable loss and bottomless grief.
Now similar scenes unfolded before her eyes, the influence of another ancient, blessed-by-the-gods land permeating her senses.
She took what comfort she could in the differences she’d been discovering since they’d started their drive to the capital, Jawara, from the private airfield Durante’s jet had landed in.
Castaldini’s landscape was wilder, more varied, segueing from mountain chains with rivers traversing them to plains with lakes and ponds that softened the harshness of the craggy terrain they rolled from. Then, at the very edge of the island, the land gave way to dense maquis followed by miles-deep expanses of powdered gold lapped by what seemed to be liquid turquoise.
Durante embraced her, as if feeling her turmoil. “This is your first trip here, isn’t it, bellissima?”
Tell him. Tell him now.
The urge almost burst her heart. It had been doing so ever since he’d asked her to marry him two days ago.
Dread had won out then. It won out again now. Weakness, too. She’d snatched at his offer without coming clean, and she still couldn’t do that now. And in an hour’s time they’d meet the man who could reveal the secret he’d made her keep. She dreaded Durante’s reaction, but at least she’d finally breathe easy that it was out.
For now she was powerless to do anything but let him clasp her to him. “It is strange that I never came here.”
Stranger than she could let on, with her lifelong relationship to King Benedetto.
“But it was your connections to this land that led you to find me. And this convinces me. Someone out there must really want to reward me. I wonder what I ever did to deserve that much? I must have done something huge. Why else did I find you? Why else do you love me? But even if I didn’t deserve you before, I’ll do everything I can, for the rest of my days, to deserve the gift of you.”
Awe and gratitude deluged her. She clung harder, until she felt as if she were submerged in his flesh, his love. “Don’t start me on correcting you about who’s the gift here.” After an endless moment of supercharged communion, he looked away as if compelled, watched the scenes going by. “You miss it. It’s been five years?”
“Months,” he muttered. “I came back after Padre’s stroke.”
“But you said…”
“I couldn’t stay away. I stayed until he was out of danger. Paolo and Clarissa have been supplying me with constant reports of his condition ever since. But I swore them to secrecy. Needing to make sure he is all right has nothing to do with forgiving him, as they both seem to have done.”