He paused again. He had to get this right. He had only one chance, and on it everything depended. Everything.
‘Two people,’ he went on, his eyes never leaving her, ‘who met as strangers but parted as lovers. Nic Rossi and Doc Fran.’
Doc Fran. The sound of his affectionate name for her rang in her ears, clutched at something inside her. She wanted to cry out, but was silent. Silent as she stood there, unable to move, unable to do anything but hear his words, as still he spoke to her.
His eyes were fixed on hers, willing her to listen. To believe. Believe what he was telling her, what he must tell her. His voice took on an intensity that caught at her, made her take a breath in.
‘Fran, why—why—when we first met, do you think we never told each other who we were? Why did we want to be the person each of us presented ourselves as being? Because,’ he spelt it out now, finally, urgent to make her understand, ‘we didn’t want to be weighed down by the rest of who we are! We wanted to be free of that.’ She must understand him, surely she must—
Her eyes were widening, wondering, taking in his words. Letting them make sense inside her.
Then she heard herself answer him.
‘Here in the USA I’ve never had to be Donna Francesca,’ she said. ‘I could just be...myself.’ She looked at him. ‘The person I would have been but for an accident of birth. With no expectations on me to marry a man like Cesare, to be his Contessa, fulfilling my mother’s dreams instead of my own.’
He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, filling with new self-knowledge. ‘I liked it that you thought me just one of the security team. It meant I didn’t have to be Nicolo Falcone, endlessly proving the world wrong about me. Proving I could outsoar Viscari.’
Her expression changed. She was reminiscing. ‘I remember how you said it was defeatist to accept the universe as it is.’
His blue-eyed gaze drifted across her face. ‘I remember the fire in your eyes as you talked to me about the stars. The passion in your voice.’ His expression changed again—changed to one that started to melt the bones in her body. ‘And not just a passion for the stars.’
She gave a smothered cry, backing away. ‘But that’s gone. You made it clear enough that night I came to your hotel.’
His eyes flashed. ‘I was telling Donna Francesca.’ He took a shuddering breath, making himself say what he knew now was the truth. The truth he had tried to twist into knots inside him. ‘I used it—used your being Donna Francesca—to send you away.’ He shook his head slowly, as if clearing something from it. ‘But that wasn’t the reason. I was lying to myself—to you.’
His mouth set and his gaze turned inward.
‘All my life,’ he said slowly, finding the familiar thoughts that had controlled him all his life hard to put into bare, bald words, ‘I have feared being as my father was—a man who left my mother pregnant with me. It was why I was so insistent that we marry. All my life I have vowed I would not be like him. And the simplest, surest way to not be like that was never to let any woman close to me. So I would always part from women, thankful to do so, thankful they had not come to rely on me, to hope for what I dared not offer them. And that,’ he said, ‘is what I did with you—as I have with all the other women who have passed through my life.’
His face worked.
‘Except you were never like any of those women. Right from the start you were different.’ He paused. ‘Special. Like no other woman I’ve known.’
He took another breath.
‘So when I saw you again, that night in London—saw you again when I had thought never to do so—all I knew was an overwhelming rush of something I had never felt before, never allowed myself to feel. You made every other woman in the world disappear for me. And that showed me...’ His voice changed, dropped. ‘Showed me the danger I was in—’
He broke off.
‘I had to find something—anything—to keep you at bay. So I used the revelation of who you were as a way of doing that.’
Fran’s eyes shadowed. She had her own truth to face. One that she had hidden from herself.
‘I told myself that night when I came to your hotel that I simply wanted to make my peace with you—that I couldn’t bear your cold rejection just because I hadn’t told you the truth about myself, because I’d seemed so friendly with Vito Viscari. But I was lying to myself. I know that now. I came to you for one reason only.’
Her voice changed, became charged with intensity.
‘I came
to you because the first emotion that leapt in me when I saw you again was joy, Nic. Overwhelming joy. And I wanted to find you again—the Nic I’d known here, in our time together. That’s why I came to you that night...the true reason that I blinded myself to.’
Emotion filled her, full, and choking, so that she could hardly breathe. Could not look at him.
She walked away from him, moving to the low wall that separated the terrace from the rough ground beyond, where it started its precipitous plunge a mile deep into the earth. She gazed out across the gaping distance to the rim so far away. Where once they had stood together, hand in hand.
But now...?
The question hung in the air—hung in the great gap of space that yawned over the plunging canyon.