IT WAS ALMOST dawn and she still hadn’t come to him, still hadn’t told him. And for the first time since that night when he had made love to her, Leandro kept himself away from her bedroom.
The party had come to an end hours ago and the dense silence, the pitch-dark of the night, suited his somber mood. Somehow, he’d held on to his control. His jaw should have turned to concrete hours ago for the way he’d gritted his teeth and greeted everyone.
His face should have turned to brittle glass for the happiness and normalcy he’d had to fake.
His blood should have chilled to ice at the sight of Alexis in a navy blue silk dress that hugged her curves so gloriously. She had looked strained though he was the only one who noticed.
Like him, she hadn’t wanted to mar the happiness of Valentina’s big night.
If he went to her, he would weaken.
If he touched her, if he lost himself in the sensuality of her body, he wouldn’t care about why she was avoiding him.
If he took her and moved inside her, the hurt wouldn’t lessen when he was done.
Because he would still be outside of the wall she’d erected between them.
It was nothing but a madness and Leandro was through with being this mad, this out of control.
He had to do something to shred this fear. He had to take action.
Only action, only setting things right had always saved him. Had stopped him from crumbling. Had enabled him to take care of Luca and Valentina.
And the right thing was that Alexis belonged with him just as Isabella did.
She was his and he wouldn’t let her go.
He reached his study and slammed the door shut behind him.
Countless times, he had come in here, to swallow his tears. To bury his fears. To shore up his courage so that he could act like an adult when he had barely been one.
Here was where he had lost his innocence and discovered that the man who should have protected them all was an animal instead.
Here was where he had threatened Enzo after he had raised his hand at their mother.
Here was where he had hugged Luca when they’d discovered the horrible truth their mother swallowed.
Here was where he had argued with Antonio, for days, about the rightness of bringing Valentina home.
A growl rumbled through him at the thought of losing Alexis, too.
He had just poured a generous measure of whiskey, something else he’d never indulged in as a rule, when the door opened behind him.
Even in that moment, his breath hitched in his throat, hope flared.
Antonio stood at the door and Leandro turned away from his grandfather’s shrewd gaze. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this.
Not when he didn’t understand himself.
“Drinking, Leandro?” Antonio’s challenge was instant, dry and carried the weight of a thousand questions. Enzo had not only been an alcoholic but an abusive one.
All of them, even Antonio, had felt the effects of that.
Leandro threw back the whiskey in a reckless gesture. It seemed he was finally coming apart at the seams and he hadn’t even realized that he had been holding so tight. That his complacency and his control were this flimsy.
The fiery slide of the whiskey against his throat and chest blunted the edge of his roiling emotions. Just. He faced Antonio and shrugged. “Maybe I have earned the right, Nonno?”
Antonio’s cane was a harsh rap against the gleaming marble floor. “Maybe you have become weak.”
Leandro remained silent, hating to agree with Antonio.
“That woman, what has she done now?”
Brittle laughter escaped Leandro’s mouth. Apparently, the only absolute in his shifting world was Antonio’s black prejudice of Alexis.
“She is pregnant.”
A fierce kind of joy lit up Antonio’s old eyes, so raw that Leandro looked away. He thumped Leandro on the shoulder, the force of it no less for his frail body.
“Marry her soon,” he declared as if that hadn’t been a foregone conclusion from the moment Leandro had seen that Alexis needed him just as much as Isabella did.
Why couldn’t she accept it when Leandro offered her everything?
“The Conti heir cannot be a bastardo—”
“You do not know if it is a boy, Nonno, and she has not told me.”
Antonio missed a beat. “You think she will use this to manipulate you?”
“Alexis doesn’t have a manipulative bone in her body.”
“Then why does it—” Antonio stared at Leandro, then frowned as if he couldn’t fathom the import of this. “This matters to you? That she has not informed you?”
Leandro drove his shaking fingers through his hair. Trust his grandfather to arrive at the crux of it so easily. “Si, it does. It means I still do not have her trust. It means she still has not accepted that we must marry.”
It means that he still did not have her heart. And that clawed through him.
Something dawned in Antonio’s gaze. Whatever it was, Leandro didn’t like it one bit. “She leads you by your manhood, she refuses to marry you and now...she plays with your emotions. I knew this would happen.”
Running a shaking hand over his nape, Leandro bit back his stinging retort.
The sounds of a file slapping the mahogany desk brought his head up.
A grim sort of triumph danced in Antonio’s eyes.
“What is that?” Leandro inquired.
“Read it for yourself.”
A small insignia on the top right corner of the file was Leandro’s first clue—a highly expensive Milanese private investigations firm.
A passport-size picture of Alexis, maybe eight or nine years old, that naive but defiant tilt to her chin, his second clue.
Pages and pages of information on Alexis from school grades to jobs, including the time she and her friends had received a mark on their juvenile record for some minor shoplifting. When she had been fired from a job at an accounting firm when she’d been eighteen—the year after her brother’s death, he remembered.
Facts even he didn’t know about her pregnancy. The loan on her store that had been almost defaulted. And then details about the accident and her recovery.
Nausea barreled up Leandro’s chest and filled his throat. “What in hell is this?” The question was rhetorical yet he couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“It’s a report that I had that firm put together a week after that woman stormed into our home. That shoplifting record, those bad investments, and this accident recently...it is not a hard story to put together.
“I can find a lawyer in two minutes who will label her an incompetent mother. And your children will be yours.”
“I will not separate my children from their mother. I need her in my life, Antonio.”
Leandro’s stark statement echoed around them while Antonio’s mouth tightened. But he did not care. Dio, he did not care about anything.
For the first time in his life, he wanted, no, desperately needed, something to even go on. He wanted Alexis’s heart, he wanted to be loved by this strong woman, he wanted to bask in the generosity of her laughter and passion. He wanted to go to bed with her through countless dark nights and wake up with her to a million sunrises. He wanted to help her heal and see her soar...
Yet he did not know how to keep her from slipping away from him.
She was. Dio, she was.
“I could not hurt her with this, Nonno. I could not forgive myself if I hurt her.”
“Then use it in my name. Use it to scare her, use it to bind her to you.”
Leandro jerked away from the table.
It was so diabolical and yet simple.
Antonio could force her hand with this very file. Even a whisper of a separation from Isabella would send Alexis into his arms. Leandro could reassure her it was not true, but persuade her to the altar with him. And she would be Leandro’s forever.
Once Alexis gave her commitment, once she vowed herself to him in marriage, there would be no going back, whatever way she’d arrived there.
She would be that perfect, adoring wife, her loyalty toward him and their family absolute. He knew that as well as he knew his own mind.
A life with Alexis and Isabella and his unborn child, just as it should be, versus this anxiety, this confusion about her feelings, this desperate chasm that he couldn’t fill no matter what he did.
If he used it, Alexis would be shattered. It was the worst thing he could aim at her, even in the guise of Antonio, the worst that she believed of herself.
But if he didn’t...what if she never agreed to marry him? What if after everything Leandro had done, he wasn’t enough?
He could have the only woman he’d ever wanted in his life this badly.
What, per carita, was he waiting for?
* * *
Alex felt every passing second like a net was drawing in closer around her. Soon it would choke her if she didn’t tell Leandro about the pregnancy. The terrifying anxiety she had felt at seeing the test positive had calmed now, but not the fear of the oncoming fate.
She hated cheating him of this news every passing second, especially as she knew how elated he would be.
A big, loving family, he wanted it. He wanted everything he and Luca and Valentina hadn’t had growing up. He would shower this baby with just as much love as he did Isabella. He had so much love to give, and yet, would he open himself up to feeling anything remotely like that for Alex herself?
Again and again, he talked of duty, of what an exceptional mother she was, of giving Isabella security, of the rightness of all of them together...
And nothing about her and him...
Nothing about why he wanted her with a desperate intensity every night, about the raw fear she saw in his eyes when he didn’t think she was looking at him, about the urgency and anger she sensed gathering in him every time she postponed their talk of future...
Would he ever learn that he had to risk his heart to have and hold hers? Would it all be her capitulation but none of his? Would he only manipulate her again and again, like he’d already done with her parents’ store?
For one question of Luca and five minutes of his time had told her that some offshore branch of Conti Luxury Goods had acquired a tiny health food store in Brooklyn.
Why, why did he need to buy their store and offer that exaggerated price for it?
Was it just to retain control of this situation between them? To arm himself against her?
So every time she had gathered courage yesterday, every time she had firmly put her reasons for not jumping into marriage, fear eroded her courage.
That she would let him persuade her, that he would forever bind her to him without ever opening his heart to her, that she would forever wonder if it was something to do with her that stopped him from loving her... Alex didn’t want to live like that.
She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life like she’d done for so long. Craving her parents’ approval and attention but never receiving it, calling herself inadequate and not being able to help it, forcing herself at things that she’d never been good at and failing...
On and on, the cycle would go on...
God, it would be a thousand times worse with Leandro, for she wanted more from Leandro than she’d ever wanted from anyone else.
She wanted him to want her because he couldn’t live without her. Because he loved her, just as much as she loved him. She wanted him to be desperate for her, just as she was.
Bloodthirsty of her, true, but how could she live with anything else?
When she knew walking away from him would shatter her into a thousand different pieces.
* * *
The morning had started out horrible with nausea churning through Alex’s stomach. She had barely slept, waiting and wondering if Leandro would come to her.
When somewhere around dawn, she’d realized he wasn’t going to, she had cried herself to sleep. The tears felt both like a burden and a relief for she was no closer to deciding what she wanted to do.
She’d desperately wanted to go find him, to sink into his embrace, to tell him how much she loved him. But what would he say? What if he only took advantage of it?
What if he turned the biggest truth of her life into another weakness?
She emptied her glass of orange juice and decided to take Izzie out for a walk when Luca walked onto the terrace, a grim expression on his face.
Fear was a fist in her throat for Alex knew, instantly, that something was very wrong.
Luca threw a file on the table. “I promised I would help.” There was no warmth or charm in his tone. A nerve flicked violently in his temple while that laughing mouth set into a hard, cruel curve.
It was such a change in his demeanor that it took her a few seconds to focus on the file.
Like a snake uncoiling, ready to strike and sink poison, it stared back at her. “What is it, Luca?”
“A file, cara.” His tone tempered and perversely, it made her throat raw. “About you. To prove that you’re an incompetent mother.”
Alex jerked so hard that she’d have toppled off the chair if not for Luca’s hand behind her. Her heart thumped in her chest, a loud rushing in her ears made her head spin. The nausea she’d felt this morning returned a hundredfold.
She gripped the edge of the breakfast table, looking for an anchor in her drowning world.
Incompetent...the word was a like a burn mark on her skin, festering and deep and painful. More so than all the pain she’d suffered in the accident.
More so than all the years of tears and deprecation and grief she had suffered at her parents’ hands.
With shaking hands, she opened the file. Watched pages and pages of her life distilled into hard little facts. Stripped of her insecurities and fears. Reducing her entire life into one dimension.
Disorganized. Years of her chaotic nature, her rebellion against being compared to Adrian’s obsessively organized life.
Poor financial straits. Years of having slaved over the store and the house and nothing to show in return. Apparently, no loans at least, thanks to Leandro.
Panic attacks. Incomplete use of one hand.
No career prospects.
Doubt was a pit of thorns that she tumbled into, mocking her, scraping her.
It was every horrible thing her mother had insinuated over the years and every fear she had made herself sick over again and again.
Alexis bent her head to the table, and pulled in a deep breath to keep the grief rising through her at bay.
No, she refused to be reduced, refused to let her pain, her fears, her very life, be reduced to such cold, hard facts.
This wasn’t even about her.
She wasn’t a failure. Not the woman who took what she wanted seven years ago. Not the woman who had a daughter and raised her against all odds. Not the woman who dared set the rules with a man as ruthless and autocratic as Leandro.
She dashed away the tears before they could spill. Rage was a feral thing inside her and she let it roam freely. She stood up and faced Luca. “Do you know who commissioned this?”
Please, let it not be Leandro, she prayed frantically.
If he’d done this, she could never forgive him. There’d be nothing but ashes left.
“Antonio.” Relief battered her. “A chartered flight leaves in three hours. It is best if you take Izzie and leave.”
“You think Leandro will use this against me.” Horror seeped into her words.
“I have stopped guessing the lengths to which my brother will go to ensure what he thinks is right. He’s done it for too long and knows nothing else.” The impact of Luca’s fist on the table rocked through Alexis. “Maybe I was wrong and there’s no hope for—”
A fist to his mouth threw Luca back. Loud and vicious, his pithy curse rent the air. Heart rapping against her rib cage, Alex pushed her chair back and stood up.
Shock buffeted her as she realized it was Leandro that had thrown the punch at Luca.
Knuckles bruised, mouth tightened into a thin line, gray eyes blazing with fury, it was Leandro like she’d never seen before.
When he moved toward a barely upright Luca again, Alex planted herself in front of him. “Stop it, Leandro. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Something swept across Leandro’s face then, a black, glittering shadow that sent ripples of alarm up and down her skin. “He not only advises you but aids you to run away, with Isabella in tow, and I should forgive him?”
“He aids me because he has lost hope for you. Because he thinks—” her chest was so tight, “—that you’re an unfeeling brute who would manipulate me into spending my life with you without earning it, without even deserving it.”
That arrogant head of his reared back as if she had slapped him. That sensuously wicked mouth that had licked and caressed her to rapture flinched. But Alex felt no satisfaction in hurting him, in piercing that steely invulnerability of his.
How could she when her gut was twisted into a painful knot, when her heart thudded in fear of a future that could very well be ruined?
Luca’s harsh, pain-filled laughter surrounded them. He stepped forward now, past Alex, as if challenging, almost inviting, Leandro to take another swing at him. “Our parents have ruined him, too, cara. You are a fool to trust him.”
The contempt in his tone left a jarring reminder even after he left.
A bleakness touched Leandro’s gray gaze even as it swept over Alex in that hungry way of his. “Have you decided I do not deserve to know that I’m to be a father again?”
He didn’t demand in a fury or betrayal but as if he’d already lost her. As if she’d hurt him immeasurably by not sharing it with him. “It’s not something I could hide from you long.”
“But you did not share it with me in happiness. That is telling enough.”
“I hated not telling you every moment. I hated depriving us of the joy of it...but God, Leandro, you manipulate everything around you, arrange everyone’s lives.” Tears she’d held back fell out of her eyes. “I trusted you, always and you...
“Is he right, Leandro? Would you have used that file against...me?” Her voice broke, throat full of needles. “Did you consider it?”
His strength and heat surrounded her, and Alex almost leaned into him, driven by deep need and instinct. When he spoke, he sounded as if his own throat was full of gravel. “I considered it. For all of five minutes.
“I was desperate, bella, I could feel you slipping away from me this past week. And then you wouldn’t look me in the eyes, you hide this news from me.”
He rubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes, the vulnerability of the gesture tugging at Alex even now.
“Because you made me doubt everything. You bought my parents’ store and didn’t say a word to me. You talked of marriage and duty and family but not of us. Not once.
“I couldn’t live like that again. Not when I discovered how...
“Not for Izzie, not for this baby. I couldn’t settle for something less again. Not from you, of all the people in the world. I deserve to spend my life with someone who loves me, Leandro.”
“Are you leaving me then, Alexis?”
The stiffness in her spine relented, the rigidness of her muscles melted and Alex struggled to regulate her long exhale.
For in that tiny question, she discovered a universe of meaning.
The old Leandro wouldn’t have asked such a desperate question. As if it was all beyond him now. He would have never accepted defeat when he could move mountains and rearrange landscapes for his purpose.
His pain in those words and the relief it provoked was a tiny, threadbare bridge between the chasm that had opened up between them over the past week.
Hope flickered in her chest.
Heart in throat, every inch of her skin hyper-aware of him, Alex stared back at him. Refused to even betray her heart by the flicker of an eyelid. “If I do take Luca’s help and leave, it’s your own fault.
“If you lose the right to be Izzie’s father, if you lose this joy that we could’ve had...” she swallowed away the words that rose to her lips, “then it is all your fault.
“It is your own refusal to open up your heart to me, your own stubborn, arrogant belief in thinking you know best, your bloody incapability to feel anything, that would ruin the best thing that’s come into your life.”
The silence clattered with the beat of some bird’s wings across the blue sky, with the soft hum of a lawn mower somewhere, the world puttering on its humdrum way while her heart stuttered in her chest.
“You think me unfeeling, mia cara? To attack my own brother like an animal, you think I’m not weak? You think it doesn’t terrify me at this moment that there is nothing I can do to stop my very life from falling apart? You think it didn’t disgust me that I considered even letting you see that file?
“My heart is not mine anymore.
“My fate is not mine anymore.
“I have been rendered into nothing at your hands, tesoro. I’m nothing without your love.”
And just like that, the man she loved with every fiber of her being went on his knees.
That stunning, honorable man raised his head toward her and spoke the words she’d been dying to hear with every breath in her. “All my life, I have tried to control and master every emotion. I lived only to make sure no one ever hurt me and Luca and Valentina, without ever risking anything... I didn’t even realize what I missed until I met you.
“You...you make me risk everything, bella. To place my happiness in your hands, to trust myself into your hands, it terrifies me.
“But I love you so much, mia cara. If you give me one chance, I will change. And I will love. And I will risk everything I have again and again to prove I’m worthy of the woman I love more than anything else.”
The woman I love more than anything else...
Tears filled and overflowed from Alex’s eyes at the pure supplication in Leandro’s words.
Her trust in him soared on wings, her entire being felt as if she could float away on a cloud of happiness.
She fell to her knees in front of him and took his mouth with hers. He tasted of passion and thirst and hunger that could never be sated, and of love.
Of unconditional love, of utter acceptance, of deep, abiding trust.
Frantic words in Italian caressed her skin as he pressed kisses to every inch of her face, as he wrapped his strong arms around her and held her tight. His anxiety spoke in his shaking fingers, in his tight grip.
In the shudder that went through him when he said roughly, “Per piacere, bella, tell me you’re not leaving me. Tell me you’ll stay and love me. Tell me you’ll let me be a part of your life, cara.
“I would take nothing that you do not want to give, Alexis. Never again.”
“I love you, Leandro, so much.” Alex buried her mouth in his neck, breathed in the taste and scent of him. “I would have killed you if you had used that against me. I’d have—”
“Shh...mia cara. They are all lies, you know that, don’t you? If anything, I’m the one incompetent to love you. I’m the one who’s not worthy of you and Izzie and this baby.” He pulled her to him right there until she sat in the cradle of his thighs, and his hand found her stomach.
“I hate him, Leandro,” she said snuggling into his warmth. “I’ll never forgive him for putting such idea in your head.”
With gentle fingers, he clasped her chin, understanding her. “He’s old and set in his ways, cara.”
Fear made her words sharp, harsh. “What if you had lost me because of his horrible advice? What if we had lost all this?”
“You know what I see when I look at him, Alexis?
“Myself, if you hadn’t come along. He has been through grief and loss and such pain to be hardened by it all, bella. He tried to do right by Luca and me in his own way.
“If nothing else, I have to keep him around the family as a reminder of what I could become if—”
“You’re generous and kind and honorable, Leandro.” Alex turned around in his arms and pressed her forehead to his. “You’re the man I love. You would never become like that. You could never hurt anyone you love like that.”
Her belief in him unmanned Leandro, her love for him shook him. “But I already have, Alexis.” A shiver ran through him and Alex turned and embraced him again.
“What do you mean?”
Leandro hid his face in her shoulder, fear fisting his gut. How foolish he had been in thinking he could arrange and assure everyone’s happiness around him. When his own wasn’t in his hands. “Luca hates me. And Tina... Dio, Tina’s entire happiness hinges on the fact that the bet I made is right.”
“You set up Kairos with her, didn’t you?” Alex asked, her perceptive gaze settling on him.
“I did. I couldn’t risk Antonio threatening to tell her that she’s not a Conti. If she was married, if she wasn’t one anymore, I thought she would not care. Luca thinks, rightly, that I have gambled with her happiness.
“If she discovers it, she will never forgive me. And I will lose her.”
Alex caressed the clenched muscles in his back, clasped her arms around Leandro tight. She understood Luca’s anger now, and the underlying fear. But she couldn’t let the man she loved suffer. Pressing her mouth to his temple, she lifted his chin. “You did it with the right intentions. You did it because you love her so much.
“She’ll understand one day, Leandro. Because she loves you. Just as I understood what you did with me.”
The trust in her eyes, the fierceness of her embrace, Leandro realized for the first time in his life that he wasn’t alone anymore. That he didn’t have to bear the burden by himself. That Alexis would seek to protect him just as he would do with her.
The depth of her love filled him with a quiet strength. He brushed his lips against hers, sensing a hole he hadn’t even known inside fill. “Promise me that you will spend eternity with me.”
With a kiss, Alex agreed.