“The guilt of making me fall in love with you, the guilt you feel when I look at you with adoring eyes, the guilt of hiding the fact that you only asked me to marry you because I come with a hefty stock option in Vito Automobiles.”
She thought he would explode with anger. But his silence only confirmed his guilt. It skewered the last ray of hope she had nourished that there would be a different explanation, that there could be another reason.
Some fantasy that she hadn’t known she had bought into that gorgeous, powerful men like Raphael Mastrantino could fall for plain, geeky, shy nobodies like her.
And now she was pathetically self-pitying too.
“Pia, I was attracted to you from the first night. And you to me.” The resignation in his voice delivered the final crack against her heart. He wasn’t even denying her allegation.
“According to your mother, you attract more than half the female population in Milan, if not Italy. But I don’t think you’d consider marrying them all.”
“No. I admit that when Gio proposed it—”
“Of course Nonno talked you into it.” She banged her head into the door behind her. The urge to do violence instantly died when her head pounded.
“Dio mio, Pia! Stop acting like a child!”
“When have you or Gio treated me like an adult? I obviously don’t inspire him to high levels of confidence in myself. Clearly, he knew that it was a facade. Was it the stock that worked finally? Or was it the fact that with the stock in hand, as the uncontested CEO of VA, you’ve reached heights that your father never could. You could prove to yourself and the world that you’re not him. That you could never be weak like him. Have you sold yourself to Gio just to prove that you’re incapable of loving, Raphael?”
Raphael pushed up to his feet with an athletic grace she loved and hated and pulled her up with him. When she’d have pushed away from the door, he caged her there with his body. The scent of their intimacy was still thick in the air, a potent mixture that made longing rush through her. “The only thing Gio sought to do was to protect you…”
“From the likes of Frank, si? Because I’m naive and plain and will fall for any sweet-talking rogue, like I fell for you, si? I get it. He could have just tied up the stock in your name, couldn’t he? He could have told me not to fall for anyone because it is only the Vito fortune that is valuable about me.”
“Pia, that’s not true.”
“That’s what your actions have made me believe, Raphael,” she said softly. “That’s what hurt the most. He didn’t have to barter me to you as if I were cattle he couldn’t wait to get rid of.”
Raphael cursed. “He did that because he thought I needed you too.”
“Then he is a foolish old man. Because you don’t need anybody, least of all a naive idiot like me. Congratulations, Raphael, you have the company, you have the world’s adoration, and you have proof that you’ll never give something as weak as love any place in your life, like the rest of us. But you’ve lost me.”
Tears catching her throat, Pia pushed away from him.
“Do not walk away from this. Talk to me. Tell me what you need from me. This is the night of our engagement party. There are two hundred people arriving even now.”
“All these weeks I was desperate to hear those words from you. I was… I really needed you, Raphael. You will protect me from the big bad wolves of the world. You will triple and double my stock value in VA. You will ply me with expensive, breathtaking gifts. You will seduce me long into dawn. You will pleasure me until I don’t know my own name. But you can’t love me, can you? You were right all along. It’s just not in you.” Poison spewed from her lips and Pia couldn’t seem to stop herself. And for this, for turning her into this, she truly hated him. “I thought it was only words you weren’t capable of.”
“I understand that you’re upset. But you’re being far too cynical about it.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy that I see the world now as you see it?”
“Nothing has changed.”
“No, everything has changed, Raphael. Don’t you see? I have changed. My perception of you has changed. In my eyes, you’re no better than Frank.”