Giuseppe Furlan looked more like his only son than Ranieri cared to acknowledge. Because looking at his father was always like looking into a kind of fun house mirror. It was a view of the future, but a future that required that Ranieri make a certain set of unpalatable choices. To be embittered, always. To make the same mistakes again and again. And to blame others instead of himself, forever. If he took care to do those things then Ranieri was sure to find himself with those same stooped shoulders and his father’s indignant chin.
A fate worse than death, Ranieri had long believed.
Giuseppe barely even glanced at Annika, its own insult. “I have a very important investment opportunity I need to speak to you about, Ranieri. This is a business call.”
Ranieri offered what he hoped passed for some kind of a smile, though it felt far too harsh. “Perhaps you both missed the news,” he said, a deep chill in his voice. “I am on my honeymoon. This is my wife. You appear to have forgotten to offer us your felicitations. An oversight, I am certain.”
“I had no idea you were even getting married,” his mother said querulously, but with enough heat that he suspected he’d hit upon her true reason for coming here today. “How do you think that made me look? You didn’t even think to invite your ownmother!”
There were a great many things Ranieri could have said to that, all of them unkind. But instead, Annika went and sat next to his mother on the couch, reminding him that despite the way high society New York liked to talk about Bennett Schuyler’s supposedly shameful daughter, she was, in fact, the consummate hostess. Her manners were exquisite. Here, when it counted, not out there in public where everything most people did was a bid for status and points.
“It happened so quickly,” Annika was saying. “And it’s all my fault. My father died so suddenly, you see. He’d been in a coma for a long while, and then there at the end...well. I didn’t see it coming.” She kept smiling in that engaging way of hers, despite the sour expression Paola offered her in return. “Our wedding was very quick and very small. But you must forgive Ranieri. I’m sure that he wanted to wait until his whole family was there, but it wasn’t possible.”
Ranieri stood there, battling warring urges within him. He wanted to throw his parents out. But then, he always did. He wanted to protect Annika, even though he knew if he did that, his parents would focus on her in a way he knew hereallywouldn’t like.
And beneath all of that, he wanted to live in the version of their story that Annika was telling. Where everything between them was clean and new and theirs. No wills, no games of one-upmanship. Only a man and a woman who had rushed to marry because they wanted each other that badly.
What did it say about him that he wanted that to be real?
It should have shaken him that here in this cottage, so far away from reality, he had almost convinced himself that it was.
“Congratulations on your union,” Giuseppe said grudgingly. His cold eyes moved over Annika, then dismissed her. Another insult Ranieri would have dearly liked to address, but that was the trouble with his parents. Calling attention to their behavior only made it worse. “I’m certain the wedding was charming. How nice. But I would really like to talk to you about this investment. This one is a sure thing.”
Ranieri stood there, frozen at the mantel. His parents were playing their usual games, here in this cottage that was all things elegant and graceful but was still nothing more than a monument his grandmother had built to her own loneliness.
And he felt nothing but dirty.
He might thunder on about the Furlan pride, but pride wasn’t what he felt when he was around these people. It was this other thing.
They were a stain and he had never been able to wash it clean.
And he might have tried to conceal that stain with money, businesses, properties, too many women. He might have found ways to pretend.
But at the end of the day, it always came down to this. His mother’s inability to think of anyone or anything but herself. His father’s obvious feeling of entitlement to his son’s hard-earned and long-kept wealth. When he’d been young, the details might have been different but the end result had always been the same. Anything he did was an insult to his mother, if she chose to take it that way, and whatever it was had to be scrutinized to see if it might be an opportunity for his father to leverage his own interests.
They had never cared about anything else. He knew that despite their divorce the two of them met regularly to discuss all the ways Ranieri had let them down and what they could do to force him into line. This cottage was his favorite place on the planet, but he only used it sparingly, because they had their spies in this valley and they always descended upon him here.
He would have said he’d grown immune to them.
But today, in the middle of the same old story sat Annika. His Annika, looking fresh and pretty and entirely his.
And she did not belong here, with them, where they could get that stain on her, too. The certainty of that was like concrete, falling through him like so much stone.
Yet he understood it now, what had happened last night. What he’d almost said this morning. Annika made him feel clean. She made him imagine that there was something more to him than his father’s grift and his mother’s complaints. Of all the women he had ever been with, Annika was the one who should have wanted him least. And she was the one who’d asked him for nothing.
It was no wonder at all that she was the only one he wanted. The only one he could not be without.
For it was clear to him now, standing in this study while his parents began to bicker and Annika sat between them looking serene, that there was no reason he should have adhered to even one of the stipulations attached to that will. It might have been inconvenient to start over, but as he’d told Annika already, that was what he excelled at. That was what he did.
He didn’t need the Schuyler Corporation at all.
But he was very much afraid he might need her.
And it was not lost on him that acknowledging this now, with his sordid past on excruciating display, was as good as not acknowledging it at all. And no matter that the admission made everything inside him seem to slide off the side of the planet, even if he made it only to himself.
“You always do this,” his mother was saying shrilly to his father. “You always try to cut me out. I won’t let you do it this time.”
“I owe you nothing, woman,” Giuseppe retorted, with a snort of laughter. “You’ve already sucked me dry.”