The Italian's Doorstep Surprise

He gave a strangled curse and said her name as a prayer. “Honora!”

She exploded, soaring into the sky with a joyful cry, just as he poured into her with a guttural shout.

Afterward, she collapsed over him. They held each other, naked, on the white leather sectional, surrounded by tall windows, as the warm summer breeze oscillated the translucent curtains, caressing their skin.

Turning to her side, Honora rested her head on her husband’s chest, listening to the beat of his heart as he softly stroked her hair, both of them sweaty and tangled in each other, the only sound the distant plaintive call of seagulls.

And it was in listening to his heart that she finally knew her own.

Her eyes flew open.

She was in love with him. Utterly, completely in love with the man in her arms. The man who’d promised to be hers forever. The man who wanted to give her everything. His name. His fortune. His honor. His life.

Everything. Except his heart.

CHAPTER EIGHT

NICO HAD FLOWN the transatlantic route many times since he’d moved to New York and created his real estate development firm. He’d justified the expense of the state-of-the-art Gulfstream G650 because it gave him space and privacy, either to work in the sitting area, or to sleep in the private stateroom. Time was money.

The New York–Rome route had been the most frequent for the last two years, as he’d quietly bought everything his estranged father possessed, both assets and debts. After his father’s death, he’d remained in Rome to distract himself with multiple billion-dollar deals, a new resort on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia and other projects that were a quick flight away—Dubai, Athens, Barcelona.

He’d told himself there was no longer any point in trying to acquire his father’s ancestral home, the Villa Caracciola, in the quaint village of Trevello on the Amalfi Coast. The former palace was decrepit, barely clinging to the rocky hillside. When his father’s elderly widow, Princess Egidia, had still refused to sell it, even at top dollar, he’d let it go. Fine. Let her live there without staff and barely enough money to pay the electric bills. It seemed a just punishment.

But as he traveled back to the Amalfi Coast with his new bride, Nico found he’d changed his mind. Perhaps taking possession of the villa where his young mother had been seduced and betrayed would finally exorcise the ghosts of the past.

It wouldn’t be the main goal of his honeymoon, of course. As they boarded the private jet in New York, all Nico could think about was making love to his wife. After their time together at the Hamptons house, he should have been satiated. Instead, he desired her even more. He was bewitched. Obsessed. Honora would be the main focus of this vacation.

But in spare moments, he would set his lawyers loose on his widowed stepmother, and force her to sell the Villa Caracciola. How hard could it be?

Once the jet was in the air, the smiling flight attendant served them a light meal of fruit and freshly baked crusty bread, cheese and ham, and sparkling water. As Nico and Honora ate, they looked at each other over the glossy oak table, and he felt shivery inside. By her dazzled expression, the way she bit her passion-bruised lips, he thought she must feel the same.

It was only the presence of the flight attendant, flirting with his security chief on the other side of the cabin, that kept Nico from sweeping all the food off the table and taking Honora right there. As it was, he barely tasted the food, and as soon as Honora was done their eyes met, and without a word, they rose and went to the private stateroom in the back.

Locking the door behind them, he kissed her passionately and drew her down to the bed. They remained there for the entire transatlantic flight, making love, sharing a shower in the tiny en suite bathroom—laughing at the tight squeeze of space. Holding each other quietly in bed afterward, they whispered the secrets of their hearts into the darkness.

At least, Honora whispered the secrets of her heart. How lonely she’d been as a child, how she’d never felt smart in school, how she’d always felt like a burden to her family.

Nico didn’t answer. He just listened. Listened? He devoured and consumed her secrets like a miser tucking away pieces of gold. But he himself did not share. He’d learned long ago t

hat being vulnerable was just offering rope for someone else to hang him with.

So he marveled at her fearlessness, as she confided that she’d never thought she deserved to be this happy, not after the way her parents had died in a car crash when she was a child. Somehow she seemed to think it was her fault—he didn’t understand why, but he assumed she had her reasons. And he promised himself that he would never, ever use any of it against her.

Nico was her husband now. Her protector. If he could not love her, or feel emotions as she did, he could at least do one thing: keep her secrets as closely as he kept his own.

By the time the jet was preparing to land at a small airport near the Amalfi Coast, Nico was nearly licking his lips in anticipation of their honeymoon—two weeks of nothing to do but make love to his beautiful, sensual wife, showing her the pleasures of Italy, the delicious pasta and fresh seafood, and swim in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

And then, to cap it all off, in his spare time, he’d toss his wicked stepmother out of her rathole and raze the Villa Caracciola to the ground. In its place, he’d build a brand-new modern mansion in which to start his new dynasty.

He might have no idea how to be a parent, but he could for damn sure build his daughter a palace to live in. Whenever he felt anxious, wondering how on earth he would make his child feel loved when he himself had never known what that felt like, he reassured himself with the thought that his wife could be in charge of nurturing and loving.

Nico would be in charge of building an empire. He would protect and provide for them in a new ancestral home. The Villa Ferraro.

As he and Honora descended the steps of his private jet to the tarmac, it was full morning. The sun was warm, perfectly suited to his white collared shirt and dark trousers, and Honora’s red cotton maternity sundress and sandals. Nico felt tired, having gotten very little sleep on the flight, but happy. What was it that made his wife so addictive, like a drug he could not resist?

And how was it possible that he’d barely noticed her for all those years? How had he never truly seen her until he’d been exhausted and drunk with a bad concussion last Christmas?

“We’re here,” Honora said, gripping the handrail as she stood at the top of the steps, looking out rapturously at the tiny airport nestled behind the hills. “Italy.”