She had a daughter.
And her daughter wasn’t healthy. Nothing had come together quite right, limbs didn’t attach correctly—a hole in her tiny heart.
Cass had been dumbstruck. The doctor talked. Cass stared at the sonogram. Her daughter—her daughter—wouldn’t survive.
Sitting there in her robe, the cold gel drying on her stomach, time came screeching to a stop. After the doctor finally finished talking, she sat silent, her head buzzing with numbing white noise. And then the cloud cleared in her head and she was herself again. Tough. Determined. The fighter.
“How can I help her?” she’d asked.
The doctor’s brow creased. He didn’t speak. His expression grew more grim. “You can’t,” he said at last.
But it wasn’t an answer she accepted. This was her daughter. Her daughter…and Maximos’s. “There must be something.” She strengthened her voice, and her resolve. “Procedures done in utero.”
“It’s unlikely she’ll even survive birth. If she does, she won’t survive outside of the womb.”
Cass shook her head, furious. She wouldn’t accept a diagnosis like that, and she’d stood then. Brave, fierce, undaunted. “You’re wrong.” Her voice didn’t waver. “She’ll make it. I’ll make sure she survives.”
But Cass had been the one wrong. Two weeks later she woke up in agony. Rushed to the hospital, she miscarried that night.
“Do you want a family?” Maximos asked, ignorant that each of his questions were absolute torture.
“Yes.” Her eyes burned but she wasn’t going to cry, couldn’t cry about the devastating loss. Some pain went too deep, some pain caused insurmountable grief.
Losing Maximos had hurt—badly, badly—but losing their child had broken her heart.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS early afternoon when the picnic at Aci Castello ended with many of the Guiliano guests scattering to either explore the castle ruins or the beautiful beach at the foot of the castello.
It was hot, temperatures soaring for mid-September but Cass stayed with Maximos and his sisters who were stretched out on the blankets, their conversation light, teasing, punctuated with much laughter.
And Maximos teased his sisters as much as they did him. She’d never seen Maximos like this. She’d only ever known the proud Sicilian, the lover and warrior, never the man who cherished his family and was adored in return.
He lay not far from her now, propped up on his elbow. His body was powerful, muscular, beautiful. She tried not to stare and yet she couldn’t not look.
His hand briefly touched his knee, his skin darkly tan, the hair on his thigh even darker, a crisp curling of hair on toned muscle, on taut bronze skin. She’d never met another man put together the way Maximos was. The ease with which he sat, he stood, he moved.
The shape of his head.
The perfect nape.
The broad palm, the strong hand absently stroking his knee.
Just looking at him made her remember last night, made her remember how it felt…skin on skin…his hand on her thigh…his hands everywhere. Watching him now she felt almost sick inside.
“Have you enjoyed today, Cassandra?” Adriana asked, sitting up and stretching.
Suddenly everyone was looking at her, and Cass, caught in the middle of thinking private thoughts, blushed. “I have, thank you.”
It was true, too. She’d enjoyed her city tour of Catania, Sicily’s second largest city, particularly the Roman Theatre uncovered in the 1860s as well as the Piazza Duomo dominated by the Cathedral, Town Hall and Seminary’s exquisite Baroque architecture. But what fascinated her most, was the violent relationship Catania shared with the nearby volcano Mount Etna.
Since Catania’s inception, it had been flooded with lava, rained on with ash, and completely destroyed in 1693 from a cataclysmic earthquake. When the city was rebuilt in the eighteenth century following the earthquake, most of the buildings were constructed from Etna’s black lava.
“I just wish there was more time to explore. I’d love to visit Mount Etna itself,” she added, and glancing up she saw that Maximos was watching her. He wasn’t smiling, either. He looked hard. Focused. Intent.
What was he thinking? There was obviously something on his mind.
“What you must do the next time you come is take the Circumetnea Railway,” Adriana said, cutting a wedge of cheese and snagging a small bunch of red grapes. “It’s not a short trip, about five hours I think, but the train takes you on Etna’s slopes through lava fields as well as vineyards.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Cass answered.
“So when do you think you’ll come back?” Adriana asked, with an innocent look at Maximos.
“She hasn’t even left yet,” Maximos answered, extending a hand to Cass. “But it’s probably time we all packed up and headed back to Ortygia.”
Maximos helped Cass to her feet and after folding several blankets Adriana told Maximos that she and the others could finish up and so Maximos and Cass began a leisurely walk back toward the harbor.
“You’re good with your sisters,” Cass said as they left the others, walking through the tall sun burnt grass surrounding the ruins.
“Aren’t most brothers?”
She shot a swift side glance. He looked calm, unflappable and perhaps that was the secret of powerful, aristocratic Sicilian men. Men like Maximos appeared impervious to storm, war and danger. Men like Maximos appeared to lack nothing and need no one. Men like Maximos were strong, forceful, invincible because they didn’t let themselves feel, and they didn’t expose themselves emotionally, physically. Risks were always anticipated, weighed, calculated. “I don’t know. I was an only child.”
“I never knew that.”
She shrugged. “We never talked about our personal lives. Never discussed childhood, or our families.”
They passed the castello, the sun drenching the stones of the ruins, the intense sun playing over the lava rock, patterning the stones shades of gold and bronze.
“Your parents?” he asked now.
“Divorced. They separated when I was fairly young.”
Cass drew a sharp jagged breath, breathing in the warm air fragrant with sweet dry summer grasses. “Your father passed away a number of years ago, didn’t he?”
“Thirteen years ago. I’d just turned twenty-five.”
Cass glanced up at Maximos. “Were you close?”
“Yes.”
Maximos’s dark, watchful gaze rested on her face.
