Reunion with Her Sicilian Enemy - Chapter three

It was like coming home. Only Evelina had never really had a home to come back to. She had escaped her old life and all the heavy chains that came with it. Lorenzo had done everything he could to make sure all his siblings had been able to move on, but no matter how she had tried, she had not been able to leave Cabbrieli behind. She had not relegated him to a past she no longer considered. He’d continued to live in her heart, like some soldier gone off to war.

Because she had been right about this. The years apart didn’t matter. The heat of it all was the same as it had been at thirteen, all the way to eighteen. The feeling of rightness, belonging, peace—like whoever was in charge of these things had designed them for each other, and only ever each other.

Her brain didn’t offer the resistance it should have, because she’d gone ten long years without feeling this, and there was no argument she could have against feeling it again.

She leaned into him, met his kiss with all the unspent love she’d been bottling up for all this time. His arms came around her in a sudden, delicious jerk of body to body. Heat swept through her, a dangerous, potent mix with all that old desire. Because he’d always been able to light her up, take her to unknown heights.

She knew this solved nothing, changed nothing about their present state, and still she could not resist.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed herself to him, molded her body to his like they were alone not in the middle of a bright parking lot. He made a noise, low in his throat, and his large, hot hands slid down her back in one slow, possessive move that had her shuddering from the inside out.

He shouldn’t taste the same. It shouldn’t feel the same. The time, the scars should make it different. And maybe there were differences born of those things, but mostly it was the same core.

Love. She’d just never been able to stop loving him. Which made tears form behind her eyes, but she didn’t let that feeling win just yet. She wanted everything out of this kiss before it inevitably ended with that old heartbreak back in its place.

But something shifted. She couldn’t say it was a tremble on his part—a man like Cabbrieli DiAgata didn’t tremble. But there was some tremor within that had him pulling back ever so slightly, his arms still banded around her. But they were no longer kissing, and he looked down at her like she was a stranger.

Like he had the night she’d refused to go with him all those years ago.

Which hurt, to be thrust back into that old memory she relived only at her lowest moments. She knew she hadn’t been wrong. Maybe she hadn’t handled everything perfectly, but she hadn’t been wrong.

And still he’d labeled her the villain. Then—with accusations. All these years later with his demeanor. She was to blame still, with absolutely no bend, no give, no maturing realization that they’d both done the best they could for their circumstances.

She pushed him away, and he let her go. She looked down at her shaking hands, then clenched them into fists to stop the reaction.

It was too easy to fall into the trap of loving him. But she was older and wiser now, and loving a person didn’t mean they were in a place to love you back. Maybe he’d changed, but…

Well, he’d have to prove it a lot better than this. She jerked her car door open. Then reminded herself to settle. “I will see you next week,” she said firmly but politely, and then she got in her car and drove away.

She didn’t let herself look in the rearview mirror. She didn’t allow herself to be alone with him the following Friday when they met. She didn’t even make eye contact.

She expected him to push. To remind her, yet again, she’d been the one to break his heart, but he kept the discussion firmly on the event and then let her duck out early without so much as a snide remark.

It left her far more unsettled than it should. She struggled to concentrate on her work, on being present with her family, on anything that required her to be engaged.

She was lost in a past haunting her present, almost as if it was those first few months after their breakup all over again. A frustrating backslide because she watched herself do it and yet couldn’t seem to pull herself back out.

“Miss Evelina?”

She blinked up at Carlo, the head of Stefano’s household staff.

“You have a visitor. He did not want to come in, but he is…pacing outside.”

Evelina straightened. Pacing. She doubted she knew any other men who would call on her and refuse to enter while pacing.

“I can send him away. He would not give his name,” Carlo said with clear disdain. “Perhaps I should call the police.”

Evelina stood even though she felt shaky inside. She smiled at Carlo. “I’ll handle it. Thank you.” She didn’t run outside, though she felt the impulse to do just that. Instead, she took her time. When she opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, she closed the door behind her.

She didn’t think Stefano would overreact at the sight of Cabbrieli, because she had never told her brothers about the way Cabbrieli had treated her when she’d refused to run away with him. But if Isa figured out who Cabbrieli was—the architect of her teenage heartbreak—she might overreact, and Isa was scarier than Stefano anyway.

“What are you doing here?” Evelina asked, watching as he paced the length of the stair and back again. She stood at the top looking down at him, liking having the high ground; no matter how literal and pointless, it felt like something to hold onto.

“This is a fine house,” he said with an angry, dismissive wave that reminded her so much of the boy he’d been that she almost smiled. Because she had understood his frustration with the world. She had known he would use all that injustice and turn it into his own success.

She’d known. But he hadn’t.

“It is my brother’s. Stefano. If you have complaints, you can take them up with him. But if he does not kill you, his wife might.”

“You and your family,” he said with such disgust.

Back in the old days, she’d accepted that his disgust was simply jealousy dressed up in an emotional pill he could swallow. But she’d spent ten years doubting herself when it came to him. Maybe she’d never understood him, seen through him the way she’d thought she had.

But with him standing here—uninvited and unwelcome, edgy and demanding—she saw so clearly that she had always done just that. Understood. Seen. Loved.

Because he desperately needed someone. He needed love more than he needed anything else. And it was the thing he least understood, least knew how to take. Or give. She sighed.

She could look back at the past with a certain kind of matured acceptance, but she could not make him do the same. And if he didn’t, whatever feelings still existed between them were moot. He had to come to some sort of realization on his own.

Because he had no doubt grown, matured, become an adult in some ways. But when it came to love, he was stuck in the same untrusting, frustrated place he’d been at eighteen. His only understanding of love was for it to look exactly as he wanted. His only understanding of life, perhaps, was to never, ever compromise.

Lest he be crushed.

Such an odd feeling to understand him, feel empathy for him, and know she could not let her guard down and try to help him. If he hadn’t changed in ten long years, when would he?

“Go home, Cabbrieli,” she said gently. Because she could feel the crushing sadness of knowing this could just never work, and she still wanted to somehow soothe it all away for him.

Something crossed his face then that had her pausing…considering. “Do you have a home?”

“I am rich, dolcezza. I assure you. I am not without many places to lay my head.”

“I did not ask if you had a place to sleep. I asked if you had a home.”

His expression grew stonier and stonier, the hands thrust into his pockets formed into fists. “Are you back to your old tricks, Evelina? Pretending you care about me for your own gain?”

Oh, he’d always poked at her temper. Even when she knew he was doing it on purpose, she’d never quite been able to keep her usual calm. “What gain?” she returned exasperatedly. “Pretending I care?” Oh, it was such a pointless enterprise, but maybe because it was pointless, she couldn’t quite keep the words to herself. “I love you, Cabbrieli. I have come to the conclusion that I always will. There is no pretending on my end. There never was. Whatever fictions you’ve created for yourself, my love certainly won’t be one of them.”

*

She was ruining everything. Standing there saying things like that… They weren’t the things he’d expected her to say. Expected her to do. Like they were eighteen all over again. She wasn’t following the way it was supposed to be.

It was like reliving that moment she’d broken his heart. He could see that cold little shack. Feel it. Practically hear the snores of his passed-out father in the lone bedroom while he and Evelina shivered together in the main room discussing their plans for the future.

He had known his father’s job wouldn’t last much longer. He was getting deeper and deeper into the bottle. Missing work more and more. Cabbrieli—thanks to Evelina and her brother’s influence—had kept at school while working only part-time and was trying to get through exams before it came to him to take over all the finances.

He was so close. Close enough to the end to have a plan. But he needed Evelina with him. He needed her to go along with it—not be whisked off somewhere else by her brother and his improving finances.

And she had refused to stay with him. She had refused to love him the way he’d needed her to. He could see it all, and he did not understand how she could possibly stand here and speak of love when…

“I leveled all these accusations at you, and you took every one. No arguments. No denials. No pleas. Just acceptance. And yet you expect me to believe, then and now, that you love me? Explain this to me.”

“Arguments? Pleas?” Her voice got higher with each word, anger flushing her cheeks. “All those terrible things you said I must be doing behind your back. The men I must have had, the lies I must have been telling.” Anger flashed in her eyes, and worse, something he hadn’t fully understood then that he saw all too clearly now. Hurt. “How could I possibly fight that when I thought you knew me better? It was devastating that you didn’t. So I said nothing at all, because you should have known. It was not the love I had for you that I questioned in that moment, Cabbrieli. It was the love you clearly did not and do not have for me.”

He did not care for the memory of the things he had leveled at her in his anger. All these years he had remembered himself as the injured party. As the betrayed, but she made it sound…different. Upside down.

“I was asking for a future,” he said, or thought he did. But his voice didn’t sound like his own. Steady and sure. There was an ache to it that certainly couldn’t be his own.

“No. You demanded what you wanted and left no room for compromise.”

Compromise. “I do not know how to compromise. To bend has always been to break.” He hadn’t fully realized he’d said those words—his father’s words for years and years, even when alcohol had withered him away to little more than nothing—until she responded.

“Back then. But look at what you’ve made of yourself, Cabbrieli. Do you still want to be ruled by back then?”

He was not ruled by anything. He was Cabbrieli DiAgata. He had dragged himself out of the slums. He had made himself into a businessman. He had taken her betrayal and turned it into fuel.

Fuel. He had no idea how she could stand here and make it seem like…the thing that had held him back when it was everything that had gotten him here. To compromise was to break. It was to lose.

He’d refused to let his life continue to be a loss.

She shook her head sadly, as if he’d responded in any way when he had not.

“I love you more than I have any right to after all these years, but until you learn even one lesson about what love really means, it’s pointless to keep having these discussions. It breaks my heart, and you have done that enough.”

She whirled and ripped open the door. He could have stopped her. He would have. Yelled some more like he had back then. Argued, demanded, accused.

But something had…changed. Almost as if in reliving the moment something new had crystallized.

He had known she’d done none of those things he’d accused her of. Even in the moment, it hadn’t been about thinking she’d done them. It had been about…getting the reaction he wanted. He’d wanted her to…fight. He’d wanted someone, somewhere, to fight for him, and when she did not…

Well, he’d accepted that only he ever would.

But in the here and now, she’d flipped it around. Opened something else inside him by making him realize…

He had only seen himself in the moment. What he wanted. What he wanted from her. He had not seen…her. What she wanted. He hadn’t fought for her. He had asked her to change everything, sacrifice everything…in part because he’d had nothing to sacrifice.

Except what he wanted. And he’d refused.

He stared at the closed door and, for the first time since he’d arranged this whole return to her orbit, wondered what he’d really wanted from seeing her again. From being near her again. Had it truly been about proving something she’d never expressed any doubt of—because she’d always been his biggest supporter, so sure he could make something of himself.

Or had he buried his true purpose deep under thoughts of spite, of anger, of hurt? When the truth of it all was just…he’d wanted to see her again. He’d wanted to face the thing that haunted him, no matter how he tried to move on. Not because of anger. Not to prove something that hadn’t needed proving.

He still loved her. As she’d said, it simply did not go away. No matter the years, the hurts.

But he’d returned with the same bluster, the same iron fist and lack of compromise, expecting different results. And that wasn’t just foolish—it wasn’t going to work. Not this time.

They were older. He should be wiser. To get what he wanted, he had to be.

And this time around, Cabbrieli DiAgata was going to get exactly what he wanted.