Unraveled (Guzzi Duet Book 1)(22)

“But you don’t want to,” Cara assumed.

She hadn’t realized it was more than the penthouse that he owned.

“I didn’t want this place,” Gian muttered heavily. Sighing, he turned to face her again. “Would you mind exploring on your own for a bit? I have a call to make, and I’ll order us some food, too.”

“Sure,” Cara said.

She could tell something else was on his mind.

Gian was good at hiding it, but she saw it.

Whatever it was.

Cara figured it wasn’t her place to push. She hadn’t come with him for the weekend to pry into his personal life. She had come because, like him, a break from life was just what she needed.

And who the hell said she couldn’t have fun while she did it?





“Is this your grandmother?” Cara held out a black and white glamor shot of a beautiful woman, as Gian walked into the bedroom without a balcony.

“No, that isn’t Aurora. And my grandmother died two years ago. Heart attack.”

Cara’s brow furrowed, as she took in the dozen and one other framed photos on the old armoire. Most held the woman, but a few had children, and some, an older gentleman that looked a hell of a lot like Gian, if he were in his forties or fifties.

“Then who is it? Oh, Louise, right?”

Gian stared at Cara, not saying anything.

“What?”

It took her far too long to realize what he wasn’t saying. A woman named Louise had lived here, and she was not his grandmother. A woman who, guessing by the photos and the statements made about the bedroom, had been involved in a romantic relationship with Corrado Guzzi for years.

The photos of the children caught her attention again.

Decades, actually.

“Oh,” Cara said quietly, carefully putting the photo back. “Well, then.”

Gian shrugged one shoulder, but didn’t move further into the room to join her. “Louise died a decade ago, about the time my grandfather stopped coming for his weekend visits. Apparently, he didn’t want much to do with the place when she wasn’t here, but he also didn’t want to sell it.”

Cara glanced back at the old photos of the children. “What about their kids?”

“Louise had kids—they weren’t my grandfather’s.”

“Huh.”

“You sound … bothered,” Gian said.

Cara’s brow furrowed. “Weren’t you bothered that he had a whole other life, with another woman, in a different city, that wasn’t his wife?”

“It was a secret that was not really a secret in our family. I was told—like everyone else in my family—that it was not a topic we were to discuss, for obvious reasons. I didn’t feel much about it, I suppose it wasn’t my place to. That was, until the deed was handed over to me. Now, I have to consider too much.”

She understood that.

It couldn’t be pleasant.

“Let’s get out of this room, then,” she suggested.

Gian nodded, and stepped back into the doorway, gesturing for her to follow. “Food is here, by the way.”

Cara walked on past, but nearly stopped as she felt his hand find her lower back. That all too familiar shiver crawled over her skin at his touch. “And what comes after the food, Gian?”

She felt his smirk grow as he pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. “Any other bedroom but that one, Cara.”





Cara crawled onto the foot of the bed, moving up Gian’s naked side in nothing but one of his dress shirts. The man woke up at the ass-crack of dawn, and it was disturbing because Cara liked to sleep.

She couldn’t sleep when Gian wasn’t, though.

He wouldn’t let her.

Gian had tossed the beige sheets across his lower midsection and groin, but that still left the rest of his body free for Cara to admire. It was quite a sight, especially in the morning with light coming in through the opened windows. For every defined cut of muscle on his body, Cara’s attention was caught and spun. He was lean like a runner, yet built enough like a fighter. It was easy to tell over his suits that he was fit, but it was when he was naked that Cara couldn’t stop staring.

A beautiful man.

Cara laid along Gian’s side, though lower than he was, so that her top half ended at his waist. He peered over the book he was reading, those brown eyes of his raking over her form and the shirt she wore.

“Shame you can’t go out like that all the time,” he said under his breath.

“I could say the same.”

“Yes, and then where would all those unsuspecting women be, huh? Falling all over themselves, I imagine. It would be hazardous for me to do that to the world.”

“Arrogant ass.”

“Complex,” he corrected with a grin.

Then, he went back to his book.

His free hand came down to tangle in her hair as he continued reading, his fingers stroking through the strands carefully. He didn’t tug or pull, not like he did when he was fucking her, but rather, stroked her hair gently as if to relax her.

And it did.

Before Cara had realized what was happening, her face rested in Gian’s palm, and his thumb stroked her cheekbone.

It was intimate.

But not the kind of intimate like the night before, when he fucked her until she couldn’t breathe or see properly.