were you thinking, Gia?”
She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been doing what she’d needed to do to protect Leo. And she’d do it a million times over.
“I left them a note. They know I’m safe.”
A flicker of dark emotion moved through his gaze. “Why didn’t you come to me?” he growled, the undertone of frustration raking a path across her skin. “You know I would have helped you.”
Her lashes lowered. “We were over, Santo. We had both moved on. What was the point?”
“That’s a lie,” he countered softly. “Why did you leave that morning without saying goodbye, Gia? Why run?”
“Santo,” she breathed. “Don’t.”
His mouth twisted. “Don’t ask why you walked into my arms that night and gave me your innocence? How we could have shared what we shared only for you to walk away and marry another man? Why I woke up the next morning alone, without an explanation? Not a note. Nothing.” A lift of his eyebrow. “Which of those things do you imagine confounds me the most?”
She closed her eyes, a hot, searing pain moving through her until it hurt to breathe. “You knew I was promised to him, Santo. You knew I was going to marry him. There was never any doubt about that.”
“I thought you’d changed your mind.” He threw the words at her in a charged voice that skittered through her insides. “You were emotional that night, Gia. Intensely vulnerable. You didn’t want that kind of a life for yourself. You wanted better.”
“And then I realized what I was doing. I was getting engaged in front of half of Las Vegas the next night. How was I going to walk away? It would have destroyed my father’s honor. His reputation. The Lombardi family’s reputation... It was not undoable, no matter how much I wanted it to be.”
She was Sicilian. A Castiglione. That she would marry Franco Lombardi, the heir to a Las Vegas gambling dynasty, was a fact that had been cast in stone since the day she’d turned fourteen, when her father had approved the match between his only daughter and the eldest Lombardi son. A match that would cement his empire.
Pursuing the career she’d always wanted, marrying a man she loved and walking away from her destiny had never been options for her, something she’d foolishly forgotten during that impulsive, explosive night with Santo.
There had been no more time left to wonder what if. To look for solutions that didn’t exist. To want what she could never have.
She drew in a deep breath. Then exhaled as she met Santo’s dark, tumultuous gaze. “I convinced myself it would be easier if I simply left,” she said huskily. “There was no future for us, Santo. You know that.”
He stepped closer, his expensive aftershave infiltrating her senses with devastating effect. “You know what I think?” he murmured, his warm breath skating across her cheek. “I think we will never know because you walked away, Gia. Because it was easier for you to surrender to the inevitable than to face what was between us.”
The brush of her bare leg against the muscled length of his thigh unearthed a shiver that reverberated through her. Heat pooled beneath her skin at the memory of what all that hard muscle could do. How it could take her to heaven and back. How it might have been worth every disastrous moment that had followed.
She watched, hypnotized, as his gaze darkened to midnight. As the power of what they created together took hold. One step and she would be in his arms. One tilt of her head and her mouth would be on his.
It would be magical. Unforgettable. Which had always been the problem between her and Santo. Because if he knew what she really was, who she was at her core, what she’d done, he wouldn’t want her anymore.
Her pulse was a frantic, flurried beat she couldn’t seem to control, and she took an unsteady step backward. “You’re right,” she agreed breathlessly, staring up into all that black heat. “It’s history under the bridge. You have moved on and so have I. So maybe we should agree on that and call it a night.”
A myriad of emotions flickered across his hard-boned face. As if he was debating whether or not to agree with her. She drew in a breath and waited, only to have his attention captured by something behind her, a bemused expression moving across his face.
An ominous thud started somewhere in the region of her heart. Warning bells rang in her head as she turned around slowly to find Leo padding out onto the porch, his thumb stuck in his mouth, his blue blanket trailing behind him. Clearly woken by their raised voices, he directed a big dark-eyed stare at Santo.
Gia stepped toward him, desperate to head off disaster. But there was no way to prevent it. Her son, cheeks flushed from sleep, golden hair ruffled, took his thumb out of his mouth, walked the last couple of steps toward her and held his chubby arms out to her. “Up.”
She picked him up and cuddled him close to her chest, her pulse pounding so loud in her ears it was like a freight train running through her head. Santo took in the scene, a frown creasing his brow. The curiosity in his gaze deepened as he stared at Leo. Then his eyes widened, shock flaring in those midnight depths.
It was like looking at two mirror images of each other.
She saw the moment realization dawned in Santo’s eyes. Watched the blood drain from his face.
* * *
Santo took an unsteady breath as he stared at velvety dark eyes that could have been his own. At the noticeable cowlick that had infuriated all three of the Di Fiore brothers as they’d grown into adulthood. He ruffled the hair of the child in front of him.
It could not be. The child could be Lombardi’s... Except there was no sign of the angular-faced Italian in the little boy clinging to Gia—there was only the identical image staring back at him. A bone-deep recognition echoed through him—a deep, primal pull in his gut unlike anything he’d ever felt in his life.
And then there was the panic arrowing through Gia’s eyes. The stark fear painted across her face as she held the little boy close. The events of the night started piling up in quick succession, bombarding him with the impossible. Why Gia had been so terrified to see him. Why she’d been so anxious to get rid of him.
Because she’d been guarding a secret she’d spent four years preserving.
Somehow, he found the presence of mind to pull himself together. “I didn’t know you had a little boy.” He set his gaze on Gia’s stricken face. “How old is he?”
She didn’t answer. For so long, so damn long, his heart climbed into his throat. “Dannazione, Gia. Answer the question.”
“He is three years old.”
The earth gave way beneath his feet, any reality he’d thought he’d ever known replaced by a grey haze that threatened to envelop him whole. But the little boy had settled now and was staring at him with big, dark, curious eyes that held the slightest bit of apprehension, and the silence on the porch was deafening.
“Friend?” the little boy whispered, looking up at Santo.
Friend? Santo almost choked on the word.
A strangled
