“And Sicily?” Annamarie persisted. “Do you like it here?”
“It’s my first visit.”
“Your first visit? You mean Maximos has never brought you to his own country, to meet his own people before?”
“She’s going to Catania and Aci Castello now,” Maximos said calmly, gently patting the baby’s back.
“But what about Agrigento, Palermo, Mount Etna?” Annamarie protested. “Those are all important to our culture. You can’t possibly say you’ve visited Sicily if you haven’t seen more.”
“And I’d like to visit them,” Cass said, wanting to change the subject, nearly as much as she wanted to escape. She couldn’t handle seeing Maximos with the baby. It was too painful, too vivid of a reminder of what she’d lost. “Unfortunately I don’t travel as much as I’d like. I tend to get preoccupied with work.”
“Ah.” Annamarie nodded with a glance at Maximos. “Another workaholic. I’m always saying to Maximos, don’t work so much. You need to rest more, play more, but Maximos is very driven.” Annamarie shot her brother another reproving glance. “He is not very good at taking things easy.”
Cass smiled but she wouldn’t meet Maximos’s eyes. Instead her gaze dropped to the baby he was holding in his arms, the infant curled so contentedly against his chest, Maximos’s powerful hand cupping the back of the baby’s head, holding the infant easily, comfortably, cradling her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Her chest tightened with heartache. She and Maximos hadn’t just had sex. They’d created life. They’d made a baby.
Their baby.
Cass watched Maximos return his niece to his sister, and the baby, dressed in a small pink outfit, crawled up Annamarie’s shoulder, tiny hands grabbing at her mother’s sparkly teardrop earring, studying the earring intently.
For a moment Cass couldn’t breathe, pain shooting through her, a lance of white-hot heat. That could have been me, she thought, that could have been me with our daughter.
“What’s wrong?” Maximos asked Cass as Annamarie walked away, excusing herself so she could feed the baby.
Cass looked at Maximos, but she didn’t see him, just the ultrasound, that first glimpse of the daughter that wasn’t meant to be. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.” Because it was nothing now. Nothing she could do. Nothing she could change.
Even if she wanted to.
“You’re not very comfortable with kids, are you?” he asked.
Turning her head away, she stared out at the horizon of blue, trying not to scream at the injustice of it. “I like kids.”
She’d been thrilled she was pregnant. She’d been thrilled she was going to be a mother. Nearly thirty, it had felt right in a way she couldn’t explain…not even to herself. She was ready to be a mother, ready for this next step in her life. Maybe she was too strong, too independent to make a good wife, but she knew how to love and her baby would be loved.
Then came the ultrasound.
She had a daughter.
And her daughter wasn’t healthy. Nothing had come together quite right, limbs didn’t attach correctly—a hole in her tiny heart.
Cass had been dumbstruck. The doctor talked. Cass stared at the sonogram. Her daughter—her daughter—wouldn’t survive.
Sitting there in her robe, the cold gel drying on her stomach, time came screeching to a stop. After the doctor finally finished talking, she sat silent, her head buzzing with numbing white noise. And then the cloud cleared in her head and she was herself again. Tough. Determined. The fighter.
“How can I help her?” she’d asked.
The doctor’s brow creased. He didn’t speak. His expression grew more grim. “You can’t,” he said at last.
But it wasn’t an answer she accepted. This was her daughter. Her daughter…and Maximos’s. “There must be something.” She strengthened her voice, and her resolve. “Procedures done in utero.”
“It’s unlikely she’ll even survive birth. If she does, she won’t survive outside of the womb.”
Cass shook her head, furious. She wouldn’t accept a diagnosis like that, and she’d stood then. Brave, fierce, undaunted. “You’re wrong.” Her voice didn’t waver. “She’ll make it. I’ll make sure she survives.”
But Cass had been the one wrong. Two weeks later she woke up in agony. Rushed to the hospital, she miscarried that night.
“Do you want a family?” Maximos asked, ignorant that each of his questions were absolute torture.
“Yes.” Her eyes burned but she wasn’t going to cry, couldn’t cry about the devastating loss. Some pain went too deep, some pain caused insurmountable grief.
Losing Maximos had hurt—badly, badly—but losing their child had broken her heart.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS early afternoon when the picnic at Aci Castello ended with many of the Guiliano guests scattering to either explore the castle ruins or the beautiful beach at the foot of the castello.
It was hot, temperatures soaring for mid-September but Cass stayed with Maximos and his sisters who were stretched out on the blankets, their conversation light, teasing, punctuated with much laughter.
And Maximos teased his sisters as much as they did him. She’d never seen Maximos like this. She’d only ever known the proud Sicilian, the lover and warrior, never the man who cherished his family and was adored in return.
He lay not far from her now, propped up on his elbow. His body was powerful, muscular, beautiful. She tried not to stare and yet she couldn’t not look.
His hand briefly touched his knee, his skin darkly tan, the hair on his thigh even darker, a crisp curling of hair on toned muscle, on taut bronze skin. She’d never met another man put together the way Maximos was. The ease with which he sat, he stood, he moved.
The shape of his head.
The perfect nape.
The broad palm, the strong hand absently stroking his knee.
Just looking at him made her remember last night, made her remember how it felt…skin on skin…his hand on her thigh…his hands everywhere. Watching him now she felt almost sick inside.
“Have you enjoyed today, Cassandra?” Adriana asked, sitting up and stretching.
Suddenly everyone was looking at her, and Cass, caught in the middle of thinking private thoughts, blushed. “I have, thank you.”
It was true, too. She’d enjoyed her city tour of Catania, Sicily’s second largest city, particularly the Roman Theatre uncovered in the 1860s as well as the Piazza Duomo dominated by the Cathedral, Town Hall and Seminary’s exquisite Baroque architecture. But what fascinated her most, was the violent relationship Catania shared with the nearby volcano Mount Etna.
Since Catania’s inception, it had been flooded with lava, rained on with ash, and completely destroyed in 1693 from a cataclysmic earthquake. When the city was rebuilt in the eighteenth century following the earthquake, most of the buildings were constructed from Etna’s black lava.
“I just wish there was more time to explore. I’d love to visit Mount Etna itself,” she added, and glancing up she saw that Maximos was watching her. He wasn’t smiling, either. He looked hard. Focused. Intent.
What was he thinking? There was obviously something on his mind.
“What you must do the next time you come is take the Circumetnea Railway,” Adriana said, cutting a wedge of cheese and snagging a small bunch of red grapes.