Page 53 of The Sicilian’s Deal For 'I Do'

Until he spoke those words, Mia hadn’t realised quite how badly she’d needed to hear them. Thinking he believed her capable of what he’d suggested had been a heavy burden.

‘The thing is, until I travelled to the other side of the world, I didn’t quite understand why I’d reacted that way.’

A drop of gelato melted over the edge of the cup, landing on her thumb. She lifted it to her mouth without thinking, tasting the sweetness. His eyes dropped to her lips, stared at her there, and her stomach did a thousand somersaults.

‘Luca,’ she whispered, a plea. ‘This has to stop.’ A lump formed in her throat. ‘You can’t keep doing this to me. You keep turning up, and making me think—’

‘Think what,cara?’

But how could she admit that to him? He wasn’t the only one who was afraid of being vulnerable. ‘You can’t keep acting as if this, us, as if there’s something more here. I realised very early on that we want different things in life, so continuing to act as though we’re in lockstep or something...it’s torture. This has to stop.’

‘But what if that’s not true, Mia? What if it turns out we both want exactly the same thing?’

She shook her head, the cruelty of the question landing square between her ribs. ‘Don’t,’ she cried, clutching the gelato cup hard, needing to hold onto something.

‘I thought I didn’t want children. I was adamant on that score. But the truth is, I’d just never met anyone I cared about enough to want to have a family with—the idea of loving terrified me, until I loved and lost. Now? The idea of being with you, of making a family with you, fills me with a joy I’ve never known before. For you to carrymychild? It is all I want.’ His words burst through Mia with radiant energy. ‘Now, the idea of having a family with you is all I care about. We are meant to be together—can’t you see that?’

She shook her head, not because she didn’t believe him, but because she felt as though she were in some kind of mad dream.

‘Mia, listen to me,’ he said, with urgency. ‘I’m in love with you. That scares the hell out of me, if I’m honest, because I’ve never been in love before, and all my experience of relationships has shown them to be capable of wrecking a person completely. I’ve never desired that sort of risk—the reward wasn’t there to justify it. Until now. Until I fell in love with you and realised I would walk through the very fires of hell to be with you, to be open about how much I love you, to be loved back by you, even for a short amount of time. It would be worth it. If something goes wrong and I am destroyed by this love, as I fear I would be if you were to leave me, it will still have been worth it. I’m terrified, Mia, of what loving you means, of how dangerous it is to give myself to someone like this, but it turns out, when you’re in love—real, life-changing love—it’s not a choice, rather than a state of being. I love you. It’s that simple.’

She stared at him, completely dumbfounded. ‘Luca, stop. It’s okay. You don’t need to say this. You don’t need to do this. I’m going to be okay. I don’t need you to save me, to save my family, from financial ruin.’

His response was to lean closer, his face just an inch from hers. ‘I am in love with you. Every single part of me loves all the bits of you. For always.’ And then, to Mia’s continually expanding sense of shock, he got to his knees in the middle of the footpath, the fountain behind him, passers-by pausing to watch. Mia didn’t notice any of that, though. She only had eyes for Luca.

‘What I should have said, on that afternoon at my house, is that I cannot imagine my life without you in it. This is not about business, it is not about money, it is not about saving you. It is, if anything, about saving me. Do you have any idea what my life was like before you were a part of it? Mia, you are everything to me. You are the first person I think of when I wake up, the last thing I want to see at the end of my day, you are in my thoughts while I work, always. And you have been since I first met you. This last year, I couldn’t get you out of my head—why is that? I barely knew you, and yet, on some level, I already loved you.’

She shook her head because it was impossible to believe him. ‘Listen to me. I was so angry with you—irrationally so. I hated you for lying to me because I expected so much more of you. I think I had already started to love you, certainly to need you in my life. The second I read of your engagement to another man, I was driven crazy. It wasn’t just jealousy, though, it was a need to set things to right. I just...went about it in completely the wrong way.’

She closed her eyes softly. ‘Notcompletelythe wrong way.’

‘I berated you and, hell, I kidnapped you, Mia. I couldn’t bear to lose you. I just didn’t understand why that was the most fundamentally important thing in my life until I faced a lifetime of living with my mistakes, of living without you.’

‘God, Luca,’ she said on a half laugh, half sob. ‘I have to say, this is the last thing I expected to hear today.’

‘But is it something you want to hear?’ He stared at her with such hope, such anxious, uncertain vulnerability that Mia could only nod at first, before adding, ‘Oh, yes. Very much.’

A smile burst through his features. ‘Then you will hear it every single day. Every day. For the rest of our lives.’

Her heart burst.

‘You are a part of me, Mia, and I hope, my darling, beautiful love, that you will agree to share your future with mine. Marry me. As soon as we can get a licence, please, marry me.’

Luca being Luca, the licence was expedited and their wedding held only one week later in a small church in the north of Australia, with sweeping views of a stunning tropical rainforest, accompanied by the sound of birds and waves. Unlike their first wedding, which had a guest list comprised of hundreds of Europe’s wealthy elite, the church had only a handful of attendees. Mia’s parents and a pair of her best friends from high school, Luca’s brother and niece, and his father, who, though frail and in a wheelchair, had been flown up from Sydney and sat in the front row with a blanket over his knees despite the heat of the day, an expression on his face that Mia found so incredibly familiar it blew her away.

Luca had said that he was like his father in many ways, and they certainly looked alike—all three of them, for Max had many similarities to Luca, too, and seeing the warmth between the brothers made Mia’s heart very happy. But more than that, seeing Luca with Carrick and knowing that her own words had helped bring about a reconciliation made her glow from the inside out. Because the resentment Luca had felt for his father had really only been hurting Luca, and in opening himself to love, to loving his father despite their imperfect past, he’d allowed himself to step into a happier future.

As for Amanda, Max’s daughter, Mia was entirely captivated. She was a charming, precocious, intelligent and funny eight-year-old who laughed readily and helped willingly. She went out of her way to care for Mia, sitting with her before the wedding, ferrying her cups of tea, doing everything she could to ensure Mia’s happiness. She would be an excellent older cousin, when the time came.

And though Mia had always known she wanted children—and she did—she wasn’t in any rush. She was young, and she was, evidently, just a little selfish when it came to Luca. She found the idea of sharing him, just yet, to be something she was not yet ready for.

There’d be plenty of time for that, in due course, but, for now, she simply wanted to enjoy being Mrs Luca Cavallaro.

Their wedding reception was at a Stone family property attached to the ‘pearl farm’, the most beautiful beach Mia had ever seen. The house itself was nestled in amongst a rainforest with sweeping views of the coastline on one side and ancient trees the other. The wrap-around balcony was adorned with fairy lights, and a long, straight table was set up on one edge, allowing their party to enjoy dinner.

Mia was already in love with Luca, but that night she fell completely in love with this property, his family, with all the parts of him, just as he’d said he felt for her.

And seeing her parents so happy, so relaxed, gave Mia a freedom she’d never thought she’d know. They were imperfect, in many ways, and she would use her mother’s style of parenting as a guide of what not to do when she had children of her own, but she was a master at accepting them as they were, for their good, their bad, their mistakes, and loving them despite that. As with Luca and Carrick, letting herself acknowledge a person’s faults and then loving them anyway represented a freedom for Mia. Besides, with Luca by her side, nobody in the world had the power to hurt or wound her. She was truly, everlastingly content.

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