Page 195 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

She placed her hand on his. ‘You’ve gotten quiet.’

‘Don’t worry about it,belleza, I’m just thinking.’

‘What about?’

‘Our baby.’

‘Do you think we could bring him here?’

‘Him?’

‘Just a hunch.’

‘We can bring her here as often as you’d like.’

Jasmine laughed. ‘Do you have to disagree with me?’

‘I just think that she will be like her mother.’ He didn’t want to curse his child to be anything like him. They would be sweet and good and pure, like Jasmine. ‘And she will love running around this place.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes…and no.’

‘Tell me, Emilio.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything. Tell me what it was like growing up here and in Perlano.’

Emilio wanted to brush off the question, but he remembered how much she valued honesty. Hadn’t he just decided he would make the right choices for his child? But it was more than that—hewantedto tell her.

‘It was wonderful and it was terrible,’ he admitted. ‘Since I was little, my father had almost no interest in me. It didn’t matter what I did or what I tried to achieve, it meant nothing to him. So I acted out. I partied.’

‘With lots of women,’ Jasmine added.

‘Guilty.’ He chuckled briefly. ‘And still he didn’t care. My mother had a rule—that we would have dinner together every night, and if both my parents were around it happened without fail. During those meals my father wouldn’t speak unless he spoke to my mother. If he had a word to spare, it went to Enzo. Never to me.’

Jasmine’s hand tightened over his own, but she said nothing.

‘That didn’t sit well with my mother.’ Emilio smiled then, his cold heart warming with happier memories ‘While Enzo was taken to work and on trips by our father, she would take me with her into the garden and the vineyards. It didn’t matter what happened inside these houses because outside we could be happy.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Valentina De Luca was a fierce woman. People listened when she spoke. When she went away on business or to come here, she would bring me and my tutors along. Enzo may have learned all he knows from my father; I learned from my mother. She raised me alone. Clothed me. Educated me. Loved me. I may as well have had no father.’

‘We’re the same,’ Jasmine said. ‘We owe a lot to our mothers. Women who had to be far stronger than it was fair to expect.’ She toyed with the ring on his finger. ‘What about Enzo?’

‘What about him?’

‘What was your relationship like?’

‘Prickly,’ Emilio answered in a matter-of-fact way. He regretted hurting his brother. He should never have betrayed Enzo the way he had, and he still hated himself for it, but there’d never really been any love between them, no brotherly bond. Enzo had had everything Emilio wished he had: two parents who’d loved him; memories of both of them; his father’s approval. Emilio would have settled for simply an acknowledgement of his existence.

‘My father could do no wrong to Enzo, and Enzo saw nothing wrong in how I was treated. Or maybe he didn’t care. Either way, he said nothing and, seeing as he was away with my father so much there really was no point in pursuing a relationship. And, as we grew, he looked down at me and how I lived with contempt.’

‘And the resentment grew into hatred.’

‘Something like that.’ Emilio couldn’t tell her the rest. She would leave and take this peace, this feeling, she nurtured within him. He would lose his baby. He would lose everything.

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