Page 38 of The Sicilian’s Deal For 'I Do'

Her heart twisted and her stomach churned. She knew the smart thing would be to say no. To tell him he could stay in her office for a while, to talk to her from a safe distance, but that then he should go, and let her go, and that would be the end of it.

But Luca was standing there with his heart on his sleeve—a heart she hadn’t really even known he possessed—and Mia couldn’t walk away from this. Danger swirled all around her. She knew what she was jeopardising, and she knew that Luca would never be what she wanted long term, but right now, in this moment, he was her everything, and she couldn’t step away from that.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, terrified. ‘But you must leave now. Go. I’ll follow when I can.’

His expression was impossible to interpret. Relief, but there was something else too, like a whip, that cracked between them.

‘I can wait for you.’

‘No.’ She was adamant. ‘We can’t leave here together, and you know it. You shouldn’t come here. You can’t come here again.’ She pressed a finger to his lips, silencing whatever response he might have been poised to make. ‘I’m glad you reached out to me, though.’ She lifted onto her tiptoes and replaced her finger with her mouth, just a light quick kiss, a down payment of what would come next.

He stalked out of her office with a face like thunder, head bent, moving quickly towards the narrow bank of elevators, almost willing her father to appear, to see him, to speculate and wonder. Selfishly, he wanted that. To throw the cat well amongst the pigeons and leave them in no doubt of what was going on. Of how much he wanted Mia after all. Of the fact she washis. Clearly that explained why he had come here not once, but twice. On some level, he welcomed discovery. In the hopes it would lead to the cancellation of her wedding? And then what?

Frustration gnawed at his gut. How could she go through with this? Mia was too beautiful and full of love to enter into a marriage of convenience. A business deal, and nothing more. And when he thought of another man calling himself Mia’s husband, touching her, making love to her, Luca felt as though a vein in his head might explode.

Yes, he welcomed the idea of discovery, but for Mia’s sake, he was as incognito as possible anyway, because he knew she’d be devastated if anyone found out about them. Fate smiled upon her, and the lift doors opened immediately, shepherding him away from the risk of discovery, for now.

Mia arrived at his home an hour later and slipped in the front door with the key he’d given her. Having a key to his place did something strange to her belly. As she inserted it into the lock, she had the weirdest sense of coming home, of truly coming home, and again she felt that jarring fantasy take over—what it would have been like if they were married, this were their house and she were simply coming back from a day’s work.

The clawing feeling of tears made her throat ache. How could she yearn so much for something she’d never known? But then, tonight wasn’t about her, and their failed engagement. Luca needed Mia. He’d come to her because he needed her help, and she would give him that.

Mia took a moment, composed herself, then stepped fully inside, closing the door and stepping deeper into his home. The lights were dimmed, and he’d lit candles—long tapered ones that had been burning for long enough that wax had formed streaky puddles down their sides and onto the base of the candle holders. Soft, jazzy music played. She sighed as she entered his lounge room fully, looking around, eyes landing on Luca at the grand piano, head bent, fingers pressed to the keys without any noise coming out.

She padded over to him silently and wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressed her head to his shoulder and just held him, hoping, as she had in her office, that some physical strength and certainty would pass from her to him with that small gesture.

They stayed like that for a long time, just the softly shifting glow of candles to alert them to the passage of time, but eventually, Mia stood, then came to sit beside him on the stool.

‘Do you play?’ he asked, turning to face her, eyes roaming her face almost as if he’d never seen her before.

She shook her head. ‘I took lessons for a few years but “Three Blind Mice” is about all I remember.’

One side of his lips lifted in soft acknowledgement of that.

‘And you?’

A muscle jerked in his jaw. ‘My mother taught me.’

‘I didn’t realise that.’ Then again, why would she?

‘She learned as a little girl. She was very good. She lost a lot over the course of her lifetime—her parents threw her out when they discovered she was pregnant with me and, after that, her life was hardly comfortable. She moved down here, to Sicily, where she had a cousin she was close to. She got my mother a job, and I believe they treated her well.’ His voice showed restrained anger. ‘At the hotel she worked at, there was a piano in the lobby. The manager would let her play, early in the mornings, before it got busy. So a few times a week, she would take me in to learn as well.’ He pressed his fingers lightly to the keys. ‘She was a hard teacher.’

Mia’s smile was soft, involuntary. ‘In what way?’

‘Completely intolerant of mistakes, even when I was a beginner. My mother spoke music like a second language. It just came naturally to her. She found my errors jarring. We couldn’t afford a piano, but one day, our neighbours had a piece of furniture delivered and I saved the box it came in. I measured out the pieces with a black pencil and drew a keyboard on top, so that I could practise finger placement at home.’

Mia’s heart flipped over at the very idea of the earnest little boy he’d been. ‘You wanted to make your mother proud.’

He dipped his head once in what Mia took to be silent acknowledgement of that. ‘I was fascinated by the piano, and the way she could coax such beautiful music out of something otherwise inanimate. I wanted to speak the language too.’

‘Show me.’

His gaze locked to hers, the air between them sparking and growing warm, so Mia felt the hairs on her arms lift and the cells in her body tingle. Then, he turned away, so his face was in profile, and his hands pressed to the keys, picking up in time with the music that was playing, echoing it perfectly, so it was a form of surround sound, but so much better, because when Luca played, he added a richness and emotion to the music that Mia hadn’t been aware of before. His fingers moved skilfully and fast over the keyboard. She watched them for a few moments but then his face drew her attention back, because it was so fascinating, lost in concentration not, she suspected, on the piece he was playing, but rather on the situation with his father. She wriggled closer, because suddenly it wasn’t enough to sit beside him, she wanted to feel him, to touch him, and to know he could also feel her.

He pulled his fingers away from the piano. The song had ended. But another song picked up, on the album he was playing—this time, Luca didn’t accompany it.

Shifting a little, he turned to face her.

‘She must have been thrilled with how well you learned.’

---