Page 48 of Bought By the Mafia

21

Iwoke to the delicious smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee. Gio was sitting in bed beside me shirtless, but looking fresh with a tray in his hands.

“Eggs benedict?” I croaked as I sat up and straightened. My sleep had been easy to come by after last night’s revelations. The weight I was carrying on back all these years was now off, and I felt light and tired. I don’t even remember falling asleep, only waking up now to two meals. The first looked just as good as the second. A bright yellow poached egg was perfectly placed on top of a meaty turkey bacon and a fluffy English muffin underneath. The second dish, Gio himself, was smiling and had a welcoming warmth to him I hadn’t seen in a while. Since before we were married. He was dangerously unassuming and sexy in a way that made me feel embarrassed to face him, just as I was waking up when he clearly had been up for some time.

“Thought I made you something before you went to work,” he said.

“You did this?” The dish had Pierre’s name written all over.

“No.” Was that a blush? I don’t think Gio was capable of reddening or feeling any embarrassment of some sort. “But I told Pierre to it make for you special.”

“Why? What’s the occasion?”

“Do we need one?” His eyes were hot and piercing as he stared at me. It made the overall combo a lot more unsettling than I would have wanted in the morning, especially after last night.

I cleared my throat. “If this is about last night and your guilt, you don’t need to do this.”

Gio shook his head. “It’s not about guilt. I was serious about what I said last night. We should start anew. Well, brand new. No more fighting. No more truces. After you went to sleep last night, I stayed up all night thinking, not just what you said, but what we’ve done to each other. We’ve hurt each other.”

I nodded absentmindedly.

“We angered each other when we should have communicated. We’ve wasted so much precious time over trivial things.”

“But I stole—”

“Money can be replaced. I already did it one hundred times over. It wasn’t the money you took that made me angry. It was the betrayal. It was the hurt. The thought that the woman I—the woman I saw myself with could turn on me so easily is what angered me. And instead of getting to the root of that anger and what it could mean, I’ve wasted time trying to make you pay. Make you hurt the same way I was hurting. I want to change that. I want us to start over. To truly start over.”

“Gio…”

He placed a hand on my thigh. “Don’t. Please don’t say no. At least think about it and give us a chance?”

I wanted it too. He had no idea how much I wanted it so badly. Giovanni Morelli is the only man I’ve ever wanted. The only man I’ve been with whose presence I’ve loved to be in. Even when he was kind. Even when he was hateful. I was that pathetic for him. And yet. I don’t think I could do it again. He made a similar speech last night and in the light of the day, there still wasn’t that much change between us. He was still Gio, and I was still Simona. As much as I wanted to believe that we could work out, we were still the same people. We both had a capacity to hurt each other, like he said. However, there was that small voice within me saying yes. Give him a chance. Give your relationship a chance.

“And Allison?” I asked. I hated being the jealous wife, but I could not ignore their relationship. They knew each other. Understood each other. Comfortable in a way I doubt Gio and I will ever be.

“Gone,” he said.

My eyes widened without meaning to. “Back to her place? What about her boyfriend?”

“I found another place for her,” he spat. He sounded angry, and I wasn’t sure about what. “It’s what I should have done from the beginning. We had agreed to work on our relationship and then I brought my ex into the mix. That was callous of me.”

“She’s my friend too, you know. As weird as that is. And she is going through a lot.”

A dark cloud fell over his face. The change in mood was as swift as it came, however, and it quickly went away. “It’s better if she has a place of her own. Better for us as well if we are to work on our relationship. If you want that.”

The statement hung in the air. Did I want it? The tiny yes voice was growing louder. What was there to lose? My heart. If it broke a second time, I don’t know how I would recover. But if I never gave it a go, I would regret saying no till my dying breath.

“One month,” I said. “One month where we explore our relationship. If doesn’t work out, we divorce.”

He winced. I hope he didn’t expect us to stay married together if it didn’t work out. We would make each other miserable if we stayed together for longer than that.

“One month is too short.”

“It’s enough to assess where we are.”

“Fine. A month it is.” He leaned forward and placed a kiss on my mouth. “It’s about to become the best month of your life,” he whispered.

I pulled back and looked down at the tray between us. “That breakfast better be the start.”

---