Page 11 of Forbidden Until Midnight

She reached the door to the library that had become her refuge in the last months. Her father was rarely home these days, and her mother let her have the space Eleanor had desperately needed. She hovered on the threshold, aware of how...intimateit felt to have Santo, a near perfect stranger who had changed her life so dramatically, in her personal space.

She opened the door and stood back to let Santo in, following him with her eyes as he walked to the middle of the room, lit solely by the gentle flames in the open fireplace. Shelves of books framed an old writing desk in front of a large bay window that, during the day, looked out over the manicured garden and the hedgerow maze. But now deep green, thick velvet curtains were closed against the wintry night. Santo scanned the photographs on the desk, one of her and her brother, one of her and her parents. The one of her and her father there to remind herself of the hope that things would return to the way they had been before.

‘That’s Freddie. My brother,’ she said, coming to stand beside him, a smile on her lips as she looked at her little brother staring up at her with nothing but love. ‘He’s a terror. He’s ten and thinks he knows everything.’

‘I’m sure you have absolutely no idea what that feels like,’ Santo observed wryly.

‘He’s the best thing in my life,’ she replied with all the love she felt. ‘Do you have siblings?’ she asked, the smile on her lips dissolving as the air between them cooled, remembering too late the scant bits and pieces of his life she’d managed to find out online.

‘No,’ he said, the absence of inflection more damning and powerful than any emotional declaration could have been. And somehow she instinctively knew that whatever kind of relationship she had, or would have, with this man, it would never be one for small talk.

He took one glance back at the photographs, pausing on the one of her parents before turning to lean back against the table, his arms crossed as if impatiently waiting. He probably wanted to get back to the party. She should just say what she wanted to say and let him leave.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said, forcing herself to meet his gaze.

‘For?’ he asked, the Italian inflection in his clipped words harsher than she remembered.

‘For what you did for me last year. I... My entire life would be vastly different if you hadn’t said what you did.’

‘You don’t regret it?’ he asked. She felt the impact of his observation, the touch of his gaze as soft as feathers, as if he were looking for signs of dishonesty.

‘No,’ she said, allowing him to read the truth in her face. ‘But... I was ashamed that you were right,’ she said, looking down at the floor. ‘About everything.’ She’d been so sure that he was wrong that night—the warnings he’d given her—but he hadn’t been.

‘I hated you for that at the beginning,’ she admitted, thinking of those first few months when everything was still so raw. ‘A part of me wanted it to just go away. To pretend it hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t. Because of the pictures.’

Santo’s gaze never left her once, his expression unreadable in the dim light cast by the fire.

She bit her lip. ‘I didn’t know my father could be like that,’ she confessed.

Her sigh shuddered out from her chest and Santo felt it deep in his soul. It was a strange thing to hear because Santo had always known. He’d grown up knowing, as if it were instinctive—as if it were an awareness that he’d opened his eyes to from the very beginning. It had made it almost impossible for him to believe that she couldn’t see Edward Carson for what he truly was.

Yet in Eleanor he could still see the child that was desperate for her father’s love. Whether or not she could instinctively sense that love was conditional, he could hardly guess. But it wouldn’t help her or him to burst that bubble—it was something that could only be discovered for herself.

But something had eased in his chest to hear her admit that she didn’t regret her decision to end the engagement. A breath he hadn’t realised he’d held almost through the entire year released, replaced by satisfaction that he had been right to do as he had done last year. Satisfaction that he had fulfilled something of his promise to Pietro, even if it had come much sooner than either of them had imagined. Santo didn’t believe that his vow was fulfilled though. Eleanor was still very much influenced by the people under this roof and, as such, not entirely as safe as she believed. But it would do for now.

She was watching him closely and he was content to let her for the moment. What he had to hide from her was hidden too well for her to discern, and what he didn’t, he was content for her to see. He nearly smiled at how easy it was for him to read her, seeing the expressions shifting across her pretty features—curiosity, hesitancy...something more that he didn’t quite want to name. She would need to learn to hide her emotions much better.

‘Spit it out,’ he said, not unkindly, but he could feel delicate strands reaching out to bind them together and he couldn’t afford it. And Eleanor, whether she knew it or not, most definitely couldn’t afford it.

‘How did you know?’ she asked. ‘How did you know that they would do what you said they would?’

If Santo was honest with himself, he’d known that she would ask it eventually. The scales had fallen from her eyes over this last year and he could tell she wasn’t the naïve girl he’d first met two years before.

‘Because that’s what they told my mother,’ he replied on an exhale, turning away from Eleanor and stalking towards the fire, the crackle and pop of the wood at odds with the pull of memories tugging him back to dark places. ‘When she was having last-minute doubts, they lied to her and told her that he would change once he was married. When hesettled down. They lied, Eleanor, because her marriage benefitted them financially. They do it time and time again. Anything to make money. Anything to keep that money.’

He turned to take in the room. The money in here was hidden well, but still there. The carpet beneath his feet, handmade silk from some far-flung corner of the world, bought by some unknown ancestor long ago. The desk, deep, rich wood and hand-carved. It would have been considered exquisite by many, but Santo couldn’t help but see it as something that his father would have lusted after. Gallo Sabatini had wanted nothing more than the legitimacy of Eleanor’s world. He’d hated his own family because‘they came from nothing and they died as nothing’, his father used to snarl—often as a warning to him and his mother. As if he could one day make sure that they suffered the same fate, should he want to.

Gallo had bullied, blackmailed, stolen, beaten and eventually married his way into his empire and had never been able to sand down the rough edges of that dirt. And the greatest pleasure Santo had ever had was burying the man beside a family he’d resented for being backward, illiterate and miserable.

‘You hate them?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he replied truthfully.

‘Then why are you here? Why do you still come to these parties?’

Words halted on his tongue, struck silent by the desire to answer her and the promise he’d made to the man who had protected his mother when he, himself, had not been able to.

‘She can never know, Santo. It would change her life irrevocably. It would put her in too vulnerable a position.’

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