Currant Creek Valley(90)

Sam figured he had left his violent days behind him when he took his discharge, but right now he was struck by a fierce urge to rip a certain passionate genius into tiny, creative little parts.

“Finally, when I was three months along and starting to show—six or seven months after we began seeing each other—I set the stage. I cooked him my very best meal, I spent a week’s salary on a new dress, I even had the pastry chef at the restaurant prepare Marco’s favorite dessert. Semifreddo with grappa-poached apricots. You’ll never see that in my restaurant, by the way.”

An owl hooted somewhere on the Currant Creek but other than that, it felt as if they were alone in the night.

“You can probably guess what happened next. I finally told him about the pregnancy over dessert. He...wasn’t happy. Said I was a stupid American girl and why did I have to ruin everything. He said all manner of things about me, worst of all that my alla bolognese was bland.”

This would have made him laugh under other circumstances but right now he couldn’t find anything about this story funny.

“Only then did I realize he was right. I had been incredibly stupid. As he finally so clearly pointed out, we would never be together. All this time while I had been dreaming of the time we could make our relationship public—when we could start our happily-ever-after together—he had been going home every night when he left my bed to sleep beside his wife. The wife I had no idea existed until that night.”

He remembered that first day he had met her at Brazen, when she had grilled him so intently about whether he was married or not before she would consider dating him. The pain of that treachery and how she had unknowingly betrayed another woman must be etched deeply inside her.

“I have no excuse. I should have seen it a million times over, I just... I guess I didn’t want to see. I wanted to blame the language barrier, since my Italian was terrible and he refused to speak English, but really it was my own stupidity.”

“You were a young woman living in a foreign country and you made a mistake.”

“I wasn’t that young. Twenty-five. Not some naive teenager. I was certainly old enough to suspect something when the man who claimed to love me would only see me in secret.”

He was willing to bet the charming Italian son of a bitch was probably older, with worlds’ more experience. She had probably transferred all her pain over losing her father to him, but he wasn’t sure she would appreciate that insight right now.

“That’s not the worst of it,” she said, her voice small.

“What happened?”

“He fired me. Well, technically I quit before he could, but he told me he didn’t want me to come back to his ristorante ever, with much dramatic gesturing and throwing things around. And since the apartment was owned by the ristorante, of course I had to leave there immediatamente.”

Now he really wanted to find the bastard. Anybody who could throw a pregnant young woman out into the street deserved the full force of an angry ex-Ranger trained in hand-to-hand combat.

“I couldn’t see any other choice in the matter so I packed my things and I left Florence. What else could I do?”

“You didn’t come home to Hope’s Crossing, though.”

“No. I couldn’t. I... My older sister Maura had had a baby on her own when she was a teenager, my niece Sage, and I saw how hard that was for her. I heard the whispers and the way certain people looked down on her for it. Call me selfish, but I didn’t want to go through that or put my family through it. I didn’t want to tell my family what an idiot I had been and I certainly didn’t want the baby. My heart was broken and I didn’t want any part of Marco in my life.”

“Completely understandable.”

“I had some vague idea of giving the baby up for adoption, maybe, but I needed to work to survive, so I took a job at a restaurant near Bologna. A terrible place, with a horrible little man for a chef.”

The breeze sighed through the treetops and she sighed along with it. “I worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Some days I forgot to eat. I didn’t go to a doctor. I just wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. I had loved him so much and I still couldn’t believe he didn’t want me. That he could hurt me like my...” Her voice trailed off abruptly.

“Like your father did,” he finished, wishing he could reach out and touch her. An arm around her shoulder, a hand on her arm. Anything.

“Claire does have a big mouth,” she said after a moment.

“She cares about you.”

“Yes. I couldn’t believe he could hurt me like my father. He abandoned us, and Marco basically did the same.”