Trust Pia to drill down to the matter.
There was never judgment in Pia’s tone. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tighter against him. He knew himself and yet every time Pia delved deeper, he found something new.
Not always good things, but things he hadn’t known.
* * *
Jaw tight, Raphael pored over her question. Had he loved Allegra?
Not that he’d had eyes for anyone but his stunning ex. He had been thinking with something other than his head.
Drunk on his success with Vito Automobiles, puffed up with power, he’d decided she was the perfect candidate long before she had set her sights upon him. He had pulled his family from scandalous ruin and bankruptcy and all that had been missing was the perfect society wife to complete his ascent.
“No, I didn’t love her. And in hindsight, I wreaked even more damage on her than her mother had done with her affairs and her neglect. I should have never married her. She needed someone softer, kinder and I…all I wanted from her was a trophy wife.”
He laid his head back against the headboard. Christo, of all the times to realize his faults. He couldn’t soften toward his ex now.
“Isn’t it good for Alyssa that her mother’s worked through the program?” came Pia’s tentative voice.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I forgave her when she had affairs behind my back. I forgave her when she lied to me about—”
A hard gleam entered his eyes. But Pia was beginning to see beneath that hardness. Beginning to understand that Raphael felt things deeply. More than even he understood. That he was just good at burying it all.
She pressed her face into his chest, feeling an overwhelming tenderness for him. And waited.
“I found her high at the house once with Alyssa barely a month old. Gio and her mother, even mine, they all pled her case. They said that addiction is like a sickness, that she didn’t know any better. But she’s an adult who’s responsible for her actions. I won’t forgive that. She’s not getting her hands on my daughter in this lifetime.”
“That sounds so final,” Pia said, before she could stop. “Are you protecting Alyssa? Or punishing Allegra? Is it even about Allegra, or is it about your father?”
He looked so furious then that Pia braced herself for a cutting reply. She’d gone too far. Worse, they both knew she’d unwittingly struck on the truth.
“Only you could look beneath my anger for a junkie ex, Pia.”
Something in his tone tugged at her. She longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him. To tell him that caring for someone was not weakness. That he wasn’t invincible, whatever the world led him to believe. “I just… I think you’ve never forgiven your father for what he did.”
He looked away but didn’t deny it. “He had been my hero for so long. And then suddenly, one day he was gone, without a word.”
And he’d left Raphael alone with a burden that would crush most seventeen-year-old boys. A burden he’d used to fuel his own ambition. A burden that his mother had continued to put on him.
“Raphael—”
“It’s all in the past, Pia.”
He took her mouth in a hard kiss that sent little waves of pleasure through her body. When he pulled her beneath him, when he rocked into her with the utmost tenderness because he was worried she’d be sore, when he kissed her mouth with warm languorous strokes, she gave herself over to him.
He loved her slowly, gently this time, as if she were breakable in his rough hands. He told her in sweet Italian what she did to him. But as their climaxes hurled them into ecstasy, as he tucked her under his arm, an ache unlike any she’d ever known settled in her chest.
Raphael might think it was in the past, but the mark was still there.
The anger, the hurt, were both still there buried under a hard shell.
He would never let himself weaken, never care again.
Pia knew it as surely as she did that she felt something more than attraction for him. Something more than admiration. And the scariest part was that she didn’t know how to stop it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PIA DIDN’T SEE Raphael for another two weeks.
He wanted her. But whether he’d have acted on it if he hadn’t been shaken by Gio’s sudden heart attack, if he hadn’t been vulnerable, was a doubt that gnawed at her constantly.