Color rode high on her delicate cheekbones. “You were with a different woman every week. In a different city on a different continent building Supersonic, Santo. You were not, in any way, prepared to settle down, that was clear. And you had obviously moved on.”
“Gia,” he growled, feeling himself slipping over the edge of reason. “Tell me the truth.”
Her beautiful eyes shone a luminous green. “I was afraid,” she admitted quietly, “that you would never forgive me for what I’d done. That you might take Leo away from me.”
She might have been right. Because right now, all he could feel was the fury burning through his veins. The anger that rose in a wild flood, stripping him of the ability to think.
He was a father. He had a three-year-old son. He had missed so many moments, so many milestones, things he would never get back. Priceless memories.
It was so far from the vision of the perfect family he’d had for himself, he couldn’t even begin to contemplate it. Because that was what he’d always wanted—the family he’d never had. A family like his best friend Pietro’s growing up—a warm Italian brood he’d been enveloped in when his own family had been shattered apart. Instead, he had a son he hadn’t known about, a woman who’d chosen another man over him, a woman he couldn’t trust. A woman with whom the complications ran a mile deep.
He wanted to scream.
Nothing should have prevented Gia from telling him the truth about his son no matter what the circumstances had been. Nothing. But he was also smart enough to know that he wasn’t in any condition to be attempting rational thought at the moment.
He turned and braced his hands on the railing while he stared out at the sparkling bay. He was supposed to be leaving in the morning. He could safely say that wasn’t happening. In fact, he didn’t want to let his son out of his sight. But Gia and Leo—who he assumed had been named after her grandfather—were safe for the night, since Delilah’s security was second to none. And he needed a chance to breathe.
Gia set a nervous gaze on him as he turned around, clearly attempting to anticipate his next move. “What are you thinking?”
“That I need time to think.”
She gave him a beseeching look. “We have a good life here, Santo—Leo and I. He is happy. Well adjusted. He plays on the beach every afternoon and he loves his friends. He won’t ever have to suffer the stigma of being a Castiglione.”
“He should be a Di Fiore.” The thick surge of emotion in his voice reverberated through the stillness of the night. “Goddammit, Gia. Have you any idea of what you’ve taken from me? Stolen from me?”
She blanched. Lifted her chin. “Yes, I do,” she said quietly. “But I did what I thought was best for Leo.”
A harsh sound choked its way out of him. “I know you think you did. That’s what astounds me. You think so much like a Castiglione, you don’t know the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong.”
A shattered look spread across her face. He ignored it, his brain too full to think. “Here’s how this is going to go,” he said tersely. “I will contact you tomorrow. At which time you will be there, Gia, or I will use every legal resource I have to find you, and when I do, you can kiss your son goodbye, because there isn’t a court on this earth that wouldn’t award me custody of Leo with your criminal past. The time for running is over.”
GIA COULDN’T SLEEP. She sat in a chair on the veranda, staring out at the ocean as the deep dark of a Caribbean night set in with all its requisite sparkling stars, attempting to absorb the fact that her secret was out after three long, painful years of keeping it. She wondered what the ramifications would be, because surely there would be consequences. Santo’s parting speech had made that clear.
Her stomach curled into a tight ball. She pressed her palms against it, as if willing it would smooth out the knots that made it hard to breathe. Had she really been foolish enough to think she could keep her secret forever? That her love for Leo would be enough to sustain the two of them in this sanctuary she’d created? That somehow, somewhere along the way, the truth wouldn’t eventually come out?
She’d pushed aside that fear every time it had surfaced, because Leo’s safety had always been paramount. But her betrayal sat in the back of her mind, festering and dark. Because she’d known what she was doing was wrong. She’d been clear on that, despite Santo’s scathing appraisal to the contrary. There had simply been no other way out.
But now, as the guilt pushed its way out into the open, filling her chest with its heavy weight, it threatened to consume her. Her decision had seemed so clear-cut in the moment. Protect her son. Do what was necessary. But after witnessing the naked emotion on Santo’s face tonight, allowing herself to acknowledge what she’d stripped him of, it didn’t seem so straightforward anymore. It felt selfish. Unforgivable.
And couldn’t all of this, she acknowledged, hugging her arms tight around herself, have been avoided if only she hadn’t had that one weak moment?
She had resigned herself to her marriage to Franco on the eve of her engagement party. Had always known her purpose in life was to cement the Castiglione bloodline through a powerful political marriage, rather than to pursue the dreams she’d had. But running into Santo in the airport lounge they’d both been scheduled to fly out of that night had thrown her into disarray.
A stormy winter night had cast havoc across the eastern seaboard, grounding all of the flights for the evening. Flustered, because she’d known Franco would be furious with her, she’d accepted Santo’s offer to find her a hotel room alongside his. They’d ended up having dinner together in the bar of the hotel because the weather had been that bad.
It had been time to catch up properly, both of their lives since high school frantically busy, with Santo building a company and her finishing off a design degree and an internship at a high-end Manhattan firm. They’d kept in touch—a party here, a coffee there—but both of them had accepted the fact that to put some distance between them was the wise thing to do. But she’d never been able to break that bond completely. Santo had been the haven she’d run to when life became too much.
Her thoughts had been a circular storm of emotion that had mirrored the gale-force winds raging outside, the knowledge of what she was about to do, the fear of what she’d been about to commit herself to, had clawed at her throat. Her decisiveness had stumbled, replaced by a desperate desire to control her own destiny, if only for one night. For the chance to know what it would be like to be with a man like Santo, who had grown from the eighteen-year-old boy she’d first met into a formidably beautiful man who made her heart race like one of the jet engines that had ceased flying overhead.
They’d polished off an expensive bottle of Amarone over a dinner she hadn’t been able to eat, an ever-present, pulsing attraction throbbing across the table between them, a living force she’d never been able to quell. She’d watched Santo extinguish it with that superior self-control of his, her heart sinking as he’d suggested they should both get some sleep.
Which might possibly have worked, had they not ended up alone in a silent elevator as they’d been whisked high into the sky. Had her desperation not reached a fever pitch about halfway there, her fear and frustration closing the distance between them. And then there had only been Santo’s arms. A hotel room she wasn’t sure belonged to him or to her. A night she would never forget a second of no matter how long she lived, every single piece of clothing they’d removed a revelation of what it had felt like to be alive.
One night for herself before she’d married a man she didn’t love.
And then had come the