An Inheritance of Shame(38)

She eyed him over her pizza, her eyes wide and so very blue. ‘Why do you think I don’t love you, Angelo?’ she asked quietly.

Angelo felt something in him shift, lurch. He had the strangest, strongest impulse to deny it, to convince her of the opposite, that she did love him. He swallowed a bite of pizza and shifted his gaze a few inches to the right of her face. ‘Because you don’t.’

‘That’s not an answer and you know it.’ He just shrugged. He hadn’t thought through this very well, he realised. He had no arguments to make beyond what to him was the appallingly obvious: she couldn’t love him. All on its own it wasn’t very compelling. ‘How can you say what I feel, or if I really feel it?’ she pressed.

‘How do you know you love me?’ Angelo challenged. ‘How can you be sure?’

He shifted his gaze back to her face, saw how still she’d gone, trapped by truth. She wasn’t sure. Damn it if he didn’t feel disappointed. She swallowed, licked her lips, causing a shaft of pure desire to streak through him. Even now, amidst a painfully awkward conversation about emotions, he wanted her. Forget talking. Forget love or lack of it. He’d just haul her into his arms and kiss her until they were both senseless.

‘I know I love you,’ she said slowly, quietly, ‘because whenever I’m with you I feel complete and whole. And when you’re gone, I don’t.’

Angelo felt his jaw go slack, everything inside him seeming to shut down. He had no words; he had no thoughts. ‘You’ve been living without me for fifteen years,’ he finally managed, his voice hoarse, and she smiled sadly.

‘I know.’ He shook his head, his instinct, his need, to deny. ‘Tell me this, Angelo,’ she cut off whatever unformed reply he’d been going to make. ‘Why don’t you want me to love you? I’m not asking for anything back. I’m not making demands or a scene. I’m not doing or expecting anything.’ She smiled, the corners of her soft mouth curving up tremulously. ‘So what scares you about my loving you? About love?’

Everything. He didn’t answer, just shook his head. Again. ‘You can’t love me, Lucia,’ he said. He sounded like a broken record, but hell, he didn’t have anything else.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘That is the answer.’

‘All right,’ she said evenly, ‘I’ll ask a different question. Why do you think I can’t love you? And I want something more than “because.”’ He heard a slight quaver in her voice, and knew, despite her quiet, utter sincerity, this was hard for her. Maybe as hard for her as it was for him. And he knew then if she could be honest enough to admit that she loved him, then he could be honest enough to admit why he didn’t think she could.

‘Because,’ he said, his gaze averted, each word drawn slowly, painfully, from him. ‘No one’s ever loved me.’ He set his jaw, wished the words right back. Could he sound more pathetic, whining about how nobody liked him?

Lucia didn’t answer, and he forced himself to meet her gaze, to see the pity that was surely reflected there. He didn’t see pity, only sorrow and a surprising determination. ‘Then,’ she answered, ‘I’m lucky to be the first.’

He blinked back the sudden sting of tears. God help him, he was practically crying. ‘No,’ he said, and that was all he could manage. He forced back all that awful emotion and met her gaze once more. ‘What is this really, Lucia? When I first saw you in the hotel—when I brought you up to my office—you didn’t tell me you loved me then. You wouldn’t even admit to being angry at me. You acted like you didn’t care about me at all.’ And he’d believed her then. Even now, with everything she’d said, he still believed.

‘Loving you,’ Lucia said, ‘isn’t the same as wanting to love you.’

‘Ah.’ Well, maybe that made sense. Of course she wouldn’t want to love him.

She sighed and shook her head. ‘Angelo, I didn’t want to love you because I knew—I know—you don’t love me back. Who wants that?’

He shrugged, hating this conversation. ‘Nobody, I suppose.’

‘Exactly.’ She hesitated, and he felt the heaviness of the words she wasn’t saying. He just didn’t know what they were. ‘I said, I didn’t want to love you,’ she said quietly. ‘But then, in just the past few days, I started thinking…’ She trailed off, biting her lip, and Angelo suddenly, desperately, wanted to know what she’d started thinking about. He needed to know.