He opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap.
Well, there is my answer. “I can’t do this. I can’t stay with you knowing that I’m the only one who is going to mourn this when it ends. I’m sorry, Gio. This is my fault. You’re exactly the man you said you were. We need to end this before you break my heart.” She took a step backward, away from him.
“It was a mistake to bring you to the wedding . . . and to Venice. We’ll fly back to the States tonight. Once we’re back in New York this will all blow over.”
“I am flying home, but not with you. It wasn’t the wedding or Venice. It’s you. You don’t get it, and I can’t explain it better than I have. Good-bye, Gio.”
“You’re going to leave over this?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because in the end you can’t give me the one thing I want from you.” She stepped away from him. “I’ll take a taxi boat back to the airport. Please send my things back to me in New York.”
“No,” he said firmly.
“Don’t, Gio. Don’t make this difficult. I need to go home.”
“We’ll fly back together.”
She shook her head. She wanted to hate him, but she couldn’t. He wanted to love her. She could see it in his eyes. He wasn’t ready to love anyone. That was what he’d tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to hear it. “No. There was a reason you came to Italy. I don’t know what you’re looking for, Gio, but find it. Find those answers. Maybe then you’ll understand what I’m asking you for. And if that happens, come find me.”
“Julia—”
Julia turned and walked quickly away. She didn’t want to give him a chance to change her mind. She didn’t want something that looked good on the surface.
She wanted it all.
Chapter Twenty-One
With Julia’s words echoing in his head, Gio stood in the small courtyard behind his father’s old palazzo. It looked as if every part of it was in need of repair. He wondered if it had looked the same nine years earlier when a younger him had stood in that same spot the day he’d come to collect his father’s remains.
He didn’t remember many details from that day, just the anger and hurt that had filled him. He wouldn’t have described his parents’ marriage as warm, but he’d been unprepared for the reality of how little his father had respected it.
While waiting for the paperwork to be completed, his father’s mistress had asked to speak to him. He remembered being enraged by the audacity of her request. He didn’t want to speak to her. He didn’t want her to exist at all.
His mother had predicted that Leora would try to pull him aside. She’d warned Gio that such a woman would say anything to milk them for more money than she’d already taken from his father. “Don’t think she’s above blackmail, George,” his mother had said. “She may threaten to tell her story. You have to keep this out of the papers. The company will suffer enough from your father’s passing. A scandal could do real damage.” Whether her tears were born from anger or loss, Gio didn’t know, but that had been the only time he’d ever seen his mother cry. “I couldn’t handle the shame on top of losing your father. Make it go away, George. Please. Make sure no one ever knows about her.”
And so he’d refused to listen to anything Leora had tried to tell him that day. Instead, he’d threatened to bring the full force of his connections down upon her if she ever spoke of her relationship with his father. She was worried about losing the house, even though his father had promised to leave it to her. He’d assured her that no one was interested in it unless they heard her name again. If they did, he would utilize every lawyer on their payroll to break the will. She would be left with nothing. Unless she kept her silence.
He’d always believed he’d done the right thing. Until now.
He hadn’t told his brothers because he’d wanted to protect them from the truth. He’d heard part of a row once between Nick and their mother that sounded as if Nick knew something. Or suspected. Nick had been confronting their mother about her role in it, which Gio had never understood. No woman deserved the humiliation of discovering her husband had another woman on the side.
Whatever their mother’s response had been, Nick had been furious afterward. Gio had sworn to his mother that he would never tell anyone about Leora, so even when pressed for answers by Nick, he’d kept the truth to himself.
If I did the right thing, why does it all feel so wrong?
What’s real and what’s a lie?
I don’t know anymore.
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Gio was faced, for the second time, with his father’s mistress. This time, however, he saw her as a person and not the embodiment of his father’s betrayal. She was modestly dressed in a blue cotton blouse and matching skirt. Her short hair curled and framed a face that, had he not spent so many years despising, he would have said had aged well. She had a classic, simple beauty, without the artificial enhancements he was used to seeing in women her age.
Was it that beauty that had drawn his father to her? Brought him back to her year after year? What was here that had been worth risking everything—marriage, children, fortune?
He was so lost in the past he didn’t realize she was speaking to him. “Gio? Is that you?”
He froze.
She beckoned him to come closer. “It is you. Come. Come inside.”
At any other time in his life, Gio would have said something cutting and left. But Julia was right. He’d come to Italy for answers, and he wouldn’t find them if he walked away. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be very pleased to see me.”
She opened the door wider. “I’ve waited a long time for you to return.”
He walked up the palazzo’s stone stairs and followed her through the back door of the house and into a salon. The experience was like stepping back into time. From the heavy tapestries on the floor to the ornate wooden ceilings, it was obvious that efforts had been made to retain the charm of the seventeenth-century palace. The furniture was all made from dark wood—simple pieces with worn cloth cushions. But the house was immaculately clean, with no evidence of house staff.
Gio noticed pictures of him and his brothers scattered around the home. On the walls, on the mantel. Everywhere people normally put photos of their family. Nearly ten years after his father’s death. Gio couldn’t understand it. He walked around the room and studied the photos. His father was in many of them, laughing with his boys.
In one photo, the one that stopped Gio in his tracks, his father was holding a baby. Gio looked over his shoulder at Leora.
She nodded and said softly, “That’s my daughter, Gigi.”
“How old is she now?” Gio asked.
“Twenty and away at college. I borrowed monies against this house, but she’s worth it.”
Gio found another photo of his father and the girl, when she was about ten, holding his father’s hand and smiling up at him. “Was she? Is she?” He wasn’t sure how to ask.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.