Page 61 of Savage Proposal

“Yes, sir.”

After taking care of the check, I met Isabella outside of the bathroom. “Ready to head back?”

She looked apologetic. “I don’t think I’m up for dinner.”

“That’s fine.” I offered her my arm, and still cautious, she slipped her hand into it. “I’m thinking dates aren’t going to be our thing.”

Isabella looked at me, surprised, but then a tentative smile curled her lips. My heart thumped violently against my ribs. Fuck, but I liked it when she looked at me like that. “So, this was a date?”

“An attempt at one.” I reached into my suit jacket and pulled out a cell phone. Brand new and fully programmed. “Here.”

She stared at it. “What? Why?”

“Just take it,” I said, handing the phone to her. “Call your sister. Set up a lunch date, and let me know when.”

Isabella’s smile grew as she stared down at the phone, and then up at me again. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to my cheek. My heart threw itself against my sternum again.

CHAPTER 37

Isabella

“Will you tell me about Sienna?” We were in bed, curled around each other, and the words had welled up in my chest before I could stop them.

Lorenzo froze beneath my cheek, and I almost took the question back. We’d returned from our attempted date, and Lorenzo made us turkey sandwiches. We ate them standing at the counter in the kitchen. My heart would skip any time I would catch his eyes on me. I thought that we would go upstairs and have sex, but instead, Lorenzo had run me a bath. Afterward, he’d tucked me against his chest and held me in a way that he never had before. For a date that didn’t start off well—not that I knew it was a date to begin with—it had become one of the best I’d ever had. No one had ever taken such care of me.

Now, here I was ruining all of that. “Why do you want to know?” His voice was tight, but he didn’t sound angry. Not yet, anyway.

I shrugged. “She’s literally a forbidden topic in this house,” I said. “You don’t even have any pictures of her.”

Lorenzo was quiet, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was going to answer me at all. I listened as his heart thumped against my cheek. “What happened to Sienna was one of my worst failures,” he said. “I didn’t like the constant reminders, so I got rid of all of her pictures.”

I tipped my head back so that I could look at him. Lorenzo had a faraway expression on his face. “What happened to her?”

He shook his head.

I reached up and touched his cheek, bringing his pensive eyes down to me. “Talking about it might help.”

He didn’t believe me, but Lorenzo didn’t shake off my hand either. “How would it possibly help?”

“Your guilt has turned her into a ghost. Even if you’ve gotten rid of her, in theory, she’s in every room of this house. You can only pretend that she isn’t for so long.”

Lorenzo studied me for a long while before his gaze drifted. I thought he might push me away, but his arms tightened around me.I wonder if he even notices, I thought and decided not to ask. “I never anticipated falling in love,” he said after a while. “Marriages in the Cosa Nostra…”

“Amalia told me that they’re usually more business arrangements,” I said.

He nodded. “My father arranged things for us with the Bianchi family. Don Bianchi is a wealthy man, and marrying Sienna brought in new business avenues for us.” He chuckledhumorlessly. “No one expected for us to have genuine feelings for each other.”

Lorenzo might not have realized it, but his face filled with a warmth the more he spoke about her, and I could practically feel it soaking into me. Maybe it was odd that I liked how he spoke about Sienna, but it finally felt like I had met the real Lorenzo. “When did you realize that you loved her?”

He made a sound of disbelief, but then he looked down at me, eyebrow raised. “You really want to hear about that?”

I nodded. “Please.”

“It wasn’t anything grand,” he said. “We had been married for a little over six months, and we were still feeling each other out. We had a standing weekly date so that we could spend time together, but we were really leading separate lives most of the time.”

“What changed?”

“It wasn’t anything huge,” he said. His eyes were far away again, like he was lost in a memory. “I had to go to Chicago for business, and the week that I was meant to be gone stretched into two, and I missed her. Not just sex with her, but everything about her.”

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