“I can’t.” Her voice sounded as dead as she felt.
“You can’t do anything else, amore. You belong with me. To me. You’re the only one for me.”
“That’s not true, never was, never will be.”
His arms fell away, and he looked at her as if she’d just emptied a gun in his gut.
“You—you don’t…” His bit his lower lip then his voice plunged to a hoarse rasp that sounded like pain and dread made audible. “You don’t love me?”
She should say she didn’t. He’d stop blaming himself for his role in her devastation, stop trying to make amends. This was what he was here doing, after all. And she no longer blamed him for anything. She only wanted to set him free.
She still couldn’t bring herself to lie. Not about this.
She escaped answering. “I am not the one for you, Vincenzo. Anyone else would be better for you. Anyone who doesn’t have a family with a criminal history.”
His devastated expression fell apart with the snap of tension, morphed into the very sight of relief. “This is what you meant? What you’re thinking?”
“It’s not what I’m thinking. It’s the truth.”
“According to whom?”
“To the world.”
“Does it look like I care what the world does or doesn’t think?”
He spread his arms, encompassing the scene around them. Everyone was staring openly at them, the buzz of recognition, curiosity and amusement rising. Some were even taking photos and recording videos.
Embarrassment crept up her face. “You do care or you wouldn’t have married me as a social facade. And when the truth comes out…”
“It never will.”
“…it will cost you and Castaldini too much. That’s why it’s a fact that any woman who doesn’t have a family with a criminal history and connections would be better for you.”
“No one is better for me. No one is better, period.” She started to shake her head, her heart ricocheting inside her rib cage at his intensity and the unwilling rise of hope. He caught her face, his hands gentleness and persuasion itself. “And pretending to care about that social facade was just so I could have you without admitting the truth. All those years I’ve been looking for a way to have you again. Because I haven’t been truly alive since I walked away from you. And now I can’t live without you. I only cared about your family’s crimes when I thought you’d been involved in them, but lately, not even then. And now none of that is an issue. I’ve managed to wipe your family’s slate clean.”
“Y-you did…? How?”
He told her, quickly, urgently, as if needing to get this out of the way, to move on to what he considered relevant.
And she felt her world disintegrating around her again.
“I never suspected… I always thought… God!” Tears gushed, then burned down her cheeks. “The years I spent being angry at Dad and Daniel, thinking they were irresponsible, criminal, when they…they…”
He dragged her to him, protecting her from her anguish, all the missing parts of her fitting back. “You can now have your family back, forgive them for everything that has been beyond them and be happy loving them again.”
She raised her eyes to his, unable to grasp the enormity of it all. “How can you be so…so forgiving, so generous, after all they’ve done to you?”
“Conceiving you is an achievement that would make up for any past or future crime. And then they were under threat. A threat I ended, so they can now go on with their lives without the shadow of fear.”
She started to protest and he scooped her up in his arms, clamping his lips over hers. As the power of his kiss dragged her down into a well of craving, she thought she heard hoots of approval and clapping.
He pulled away, groaning, “Gloria mia, ti voglio, ti amo—I’m going crazy wanting you, loving you.”
She felt he was letting her look deep into his soul, letting her see what she’d always thought would remain an impossible fantasy. Vincenzo didn’t only love her, his love was as fierce and total as hers.
But this was why she’d had to walk away. So she wouldn’t disrupt his life and destiny.
She had to protect him, especially since he clearly wasn’t willing to protect himself. “You can’t only consider your heart…you have duties, a status, and I’m…”
He clamped his lips on hers again, aborting her panting protest. “My first duty is to you. My status depends on honoring you first.”
She shook her head. “My family…if the truth comes out…God, Vincenzo, you can’t have them for your in-laws….”
His expression was resoluteness itself. “I already have them as my in-laws, and they’ll always be my in-laws, and I will be proud to have them as the family of our children.”
“Our ch-childr…” With those two magical words, a fierce yearning sheared through her, draining every spark of tension holding her together. She swooned in his hold.
His arms tightened until she felt he was trying to merge them. “Yes, our children, as many and as soon as you want.”
The magnitude of what he was offering, the future he was painting, stunned her into silence as her mind’s eye tremblingly tried to imagine it all. A future, a whole life, filled with love and alliance and trust, with him. Children with him. Even her family back, because of him.
Vincenzo took advantage of her silence and strode away with her still in his arms, talking to many people, then on the phone. She watched everything from the security of his embrace, as if from the depths of a dream. Somewhere it registered that he was arranging their exit after they’d been checked in as far as the boarding gate and arranging for her luggage to be sent back.
Then a sound penetrated the fog of her bliss. A horn.
Her dazed gaze panned around, found Vincenzo’s car with Alonzo at the wheel, waving to them urgently as he stopped in an unloading-only zone.
In seconds, Vincenzo had her inside the cool, dim seclusion of the limo. As Alonzo maneuvered smoothly into the traffic, Vincenzo bundled her onto his lap.
After a kiss that left her breathless, he drew away, his faced gripped in the passion she couldn’t wait to have him expend all over her.
“I have to get this out of the way once and forever, gloriosa mia, then we’ll never speak or think of it again. You had nothing to do with your family’s mistakes. You are the one woman I could ever love, the soul mate I would be forever proud to call mine, and to call myself yours. I truly care nothing about what the world will bring me as long as you’re mine forever.”