Page 247 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

‘It is okay,’ he whispered. It had been many years since he’d told anyone about his son. Anyone who mattered had been there at the time and had grieved with them.

Victoria mattered. Mattered far more than she should. Than he should allow.

That she should feel it so deeply...

He closed his eyes again to his own tears and breathed in more of her soothing scent.

She disentangled herself from his hold and stared at him with tears still falling over her blotchy face. ‘You shouldn’t be having to comfortme.’

He brushed a tear away with his thumb. ‘The death of any child is never easy to hear about.’ He wiped another tear with a sad smile and pressed a kiss to her forehead before reaching over for the box of tissues on the bedside table. He thrust them under her nose. With a grateful smile, she grabbed a handful and blew her nose while Marcello climbed off the bed and headed to the bureau he kept a bottle of his preferred eighteen-year-old single malt in. Taking the bottle and two crystal glasses, he re-joined her on the bed and poured them both a glass.

Visibly calmer, she took a small sip of hers then fixed her red-rimmed eyes back on him. ‘I’m sorry you felt boxed in and compelled to tell me.’

‘I’m not.’

Her eyebrows drew together.

‘Youshouldknow that about me.’ They were far beyond keeping things from each other. Their time together as lovers was coming to an end but Victoria was the most important person in his life. The last few days had taught him that much. He could envisage a future where they were both old and wrinkled and she would walk to his car with the aid of a stick and climb in next to him, and the pair of them would wheezily laugh together over the latest of life’s absurdities.

She deserved to know the truth about why that future could only be as friends.

She took another drink of her whisky and, her eyes on his, held a long breath before slowly letting it out. ‘Is Tommaso the reason you came to America?’

He inclined his head and drained his glass. Filling it back up, he explained, ‘When Livia fell pregnant we had been having problems. The pregnancy pulled us back together and papered over the cracks in our marriage, but Tommaso’s death broke us, as people and as a couple. We tried... God knows, we tried, but we could not find a way through. Not together. The old problems came back and magnified—I worked too hard, she preferred being with her sister and her mother to me. We argued over everything. Silly things. If I said something was blue she would say it was green, if she said it was pink I would insist it was black.’

He took a long sip and swirled the whisky in his mouth before swallowing it.

What he was about to say was the hardest thing to admit to. ‘I wanted out. I wanted to escape it all. We had both built a whole life in our minds of us and Tommaso, and it was taken from us, and the reminders were everywhere. Every street I walked, I had pictured walking it with him, holding his hand.

‘I wanted a fresh start, not to forget him because that would be a betrayal of his life, but to breathe again. I was suffocating. Manhattan was the perfect place to relocate to. I had always enjoyed my time there and the cut and thrust of doing business there, and it was big enough and busy enough for me to immerse myself into a brand-new life. Livia did not want to come with me and I didn’t try hard to convince her. We both knew we were over.’

‘That’s just so incredibly sad,’ she said softly.

‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But it was the only way I could live with it. We managed to part as friends and if I am proud of anything, it is that. Livia is a wonderful woman but we were never right for each other. She has a family now with a husband whoisright for her, and she is happy, and I built the new life I wanted for myself and have found a different kind of happiness.’ He raised his glass with a wry smile. ‘Even if it is happiness of a shallower kind.’

She raised a wry smile of her own. ‘You came to Manhattan and conquered all before you.’

‘I would trade every dollar to have my son back.’ Trade his very soul.

Tears filling her eyes again, she nodded to convey that she understood.

Taking the glass from her hand, he placed it with his glass and the bottle on the bedside table then ran his fingers through her glorious hair. Strangely, the weight that had formed to see Victoria with the photo of his precious boy had lifted.

‘Do not cry any more,bella,’ he urged. ‘The past cannot be changed. I have had to learn to live without him and I take each day as it comes because life is too fragile and uncertain to do anything else. Live for the moment and let the moment be this.’

Victoria parted her lips to Marcello’s gently probing mouth and wound her arms around his neck, deepening the kiss, deepening the connection.

Even as she responded to his lovemaking she had to fight more tears.

Any hopes of even a tentative future with him had been dashed before they’d had the chance to fully form.

Marcello’s demons went far beyond a marriage turned sour.

Grief had broken his heart beyond repair.

Somehow she would have to find a way through her own, different, grief because the physical pain of hearing his story had brought the truth home to her.

She’d fallen completely and irrevocably in love with him.

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