CHIARA EMERGED FROM a sex-induced haze to find herself plastered across Lazzero’s muscular chest, her legs tangled with his, his heart pounding beneath her ear in almost as wild a rhythm as hers. She had the feeling he was as thrown off balance by what they’d just shared as she was, but he didn’t say anything, just stroked a lazy path down her spine with his palm.
Her stomach dipped, settling somewhere around the rocky shore below. She’d just had wild, ridiculously hot sex with Lazzero, the depth of the connection they’d shared frightening in its intensity. She had not only walked into the fire, she’d drowned herself in it. She didn’t feel dead anymore, she felt unnervingly, terrifyingly alive, like someone had mainlined adrenaline through her veins. As if she’d denied herself this depth of feeling, of connection, for so long, it was complete and utter sensory overload.
But there was also fear. Fear she’d spent a lifetime avoiding these feelings. That the one time she’d slipped and allowed herself to be this vulnerable, she’d been destroyed. Fear that it was Lazzero that was making it so scary. Because he was an insane lover. Because she had liked him for a long time and refused to admit it.
Because of how he made her feel.
She buried her teeth in her lip. Forced herself to stay in the moment. To absorb it, rather than run from it, because she’d been doing that for far too long and she’d promised herself this was not going to be about that. This was about finding a piece of herself again that she’d lost.
“What?” Lazzero’s hand stilled on her spine, as if he could read the shift in her emotion.
She buried her teeth deeper into her lip. “Nothing.”
He rolled her onto her back and sank his fingers into her hair so that she was forced to look at him. “You are far too easy to read. You have smoke coming out of your ears. Regrets already?”
“No. It was perfect. I—” She shook her head. “Making myself vulnerable isn’t the easiest thing for me. You were right about that. It’s easier to hide behind my layers—to not engage, rather than let myself feel.”
His midnight gaze warmed. “You were engaged just now. You made me a little insane for you, Chiara. Or did you miss the part where we almost didn’t make it to the bed?”
A flush crept up her body and warmed her cheeks. She had not missed that part. She had been there for every mind-blowing second of it. She’d liked that he’d almost lost control. That she could do that to him. That he had been just as crazy for her as she had been for him. It made her feel less self-conscious about the way she felt.
Lazzero ran a finger across the heated surface of her cheek. “Give me five minutes,” he murmured, “and I will refresh your memory.”
Her gaze slipped away from his, unable to handle the intensity of the moment. Moved over the magnificent length of his muscled body, bathed in the glow of the lamplight. It warmed another part of her entirely, every inch of the honed, sinewy muscle on display, the scar that crisscrossed his knee his only imperfection.
She traced her fingers over the raised ridge of the scar. “What’s this?”
“An old basketball injury.”
“The one that ended your career?”
“Yes.”
When no further information was forthcoming, she sank back on her elbow to look at him. “I sat beside your old basketball coach at lunch yesterday—Hank Peterson. He was wonderful. Full of such great stories. He told me you come to talk to his kids at the REACH program.”
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Hank is a legend. I met him when we moved to Greenwich Village. He used to coach a league at The Cage, one of the most famous streetball courts in New York that was right around the corner from our house. It was mythical, where dreams are made—where some of the greats were born. I used to ditch my homework and play all night. Until they turned the lights off and Hank sent me home.”
Her mouth curved. “I used to do the same thing with my sketching. I was supposed to be doing my homework while my parents finished work at the bakery. Instead, my mother would come home to a whole lot of drawings in the back of my notebook and very little else. It used to drive her crazy.”
“At least she cared,” he murmured. “That’s a good thing.”
She frowned. “Yours didn’t?”
“There was no one home to care. My father was drinking by then and my mother had left. Nico,” he allowed, “used to lecture me to study. He was all about school and learning. But I was hopelessly obsessed.”
Her eyes widened. His mother had left? “I thought she remarried when your father died.”
Lazzero shook his head. “She walked out on us when I was fourteen.”
Chiara was shocked into silence. What mother would leave her children like that? When everything was falling apart around them? When her children were at their most vulnerable and needed her most of all?
“Was your father’s alcoholism an instigator in her leaving?” she asked, trying to understand.
“My mother was a sycophant,” he said flatly. “She fell in love with my father’s money and she fell out of love with him when he lost it.”
She bit the inside of her mouth. “I’m sure it wasn’t quite that simple.”
“It was just that simple.” He tucked his hands behind his head, an expressionless look on his face. “My mother was a dancer trying to make it on Broadway when she and my father met. She wanted a career, the glitz, the glamour. She didn’t want a family. When she got pregnant with Nico, my father thought he could change her mind. But he never did. He spent their entire marriage trying to keep her happy, which in the end failed miserably when he imploded and she walked out on him.”
She absorbed his harshly issued words. “That’s only one side of the story,” she said huskily. “I’m sure it couldn’t have been easy on your mother to give up her career. Her dream. And your father,” she pointed out, “sounds as if he was extremely driven. As if he had his own internal demons to battle. Which couldn’t have been easy to live with.”
“No,” Lazzero agreed evenly, “it wasn’t. But he was a man. He was focused on providing. He was hurt when he couldn’t make her happy. His pride was damaged. He spent more and more time at work, because he didn’t want to be at home, which eventually devolved into the affairs he had to compensate. Which were not in any way excusable,” he qualified, “but perhaps understandable, given she drove him to it.”
That struck a raw note given what Antonio had done to her. “Nobody drives anyone to do anything,” she refuted. “Relationships are complicated things, Lazzero. You make a choice to love someone. To see it through.”
His eyes glittered. “Exactly why I choose not to do it. Because any way you look at it, someone always messes it up.”
She absorbed his intense cynicism. “So basketball,” she murmured, seeking to dispel some of the tension in the air, “became your outlet. Like sketching was for me?”
He nodded, sifting his fingers through her hair and watching it in the play of the light. “If I was on the court, I wasn’t dealing with the mess my life was. With the shadow of a man my father had become. But I also,” he conceded, his gaze darkening, “fell in love. There’s a magic about the game when you play it on the streets of New York—an unspoken devotion to the game we all shared. By the time I’d won my first tournament for Hank, I knew I wanted to play basketball for a living.”
Her mouth curved. “Hank said you were always the first and last on the court.”
“Because I wasn’t as physically gifted as some of the other players,” he acknowledged. “I didn’t have the size some of them did, nor the jumping ability. I had to work harder, want it more than all the rest. But I was smart. I could read the court and I built my career around that. I won a division championship for Hank in my junior year at Columbia.”
A college career which, according to Hank, had been limitless in its possibilities. Until he’d injured himself.
She curled her fingers around his knee. “Tell me about it? What happened.”
He lifted a shoulder. “There isn’t much to tell. I was chasing a player down on a breakaway in a key divisional play-off game. I jumped to block the shot, felt something pop in my knee. Shatter. When I tried to stand up, I couldn’t. I’d torn the two main ligaments that hold your knee together. It was almost impossible for the surgeons to put it back together.”
Her throat felt like gravel. “That must have been devastating.”
“It was what it was.”
His standard line. But she knew now it hadn’t been so simple. “Hank said you were an exceptional player, Lazzero. That you’d been scouted by three professional teams. It had to have hurt to have that taken from you.”
A shadow whispered over the clarity of his gaze. “What do you want me to say, Chiara? That I was shattered inside? That watching every dream I’d had since I was eight go up in a puff of smoke tore me apart?”
She flinched at the harsh edge to his voice. Pushed a hand into the mattress to sit up and stare out at the sea, a dark, silent mass beyond the French doors. Maybe she’d been looking for the truth, given she’d poured her heart and soul out to him on the terrace that night. But that was not what this was, she reminded herself, and she’d be a fool to forget it.
Lazzero exhaled an audible breath. Snared an arm around her waist and pulled her back against him, tucking her against his chest.
“I was in denial,” he said quietly. “I refused to believe it would end my career. I went for a second opinion and when that doctor told me I would never play at that level again, I set out to prove him wrong. It took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of physio to accept the fact that I was never coming back. That it was over.”
A hand fisted her chest. “You didn’t give up,” she said, absorbing the hard beat of his heart beneath her ear. “Not like I did.”
“Giving up wasn’t an option. It was everything to me.”
Sometimes dreams are too expensive to keep.
Her blood ran jagged in her veins. Suddenly, he made so much sense to her. Lazzero’s world had dissolved beneath his feet, not once, when his father had imploded and his mother had walked out, but twice, when his basketball career had disintegrated beneath his feet on a painful stroke of fate. But instead of allowing himself to become bitter and disillusioned, he’d created Supersonic. Built a company around the sport he loved.
“Hank says you are a great mentor to the kids,” she said huskily.
A lift of his shoulder beneath her. “It gives them something to shoot for if a pro basketball career doesn’t work out for them. Unfortunately, the statistics are stacked against it.”
Her heart did a funny twist. She hadn’t needed another reason to like him this much. Because falling for Lazzero wasn’t on the agenda in this walk on the wild side of hers. And maybe he decided that too, because before she could take another breath, he had rolled her onto her back, speared a hand into her hair, and there was no escaping the sparks that sizzled and popped between them.
“I think that’s enough talking,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to hers. “Now that I’ve gotten you where I want you, I intend to take full advantage of it.”
She sucked in a breath, only to lose it as he covered her mouth with his, his kiss dragging her back into the inferno with relentless precision. A gasp left her throat as he slid his tongue inside her mouth, mating with her own in a fiery dance that signaled his carnal ambitions.
It was pure, dominant male at its most blatant and she loved it. Her hands found the thick muscle of his back and shoulders as she surrendered to the hunger that consumed them both.
Her last coherent thought was that it had been worth every second. Exactly as she’d known it would be. And maybe she was in way, way over her head.
* * *
An opera at the stunning Teatro alla Scala in Milan was hardly the thing to put a girl firmly back on her feet after she’d just embarked on a wild, passionate affair with a man who was most definitely out of her league. Chiara, however, attempted to do exactly that the following evening as she and Lazzero attended a private performance of Verdi’s La Traviata at the beautiful, iconic theater.
An opportunity for the sponsors of La Coppa Estiva to entertain their international guests in a glamorous, glitzy affair that had been enjoyed by the Milanese upper crust since the eighteenth century, she and Lazzero were to host a German retail scion and his wife in their private box.
She thought Micaela had gotten her outfit just right, the ankle-length sleek scarlet dress with its asymmetric cut at the shoulder glamorous, yet understated, a red lip and sparkly heels her only accessories. It was Lazzero in a perfectly tailored black suit, his ebony hair worn fashionably spiky tonight, a five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, that was making her pulse race.
His touch lingered just a little bit longer than before, the possessive glimmer in his eyes as they worked the crowd doing something funny to her insides. As if they were lovers. Which, in fact, they were, a mind-boggling detail she was just beginning to wrap her head around.
Then it was the spectacular theater that was stealing her attention. Six rows of gold stuccoed boxes sat stacked on top of each other in the oval theater, soaring high above the packed crowd below. The massive, Bohemian crystal chandelier was incredible, as was the sumptuous elegance of their box with its red velvet, silk and gilded stucco interior. Since she knew nothing about opera, having never attended one in her life, Chiara nestled her viewing glasses in her lap and scoured the program so she would know the story, but soon the lights were dimming and the curtain came up and she lost herself to the performance instead.
She was hooked from the very first second. Transfixed by the elaborate sets, the hauntingly beautiful music and the poignant story of Violetta Valéry, the heroine of Verdi’s opera.
Violetta, a courtesan, knows she will die soon, exhausted by her restless life. Alfredo Germont, played by a handsome, world-famous tenor who strutted across the stage in the opening act, has been fascinated by Violetta for a very long time. When he is introduced to her at a party, he proposes a toast to true love. Enchanted by his candid and forthright manner, Violetta responds with a toast in praise of free love.
Enamoured though she may be, Violetta decides there is no room for such emotion in her life and walks away from Alfredo. But she can’t quite seem to put him out of her head and eventually, the two embark on a passionate love affair.
Tears filled Chiara’s eyes as she watched Alfredo awaken Violetta’s desire to be truly loved. They slipped silently down her cheeks amidst the beautiful music. She brushed them from her cheeks, afraid to watch, because she knew what was to come. As in all of the great, tragic love stories it seemed, disaster was about to befall the two lovers.
Alfredo’s father, a wealthy aristocrat, pays a visit to Violetta to convince her there can be no future for her and his son. That she is destroying Alfredo’s future by encouraging his love, and that of his sister, as well, to marry into the upper echelons of society.
Heartbroken, Chiara watched as Violetta left Alfredo to return to her old life, telling him she didn’t love him to set him free. Alfredo, grief stricken and racked with jealousy and hurt at Violetta’s supposed betrayal, stalked across the stage as the music reached its crescendo and proposed a duel with her paramour to end the second act.
“Ooh,” said the German CEO’s wife as the lights came up for the intermission. “It’s so good, isn’t it?”
Chiara nodded, frantically rifling through her purse for a tissue. Lazzero offered her the handkerchief from his front pocket, a cynical look on his face. She ignored him as they made their way out into the elegant foyer with its fluted columns and crystal chandeliers, her head still caught up in the story. Absorbing its nuances.
Violetta’s story had struck so many chords in her, she wasn’t sure which one to consider first. How much the character reminded her of herself with her determination to escape her emotions. How she hadn’t been good enough for Antonio. How swept up she was becoming in Lazzero. What would happen in the end, because Violetta had to die, didn’t she? Would her and Alfredo’s love be forever thwarted?
When her opera companion excused herself to the ladies’ room, Chiara slipped out onto one of the Juliette balconies to regain her equilibrium while Lazzero introduced the German CEO around. The tiny balcony, set apart from the larger one that was buzzing with activity, boasted a lovely view of the lit Piazza della Scala.
She leaned back against the stone facade of the building and inhaled a deep breath of the sultry, summer night air. It was as far removed from her life as she could possible imagine. And yet, there was something so real about the moment. So revelatory.
She had not been living for far too long, that she knew. But was it worth the consequences that Violetta had feared to fully embrace this new world of emotion? To reap the greatest rewards that life had to offer? She hadn’t quite determined the answer to that question when Lazzero stepped out onto the balcony, two glasses of Prosecco in his hands.
She lifted a brow. “You’re not networking until you drop?”
“Hans saw someone he knew.” He handed her a glass of Prosecco. “I thought you might need this. You looked a little emotionally devastated in there.”
A wry smile pulled at her mouth. “It’s a beautiful story. I got a little swept up in the emotion. Although you,” she conceded, “did not seem quite so captivated. Which part of your jaded view of love did Verdi offend?”
“Not all of it,” he drawled, leaning a hip against the wall. “I thought Violetta was spot-on. I’m all for the concept of free love. Everybody walks into it with realistic expectations. Nobody gets hurt. Her critical mistake was in buying into Alfredo’s vision—into a fantasy that doesn’t really exist.”
“Who says?” she countered lightly. “My parents had it. They were madly in love with each other.”
“So much so that your father is in the dark place that he is?” Lazzero tipped his head to the side. “Some would call that an unhealthy kind of love. A devastating kind of love.”
She couldn’t necessarily disagree with the observation, because loving that deeply had consequences. She had lived with them since she was fifteen. She knew what it was like to be loved and what it felt like to have that love taken away. Had convinced herself she was better off without it after Antonio. But she also believed her parents had shared something special and somewhere, deep down, if she were to be completely honest, she knew she wanted it too.
She met Lazzero’s cynical gaze. “You’re talking about your parents. That messy, kind of love you are so intent on avoiding?”
“They were a disaster from start to finish,” he said flatly. “My father fell in love with an illusion rather than the reality of what he got. This,” he said, waving a hand toward the doors, “could be their story tonight. And you see how well it turned out for Violetta and Alfredo.”
She shook her head. “Violetta loved Alfredo. What they had was real. It was his father that messed it up.”
“And look how easily she was swayed. One might say she was simply looking for a way out. That she never truly committed.”
“She was being selfless. She wanted to set him free. You make a choice to love someone, Lazzero. You choose to commit.”
“Or you choose to marry for the wrong reasons.” He tipped his glass at her. “My mother married my father for the money. Carolina married Gianni on the rebound. Violetta needed to be rescued. Does anyone ever marry for the right reason? Because they want to spend their lives together?”
“Violetta’s case was different,” she disagreed. “For her to set Alfredo free was, in my opinion, the ultimate act of love on her part.”
“And what happens when she is gone?” Lazzero lifted a dark brow. “Do you think Alfredo is going to applaud himself for the decision he made when his heart has been smashed to smithereens?”
Exactly as his father’s had been? Her insides curled at the parallels. “Maybe,” she offered huskily, “he will feel lucky to have experienced that kind of love once in his life and he will have that to hang on to when she’s gone. Maybe, as much pain as my father is in, he wouldn’t trade what he and my mother had for the world.”
Lazzero rested an inscrutable gaze on her.
“What?”
“You,” he murmured. “I never would have guessed you are a closet romantic with that prickly exterior of yours.”
She shrugged. “I’m merely trying to make a point. You are the one who said to me that tarring all men of a certain bank balance with the same brush is a mistake. Maybe,” she suggested, “lumping all relationships into the same category is an equal error in judgment.”
He pushed away from the wall and caged her in with a palm beside her head all in one lazy movement. “So,” he drawled, his eyes on hers, “is that what is on offer to Mr. Right? Chiara Ferrante’s heart if a man is willing to go all in?”
Her breath stalled in her chest. He was so gorgeous, so dark and brooding up close, it was impossible to think. “Stop playing with me,” she murmured. “You are inherently skilled in the art of deflection, Lazzero.”
“Who says I’m playing? Maybe I’m accepting your challenge. Maybe I just want to know the answer.”
“Maybe,” she breathed. Because she wasn’t sure if she was ready to open herself up again to the full gamut of that emotion she so feared. To the possibility she might be rejected again—that she wouldn’t be good enough. But maybe that was the risk you had to take. To know, that if you jumped, you were strong enough to handle whatever came on the other side.
“What I think,” Lazzero murmured, his dark gaze glittering as it rested on hers, “is that you and I have a good thing, Chiara. Honest, up-front, with all of our cards on the table. And that is why it works.”
Right, she told herself. That was exactly what this was. And she could handle it. Absolutely she could.
“Although,” he said softly, lowering his head to hers so their breaths melded in a warm, seductive caress, “I didn’t come out here to debate Verdi with you.”
Every kiss, every caress, every heart-stopping moment of pleasure from the night before swept through her in a heady rush. “Oh,” she breathed, her heart thumping in her chest. “Why did you?”
“Because I wanted to do this.” He closed his mouth over hers in a lazy, persuasive possession that stormed her senses. She let her eyes flutter shut. Stopped thinking entirely as her fingers curled around the lapel of his jacket, a gasp of warm air leaving her lips as her mouth parted beneath his sensual assault.
The sound of the intermission bell ended the seductive spiral. “We should go back in,” Lazzero murmured, nuzzling her mouth.
“Yes,” she agreed unsteadily, taking a step back. “Although I’m not so sure I want to see Violetta shatter Alfredo’s heart.”