Gina was inconsolable. “I want my mommy,” she sobbed.
“Mommy’s gone to heaven, but you have me, precious,” Caroline crooned. “You’ll always have me. I’ll never leave you, I promise.”
For a moment, he thought Gina was going to accept her. Just briefly, she rested her tearstained face against her aunt’s shoulder. Then she saw him standing on the threshold, and she pulled away, stretching out her arms to him, instead.
“Go away!” she cried to Caroline. “I don’t want you, I want my Zio Paolo.”
Caroline recoiled as if she’d been stabbed in the heart. Without a word, she rose from the edge of the bed to make room for him, and started toward the door.
“Don’t leave, Caroline,” he begged, catching her by the arm as she passed. “Let’s do this together.”
But, “You heard her,” she said. “She wants you, not me.”
“She wants her mother, cara mia, and her father, too. I’m her third choice only.”
“And I’m nothing,” she muttered brokenly, tearing free from his hold, and ran blindly from the room.
He let her go because there was misery enough in the atmosphere at that moment, and Gina needed comfort. But once the child had settled down again, he stopped outside Caroline’s room and knocked.
She didn’t answer, but she’d left it too late to pretend she was asleep. He’d already noticed the seam of light showing under her door, and heard her crying softly.
“You might as well answer, Caroline, because I’m coming in, anyway,” he said.
After a second of heavy silence punctuated only by an occasional sniffle, she spoke, her voice still muffled with tears. “What for? To rub my nose in the fact that my niece would rather deal with the devil himself, than with me?”
“Let me in, and we’ll talk about that,” he replied, not about to engage in any sort of discussion with a closed door between them.
She cracked it open an inch. “What’s the matter?” she inquired bitterly as, taking advantage of the moment, he lost no time stepping quickly into the room and closing the door securely behind him. “Afraid you might be seen fraternizing with the enemy?”
“Yes. The last thing either of us needs just now is for one of my parents to show up. My mother has enough to deal with, and my father would jump to the wrong conclusions. He has rather old-fashioned ideas, one of them being that unmarried female guests do not entertain men in their rooms, at least not when they’re staying under his roof.”
“That must have cramped your style over the years. No wonder you were so fond of the cabana on the beach.”
If he hadn’t known he’d only make matters worse, he’d have laughed at the picture she made. She stood there defiant as a child, hurling insults at him in an effort to stave off another onslaught of tears. She held a wad of sodden tissues balled in her hand, her eyes were all puffy and pink, and her dainty little toes peeped out from beneath the hem of a white embroidered nightgown she’d surely inherited from some oversize Victorian ancestor.
“Caroline,” he said mildly, careful not to betray so much as a smile, “I am not your enemy, nor do I consider you to be mine. This evening, I asked you to marry me, and I’m not here to tell you I’ve changed my mind. Rather, I hope that you now see the wisdom of accepting my proposal.”
“Actually I don’t,” she hiccuped, her words interspersed with a volley of ragged sobs. “Ginahates me, and so does Clemente. They’ll hate you, too, if you make me their stepmother.”
“But I cannot take care of them alone, cara. I need your help, and whether or not you believe it, so do they.”
“They need their mommy,” she insisted, an observation he’d have thought was plain enough for anyone to see, but which, for some reason, brought about an even more violent outburst of tears from her. Turning away from him, she retreated to the bed, collapsed in a heap on the rumpled covers, and buried her face in her hands.
He made a fatal mistake, then. Moved beyond words, he went to her. Lowered himself next to her on the mattress. And unwisely chose to cradle her in his arms.
Her tears splashed warm and salty against his neck, leaving his shirt collar damp. Her hair teased his senses with the fragrance of sweet-smelling shampoo. Her slender frame shook uncontrollably against his chest. And he was lost, all his honorable intentions to give her space and time to consider his marriage proposal, reduced to smoldering dust.
She was a woman in need of a man. And he was not a man to turn away from a woman in need—especially not when her name was Caroline Leighton.
Chapter Six
SHE could have tolerated anything else Paolo threw at her—mockery, scorn, disgust—used it to bolster her battered spirit, and thrown it back at him in kind. But his humanity completed the crushing despair Gina had begun with her rejection.
To Caroline’s acute embarrassment, she found herself sobbing with the abandonment of a child. Past the point of caring how he might view such weakness, she collapsed in his arms and let go.
The floodgates opened. The tears flowed without end, accompanied by convulsive, almost primitive gasps of animal pain. Throughout, he said not a word. Instead he anchored her to him, and waited patiently for the storm to pass.
Just as well. Her senses were numbed to anything but the terrible morass of misery threatening to engulf her. Without his solid strength, she’d have descended too far into hell ever to find her way out again.
At last, though, the spate of tears slowed to a dribble, with only an occasional hiccup to fill the silence. Weak as a newborn lamb, she sagged against him.
His shirt was soaked, but he didn’t seem to mind. Beneath the soggy fabric, his heartbeat, tireless and invincible, marked the passing seconds, its driving energy hers to use for however long she might need it. In a world gone increasingly crazy, he alone offered the haven she craved.
Eventually he said, “Feeling better, Caroline?”
Sounding like a woman with a serious adenoidal condition, she sniffled, “I suppose. It’s just so hard to accept that Gina wouldn’t turn to me for comfort. I understand it, up here.” She rapped her knuckles against her aching head. “I’m practically a stranger to her, after all. But my heart can’t seem to get the message.”
He stroked her hair; long, sweeping caresses of the kind a man might employ to soothe a frightened mare. “You do know you overreacted to her just now, don’t you? That this is about more than just the children?”
“Yes,” she admitted, perilously close to being swept under by another tidal wave of self-pity. “Every time I think I’ve accepted Vanessa’s death, it jumps up and bites me in the face all over again, and the least little thing sets me off. I’m an emotional wreck.”
“You’re allowed to be. We all are. Just because we’ve paid our last respects to those we love, doesn’t mean we’re over losing them.”
“But it’s not good for the children
