‘Do you really think I’m going to spend my entire married life letting Salvatore dictate to me?” she asked the room in general, but with a pointed look at her father.
‘This I cannot imagine,” Therese remarked with a smile.
‘you are so strong, so self-sufficient.” Annemarie’s expression said she wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing .
Elisa closed her notebook and slipped her pen in its pocket. ‘I don’t believe a woman’s intellect or common sense is inferior to a man’s that is aII.”
Francesco walked around the table and patted Annemarie’s shoulder. ‘You are my Sicilian kitten and your sister is my little American tigress. Each of you has a beauty inherent to your nature though they are very different. A father could not ask for better daughters than mine.”
Annemarie blushed again and Elisa felt heat climbing up her own cheeks. ‘l’m not exactly a tigress.”
Salvatore’s eyes heated with reminders of how they spent their nights. ‘Are you not carat”’ She couldn’t begin to answer the message in his expression in front of her father and she glared at him for making her think inappropriate thoughts that had her blushing as fiercely as her shy sister.
Her father did not miss the byplay and slapped his thigh, chuckling.
‘Elisa is a good match for you, eh Salvatore? Her sass it warms the blood no?” He winked at the younger man and then turned his attention to Therese.
‘Can you imagine a year ago this man believed he would be happy married to our kitten? He would have overwhelmed her a week into the courtship, but my Elisa. . she will give Salvatore a run for his money, no?”
Francesco laughed uproariously at his own joke while Therese smiled and Annemarie blushed but Elisa was confused.
‘He wanted to marry Annemarie?” She looked at her younger sister who shrugged looking very uncomfortable being the center of the conversation.
‘lt was something I considered. That is aII.” Salvatore’s expression revealed nothing of his thoughts.
‘Si. He spoke of it to me during your visit here last summer.”
It was positively arcane, what her father was implying, that he and Salvatore had discussed marriage between him and Annemarie without her knowledge.
‘While I was here?” she parroted, grasping immediately on to the fact that meant Salvatore had been considering marriage to the perfect virginal sister while using flirtation to seduce the one he believed to be a tart.
‘I sensed a rapport between you two that made me wonder at his choice of my daughters but I said nothing. A man cannot interfere with young love.”
‘Love had nothing to do with it,” she said, pain blossoming in her heart like a poisonous flower.
‘of course, the feelings, they come with time, but still, I was right. The attraction between you two bore fruit.”
More fruit than her father would ever know about.
A baby that had been lost and a relationship that would never be the same.
She turned to Salvatore feeling a yawning pit growing inside her.
‘You spoke to my father about marriage to Annemarie last summer?” She needed confirmation to hear from his own lips that he had been thinking of marriage to her sister while contemplating her own seduction.
‘Si, but it was nothing.”
She wondered how he defined nothing. To her this revelation was something powerful something painful.
She didn’t believe he could be so cavalier about it, as if it did not matter. Didn’t he realize how ugly such a circumstance made everything? It denigrated her to the level of limbo for a short affair but then when had she convinced herself what they had shared before had been anything else for him? Had she not gotten pregnant with his child, he would have broken up with her and married her sister.
She had to lock her jaw to hold back the cry of pain that thought evoked.
Salvatore was no longer smiling. ‘As your father has said nothing came of it.”
‘Si. I knew it would not and I was right.”
Annemarie continued to look incredibly embarrassed while her father was so tied up in his typical male pride in being right that he had not caught on to the fact his disclosures were less than pleasing to either daughter’s ears. And if Elisa controlled herself, he never would. This wasn’t something she wanted made the subject of a family discussion.