“Was he a good man, Raphael?” she asked in a soft voice. It was a question no one had ever asked, and it burrowed through his flesh and blood like an arrow, lodging deeply and painfully.
“He was a coward,” he said harshly. And flinched, for his own words hurt him. Still. After all these years.
“You…how old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Raphael, you don’t think—”
He pushed away from her, loath to discuss his father and the past any longer. “I owe Giovanni everything but I’ll be damned if I let Stefano’s shadow touch Vito Automobiles. What was your answer to Enzo?”
Her gaze turned searching, and then she sighed. “I refused him. Enzo is sweet. And this offer…it will get everyone off my back, and maybe provide a measure of relief to Gio too. But marriage is sacred.”
He snorted. She glared at him. “It is for me. I could no more marry Enzo as a convenience than I could marry…you to make Gio happy.”
“There’s one point in my favor over Enzo, si?” That she distracted him enough to joke less than a minute after thinking of Stefano Castillaghi said something about his attraction to her.
“Fat good that does me,” she mumbled.
“What does that mean?” he asked, genuinely curious now. Dio, no woman sent him on a roller coaster as she did.
Color stole up her cheeks. “Can I finish telling you what happened?” she said tartly.
He grinned, liking her all riled up like this. “Si.”
“After they left, Gio told me I should accept Enzo, that he would be a kind husband. When I said I had no intention of marrying in the near future, he got…agitated. I told him I’d had enough of him manipulating me. He said it was his right to select a husband for me, to make sure another man didn’t cheat me like Frank did.
“We yelled at each other some more and I said if he kept pushing me like that, if he… I’d leave and never return, like Nonni had done.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes, but the tears fell anyway. “His face went white…he couldn’t speak. One of the staff called his physician.
“This was not like one of his usual temper tantrums, Raphael. The doctor took ages to get there and I thought—God!” Her tears turned into soundless sobs and Raphael pulled her into his arms.
She came to him as if she had no strength left. Arms vined around his neck, she buried her face in his chest.
A strange sort of weight seemed to lodge in his own throat. He wasn’t worried about Gio. The mean old bastard would live to a hundred and torture Raphael and Pia in the process.
No, it was the sound of Pia’s wretched grief that shook him.
He had never seen anyone grieve like that. With everything of themselves poured into it. His belief that all she wanted was easy money from this trip—suddenly, his cynicism, his hard shell, felt dirty near her.
Her back was slender against his broad palm; even now he was unable to stem the awareness of her soft body against his. “Pia, nothing will happen to Gio.”
“We don’t know that. I can’t lose him. Not when I’ve only just found him. To see him lying on the bed, helpless like that… All I could think of was my Nonni. I can’t… I couldn’t forgive myself if anything happened to him. I can’t let him go on worrying about me.”
“You can’t marry a gay man however decent you think he is,” he added softly, just to make sure they were on the same page. Right now, he couldn’t even try to fathom the underpinnings of his godfather’s Machiavellian mind.
She sniffled elegantly and wiped her cheeks. “No, I can’t. I couldn’t sleep. I was working on a toy and finally I hit on the perfect solution.”
Raphael pulled her hands away from his neck because the graze of her breasts against his chest was more than he could take in his current mood.
And because, while she was obliviously dwelling on her worries over Gio, his attention had wandered from her grief, from Stefano, to the pressing weight of her thighs against his. To the span of her tiny waist and the flare of her hips in his hands. To how soft and sweet she smelled.
To the semi hard-on that was fast swelling into something else.