The Sicilian's Marriage Arrangement

Hope felt sorry for her unknown grandmother. Marriage to Joshua Reynolds could not have been easy. “Well, I wanted to marry a man who loved me and was capable of saying so.”

“You wanted Luciano.”

“Not trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey! Do you have any idea how humiliated I’m feeling right now? I hurt, Grandfather, all the way to my toes.”

“What’s that boy done?”

Momentarily disconcerted at having her ultra-alpha husband referred to as a boy, she waited a second to answer. “It’s not what he’s done. It’s what you did. You set me up.”

“I set you up all right, I set you up with Luciano.”

“You set me up to be rejected by a man whose pride had been stomped on by your ruthless arrangement. You can’t force a man like Luciano to do something so personal as get married and expect it all to work out in the end.”

“Don’t see why not. He had to get married someday. Why not to you?” Joshua didn’t even sound sorry.

“Because he doesn’t love me,” she fairly shouted across the phone lines.

“No reason to yell, missy. I may be old, but I hear just fine. The man wants you and for him, that’s probably as close to love as any woman will ever get.”

She curled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. Could her grandfather be right?

“You should not have done it.”

“Hope, you wouldn’t take anything else from me.”

“I didn’t want anything, just your love.” That was all she’d ever wanted from the two most important men in her life and the one thing she was destined not to get. “I’ve got to go.”

“No, wait, child.”

“What?” she asked with a lackluster voice.

“I do love you.”

Four words she’d longed to hear since she was five years old and lost both parents. They touched her now, healed some things inside her, but could not soothe the pain from Luciano’s rejection and her grandfather’s part in it.

“I love you, too,” she said nevertheless.

He cleared his throat, the sound harsh. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I can see that.”

They hung up, her grandfather sounding not quite his normal confident, gruff self.

She decided to take a walk and slipped her feet into a pair of sandals. Once she was beyond the formal gardens surrounding the villa, she let her feet wander where they would.

So many things were tumbling through her mind, she couldn’t hold a single thought for longer than a second.

Luciano had been blackmailed into marrying her. She had no right to hold him, even less chance at securing his love. How could he come to love a woman he associated with the pegging down of his pride?

He’d forgotten about getting her pregnant, but now that she was, he wanted to stay married. She’d been humiliated to realize her marriage was the result of little more than a business arrangement between two powerful men, but this made it worse. For him to stay with her, to want her only for the life she carried inside of her was a total denial of herself as a woman.

Luciano had believed she was part of the plot and felt made a fool of because of it. So he had hurt her. He was sorry now and both he and Zia denied having slept together. Hope believed them. She remembered how sexually hungry Luciano had been his first night back from New York. He was hopelessly oversexed anyway, but that night, he had been desperate for her. That was not the response of a man getting all the sex he wanted from his ex-girlfriend.

Where did Hope’s love for him fit into all this? She was pregnant with his child, but was that enough to keep a marriage that was nothing more than an arrangement together?

No.

But her love and his sincerity might be.

He was right. They’d spent too much time alone lately. If he was serious about trying, she didn’t see that she had much choice because to contemplate life without Luciano was to contemplate a pain she did not want to bear.

She headed back to the house, determined to find Luciano and finish their discussion.

She found him on a lounger by the pool. He hadn’t changed clothes and his expression was bleak.

“Luciano.”

He looked up.

“We need to talk.”

He nodded. “Where?”

He was asking her? “Can we go back to our room? It’s the only place we’re sure not to be overheard by your mother or Martina when they get back from shopping.”

He stood up and took her arm. She didn’t fight his touch now and some tension drained from him, not all, but some.

When they reached their small sala, he led her to the sofa where he sat and pulled her down beside him.

“What have you decided?”