Italian Bachelors: Irresistible Sicilians

Entering the adjoining room, he flipped on the light. His heart twisted at the empty cot. A pile of nappies and baby accessories he did not recognise had been neatly placed on the dresser.

Where the hell had they gone?

Just as he was debating waking the household and conducting a thorough search for them, Grace walked into the room, her dressing gown covering her tall, slender frame, carrying Lily and a bottle of formula.

Immediately she switched the light off but not before he caught the glare she directed at him.

She walked soundlessly past him and settled in the old rocking chair, curling her legs in a ball and placing the teat of the bottle in Lily’s tiny mouth. ‘I want her to go back to sleep after she’s had this,’ she whispered, nodding at the light switch.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked, adopting an identical whisper.

‘In the kitchen warming the bottle up.’

The kitchen was on the other side of the monastery. In the early hours of winter it was always freezing down there. ‘Why didn’t you get a member of staff to do it for you?’

Even in the dusky light he could clearly identify the look of disdain that crossed her face. ‘Apart from your security guards, everyone’s asleep.’

‘Does she always wake so early?’ It was five a.m.

She nodded. ‘If I’m lucky she might go back down for another couple of hours. I had worried that after all the travelling she might have trouble settling, but she nodded off without any problems.’

‘In future I will ensure someone is available to warm the milk for you.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll get a kettle and a jug brought up to my room.’

‘That’s what I pay the staff for.’

‘Luca, I’m not going to argue with you about it. I’m not going to have someone else’s sleep disrupted for the sake of a kettle and a jug.’

‘I think you’ll find you are already arguing with me about it.’

The whisper of a smile curved on her cheeks. ‘No change there, then.’

Grace had always enjoyed sparring with him but it had always been done in a gentle, amused fashion. She was the only person, aside from his mother and brother, who did not automatically assume his word was on a par with God’s. She challenged him, made him look at the world through a different prism. Where he saw things in black or white, she saw the varying shades of grey in between. It was one of the many things he’d loved about her: the context and sense she helped him make of the world.

Having taken over the running of the estate at the age of twenty-one, he’d been so focused on keeping the high standards set by his father and keeping his family safe from those who would snatch everything away from them, he’d never had the time to really think about his place in the world.

When, a year into Luca’s marriage, Francesco Calvetti, an old childhood acquaintance whose family had been the Mastrangelos’ bitter enemies, had suggested going into business together, it had seemed like perfect timing. Luca had already been toying with the idea. Both men were keen to establish themselves away from the long shadows cast over them by their respective fathers and equally keen to end a feud neither had wanted.

Being with Grace and the fresh perspective she had on life had, for the first time, made him see that the life he had been living was the life expected of him. He was living in his father’s footsteps. His own hopes and dreams had been suppressed for the good of the family. For duty.

It was time to strike out in his own name.

Yet, for all the context his wife had given his world, he failed to see the context or sense in why she had run away.

She thought he was a monster. She had wilfully kept their child a secret from him. Where was the context in that? So they’d had an argument? All couples rowed. One proper argument was not good enough reason to rip a marriage apart.

A lump formed in his chest. He swallowed hard to dislodge it. ‘Did you find everything you need in the nursery?’

‘Pretty much. Thank you. And thank you for putting me next to her.’ She adjusted her hold on Lily and looked back at him. The rising sunlight was slowly dispersing the dusky grey, her features becoming clearer by the passing minute. ‘I admit, when you said I was to have the blue room, I thought it was deliberate because you knew how much I hated it. It took a while for me to remember it adjoined another room.’

‘She is sleeping in my old cot,’ he said. ‘My mother got the staff to take it out of hibernation.’

‘I did wonder.’

He should leave; return to his room. Instead he found his eyes transfixed on the feeding baby. His feeding baby. Their feeding baby. A child he and Grace had created together.

A part of him longed to reach over and touch her, to stroke his baby’s face, to hold her to his chest and feel her warmth on his skin, to smell that sweet, innocent scent.

They looked so perfect together. Even Grace could not create a more beautiful picture.

A spike cut through his heart, piercing him, a pain a thousand times stronger than the ache in his shoulder. It took all his strength not to sway with its force.

And there was another ache too, a much baser ache that should not exist for her, not any more.

His sex drive had always been high but Grace was the only woman who had been able to turn him to lava with nothing more than a seductive smile or the flash of a shoulder. To his body, there was no more desirable a woman. Even the curve of her ankle was erotic.

There were times when he would swear she was a sorceress. How else could he explain the hold she had over him, the unquenchable yet ultimately poisonous desire that lived in his blood? Why else had he not grabbed his freedom when he’d had the chance, as any other red-blooded Sicilian man would have done?

But he’d had no time for such pursuits. What with running the estate and his other, newer, business interests, there had been no time for any kind of affair. On top of all that, the main focus of his energies had been spent on tracing Grace. Sex had never crossed his mind.

To discover his libido had reawoken because of her and that he could still respond when she wore nothing but a tatty old dressing gown sickened him. That his fingers ached to lean over and trace the delicate line of her neck, that his lips tingled to press against her...

He dragged his gaze upwards and found her staring at him, the same pained yearning mirroring back at him, her angular cheeks heightened with colour. Then her eyelids snapped a blink and she turned her face away.

Clenching his hands into fists, Luca looked to the door and willed his thundering heart to slow.

The sooner he found himself a lover, the sooner he could be released from the sexual hold she still held on him.

The sooner he stopped thinking about making love to his wife, the better.

‘Write a list of everything you need for you and Lily, and I’ll get someone to get it for you tomorrow.’

Closing the door softly behind him, he went back to his room and fired up his laptop.

There was no way he would be able to get any sleep now.

Work would be his salve, as it had been since Grace disappeared. Work would help focus his attention on the matters that truly deserved it, not the deceptive, heartless bitch he had been foolish enough to marry.

* * *

As Grace tiptoed back into her bedroom from the adjoining nursery there was a rap on the door.

She hurried over and yanked it open, her fingers already flying to her lips.

‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve only just got her down for a nap.’

‘Here’s your passport,’ Luca said without any preamble, extending it to her, making no move to step over the threshold.

Snatching it from his hand, she flipped through it. ‘I did wonder if you would give it back to me.’

‘Why would I want to keep it?’ he said, his top lip curving. ‘You are free to leave whenever you like.’

‘And Lily’s passport?’

‘I will be keeping that.’

She expected nothing less. ‘I suppose it’s pointless asking where, exactly, you will be keeping it?’

‘You presume correctly. Now give me your phone.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t take it from me yesterday.’ Turning her back to him, she grabbed it off her bedside table where it was charging.

‘Today will suffice.’

She passed it to him. ‘I take it you’re going to put a tracker in it.’

‘You’re getting good at this—you assume correctly. If you need to make a call before I get it back to you, use the landline.’

How she hated the coldness of his tone. And how she hated that she hated it.

‘I’ll do that,’ she said with a brittle smile. As he had still not stepped over the threshold she took great delight in shutting the door, quietly, in his face.

The smile dropped. She leaned back against the closed door and crossed her hands over her racing heart.

* * *

Her phone was returned that afternoon by one of the maids. She took it from her gingerly and threw it onto the bed. It felt tainted. The first chance she got, she would buy herself a new pay-as-you-go one.

Purchasing another phone turned out to be trickier than anticipated.

When she felt ready to take Lily on a Sicilian shopping trip two days later, a Mercedes was brought out for her. Three heavies were sitting in it.

The number of her personal ‘guards’ had been increased.

Pushing Lily around Palermo, her gorillas surrounding her, she knew she was onto a lost cause.

Their presence only served to remind her of what she had hated most about her marriage. Before she had opened her eyes to her husband’s true nature, the biggest blot on the marital landscape had been the lack of privacy. Sure, on the estate she could come and go as she pleased, but she had always been aware of hidden cameras, supposedly there for all the Mastrangelos’ protection, watching her every move on the grounds. Outside the estate, she was under constant armed guard. She couldn’t even pop off to buy a paintbrush without one of Luca’s gorillas accompanying her.

She had hated it.

She still hated it, loathed the thought of her daughter growing up in an environment where freedom meant nothing.

Freedom was precious. It was unrealistic and dangerous to expect Lily to have the same levels of freedom she had enjoyed, but, unless she found an escape route, her daughter would never experience what it meant to be a proper, regular child. She would never be able to explore and get into mischief without her parents knowing her every move. She would always be in her father’s eyeline no matter where he was.

All the material advantages Lily would have being a Mastrangelo would be cancelled out by the disadvantages. And that was without considering what it would be like growing up with a father who was a dangerous gangster.

While Grace didn’t believe for a second that Luca would lay a finger on either of them, his rages, which in the last six months or so of their marriage had become more frequent, could be terrifying. Especially for a child. She never wanted her daughter to witness that.

When she returned to the monastery, she carried Lily to the private front door of their wing. Before she could unlock it, Donatella materialised. ‘I thought you would want to know that Pepe will be returning tomorrow,’ she said, referring to Luca’s younger brother who had his own, rarely used, separate wing in the monastery. Pepe was the family firebrand, a playboy rebel without any discernible cause. Yet, despite his outward rebelliousness, he was fiercely loyal to his family.

Grace was not looking forward to his return. Pepe would know the truth of what had gone on between her and Luca. The last time she had seen him, Pepe and Luca had had a massive argument. She still had no idea what the row had been about but it had been heated enough for her to worry that one of them would get hurt. It still made her blood freeze whenever she recalled questioning Luca about it afterwards and their own subsequent row.

‘Thanks for the warning.’ She placed the key in the lock and as she turned it Donatella placed a bony hand on her arm.

‘Why did you return?’

Grace eyed her warily. There was little point in saying it was because of love. The atmosphere between her and Luca was so cold and yet somehow so charged, the entire household had to be aware things were not right between them. ‘What has Luca told you?’

‘Luca does not confide with me. All he has said is that he found you and you agreed to try again. He still has not told me why you left to begin with, or what happened to his shoulder.’

Grace blanched. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog that clouded it every time she thought of it. She could still smell the gun smoke.

She could also see the poor beaten man whose eyes had widened with terror when he recognised her as Luca’s wife.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s for Luca to tell you what happened.’

Donatella studied her for a moment before digging into her pocket and producing a key.

Grace stared at it.

‘It’s the key for your studio,’ Donatella said, passing it to her. A shadow crossed her face. ‘Luca refused to let anyone in there. He said it was yours until you returned, even if you only came back to collect your belongings.’

‘He said that?’

A sliver of ice shot out of her mother-in-law’s eyes. ‘I am not a stupid woman. I can tell you do not wish to be here. But you are here even if the circumstances are not what you or my son would wish.’

With those enigmatic words, Donatella walked off.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT TOOK ANOTHER two days before Grace gave in. Leaving Lily with Donatella, who was delighted to be granted her first official babysitting duty, she headed through the thick forest that surrounded the monastery to her cottage.

Her cottage. Given to her by Luca on their wedding day.

She could still recall her excitement when she’d first walked inside and seen the lengths he had gone to to make it into a proper studio for her. The walls of the ground floor had been knocked down to make one enormous room, and painted white to enhance the natural sunlight. Daylight-mimicking light bulbs had been installed for when the muse took her at night. There were easels to accommodate all different sizes of canvas, a hundred different brushes of varying sizes and hair and, best of all, he had bought every shade of paint from the specific brand she favoured. She had been in heaven.

She had not picked up a paintbrush or done anything as basic as a doodle since she had left. All her creative juices had died when she walked out of the estate.

Taking a deep breath, she turned the key and pushed the door open. Immediately she was hit with the trace of turpentine and oil paint, scents that had seeped into every crevice of the cottage.

At first glance it looked exactly as she had left it. The canvas she had been working on was still on its easel, a fine layer of dust now covering it; her brushes all rammed into varying pots, her tubes of paint still scattered randomly across her workbench. Stacks of blank and completed canvases still lay in neat stacks; half-finished canvases she had left to dry before working on them again still lined the walls.

Someone had been in there during her absence. It was nothing specific she could put her finger on, more of a gut feeling.

Her stomach tying itself in knots, she climbed the open staircase to the first floor. The sense that someone had been there grew stronger, especially when she entered the bedroom. This was the room she had slept in whenever Luca was abroad or tied up with business until the early hours, something that had dramatically increased throughout the second year of their marriage. Although she’d missed him being around so much, she would take the opportunity to work through the witching hours without guilt and then flop into bed shattered.

One thing she had always been able to take heart from was that he would always join her if he was in Sicily. Wherever she slept, he would seek her out. Always. She would wake to find herself wrapped in his arms. Invariably, they would make love and she would tell herself that everything between them was fine.

She was certain she had left the bed unmade.

The bathroom was dusty but clean, relatively tidy, her toothbrush and other toiletries on display where she had left them. A quick peek in the laundry basket revealed the tatty jeans and paint-splattered jumper she had last worked in.

Her bittersweet trip down memory lane was interrupted when she heard the front door shut.

‘Hello?’ she called, hurrying to the stairs. About to step down, she paused when she saw Luca leaning against the front door staring up at her.

‘What do you want?’ They were alone for the first time since he had found her. Now there was no Lily to temper the tone of her voice for, she made no attempt to hide her hostility.

The first thing she noticed was his lack of a sling. Dressed in black jeans and a light blue sweater, his arms folded across his broad chest, his jawline covered in dark stubble, he carried a definite air of menacing weariness.

‘We’ve been invited to Francesco Calvetti’s birthday party in Florence next Saturday,’ he said without any preamble.

‘Why’s he holding it in Florence?’ Francesco Calvetti was as big a gangster as her husband. It was only after Luca had invested in a couple of casinos and nightclubs with him that the cracks in their marriage had appeared and he had begun to change...

‘He bought a hotel there. I’ve accepted the invitation for us.’

‘It’s far too short notice.’

‘I wasn’t asking your opinion on the matter. I was telling you.’

‘And what about Lily?’

‘I have spoken to my mother and she has agreed to care for her overnight.’

‘Absolutely not.’ No way was she going to leave her baby to attend that man’s party.

‘I have also seen the local priest about having Lily baptised,’ he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I have booked her in for the first Sunday of the new year.’

‘Well, that’s telling me,’ she said, stomping down the stairs. ‘We can argue about the christening in a minute. I am not leaving Lily to attend a silly party.’

‘It is not a silly party. It is an important event that you will attend as my devoted wife.’

The way his eyes burned into her left Grace with no doubt as to the meaning laced in his words.

Devoted wife.

Luca might have abandoned the idea of displaying togetherness in front of his family but this did not extend to the wider world.

She would be expected to accompany him and act the docile, dutiful wife.

She would be expected to play the role of lover to a man she hated with every fibre of her being. The consequences of failure would be harsh. Banishment from her daughter’s life.

‘Am I at least allowed a say in the christening? Or is Lily’s entire future to be decided by you?’

His nostrils flared. ‘That all depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether your opinions concur with mine.’

‘So that’ll be never, then,’ she threw at him bitterly.

‘Consider yourself lucky to be here and able to voice an opinion,’ he said, his tone a low, threatening timbre. ‘It’s a sight more than you gave me.’

‘It’s a sight more than you deserved,’ she spat. ‘Now, unless there’s something else you want to tell me, you can leave.’

* * *

Luca clenched his fists by his sides at her defiance, at the folded arms crossed over the slender waist, her hair sprouting in all directions. Since they had returned, the red dye had faded, her natural honey blonde coming through.

He didn’t know if he wanted to wrap his hands around her throat or kiss the defiance from her face.

She had been home for six days. In all that time he had tried to block her from his mind but she was still there, festering in his psyche. He didn’t want to exchange one solitary word more than was necessary with her. Simply looking at her deceitful face made his stomach clench.

‘I am not yet ready to leave. You owe me some answers.’

Her striking features contorted into something feral. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

Every sinew in his body tightened. When she turned her back on him and walked to her workbench, he had to fight the urge to wrench her round and force her to look at him.

‘You damn well do. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. No letter, no phone call, nothing to let me know if you were dead or alive.’

She turned around, leaned against the bench and rolled her eyes. ‘Steady on, Luca—you make it sound as if you were worried about me. Surely a heart is needed to feel worry?’

It was the dripping cynicism that did it for him. The sheer lack of remorse. The implication that her selfish, unrepentant behaviour was somehow his fault.

All the rage he had been smothering since he found her exploded out of him, consuming him in a fury that accelerated when he found his tongue to speak.

‘Worried about you?’ he said, his words coming out in a raging flow. ‘Worried about you? I thought you were dead! Do you hear me? Dead! I imagined you lying cold on a verge. I pictured you cold in a mortuary. For two weeks I could not sleep for the nightmares. So no, I wasn’t worried about you. It was much worse than that.’

For a moment he thought he caught a flicker of distress on her face before her now familiar insouciance replaced it. ‘I apologise if I caused you any distress...’

Slam!

Without conscious thought, the desperate need to purge the storm of emotions acted for him and he punched the wall.

‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ he raged. ‘I thought we were happy. When you went missing, I thought you’d been kidnapped but when I received no ransom I thought you had been killed. I called your mother, I called Cara—neither of them had heard from you. Or so they said. It never crossed my mind you would do something so wicked as to up and leave without a word.’ He threw his arms out, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, ignoring the throb in his fist. ‘You didn’t just leave me, you left everything, all your work, all your clothes...’

In the midst of his fury he saw how white she had become, how she clung to her workbench as if she depended on it to keep her upright.

Taking a deep, ragged breath, he fought for control and forced his voice to adopt a modicum of calm. ‘Two weeks after you went missing, your bank statement arrived. I opened it and found every euro had been transferred into a new account the same day you disappeared. Do you know how I felt then?’

Slowly, she shook her head.

‘Elated. Suddenly there existed the possibility you were alive. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to me to check the safe for your passport.’ When he had discovered it missing, the relief had been so physical he had slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, sitting there for minutes that had felt like hours, his usually quick brain taking its time to process the implications. But once he had processed them...

He had dug up all her bank statements and read them in detail. Apart from the odd splurge on painting materials, Grace had hardly touched the allowance he gave her. Over a two-year period she had accumulated more than two million euros.

Had she been planning her escape from the start?

Whatever the reason, his wife had saved enough money to start over.

From then, it had been a case of following the money trail. Luckily for him, money—his money—was able to lubricate the tightest of lips and within a day he had been in Frankfurt. Unluckily for him, he had been a week too late. She had already gone. It had taken another four months for him to find her latest location but he had been too late then too.

In the meantime, Pepe had come up trumps with Cara’s phone, through which they’d determined what they had good reason to believe was Grace’s number. That same number had remained inactive until barely a fortnight ago.

‘You put me through hell,’ he said flatly. ‘I would have gladly traded my life for yours and you let me believe you were dead. Now tell me why I don’t deserve some answers.’

‘I was going to leave you a note,’ she said. For the first time he detected a softening in her voice. ‘But I couldn’t risk you coming home early and finding it before I had a chance to leave Sicily. I knew you would never let me go.’

‘What kind of a monster do you think I am?’ he asked, throwing his arms back in the air. ‘That argument we had before you disappeared? Was that the cause of it?’

‘No! That row—as horrible as it was, I would have forgiven it in time...’

‘So tell me! When, exactly, did I frighten you so much that you believed I would stop you doing anything?’

‘That’s just it! You never let me do anything.’ She threw her own arms in the air. ‘You promised I could exhibit my work in Palermo and it came to nothing—every time I found the perfect venue you found the perfect excuse to keep me from buying it. I wasn’t allowed to drive my own car, I had to travel everywhere with armed guards—I couldn’t even buy a box of tampons without one of your goons hovering over me. I would insist he stay outside the shop door but I couldn’t be certain he didn’t have his binoculars out spying on me, ready to report back to you.’

‘My men were assigned for your own protection, not to spy on you,’ he roared. ‘They were there to keep you safe. This isn’t England. You knew when you married me that you were marrying into—’

‘I most certainly did not! I took you at face value. I thought everyone in Sicily carried guns for their personal protection. If I had so much as suspected the kind of monster you really were...’ Her vicious tongue suddenly stopped, her eyes widening, fixing on his shoulder. ‘Luca, you’re bleeding.’

Sure enough, when he followed her line of sight down to his shoulder, a dark stain had appeared. Immediately he became aware of the accompanying ache.

Now he was aware of it, his knuckles throbbed too.

Grace stared for a moment longer, then turned and dragged a paint-splattered chair over to him. ‘Sit down and take your top off,’ she ordered in short, clipped tones. ‘I’ll get the first-aid kit.’

‘Stop trying to change the subject,’ he said. With all the bitterness and acrimony flying around, a sour taste had formed in his mouth. ‘You were about to explain what you find so abhorrent about me.’

White-lipped, her jaw clenched, she sank to her knees in front of a small cabinet. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said as she rummaged through it. ‘My home truths won’t mean a thing if you bleed to death. Let’s sort your wound out first.’

Yes, he was hurt. Heartsick and nauseated with a chest so tight it was difficult to draw breath. ‘You are the last person I want tending to any of my injuries, now or ever.’

A small green bag with first aid written on it whipped over and landed by his feet.

‘If you want to bleed to death like a stuck pig, be my guest. Or, if you want to be an adult about it, let me take a look at your wound.’

She stood before him, hands on hips, glaring at him. He had always known she had proper backbone but its strength had only become fully apparent since he found her.

An image flickered in his hammering brain of his wife facing off against their teenage daughter. Would Lily inherit her mother’s independent streak? How often would he have to step in as peacemaker when they faced off to each other?

That was if they lasted that long. At the rate he and Grace were going they would be lucky to see the new year in without killing each other. He could feel the fury that resided in her as clearly as he could feel his own.

He inclined his head and then carefully removed his sweater and shirt.

With brisk efficiency, Grace picked up the first-aid kit and brought another chair over to sit opposite him.

She tilted her head and studied him. ‘You’ve torn the stitches.’ Unzipping the kit bag, she removed a square foil package and ripped it open with her teeth. ‘Keep still.’

Her head bowed in concentration, she used the antiseptic wipe to clean the blood with her right hand, her left hand resting lightly on his thigh to steady herself.

His senses filled with the fragrance of her shampoo tickling his nose. The trace of turpentine that had become more elusive the longer she had been gone was there too, more pronounced than it had been in months.

Being back in her studio with her filled him with emotions he could not begin to comprehend.

How he had loved watching her paint, watching the deep concentration she applied to her art. She would cut out the world from inside her head so all that remained was her and the canvas that became an extension of herself. If he was home, he would bring his laptop to the studio and work while she painted. For the most part she would be oblivious to his presence, but every now and then she would turn her head and bestow him a beaming smile that left him in no doubt how happy she was to have him there with her.

Even before she disappeared he had missed those times, but the running of the casinos and nightclubs had taken him away from home more frequently than he would have liked, especially in the evenings.

‘I like what you’ve done to your hair.’

She stilled and raised her eyes. ‘I thought you would hate it.’

‘Is that why you cut it so short? To spite me?’

‘Partly. Mostly it was to make it harder for you or anyone searching to recognise me. Every time I moved on I would cut a little more off and change the colour.’

‘It’s just as well I found you when I did or you would have ended up looking like a Tibetan monk.’

She laughed, but it sounded forced. ‘Yes. I might have ended up in a proper working monastery. You would never have found me then.’

‘Probably not.’ He expelled a breath. There was something incredibly soothing about the way she tended him, her fingers gentle and unrushed. He closed his eyes as he felt the now familiar hardening in his groin.