“Angelo.” Her lips were numb as she moved jerkily forward to set a hand on his arm.
He pulled away, his profile cast in iron.
“Angelo, I love you,” she whispered, voice faint because she had never said the words before. Her throat was nothing but sandpaper, her chest a broken shell. She didn’t know how to offer her heart when it was such a tender, thin-skinned little thing. It was new and delicate as butterfly wings, beating in her cupped hands.
“Don’t.” His head went back in recoil. “Even if it were true, how long would it last?”
Even if it were true? His rejection of her feelings was so shockingly typical, it knocked the breath clean out of her.
“I’m never going to be one of you. I don’t want to be.”
“I’m not one of them, either. You know I’m not,” she choked, stricken that he would lump her in with those horrid people who’d failed to ask questions and had turned a blind eye, leaving his mother to her suffering.
“No, you’re special, Pia. You are. Far better than I deserve.” His gaze came back, resolute. “You know it. Your family knows it. I’ve always known my illegitimate hands shouldn’t be handling the fine china. You deserve better than me, Pia. You genuinely do.” His voice became agonizingly gentle even as he dismissed every tender moment that had bound them together. “I can’t bring you down with me. It’s only going to get worse. Turns out money does not buy respectability.” His eyes were shadowed with futility. “Best to end it here and now, before I do any more damage.”
When he turned away, she lifted a hand, feet rooted with shock. She didn’t realize he was getting into the car and leaving until the engine started and he pulled away.
Then her breastbone fractured and her throat strangled on a tormented, “No—” but he was already shooting through the gate and gone.
“He’s right. You’re better off without him,” Rico said, grasping her arm, trying to hug her. “We’ll look after you. And the baby.”
Ice formed around her, stiffening her joints, making her brother’s attempt to comfort her an awkward, unwelcome embrace. She wanted Angelo to hold her and look after her and their baby. She couldn’t breathe. She had laid herself bare to the man she loved and he’d left.
No one would ever love her. Ever.
“I’ll take you inside,” Rico said.
“No.” Pia withdrew into her protective casing the way one of her beloved hermit crabs cringed back into its borrowed shell. She would need a bigger one to hold this amount of heartbreak. She didn’t know how she would carry the weight of it, but that was another day’s job.
“Go home to Poppy,” she managed to say. “She’ll be worried. I’ll sell my house to pay your legal bills. You won’t lose your home.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It makes perfect sense,” she said with one of her well-practiced expressions of cool reason. The profound loneliness washing over her was as familiar as returning to a big, empty house. “This was my error in judgment. Let me make amends.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FROM THE MOMENT Angelo had been forced to release his mother’s story, he’d been in agony. All his helpless, furious guilt at being unable to help her, or prevent her early death, had risen up to turn him on a spit of fire.
He hadn’t wanted Pia anywhere near the ugliness of his news conference. The fresh accusations and blatant lies Tomas had told, trying to absolve Darius from his crime along with their father, had made him sick.
And ashamed. He was so damned ashamed to have one single drop of their blood in him. Even more chagrined that he wanted his wife by his side while he was standing knee-deep in family closet filth.
He’d had the strength to insulate her from the brunt of negative attention they’d been forced to endure, but after weathering that first blast, he had wanted only one thing. To get back to Pia. To crawl into the bubble of calm she always provided—not that he believed all his problems would disappear, but they would be bearable, he’d thought, if he could only hold her.
Rico had caught up to him in the courtyard before he’d even climbed from his car. Of course Tomas was going after the house, claiming some sort of conspiracy between them to defraud him of the jewelry. Angelo’s brothers were grasping at any straw within reach.
Angelo hadn’t been at his rational best. Nothing in him had wanted to give an inch to anyone. When Pia had tried to reason with him, he hadn’t been able to see through his haze. What he had glimpsed, however, had been a harrowing doubt in her eyes. Justified qualms over why he had married her.
Her lack of faith in him had nearly cut him in half, but what did he expect? That she would take the side of someone his brothers were calling an “abomination
”?
When she had then claimed to love him, he hadn’t been able to take it in. Hadn’t been able to accept it, given the ugliness he had brought into her life by forcing their marriage. There had been a part of him that had seized the chance to marry her because of her name. He had wanted vengeance above anything else.
He didn’t deserve to be loved for any of that.
Stop the cycle of hatred, she had said, and he had realized how twisted he had become. If he kept it up, he would be no better than the darkness he had come from.