STEFANO had so much strain etched on his taut face he looked a lot older then he was. His hair was shorter now. He was a little too thin. His extrovert ebullience appeared to have deserted him. His dark eyes evaded both Milly’s gaze and Gianni’s.
Milly glanced at Gianni and just winced. The Sicilian side of Gianni’s brooding temperament was in the ascendant. He looked grim as hell, but kind of satisfied too, content that his kid brother should be nervous as a cat in his radius. Milly began to revise her assumption that she had been punished more than Stefano. The two brothers had once been pretty close. Stefano, for all his brash talk and swagger, had been heavily dependent on Gianni’s approval. And Gianni, she now recognised, had cut him loose from that support system.
Milly stood up. ‘Anybody want a drink?’ she gushed, to break the awful silence.
‘No, thanks…I need to talk,’ Stefano announced tautly.
‘We’ll talk elsewhere,’ Gianni drawled, smooth as glass, but he shot Milly a grim, assessing glance, evidently having expected her to be more discomfited by Stefano’s presence.
‘I don’t keep a hair shirt in my wardrobe,’ Milly told Gianni defiantly.
‘Milly has to be here,’ Stefano stated stiffly. ‘And you have to promise to hear me out, Gianni. I don’t care what you do afterwards, but you’ve got to give me the chance to explain things.’
‘Is there some point to that curious proviso?’ Gianni enquired very drily.
Stefano lowered his head. ?
??You’re my brother and I’ve wronged you,’ he breathed tightly. ‘I’ve lied to you, deceived you, and I stood by and did nothing when I could have helped you. I followed the tabloid coverage after you got married. I found out what had happened to Milly…the hit-and-run and everything since…and I guess I just couldn’t live with myself any more.’
Milly sank back down into her chair because her knees were wobbling. As far as the two men were concerned she might as well not have been there, and if the knowledge of their marriage had scared Stefano into confession mode, she had no desire to distract him.
Gianni was very still. ‘How have you lied?’
‘About that night with Milly in New York,’ his brother said gruffly.
‘But you had no reason to lie. I saw the worst with my own eyes!’ Gianni shot back at him.
‘There’s no way you’d ever have forgiven me for what I did!’ Stefano burst out with sudden rawness. ‘You’d have thought I was some sort of pervert. I had to lie! It was me or her, surely you can see that?’
Gianni was now the colour of ash beneath his bronzed skin, his hard facial bones fiercely prominent. ‘Milly said you assaulted her…’
The silence hung like a giant sheet of glass, ready to crash.
Milly cleared her throat and spoke up. ‘Stefano told me he loved me. He was drunk. I was feeling sick and I told him to go home,’ she explained. ‘I heard the front door slam while I was in the bathroom. I thought he’d left…’
‘I opened the door and then I changed my mind,’ the younger man mumbled.
‘So I got into bed and went to sleep.’
Gianni scrutinised her taut face and then focused with mounting incredulity on his brother.
‘I saw her sleeping. I just wanted to kiss her. That’s all. I swear!’ Stefano protested, weak as water now beneath the appalled look of menace and disgust flaring in Gianni’s diamond-hard eyes.
‘I think maybe you thought that if you kissed me, you’d be able to prove that I could respond to you,’ Milly countered with contempt. ‘You were angry with me. I’d dented your ego, and just for that you frightened the life out of me!’
‘I was drunk as a skunk…I hardly knew what I was doing!’
Gianni’s hands coiled into powerful punitive fists, and as he absorbed his kid brother’s mute terror a look of very masculine revulsion crossed his lean, strong face. ‘Accidenti…I wonder how many sex offenders say that.’
Milly sprang upright again, her fine features flushed with turbulent emotion, and suddenly she was erupting like a volcano. ‘You needn’t sound so blasted pious!’ she fired bitterly at Gianni. ‘If Stefano had been a rapist, you’d have given him open house. You just walked out and left me with him!’
Beneath the bite of that derisive attack Gianni froze, to stare back at Milly with stricken eyes.
Stefano’s shoulders slumped as he too looked at Milly. ‘I didn’t mean to terrify you, but when you woke up you went crazy, like you were being attacked—’
‘She was being attacked,’ Gianni slotted in from between clenched teeth, his Sicilian accent thick as molasses as he visibly struggled to control his own rising fury. ‘When you touch a woman without her consent, it’s an assault.’
‘I panicked! When you saw us, I was only trying to hold her still until she calmed down—’