The Unwanted Conti Bride (The Legendary Conti Brothers) (13 page)

Like she was at a reproduction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Do you know classical music, then?”

Look at them, holding a conversation as if they were on a first date. Thrusting and deflecting as if there wasn’t a storm gathering around them.

She shrugged, preparing herself for the fight. He knew nothing of her if he thought she would back down now. “There were a few months there after my mom and Sal married where he thought I required a little polish. It was a bleak time. There was a piano teacher, ballet classes and even an art teacher. Penguin me and ballet, can you imagine?”

“If you call yourself a penguin one more time, I shall spank you.”

“I also now see why Tina was so amused when I called you a peacock.”

“What am I, then?”

“A panther.”

“Why?”

“Its spots are in plain sight under that black coat. It is more vulnerable than any other jungle cat for, however much it tries, it can’t blend in like the other ones. It automatically stands out.”

He stood like a statue, with his hands behind him. The man she had thought couldn’t be still in any way, the man she’d thought lacked any depth. What a laugh he must have had all this time...

“But we were talking about music, weren’t we? I practiced for hours and hours, determined to be the perfect little princess to please Sal. Even though my strength lay in numbers. Mr. Cavalli said I was brilliant with technique, but I played without soul. That for me it was just a means to an end.” How right old Mr. Cavalli had been.

Music, music like Luca played, just was. It defied paltry human parameters. It defied night and day; it defied constriction or boundaries. It defied definition of any sort.

“Like a piece of flaky, buttery pastry, he’d say, only without the warm, sugary goodness in the middle. It was such a good metaphor, I was completely horrified and quit. So, yeah...I do know a bit about music.”

And before she could regulate the words, they shot out. Like pieces of jagged rocks shattering the carefully constructed glass wall around him. “It’s yours, isn’t it, Luca? You wrote that piece.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HEY
’
D
HAD
SO
LITTLE
time left. A handful of moments. Of laughter and making love. Of late-night feasts and frantic early-morning sex. He was going to pack so many things into that time. He was going to persuade her the best way he knew to extend the duration of their marriage.

To however long it would take for them to get each other out of their systems.

Now they had nothing.

It was over.

Luca felt a strange kind of relief on one side. That it was all over. The end of things was something he was infinitely familiar and comfortable with.

Hiding in plain sight had never been harder than it was with Sophia. She clawed and ripped, cajoled and kissed her way to the core of him. The rational part of him that reminded him whose son he was and how he had come to be took a beating at her hands.

You are Luca Conti
, it shouted in an eternally tireless voice, forever reminding him what he should and shouldn’t have. It grounded him. It balanced him.

Then there was the second half. The part that he had never made peace with. The part that craved and gobbled up everything and anything, that demystified the most complex puzzles for him in a matter of seconds.

He’d always thought of it as a yawning blackness, forever hungry.

There was beauty in it; there was intellect in it. And above all, it just was.

And it was that part that was thrashing, wild with grief, already mourning the loss of this woman. The woman who above everyone else had seen and identified it. The woman who promised friendship, companionship, acceptance with her words and demands.

But Luca had a lifetime of practice suppressing this part of him. Or at least ignoring it just enough. Pretending that it didn’t exist had only pushed him even more toward the edge. Like Antonio had done with his father.

So instead, he had compartmentalized it. Like a wild dog that was fed just enough from time to time to keep it compliant, to keep it tethered.

He felt Sophia’s hand on his flesh and realized how cold he was. Or maybe that was grief, too.

“Luca?”

Turning toward her fully, he answered her. “It is my own. I finished it this last week. Which is why I didn’t call you.”

Her beautifully intelligent eyes flared then steadied. “A week?”

“Si.”

“
You don’t sleep or stop until you finish it.”

He shrugged.

Now the truth lay between them, a dark specter.

He could see that she hadn’t expected him to agree. She had guessed it but there had been a small hope that it might not be true. That he was the waste of space she thought him rather than...
whatever freak of nature
he was. It was the same realization he had seen in his mama’s eyes for years before she’d left.

The tremulous hope that his last episode of restlessness and headaches and the furiously written music was all just a one off. And the crushing sense of defeat as she realized that he was just like his father. Not just in form but in his mind, too.

As if that wasn’t unbearable enough for her.

With Sophia, however, that bucking lasted only a few seconds. He saw, with a strangely detached fascination, the moment she faced the disconcerting truth and accepted it. Her shoulders squared. Stubborn chin lifted, ready to march into battle.

He laughed then. And because he was so weak, and because he had trapped himself without a way out, he hauled her toward him and kissed her. He, the creative genius with an IQ off the charts, he had thought himself so clever. He would seduce her, he would steal a part of her and then go on his merry way. Or he would take and take of her but give nothing of his own self.

What an arrogant fool he was...

At the back of his mind, furious panic was setting in. Like a gathering wave of blackness that would rip him apart. It sent his heart thudding so loud that he could feel it in his throat.

His lips on Sophia’s became more demanding, rough, desperate. He wanted to sink under her skin and never emerge. He wanted to drown in her forever. He’d barely breathed the pure, shining wonder that was she before she pushed him away. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Is my touch already that distasteful,
cara mia
?” he retorted, unable to keep the ugly jeer out of his tone. Unable to not slide a little into the quagmire of self-pity.

This was what happened when he forgot who and what he was.
Dio
, he became a wounded, raving dog. And if she didn’t leave soon, he would take a chunk out of her.

“What?” She glared at him first. Then her eyes lost that glazed look, her mouth became a purse of displeasure and then she shook her head at him. “You kiss me and I lose all rationality, all common sense. I will not let you sex me up and send me on my way again, with a pat and an orgasm.”

Something in him calmed at the matter-of-fact tone. As long as she didn’t loathe him, he could still keep his dignity even as he ended the one meaningful relationship of his life. He sighed, folded his hands and leaned against the wall. He would last through this, too. He always did. “Sophia, you are making a big—”

“You cheated me, again. You—”

He laughed. “Even you couldn’t rise above making this about you, could you?”

She flushed. “I was just warming up. Your entire life is a lie.”

A shaft of anger pierced him and he welcomed it. He never lost his temper, as a rule. There was enough unpredictability in his head and he ruled the rest of it with a tight leash. Trust Sophia to provoke that, too. “My life is what I need it to be.”

“And why is that? This is not the dark ages to fear...talent,
no
...
talent
is such a lukewarm word, isn’t it?” Her entire body bristled with the force of her words. “To fear such beauty, such...genius, whatever else it is accompanied by. You can’t just...throw it away like this. My God, what is your brother thinking?”

His faith in her wavered then, at the strange light in her eyes. “My brother thinks I have enough problems to deal with without pursuing fame and recognition.”

“Fame and recognition, Luca? That’s not what I mean. There is such beauty in your music, such pain and hope...” Tears filled her eyes and swept down. “I...I just wish... Looking at you, at the perfect foil your looks and your charm provide you, I can hardly believe it.

“Until I close my eyes and that music moves through me. Then I open my eyes and I see you. All of you.”

The sight of Sophia’s tears unmanned him like nothing else.

“Why have you made your life into such a travesty? How can you bear to contain all that and breeze through life as if you were nothing? You have made a joke out of a gift—”

It came at him then, fraying the edges of his temper. Anger and self-loathing and utter helplessness. He stepped away from her. It was the helplessness that flayed him. Always. And he knew Sophia wouldn’t stop until he laid himself bare in front of her. Until he stood there in all his utterly powerless nakedness. Until he satisfied her, too, that this was all he could be.

“I’ve never had a choice to be anything else. I do not believe it is a gift.”

He saw her blanch then. “The headaches and the insomnia... I’m sure they make it very hard. But you said yourself—”

“You’re not listening, Sophia. My father was like this but violent. Antonio neither helped him nor controlled him, with the fear of the Conti name being dragged through mud. Enzo ran wild, buried those headaches in alcohol and drugs. He became abusive. And when my mother told him she was leaving him, he...lost it. He...” His voice broke here, and Luca felt like he was a jagged rock, full of painful edges, never changing. “He forced himself on her. And you know what she had as a result? Me, in his image, every which way.”

There it was, his shame. The very cause of his existence. A mass of ugliness shrieking in the room with them.

Acid burned through his throat. He wanted to sink to his knees and cry as he’d done the day he’d found out. He wanted to throw himself into her arms as he’d done once with his brother. He wanted to...take Sophia and bury himself in her sweetness; he wanted to escape in her arms one more time.

But he would not give in to any of those urges.

To not rail at something he could not change, to not become what his father had, that was in his hands. It was his choice to make.

So he stood there, bending and bucking at the fresh grief that tore through him with vicious claws, but refusing to break. For it had been years since he had felt the loss of the freedom to be anything else. But she made the grief and the loss fresh tonight.

Sophia made everything hurt again, ravage him. Everything was excruciatingly raw again.

Her face had lost all its color; tears filled her eyes and overflowed. Luca held her gaze, locked away his own. Crying had ever only made his headaches worse and all his pain was reflected in her clear gaze, anyway.

She didn’t utter platitudes. She just stood there unflinching, absorbing everything he threw at her. As if his pain was hers. As if she would stand and fight for him, too. As if he, too, had been accepted into that band of people she loved and protected so fiercely... He had never wanted to belong to someone as desperately as he did then. Never wanted to put himself in another’s hands so much.

He never wanted to believe that he could have loved so much.

He weakened then. Almost broke. Until he started speaking again, until he reminded himself. “He was a monster to her. And every time she looked at me,
Mama
broke inside a little. And then I started having these bouts of restlessness, these...episodes. In the beginning, I was barely rational through them. They terrified her.
I terrified her.
In the end, she walked out. So do not dare to tell me that it is a gift I should celebrate or rejoice. Or share with others. Do not presume to tell me how I should live my life.”

* * *

He thought he was like his father. That wasn’t just Antonio’s fear.

It was Luca’s, too.

But Luca, unlike half the thickheaded men she knew, was also extremely self-aware, was so much in touch with his emotions. He had to know he was nothing like his father. That he would never hurt anyone.

“Did you ever get violent like him?” she asked, still processing everything he’d told her. He looked remote, painfully alone. This was his cross to bear, she could see. This fear was the invisible wall she’d been throwing herself against.

He shook his head. “No. I... When I was too young to understand, Antonio thought I was just being a boy. But my brother, he understood it. He would never leave me alone, night or day through it. Headaches, or insomnia, or madly scribbling notes on paper, Leandro stayed with me like a shadow. He...helped me develop self-discipline, told me again and again that just because I was a genius that didn’t mean he would be my servant. But he became more—he became mother and father and friend to me.”

Sophia smiled and nodded, a little of the pressure in her chest relieving. She would kiss Leandro when she saw him next for what he had done for Luca. But there was also panic building inside her. A sense of cavernous loss and a chasm of distance between her and Luca that she couldn’t cross. “Then you’re nothing like him, are you?” She heard the crack in her tone then. The desperation.

But none of it touched him. “You’re a foolish woman if you think I’m not. After everything I just told you.”

Standing helplessly there, Sophia realized it then.

That he was like his father was not a fear. It had become his shield against more hurt. More rejection. It was his reason to separate himself from everyone, his reason to loathe himself.

What else could a mere boy do to protect himself against the violent image that he’d been brought into life through such a horrible act? Against a fate he couldn’t change? And what torture to be always reminded of it, again and again, of the man who’d wreaked that destruction, to have no escape from it?

Something so beautiful, but tainted in ugliness. Much as she pitied his mother, Sophia was filled with a powerless rage. “She should have protected you. It was not your burden to bear.”

For it was nothing but a burden. An unimaginable one. Every inch of her flinched when she imagined how trapped he must feel always. How much he must crave escape from himself...

“How can you blame her of all people?” He was blazingly furious now. But Sophia much preferred him like this instead of that cold smile he’d given her earlier. She preferred the wild, unruly part of him, the part she was sure he hated. “She was innocent in all this.”

“So were you!” she yelled, fresh tears pouring out of her eyes. “She could’ve been stronger for you. She... It was not your fault. None of this is.”

“I’m aware of that. You think I have been punishing myself all these years? Do you see the life I have lived?”

She wiped her cheeks and smiled. “No, and I think that is your greatest accomplishment, isn’t it? Not that beautiful piece of music. Not whatever mysteries your genius mind can solve. Not the big joke you play on the whole world. You laugh through life, you strut through it, you don’t make any apologies for the way you do it...” She was laughing a little and crying a little again. “You...
live it so gloriously, Luca
.”

Her chest constricted, every inch of her yearning to hold him to her, to mold him with her fingers. To feel that hard body against hers and tell him that he was loved. That he was the most glorious, wonderful man she’d ever met. That he’d filled her life with courage, and laughter and love these past months.

That he was better, more than any man she’d ever known.

Genius or not, Luca was generous, kind, magnificent. But now that she knew the reality of him, now that she had heard his music, there was no escape. Her fate was tied to his.

She had toppled into love and it was exactly as she had feared. Her knees were skinned, her body bruised, her heart already taking a beating. And after all her careful maneuvering through it, after being strong for so many years, he was going to rip apart the very fabric of her life.