A Hunger for the Forbidden(54)

She shook her head. “I didn’t. I still don’t think you’re that. I don’t think you’re perfect, either, but I don’t think it was ever terribly fair of me to try to make you perfect. You had your own life apart from me. Your own experiences. My mistake was believing that everything began and ended during the times our eyes met over the garden wall. In my mind, when you held me after the attack, you went somewhere hazy, somewhere I couldn’t picture. I didn’t think about what you did after, not really. I didn’t think of the reality of you returning home, covered in blood. I didn’t think about what your father might have said to you. I knew Benito Corretti was a bad man, but for some reason I never imagined how it might have touched you. I only ever pictured you in the context of my world, my dreams and where you fit into them. It was my mistake, not yours.”

“But I wouldn’t have blamed you if you never imagined that. No one did. Not even my family, I’m certain of that.”

“Still, I wasn’t looking at you like you were a real person. And you were right to make me see.”

“Alessia, if you want—”

“Let me finish. I see now. I see you, Matteo, not just the fantasy I created. And I don’t want to walk away. I want to stay with you. I want to make a family with you.”

“You trust me to help raise your child after you found out what I’m capable of?”

“That night of your life can’t live in isolation. It’s connected to the rest of your life, to all of it. To who your father was, the history of what he’d done to other people, to what he’d done to you.”

“He never did anything to me, he just—”

“He forced you to do things you would never have done. He made you violate your conscience, over and over again until it was scarred. He would have turned you into a monster.”

“He did, Alessia. That’s the point. He did.”

She shook her head. “You put a stop to it.”

“I had to,” he said, his voice rough. “I had to because you don’t just walk away from the Correttis. It’s not possible. My father would not have released his hold.”

“I know. I understand.”

“And you absolve me?”

“You don’t need my absolution.”

“But do I have it?” he asked, desperate for it, craving it more than his next breath. She nodded. “If I have yours.”

“For what?”

“For what I did. For not telling you about Alessandro. For agreeing to marry him in the first place. For trapping you in this marriage.”

“You didn’t trap me.”

“You said—”

“Alessia, I have been manipulated into doing things far worse than marrying you, and I have done it with much greater coercion. A little news piece on what a jerk I am for not making your child legitimate was hardly going to force my hand.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“To cement the deal. To give our child my name. All things I could have walked away from.”

“Then forgive me, at least, for lying to you. For leaving you in the hotel room.”

“I do. I was angry about it, but only because it felt so wrong to watch you walking toward him. To know that he would have you and not me. If I had known that there was a deal on the table that could be secured by marriage to you I would have been the one volunteering for the job.”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “When my father first told me about the deal with the Correttis, that it would be sealed by marriage, I said yes immediately. I was so sure it would be you. And when it was Alessandro who showed up at the door to talk terms the next day I thought … I thought I would die.”

“Waiting for your knight to rescue you?”

“Yes. I was. But I’ve stopped doing that now. I need to learn to rescue myself. To make my own decisions.”

“You’ve certainly been doing that over the past couple of months.”

“I have. And some of them have been bad, ill-timed decisions, but they’ve been mine. And I want you to know that I’ve made another decision.”

“What is that?”

“You’re my husband. And I’ll take you as you are. Knowing your past, knowing the kind of man you can be. I want you to understand that I’m not sugarcoating it, or glossing over the truth. I understand what you did. I understand that … that you don’t feel emotion the same way that I do. The same way most people do.”