The Illegitimate King (Castaldini Crown 3)

She shakily dragged herself up to her elbows. “What?”

He muttered something indistinct then exhaled. “Nothing. Just what the hell are you doing here anyway, Clarissa?”

She leaned over him, feeling strain still clutching his every muscle. She needed to alleviate it, had to let him know he wasn’t alone in dealing with demons that wouldn’t let go. “I came looking for you. Then I…heard you. I had to come in, Ferruccio. You were having a nightmare, and I…I wanted to help.” Her hands trembled as she grasped his arm, pulled it away from his eyes. “I still do.”

Suspicion flared in his gaze before it dissipated and something else took over. Something that, before the past fraught minutes since she’d walked in on him, she hadn’t believed him capable of feeling, let alone exhibiting. Naked emotions. Intense, permeating, sincere. She could read them all as if they were being generated inside her, were hers to experience, to revel in, to share. Relief, gratitude, need—or solace, for closeness.

He grabbed one of her hands, pressed it to his chest as his other one trembled its way to her throat. He let out a shuddering breath, as if venting the scare of his life. “Dio Santo, Clarissa…I could have hurt you.”

She couldn’t bear his guilt. She reached out with her free hand, smoothed his forehead. She cursed herself when her lips trembled and lost their grip on her smile, let it slip off. “You didn’t. It was like a new kind of roller coaster. You have this flattering way of making me feel like I weigh five pounds instead of a hundred and fifty.”

Those painstakingly sculpted lips of his, which had been pressed into an austere line since he’d jerked awake, relaxed a bit, filled with a measure of his humor and sensuality. “I’m just sorry you got in the way when I was still fighting with whatever it was that invaded my dreams. For a moment there, I couldn’t tell that I was awake, that it wasn’t happening…anymore.”

She sat up, tucked her legs beneath her, used the movement, the moment, to steady herself after that last “anymore” played havoc with her imagination, her heartbeats. “You’re not talking about what you’ve experienced during this nightmare alone.”

His eyes escaped hers. Then he seemed to decide not to evade the issue, nodded. “There’ve been some…bad times. They come back from time to time. I’m not sure why. It’s been a very long time since I was a kid on the street fending for my life. The memories have dulled to a distant echo.”

“Have they?” She didn’t buy that for a second. He didn’t know he was talking to an expert in childhood trauma here. “Some memories remain as clear as ever. They even take on sharper clarity with time, become augmented, having been experienced through and recorded by the impressionability and exaggeration of a child’s psyche.”

His eyes snapped back to hers, amazement glinting in their silver steel depths. She could almost hear him wondering where she got such insight, debating whether to broach the subject. She steeled herself for his questions, preparing evasions, but he seemed to let it go, as she’d fervently hoped, steering away from the land mine of going into her personal history, focusing on his revisited trauma. “I wasn’t exactly a child when I ran away from my last foster home.”

“You were before you ran away. The reasons you left must have been as…unerasable. And then, thirteen isn’t that grown-up. I can’t even imagine spending one day on the streets now, let alone when I was that age. To be that young and know I have no one to run to, no one to think of me or protect me, to even shelter me and give me a bite to eat when I’m starving…how did you do it, Ferruccio? How did you survive all that?”

His gaze wavered. His voice grew thick, impeded. “Millions of kids survive that and worse every day, all over the world.”

“None have become what you’ve become. There’s only one explanation for that. You’re a miracle, Ferruccio Selvaggio.”

He looked completely taken aback. Flabbergasted. He looked at her as if he thought he was still dreaming, or wading through the aftereffects of a mind-tampering drug.

He must be trying to understand what had brought on her change in attitude. To tell him that, she’d have to tell him things she never wanted to reveal. To him of all people.

Apart from the shock of hearing her admitting her admiration, her awe of him, she could see he was nowhere near back to his steely controlled self. Judging by the redness creeping beneath his razor-sharp cheekbones, he was embarrassed by her praise!

Before she could tell him it wasn’t praise, just statement of fact, he shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any miracle involved in what I achieved. I’ve had as many good breaks as I’ve had bad ones. I haven’t only been exposed to monsters who live to prey on the vulnerable just because they can, I’ve been gifted with finding angels who help and guide, also just because they can. I dream of them, too, even if their guest appearances don’t elicit such a…dramatic response. When all is said and done, I have more to be thankful for than any man I know. And if the occasional nightmare pops up every now and then as a sort of a ‘thou art mortal’ reminder, it all comes with the territory.”

Her lips twitched at his attempt at levity. But not with humor. With aching. She’d so recently likened him to a drunk-on-power, malicious god. His reference now to what kept him human made her realize more than ever how indescribable his ordeals had been, that he still struggled, that his imperviousness was only a perfected act.

And she realized another vital thing. The likely reason behind his reputation as a heartless womanizer who didn’t let women stay the night after he’d had his pleasure. He’d wouldn’t want to expose what she’d just witnessed, what he must consider a weakness, to another human being. He probably never thought of seeking solace.

Though he hadn’t chosen to expose that Achilles’ heel to her, he’d easily accepted the fact that she witnessed it and had bared more of his inner self willingly, almost eagerly.

“Grazie molto, mia bella unica.”

She stared at him, truly at a loss. “For what?”

He cupped her cheek in his large, warm hand, stroked a gentle finger across the arch of her eyebrow, down her nose to the slightly parted lines of her lips. “For going up against the monsters that go bump inside my head.”

The suddenness with which communion, emotional and sublime, switched to awareness, carnal and greedy, was dizzying.