“You’re not sure now?”
“No, I am,” she bit down on her lower lip, trying to find the right words. “When I was with Mich – my ex,” she recovered quickly, silently cursing the slip of the tongue. “It became a matter of survival. I would never have started a family with him.”
“Did he want to?”
Nausea shifted through her. “He mentioned it once or twice.” A shiver ran down her spine. It had been more like a threat – a way of tying her to him for the rest of their lives.
“When you go back to England,” he said after a moment, his expression distracted.
“Yes?”
“Do you think he’ll still want to see you?”
“Do I think he’ll be looking for me?” She bit down on her lip, moving it from side to side. “The truth is, it’s possible.” She swallowed, her delicate throat shifting with the involuntary action. “And on one level, that terrifies me, but on the other, I’m different now. Like getting away from him, taking some time to recover mentally and emotionally, has reminded me that I’m strong and independent, that I can handle him. Before, it was like I was drowning and every time I thought I could get my head above water, another wave would come and crash against me, so I would go under water once more. But I don’t feel that now.”
He nodded slowly, the look of pride in his eyes unmistakable. “You’re so strong, Maddie.”
“Yeah. I am. And you make me feel invincible,” she said honestly, and then she smiled, because from the ravages of her heartbreak she felt the kind of happiness she hadn’t believed possible, seven months earlier.
“You can come if you want.” He heard the offer and inwardly cringed. Maddie was leaving Ondechiara in a week’s time. Why in the world would he invite her to come to Villa Fortune with him, to eat with his family and Yaya? “Elodie and Fiero will be there. I know Jack would love to see you again.”
But Maddie shook her head, her hair blowing around her face so he wanted to ball it in his hands and hold her to him, kiss her until she was whimpering into his mouth and her body was soft against his. He wanted to kiss her surrender from her and he wanted to make her his. Again. And
again and again. He was already leaving an hour later than he’d intended because getting out of bed had been an almost impossible feat.
Leaving her now, with her hair tousled and her body clad in just an oversized shirt of his that hung off one shoulder, was ridiculously hard.
“Your ankle’s definitely better?”
As if understanding his question, Dante, at her feet, nosed the delicate flesh there. Maddie smiled. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be gone one night. If it wasn’t Yaya’s birthday…”
“Go.” She stood up onto the tips of her toes so her shirt lifted along her tanned thighs and he groaned.
“You’re killing me, Maddie.”
She grinned, batting her long dark lashes. “I hope so.”
When he was getting around the small coastline of Ondechiara, Nico drove. But going to the airport, he preferred to have his driver meet him. It meant he could work, and on this occasion, he was grateful not to have to navigate traffic when his mind was busy pulling apart the question of Maddie Gray and the part she’d started to play in his life, and his mind. What had started as a casual fling had quickly turned into something different, if only by virtue of the fact she’d basically moved in with him after her ankle injury. She was well enough to go back to La Villetta now, but he didn’t encourage that and fortunately, she hadn’t suggested it.
He liked having her around.
He loved waking up next to her.
Something like panic pushed all the air from his lungs, because he sensed the danger of this – of how much he could come to care for her. How much he already did care for her?
The countryside sped by his window and his eyes ran over it, barely noticing the vines and rolling hills, the glistening ocean in the distance.
Was it so bad if he’d started to have feelings for Maddie?
He closed his eyes and it was like being drowned, just like Maddie had described. That sense of independence that had been a part of him from childhood. Was it leaving his mother that had done it? Made him determined never to love nor rely on another person to quite that extent, as long as he should live? Claudette had messed him up, but she wasn’t the first person to break his heart. No, his mother held that privilege and now, he saw that it had shaped him in a way he hadn’t been fully cognisant of. Being wrenched from his home and moved to his grandparents’ had been harder than he’d ever admitted. He loved Yaya and Gianfelice but he’d adored his mother, even when he could now see how inadequate her style of parenting was. To be pulled from her home and told he now lived somewhere else, with someone else, had ripped the rug out from under him.
Was that the root of his inability to contemplate a future with anyone?
What if he let Maddie in and she lied to him, like Claudette did? What if she stopped wanting him one day, like his own mother had? Nico would have said he wasn’t afraid of anything but the wounds he’d had inflicted at four years of age were slow to heal and stood like cautionary tales to any kind of softening he might have been tempted to do.
They’d set the rules for this affair from the outset and the smartest thing to do would be to stick to them. No matter how tempted he was to do otherwise.