A Hunger for the Forbidden Page 12

  “Did your mom say it to you?”

  “No. A cook we had, I think.”

  “Oh. It’s the kind of thing my mother probably would have said to me someday. If she had lived.”

  “You miss her still.”

  “I always will. But you lost your father.”

  Guilt, ugly, strangling guilt, tightened in his chest. “Yes.”

  “So you understand.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You don’t miss him?”

  “Never.”

  “I know your father was hard to deal with. I know he was … I know he was shady like my father but surely you must—”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Will you miss your father?”

  “I think so. He’s not a wonderful man, but he’s the only father I have.”

  “I would have been better off without one than the one that I had.”

  Alessia moved to put the pasta into the pan. “You say that with a lot of certainty.”

  “Trust me on this, Alessia.”

  They stood in silence until the pasta was done. Matteo got bowls out of the cupboard and set them on the counter and Alessia dished them both a bowl of noodles and sauce.

  “Nothing like a little post … you know, snack,” she said, lifting her bowl to her lips, her eyes glued to his chest. “You’re barely dressed.”

  “You should talk,” he said.

  She looked down. “I’m dressed.”

  “Turn around.” She complied, flashing her bare butt to him. “That’s not dressed, my darling wife.”

  “Are you issuing a formal complaint?”

  “Not in the least. I prefer you this way.”

  “Well, the apron is practical. Don’t go tearing it off me if you get all impatient.” She took a bit of pasta and smiled, her grin slightly impish. It made it hard to breathe.

  There was something so normal about this. But it wasn’t a kind of normal he knew. Not the kind he’d ever known. He wasn’t the sort of man who walked barefoot in the grass and then ate pasta at midnight in his underwear.

  He’d never had a chance to be that man. He wondered again at what it would be like if all the things of the world could simply fall away.

  “Matteo?”

  “Yes?”

  “I lost you for a second. Where were you?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “Mmm.” She nodded. “I’m tempted to ask you what about but I sort of doubt you’d want to tell me.”

  “About my father,” he said, before he could stop himself.

  “You really don’t miss him?”

  “No.” A wall of flame filled his mind. An image of the warehouse, burning. “Never.”

  “My father has mainly ignored my existence. The only time he’s ever really acknowledged me is if he needs something, or if he’s angry.”

  Rage churned in Matteo’s stomach. “Did he hit you?”

  “Yes. Not beatings or anything, but if I said something that displeased him, he would slap my face.”

  “He should feel very fortunate he never did so in front of me.”

  Alessia was surprised at the sudden change in Matteo’s demeanor. At the ice in his tone. For a moment, they’d actually been getting along. For a moment, they’d been connecting with clothes on, and that was a rarity for the two of them.

  He was willing to try. He’d told her that. And he would be faithful. Those were the only two promises she required from him. Beyond that, she was willing to take her chances.

  Willing to try to know the man she’d married. Past her fantasy of him as a hero, as her white knight, and as the man he truly was. No matter what that might mean.

  “I handled it,” she said.

  “It was wrong of him.”

  She nodded. “I know. But I was able to keep him from ever hitting one of the other kids and that just reinforced why I was there. Yes, I bore the brunt of a lot of it. I had to plan parties and play hostess, I had to take the wrath. But I’ve been given praise, too.”

  “I was given praise by my father sometimes, too,” Matteo said. There was a flatness to his tone, a darkness in his words that made her feel cold. “He spent some time, when I was a bit older, teaching me how to do business like a Corretti. Not the business we presented to the world. The clean, smooth front. Hotels, fashion houses. All of that was a cover then. A successful cover in its own right, but it wasn’t the main source of industry for our family.”

  “I think … I mean, I think everyone knows that.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they do. But do you have any idea how far-reaching it was? How much power my father possessed? How he chose to exercise it?”

  She shook her head, a sick weight settling in her stomach. “What did he do, Matteo? What did he do to you?”

  “To me? Nothing. In the sense that he never physically harmed me.”

  “There are other kinds of harm.”

  “Remember I told you I wasn’t a criminal? That’s on a technicality. It’s only because I was never convicted of my crimes.”

  “What did he do to you, Matteo?” Her stomach felt sick now, and she pushed her bowl of food across the counter, making her way to where Matteo was standing.

  “When I was fifteen he started showing me the ropes. The way things worked. He took me on collection calls. We went to visit people who owed him money. Now, my father was only ever involved on the calls where people owed him a lot of money. People who were in serious trouble with him. Otherwise, his men, his hired thugs, paid the visits.”

  “And he took you on these … visits?”

  Matteo nodded, his arms crossed over his bare chest. There was a blankness in his eyes that hurt, a total detachment that froze her inside.

  “For the first few weeks I just got to watch. One quick hit to the legs. A warning. A bone-breaking warning, but much better than the kind of thing he and his thugs were willing to do.”

  “Dio. You should never have … He should never have let you see …” She stopped talking then, because she knew there was more. And that it was worse. She could feel the anxiety coming off him in waves.

  She took a step toward him, put her hand on his forearm. It was damp with sweat, his muscles shaking beneath her touch.

  “One night he asked me to do it,” he said.

  His words were heavy in the room, heavy on her. They settled over her skin, coating her, making her feel what he felt. Dirty. Ashamed. She didn’t know how she was so certain that was what he felt, but she was.

  “What happened?” She tried to keep her voice steady, tried to sound ready to hear it. Tried to be ready to hear it. Because he needed to say it without fear of recrimination from her. Without fear of being told there was something wrong with him.

  She knew that as deeply, as innately, as she knew his other feelings.

  “I did it,” he said. “My father asked me to break a man’s legs because he owed the family money. And I did.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  MATTEO WAITED FOR the horror of his admission to sink in. Waited for Alessia to turn from him, to run away in utter terror and disgust. She should. He wouldn’t blame her.

  He also desperately wanted her to stay.

  “Matteo …”

  “These hands,” he said, holding them out, palms up, “that have touched you, have been used in ways that a man should never use his hands.”

  “But you aren’t like that.”

  He shook his head. “Clearly I am.”

  “But you didn’t enjoy it.”

  “No. I didn’t enjoy it.” He could remember very vividly how it had felt, how the sweat had broken out on his skin. How he had vomited after. His father’s men had found that terribly amusing. “But I did it.”

  “What would your father have done to you if you hadn’t?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does, Matteo, you were a boy.”

  “I was a
boy, but I was old enough to know that what my father did, what he was, was wrong.”

  “And you were trapped in it.”

  “Maybe. And maybe that would be an acceptable excuse for some people, but it’s not for me.”

  “Why not? You were a boy and he abused you. Tell me, and be honest, what did he say he would do to you if you didn’t do it?”

  Matteo was afraid for one moment that his stomach might rebel against him. “He told me if I couldn’t do it to a grown man, there were some children in the village I might practice on.”

  Alessia’s face contorted with utter horror. “Would he have done that?”

  “I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to find out, either.”

  “He made you do it.”

  “He manipulated me into doing it, but I did it.”

  “How?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  “It’s easy to do things, anything, when you can shut the emotion down inside yourself. I learned to do that. I learned that there was a place inside of myself as cold as any part of my father’s soul. If I went there, it wasn’t so hard to do.” It was only after that he had broken. In the end, it was both the brokenness, and the cold, that had saved him.

  His father had decided he wasn’t ready. Didn’t want his oldest son, the one poised to take over his empire, undermining his position by showing such weakness.

  And after, the way he’d dealt with the knowledge that he’d lived with a monster, the way he’d dealt with knowing that he was capable of the very same atrocities, was to freeze out every emotion. He would not allow himself to want, to crave power or money in the way his father did. Passion, need, greed, were the enemy.

  Then he’d seen Alessia. And he had allowed her a place inside him, a place that was warm and bright, one that he could retreat to. He saw happiness through her eyes when he watched her. His attraction to her not physical, but emotional. He let a part of himself live through her.

  And that day when he’d seen those men attacking her, the monster inside him had met up against passion that had still existed in the depths of him, and had combined to create a violence that was beyond his control. One that frightened him much more than that moment of controlled violence in his father’s presence had.

  More even than that final act, the one that had removed his father from his life forever.

  Because it had been a choice he’d made. It had been fueled by his emotion, by his rage, and no matter how deserving those men had been … it was what it said about himself that made him even more certain that it must never happen again. That he must never be allowed to feel like that.

  “Do you see?” he asked. “Do you see what kind of man I am?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. You’re a good man, with a tragic past. And the things that happened weren’t your fault.”

  “When I went back home the day of your attack, there was still blood all over me. I walked in, and my father was there. He looked at me, saw the evidence of what had happened. Then he smiled, and he laughed,” Matteo spat. “And he said to me, ‘Looks like you’re ready now. I always knew you were my son.’”

  That moment was burned into his brain, etched into his chest. Standing there, shell-shocked by what had happened, by what he had done. By what had nearly happened to Alessia. And having his father act as though he’d made some sort of grand passage into manhood. Having him be proud.

  “He was wrong, Matteo, you aren’t like him. You were protecting me, you weren’t trying to extort money out of those men. It’s not the same thing.”

  “But it’s the evidence of what I’m capable of. My father had absolute conviction in what he did. He could justify it. He believed he was right, Alessia, do you understand that? He believed with conviction that he had a right to this money, that he had the right to harm those who didn’t pay what he felt he was owed. All it takes is a twist of a man’s convictions.”

  “But yours wouldn’t be …”

  “They wouldn’t be?” He almost told her then, but he couldn’t. The words he could never say out loud. The memory he barely allowed himself to have. “You honestly believe that? Everyone is corruptible, cara. The only way around it is to use your head, to learn what is right, and to never ever let your desire change wrong to right in your mind. Because that’s what desire does. My father’s desire for money, your father’s desire for power, made them men who will do whatever it takes to have those things. Regardless of who they hurt. And I will never be that man.”

  “You aren’t that man. You acted to save me, and you did it without thought to your own safety. Can’t you see how good that is? How important?”

  “I don’t regret what I did,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I had a good reason to do it. But how many more good reasons could I find? If it suited me, if I was so immersed in my own needs, in my own desires, what else might I consider a good reason? So easily, Alessia, I could be like Benito was.”

  “No, that isn’t true.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’re … good.”

  He laughed. “You are so certain?”

  “Yes. Yes, Matteo, I’m certain you’re good. Do you know what I remember from that day? The way you held me after. Do you know how long it had been since someone had tried to comfort me? Since someone had wiped away my tears? Not since my mother. Before that, I had done all of the comforting, and then when I needed someone? You were there. And you told me it would be okay. More than that, you made it okay. So don’t tell me you aren’t good. You are.”

  He didn’t believe her, because she didn’t know the whole truth. But he wanted to hold her words tightly inside of him, wanted to cling to her vision of him, didn’t want her to see him any other way.

  “I got blood on your face,” he said, his voice rough. “That day when I wiped your tears.”

  She looked at him with those dark, beautiful eyes. “It was worth it.” She took a step toward him, taking his hand in hers. “Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

  And he was powerless to do anything but follow her.

  Alessia woke the next morning with a bone-deep feeling of contentment. She noticed because she’d never felt anything like it before. Had never felt like things were simply right in the world. That there wasn’t anything big left to accomplish. That she just wanted to stay and live in the moment. A moment made sweeter by the fact that there was nothing pressing or horrible looming in the future.

  Then she became conscious of a solid, warm weight at her back, a hand resting on her bare hip. And she was naked, which was unusual because she normally slept in a nightgown.

  A nightgown that was torn.

  A smile stretched across her face and she rolled over to face Matteo. Her lover. Her husband. He was still sleeping, the lines on his forehead smoothed, his expression much more relaxed than it ever was when he was awake.

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek, the edge of his mouth. She wanted him again. It didn’t matter how many times he’d turned to her in the middle of the night, she wanted him again. It didn’t matter if they had sex, or if he just touched her, but she wanted him. His presence, his kiss, him breathing near her.

  This moment was one she’d dreamed of for half of her life. This moment with Matteo Corretti. Not with any other man.

  She’d woken up next to him once before, but she hadn’t been able to savor it. Her wedding had been looming in the not-too-distant future and guilt and fear had had her running out the door before Matteo had woken up.

  But not this morning. This morning, she would stay with him until he woke. And maybe she would share his bed again tonight. And every night after that. He was her husband, after all, and it only seemed right that they sleep together.

  They were going to try to make a real marriage out of a legal one.

  He’ll never love you.

  She ignored the chill that spread through her veins when that thought invaded her mind. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t dwell on it. Right now, she
had a hope at a future she could be happy with. Matteo in her bed. In her life.

  And she was having his baby. At some point, that would sink in and not just be a vague, sort of frightening, sort of wonderful thought.

  But right now, she was simply lingering in the moment. Not wondering if Matteo’s feelings would ever change, not worrying about changing diapers.

  He shifted then, his eyes fluttering open. “Good morning,” he said. So much different than his greeting the morning after their wedding.

  “Good morning, handsome.”

  “Handsome?”

  “You are. And I’ve always wanted to say that.” To you.

  “Alessia … you are something.”

  “I know, right?” Matteo rolled over onto his back and she followed him, resting her breasts on his chest, her chin propped up on her hands. “Last night was wonderful.”

  He looked slightly uncomfortable. Well, she imagined she wasn’t playing the part of blasé sophisticate very well, but in her defense … she wasn’t one. She was a women with very little sexual experience having the time of her life with a man who’d spent years as the star attraction in her fantasies. It was sort of hard to be cool in those circumstances.

  He kissed her, cupping her chin with his thumb and forefinger. She closed her eyes and hummed low in her throat. “You’re so good at that,” she said when they parted. “I feel like I have a post-orgasm buzz. Is that a thing?”

  He rolled onto his side again and moved into a sitting position, not bothering to cover himself with the blankets.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve ever experienced it.”

  “Oh.” That hurt more than it should have. Not because she wanted him to have experienced post-orgasm buzz with anyone else, but because she wished he’d experienced it with her.

  “What is it, cara?”

  “Nothing.” She put her palm flat on his chest and leaned in, her lips a whisper from his. Then his phone started vibrating on the nightstand.

  “I have to take that,” he said, moving away from her. He turned away from her and picked it up. “Corretti.” Every muscle in his back went rigid. “What the hell do you want, Alessandro?”

  Alessia’s stomach rolled. Alessandro. She would rather not think about him right at the moment. She felt bad for the way things had ended. He’d been nice enough to her, distant, and there had been no attraction, but he’d been decent. And she’d sort of waited until the last minute to change her mind.