A gasp tore through her. He pressed her closer, lost in the past. “But what I felt didn’t matter. Only Clarissa did. I faced my father. I didn’t care what was going on between him and my mother, but I wouldn’t see Clarissa hurt. He swore he’d been ignorant of this, that he’d never let my mother lay a hand on Clarissa again. I left Castaldini the day Father took Clarissa to his apartments. I returned periodically to check that she remained safe from our mother’s mood swings.
“She was. For those moods stopped swinging, became a steady downward descent. Until the day she died. I came home for her funeral, almost didn’t recognize the woman in the coffin.
“After the funeral I had a long conversation with my father. He said he’d tried his utmost to help her over the years, but she’d been unapproachable about undergoing therapy, had accused him of trying to make her admit that she was crazy.
“I went to her apartments looking for jewelry and personal items that I thought Clarissa should have and would never think of taking for herself. After the abusive period passed, Clarissa had become closer to our mother, sort of her keeper, and I wanted her to have some reminders of better times before mental illness took our mother away from us, to equalize the anguish and sadness that had taken over Clarissa’s memories of her. And I found my mother’s diary.
“The entries started with her discovery of her pregnancy with Clarissa. Some were written in…blood.” Gabrielle gasped, squeezed him as hard as her heart contracted. “Page after page, year after year of agony, of obsession, of unbearable feelings of betrayal. I could almost hear her laments blast me from the pages. How she’d given him her life, her soul, her heart, given birth to the flesh of his flesh, and he’d told her she’d always been a convenience, a means to an end, that his true love was a woman who might not be a queen but was the queen of his heart, a woman she wasn’t fit to be a servant to. The last entry made it clear that my mother intended to end her life.”
Gabrielle panted, her heart threatening to punch a hole in her chest.
“I stormed to my father, hurled the diary at him. It had been him all the time. He had systematically destroyed my mother while he earned our sympathy for suffering such a wife. I demanded to know who the woman was whose comparison he’d used to dismantle my mother’s soul. He said it had been her delusions talking. But I saw the lie in his eyes. And I told him he’d taken my mother from me, from all of us, pushed her until she’d killed herself, that I’d leave Castaldini and I’d return only when he was dead.”
She crushed him to her as if she’d take him into her, hide him from hurt, and sobbed. Until she felt she’d come apart.
“Shh, don’t cry, preziosa mia, it’s all right.”
She hiccupped a syncopation of incredulity before bursting into even more hacking sobs. He was soothing her?
He was, kept gentling her, murmuring to her as if she were a frightened child, until his caring and consideration became too much to bear.
She pushed away, wiping angrily at the tears blinding her, winced when her vision cleared. She’d soaked his hair and face.
She blotted them frantically. He caught and kissed her hands. She surged to him, raining kisses all over his face, quavered, “You’ve got this wrong. I’m supposed to comfort you.”
“And you did, amore mio. With every beat of your heart as I recounted the story, as it pounded, tripped, held its breath then burst with empathy and compassion.”
“But what good is that when you have all this pain inside you? This way you’ve lost both your parents in ways worse than death…”
She stopped, couldn’t breathe. King Benedetto couldn’t be guilty of such cold-blooded abuse at all, let alone to the woman who had loved him to the point of self-destruction, his queen and mother of his children, could he? If he had, then he wasn’t the man she’d believed him to be, didn’t deserve to get Durante back. Worse, if that was how he treated those who loved him, what if he did the same to Durante? And he’d wanted her to convince him…
Sobs wracked her. “I can’t bear it.”
He took her face in his hands, stroked both thumbs over her cheeks, wiped away her tears and anguish. Then he began to sing.
“Vorrei che i tuoi occhi siano la mia prima luce al risveglio…”
I want your eyes to be the first light I see when I wake up every morning.
Everything stilled. The air filled with the magic that emanated from his lips, potent, unstoppable, the sound of power and virility and wonder. Of love.
Quakes started again, different in origin but just as devastating, as consuming. He continued his spell, deepening its destruction, spreading its restoration.
“E il profumo della tua pelle accompagni ogni mio passo…per sempre.”
And the perfume of your skin to accompany my every step…forever.
“Vuoi percorrere il sentiero della vita insieme a me, amore?”
Will you walk your life’s path with me, my love?
Then he fell silent. And she wept. Her first tears of wonder, of being moved by beauty to an extreme surpassing any pain.
Suddenly trepidation pushed aside the tenderness in his eyes.
She couldn’t let him think her reaction wasn’t one of extreme joy and enjoyment. She blurted out, “That’s the most unbelievably, almost painfully beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. How did something like that not become an immortal hit?”
“Maybe because its writer wanted only one woman to hear it.”
“You…?” Shock hurtled through her. “Dio…Durante…”
“Sposami, anima mia.”
Marry me, my soul.
“Gabriella mia, mi vuoi sposare?”
Durante asked again. Will you marry me?
And nothing. Gabrielle was staring at him as if she’d suddenly stopped understanding Italian.
His certainty wavered. This didn’t look like surprise. Not the pleasant kind. But…why? What could be so…shocking? Surely she’d known where all this was leading? But if she was…unpleasantly surprised, did that mean she didn’t…?
No. He wouldn’t speculate. Never again. No doubts. He’d ask, and she’d tell him the truth. She always told the truth.
“Gabrielle? Don’t you have anything to say, bellissima?”
“Say? I-I can’t think of anything…can’t think…”
“Then tell me the first thing that jumped into your mind.”