The Sicilian's Scandalous Secret

Only now was she understanding what a fundamentally bad decision she’d made when she’d kept the news of her pregnancy from him. He was right, she thought miserably, that she’d thought like a Baracchi. She’d assumed that the rift between them was a scar that would never heal because that was the way her family had always dealt with things. No slight was forgiven.

It shamed her to remember how many times the Ferraras had made overtures towards her family. Always, her grandfather had taken it as an affront.

‘I didn’t know that about you.’ She tipped her head back and rinsed her hair. ‘I mean, I knew you were close to your brother, of course. But I didn’t know that he’d made those sacrifices. I knew he’d built the company into something amazing but I thought that was because he just had a driven alpha personality.’

‘That too.’ There was humour in his eyes as he turned off the jet of water and draped a towel around her shoulders. ‘But we are fortunate in that. It was Cristiano who grew the business and supported us all at a time when my family was devastated by the loss of my father. He held it all together. And now I am happy to be able to take over that role so that he can spend more time with his family.’

She remembered Cristiano at the wedding. Tall, dark and intimidating. ‘He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t approve of the fact you married me.’

Santo hesitated. ‘He doesn’t approve of the fact you didn’t tell me you were pregnant, but that is in the past now. He is protective of me, just as I am protective of him. I gave Laurel a hard time when they separated, mostly because I didn’t understand what was going on. Truthfully a man never knows what is going on in another’s marriage.’

She felt a twinge of envy. ‘You’re so close to your brother and sister.’

‘Of course. We are a family.’ He said it as a simple statement of fact. As if it couldn’t possibly be in doubt.

‘I like it when we talk,’ she said impulsively. ‘We’ve never really talked about normal things. Even that night—’ She broke off and he frowned.

‘What?’

‘We didn’t talk. We just…did crazy stuff and then the call came and—’

‘—and your brother was dead.’

They’d never really talked about that either, had they?

‘He stole your car. You could have told everyone that, but you didn’t. I’ve never thanked you properly for not going public with that.’

‘How would that have helped? I had no desire to make a bad situation worse.’

‘It might have made you look better. Nonno told people you’d lent it to him. And to be honest I don’t know why anyone believed that, given the history between our families—’ She shrugged. ‘He made you look like the reckless one and I feel really bad about that.’

‘Don’t. He did not want to admit that his grandson stole the car,’ Santo said quietly. ‘He was grief-stricken. He didn’t want to see bad, only good, and I understood that.’

‘People believed—’

‘The people who mattered to me knew the truth. The opinion of the world in general is of no interest to me.’

And he’d been surrounded by supporters, protected by that web of family that was fundamental to who he was. Whereas she… ‘It was the worst time of my life. Worse even than the day my mother left and the day my father died. I thought Nonno was going to die,’ she confessed, drawing away from him and tightening the towel around her. ‘For weeks he just cried. Then he blamed himself and the guilt was almost worse than the grief. And then when he couldn’t bear the guilt any longer he blamed the Ferraras. He cursed your name with every breath he took. And that carried on for months after Roberto died. And then I discovered I was pregnant.’

Santo knotted a towel around his hips, dark brows locked together, eyes fixed on her face. ‘It must have been very frightening. You must have felt so alone.’

‘I was alone. I had no one to talk it through with. I didn’t know what to do. Somehow, you’d become the focus of his blame. He blamed you for lending Roberto a car he couldn’t handle. I told him Roberto took the keys, but he just didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to believe it. Then he blamed you for driving a flashy car that was nothing but temptation for a young man like Roberto. It was frighteningly illogical. He was the only person I had left in the world and I was watching him fall apart in front of me. First his son, my father, and then his grandson.’

‘It must have been an unbearable loss,’ Santo breathed. ‘I remember when we lost my father, it felt as if someone had ripped a hole in our family. But we had each other and you had no one.’

‘After that night, I waited for you to contact me,’ she confessed. ‘I used to lie awake, dreaming that you’d come—’

He swore softly in Italian and gathered her against him. ‘And I assumed that I was the last person you would want to see. We talked about it, Cristiano and I, and we decided that it would be more respectful to keep a distance.’

‘But did you tell Cristiano about us?’

He was silent, his chin resting on her head. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t tell him that part.’

‘And yet you are close and tell him everything.’

‘That night was—’ He broke off and she nodded.

‘Yes, it was. And that is why I couldn’t tell you I was pregnant. If you and I had ever spoken—if we’d had any sort of friendship or relationship—maybe I would have contacted you, but I honestly wouldn’t have known what to say. “Hey, do you remember that night when we had sex?”’ She bit her lip and drew away slightly so that she could look at him. ‘First I was so swamped in my grandfather’s grief and