“She wasn’t anyone you knew. I didn’t flaunt her under your nose for five damned years!”
So harshly unforgiving she wanted to cry, but how could she have known it mattered? How?
Paolo could only imagine what he looked like. His hands had been spiking up his hair for the last two hours while he waited for her, getting nothing but voice mail until he was convinced she was in a ditch somewhere.
“I hated you for that, Lauren,” he admitted, finally getting off his chest a weight that had been suffocating him unacknowledged since forever.
She made a sound of extreme hurt, giving him a pinch of compunction, but this particular wound needed flushing before it would close and heal.
“You married the wrong man.”
It wasn’t anything she hadn’t said to herself, but the way he said it, angry and filled with accusation, was new and freshly hurtful.
“You think I should have left my wedding with you.” It was completely illogical, so much easier to say than it would have been to do, but in her heart she believed it, too.
“Yes,” he agreed, a ring of accusation still in his voice.
“I didn’t think you were serious. I believed you hated me.” Her voice cracked and she couldn’t continue. Her hands ached where she clutched them together and she tried again to focus on the Milan skyline, but to no avail. The wall of windows was a black slate with a single lamp reflected in it. It winked as Paolo passed in front of it and came to stand behind her and grasp her shoulders.
She ducked her head, devastated anew by his power to hurt her with nothing but his own hurt.
“What I feel for you isn’t love, Lauren.”
A paroxysm of pure anguish struck her. Before she could recoil, his hands tightened and he spoke with swift intensity.
“Love is a security blanket your family gives you. It makes you strong enough to take on the world. You are not a warm, fuzzy blanket, Lauren. You’re a wildfire. You’re a drop out of a plane without a chute. What I feel for you makes me feel weak and scared and I can’t control it. I have conquered a million different challenges and the one thing I couldn’t do was stop what I felt for you, even though it could destroy lives.”
She lifted her head and turned to search his eyes, drawn on a rack of conflicting beliefs.
Paolo framed her face with gentle hands. “What I feel for you is so much bigger than love. You struck me between the eyes the first time I saw you, so much so that I drank myself into oblivion that night. I didn’t put it together. I didn’t realize that the reason I was so gutted by that baby not being mine was because I’d given up something precious for it. You.”
“I didn’t think it mattered who I married because the one man who intrigued me was taken,” she confided, seeing that truth now.
“I should have stolen you from the church before you went down the aisle. These lonely years for both of us have been my fault,” he said bleakly.
She touched his lips, fingertips dampened by his hot breath as delicate hope invaded her heart. “You had to straighten out the bank. I needed to grow up. Mamie needed me. Perhaps it worked out as it was meant to.”
He nodded somberly. “But I would have come to you in Charleston even if you hadn’t called. It might have been a day or two later, after his death was made public, but nothing would have kept me away. Nothing would be different now.”#p#分页标题#e#
“We’d still have had that fight this evening before leaving the house?” she teased, tearing up with remembered hurt, but soothing over it for both of them.
He smirked ruefully. “Probably. Because when a man loves a woman this much, he can’t believe she’s so obtuse about what it means when he rushes home to see her.”
“But that’s because I’m not—”
He kissed her, stilling any self-deprecating argument she might have raised.
Paolo lifted his head a few minutes later. A light she’d never seen shone from his eyes. “Quit telling me what you’re not. You’re a Donatelli. That puts you head and shoulders above the rest right there.”
His arrogance made her smile, which only made him stand taller and even more proud. “You’re gloriously human, Lauren. Passionate and softhearted and capable of making mistakes because you love someone. I need that, working with numbers and bankers and economists all day.”
“Exactly. Human. Not an international space station or anything really exciting.”
“And yet I feel omnipotent, having won your love.”
She blinked fast, trying to see through her tears. “What I feel for you...” She bit her lip. “I always knew you had the power to consume me. I was afraid to let you, afraid of how intense my feelings were. I never felt this way with Ryan.”