The Italian's Deal for I Do(66)

“It’s also a possibility she might use her phone,” Stefan exploded, abandoning his pockets to throw his hands in the air.

Rocco gave Stefan a hard look. “Stay here with Zayed and keep things running. Make sure what needs to happen happens. You,” Rocco said, tossing his car keys at Christian, “drive.”

Stefan watched with slack-jawed amazement as Rocco and Christian jogged down the front steps of Villa Mondelli, across the lawn teeming with caterers and wedding staff and toward the car park. His tux jacket and tie discarded, his gaze tunnel-visioned, Rocco had the glazed look of a man on the edge.

And now he was leaving the site where five hundred people were gathering in just under three hours for his nuptials in the hopes of finding his fiancée sniffing a rosebush?

“Someone needs to stop him,” Stefan muttered. “Someone needs to stop this.”

“He’s pursuing his destiny,” Zayed murmured. “Leave the man to it.”

Rage, pure unadorned rage that had been building up inside Stefan all morning, a rage he knew to be about more than this, about the subject of women leaving in general, bubbled up inside of him until it spilled out of his lips in a harsh, unavoidable attack.

“Did you actually just say that?”

Zayed turned his dark, dark eyes on him, armed with that Zen thing he did so well. “We’re all concerned about Rocco, Stefan. But the man knows his mind. He knows this. So stop projecting your anger on the situation and use the opportunity to examine where it’s coming from.”

Stefan felt the jab right through him. It knocked the breath from him, his coiled fingers swinging uselessly by his sides. Then he recovered without acknowledging the truth or error of Zayed’s statement, gave his friend the most disgusted look he could manage and walked away.

Zayed could stand there doing nothing while Rocco flailed. He had to do something. He was Sicilian. He had been bred to make things happen. Or make things not happen, in this case. And he needed the madness to stop.

He was midway through his third phone call, this time to a friend in the local police department, when Zayed informed him Olivia and her mother had just pulled up in the car park. Pocketing his mobile, he pushed the other man’s arm aside, took the steps to the lawn two by two and headed for satisfaction.

Olivia stood by a small compact car alongside what had to be her mother given the likeness in resemblance. The wedding planner was with them, barking orders with the relieved expression of a woman who’d escaped a death sentence. Except now she had to get the groom back here in time.

Stefan stopped in front of Olivia, as tall, lanky and stunning as ever, steam coming out of his ears.

“How could you?” he bit out.

Olivia whitened. Her mother went to stand between them, but Olivia brushed her mother’s arm aside and lifted her chin. The vulnerability painted across her face, the dark, haunted shadows underneath her signature blue eyes, stopped his anger in its tracks.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I needed to make sure I was doing the right thing.”

It floored him for a moment, the honesty. How miserable she looked... How the complexity of what she and Rocco shared was written across her uncertain face.

“I love him.” She said the words tentatively at first, then with greater force. “I love him, Stefan. Madly. Deeply.”

The veracity of her confession reached down to his jaded, black heart. Felled him on the spot.

“Lucky for you, Olivia Fitzgerald,” he said harshly. “You just said the only three words that matter.”

Keep reading for an excerpt from THE GREEK’S PREGNANT BRIDE by Michelle Smart.