“I needed him here in London. I planned that before we even met. I didn’t think he could do something like this, either,” Alessandro bit out, giving his face a tired rub. “But he was directing his anger with me onto you. He’s always been jealous. Ever since my father died and my grandfather and uncle turned their attention to grooming me to run things. He felt passed over.”
She knew the basics of their family history, that Alessandro had been twelve when he lost his father. His grandfather, Ermanno, had already been semiretired. Alessandro’s mother and her children had moved into the castello with Ermanno so he could mentor Alessandro himself. Alessandro’s uncle Giacomo, Primo’s father, had taken over the day-to-day running of things until Alessandro was old enough to do it himself.
“Primo’s father was in charge for a decade, about as long as my own father was. He’s always believed he has as much right to take over as I do. We fought about it more than once in our teens. Quite honestly, if my grandfather had seen Primo as the better leader, he would have named him the successor, but Primo was always driven by passion and not in the right way. I thought we had put it to rest when I gave him this position in London. He had the freedom to grow the branch under his own terms. I believed his loyalty was unshakeable.”
The disillusioned note in his voice almost made her sympathize, but she resented his blind belief at the same time.
“That’s why I trusted him,” she said. His misjudgment had shaken her belief in him and thus her belief in herself. She’d never had much faith in her parents beyond the expectation that they would keep her fed and physically safe, but Alessandro had seemed to offer more than that. Then he had delivered...this.
She never should have counted on him. But she had.
“Did you trust him? Because you told the paramedics you didn’t want him near you or the baby,” he said pointedly.
“It seemed paranoid when I said it.” She was reluctant even now to admit how much a victim she’d come to feel around Primo. He’d been downright sinister catching her in those first contractions and saying with such concern, “Go lie down. I’ll call the hospital.” Who imagined anyone would lie about something like that? It was only as things had progressed, as fear for her life and her baby’s had gripped her, that she’d started to suspect he was deliberately delaying things.
“What could he possibly have thought to gain by doing something like this?” The magnitude of the crime kept striking like aftershocks from a quake.
“It wasn’t something he planned,” he said with grim cast to his hard features. “The opportunity presented and he acted. He admitted that much. A paternity question down the road would have caused us a great deal of suffering and could have opened doors to his own heir taking control over my false one. That’s as far as he got with thinking it through.”
“Mio Dio,” she breathed, sliding her arm up over her eyes, hiding from the thought of Alessandro questioning her faithfulness a year from now, when they might have discovered the baby wasn’t his.
Suddenly Alessandro’s voice was right beside her. “He was behind some death threats I received earlier this year.”
“What?” she gasped, dropping her arm.
“I didn’t tell you because you were already anxious about the pregnancy. I wanted you near the specialists here in London anyway, but it seemed safer for you to be out of Naples. That’s why I haven’t brought you home, even to visit.” His jaw looked carved from marble.
“All this because he’s jealous? No, he was punishing me,” she said with an appalled crack in her voice.
“He wasn’t happy about our marriage, that’s true. Had he married you and been given control of your father’s fortune, he would have been in a better position to challenge me over controlling the family company. When I married you, I became untouchable. There really was no other way for him to bring me down except to attack my personal life.”
“That’s sick,” she said, recoiling. “Did you know that? That his reasons for talking with my father were more about making a strategic move against you than wanting a wife?”
A very brief pause, then, “I was aware there could be certain challenges if he bettered his position,” he said carefully. Too carefully.
“You married me to prevent him from gaining an advantage,” she breathed. She hadn’t thought she could be any more shocked, but she was. All those tiny details she’d recalled from that first evening took on new meaning. His initial air of disapproval— “You were planning to stop it, one way or another.” His question about whether she wanted a love match... “You wanted to talk me out of it, but you proposed instead. It was a calculated move to keep him in his place.”