She ducked her head, devastated anew by his power to hurt her with nothing but his own hurt.
“What I feel for you isn’t love, Lauren.”
A paroxysm of pure anguish struck her. Before she could recoil, his hands tightened and he spoke with swift intensity.
“Love is a security blanket your family gives you. It makes you strong enough to take on the world. You are not a warm, fuzzy blanket, Lauren. You’re a wildfire. You’re a drop out of a plane without a chute. What I feel for you makes me feel weak and scared and I can’t control it. I have conquered a million different challenges and the one thing I couldn’t do was stop what I felt for you, even though it could destroy lives.”
She lifted her head and turned to search his eyes, drawn on a rack of conflicting beliefs.
Paolo framed her face with gentle hands. “What I feel for you is so much bigger than love. You struck me between the eyes the first time I saw you, so much so that I drank myself into oblivion that night. I didn’t put it together. I didn’t realize that the reason I was so gutted by that baby not being mine was because I’d given up something precious for it. You.”
“I didn’t think it mattered who I married because the one man who intrigued me was taken,” she confided, seeing that truth now.
“I should have stolen you from the church before you went down the aisle. These lonely years for both of us have been my fault,” he said bleakly.
She touched his lips, fingertips dampened by his hot breath as delicate hope invaded her heart. “You had to straighten out the bank. I needed to grow up. Mamie needed me. Perhaps it worked out as it was meant to.”
He nodded somberly. “But I would have come to you in Charleston even if you hadn’t called. It might have been a day or two later, after his death was made public, but nothing would have kept me away. Nothing would be different now.”#p#????#e#
“We’d still have had that fight this evening before leaving the house?” she teased, tearing up with remembered hurt, but soothing over it for both of them.
He smirked ruefully. “Probably. Because when a man loves a woman this much, he can’t believe she’s so obtuse about what it means when he rushes home to see her.”
“But that’s because I’m not—”
He kissed her, stilling any self-deprecating argument she might have raised.
Paolo lifted his head a few minutes later. A light she’d never seen shone from his eyes. “Quit telling me what you’re not. You’re a Donatelli. That puts you head and shoulders above the rest right there.”
His arrogance made her smile, which only made him stand taller and even more proud. “You’re gloriously human, Lauren. Passionate and softhearted and capable of making mistakes because you love someone. I need that, working with numbers and bankers and economists all day.”
“Exactly. Human. Not an international space station or anything really exciting.”
“And yet I feel omnipotent, having won your love.”
She blinked fast, trying to see through her tears. “What I feel for you...” She bit her lip. “I always knew you had the power to consume me. I was afraid to let you, afraid of how intense my feelings were. I never felt this way with Ryan.”
He cupped her face, thumbs gently smoothing under her damp eyes. “I used to think that after the childhood he’d had, he deserved the love of a good woman. It’s the only way I could justify not stealing you from him. It’s his loss that he didn’t appreciate you, Lauren. I won’t make that mistake.”
Her smile trembled and fell apart under his tender kiss. Slowly they melted into each other, for once savoring their reunion because they knew now, without doubt, that they had the rest of their lives together.
EPILOGUE
Fourteen weeks later...
LAUREN SMILED, FEELING as though she was an actor in a movie. The hee-haw of the ambulance siren was so European.
“There’s nothing funny about this, Lauren.” Paolo took the oxygen mask off his face to speak, rocking on his seat as the ambulance took a sharp corner.
“Don’t be angry at me. This is the one who didn’t want to wait for the ambulance.” She pointed at the sleeping infant swaddled beside her, his little face screwed up in a masculine frown of concentration, as though everything he did would be done intensely whether it be sleep, cry or deliver.
No mystery where he’d get a quality like that from, Lauren thought with another affectionate grin.
“He and I will have words about this, make no mistake. He almost put me into an early grave. I still feel weak,” Paolo complained, his words belied by the flush of pride that shone off him like a halo.