"I cannot marry you," she said again, each word a slashing wound to her heart. Annette tried to hand him the ring again. "I'm not the right woman for you."
"I will be the judge of that,caro." Carlo looked at her with indulgence rather than anger, and totally ignored her outstretched hand. "Of course, you can marry me. Things may be happening more quickly than either of us expected in certain regards, but it is nothing to fear."
She wasn't afraid of being a mother, but neither was she ready for that role just yet. "You expect me to jettison my job and move to Sicily."
"You knew we would have to move there at some point, that you could not stay with your organization long term."
"Yes, but I had plans, goals for what I could do while I was there."
"So, make new plans. Set new goals." His tone implied this was not rocket science.
"If I married you, it would always be like this, wouldn't it? Me changing to fit your plans, you making decisions without my input."
He sighed. "Perhaps, I should have spoken to you about the move, butcara, you must understand, the last weeks have been intense. It took a great deal to clear my schedule for the honeymoon. My father's decision to retire came unexpectedly, even for me."
A two-month-long honeymoon she had not asked for and did not want. Not to mention emotionally painful and stressful, not that Carlo would admit to anything that might resemble weakness.
"He works too many hours and dines on stress," Annette said, realizing she might as well be describing Carlo. She still found it hard to believe Alceu wanted to retire.
His healthmustbe more precarious than Carlo was acknowledging. But was that because Carlo refused to see it, or he simply didn't want to share it with her?
Her Sicilian lover shrugged. "He will have to learn to eat food instead," he joked.
"Yes, but it's not your father that's worrying me." She sighed, realizing how callous that sounded. "I don't mean I don't care about him. I do care. Very much, but he's not the problem."
"No, your job is the problem."
She shook her head. "It's not my job. It's me. You want me to be something I'm not, someone I'm not even sure I could ever be, even if I was willing to try."
"You are talking nonsense. Listen, this is just prewedding jitters. You will feel better after we are wed."
"I am not going to marry you." She held the ring out again, pain so heavy she wasn't sure she could hold it inside. "Take it. I mean it, Carlo."
But he remained with his hands stubbornly down. "I will not. I will be standing at the front of the church waiting for you in two days' time. I expect you to be there. Whatever problems you think we have, we can work them out later. We have a lifetime."
He turned and strode away without another word.
Annette tried to shout after him, but she could not make the words come.
No matter what he thought, that was not how it worked. Whatever problems they had would follow them into marriage. And this problem was insurmountable.
She was not the right woman for him.
And as much as it hurt to admit,he was not the right man for her.
One thing she knew with absolute certainty, being alone was better than living with someone who needed her to be something other than her authentic self to accept her. She'd lived that way since she was five years old, until she'd gone away to university.
She could not live that way again.
Not ever.
CHAPTER 6
Annette came out of her fugue of memories to note her sister had left the terrace and she was entirely alone. It was not a new feeling.
She'd basically been alone since becoming the unwanted baggage from her birth father's first marriage, dumped with his brother to appease his new wife. Named Annette after her mother, Anne, her adoptive family had instantly started calling her Netta in deference to the woman now married to William Hudson. Apparently, Annette looked too much like her birth mother as well, serving as a continual reminder of a past both her birth father and his second wife would prefer to forget.
She was blonde and blue eyed, like her deceased mother. Everyone else in the Hudson clan were brunettes. Kimber, the woman who her birth father had married, was even a brunette, though she had salon perfected red highlights. At five-feet-three inches, Annette was shorter than all the other women in her family too. Where they were tall and svelte, she was short and curvy.