Page 27 of The Virgin’s Dance with the Devil (The Martinelli Wedding #3)

Chapter Fourteen

“Marisa?”

Marisa kept her eyes closed. She didn’t move a muscle. If she moved, Luisa would know she was faking sleep.

The mattress dipped. A hand stroked the top of her head. “Marisa, I need to talk to you. There’s something you need to know. Please open your eyes for me.”

She didn’t want to open her eyes. Reality was only real when she opened her eyes. When she opened them, she would find herself back in her childhood bedroom, where she’d been since the early hours of the morning.

After collapsing in her sister’s suite, the Rossellinis had made a collective decision, without Marisa’s input, to go home.

Marisa hadn’t been capable of giving input.

She hadn’t spoken since falling into her sister’s arms. She couldn’t.

She didn’t dare speak or open her eyes. If she could only block her hearing off too, she would be able to completely anaesthetise herself.

“I know you’re awake and that you can hear me,” Luisa said gently, sliding her fingers through Marisa’s hair as Rico liked to do. “Believe me, I know you want to be left alone, but you need to hear this – Lorenzo Esposito’s dead.”

Her broken heart catching, Marisa’s eyes flew open before she could stop them.

Her sister was gazing down at her. She looked drawn. Tired.

“They think he had a cardiac arrest. It happened in the church. Rico and one of his brothers gave him CPR, but there was nothing they could do.”

Now her heart twisted and spasmed.

“There’s more.” Luisa sighed. “Niccolo’s gone missing.”

Marisa didn’t think she had any breath left in her to suck in.

“He escaped from the church before the ceremony could start. I don’t know how much you know, but he was being blackmailed into the marriage.

Gennaro says the sons are blaming Niccolo escaping from the church for killing their father, and are swearing vengeance.

He wants us to pack our things and be ready to leave. He thinks we’re in danger.”

“No,” Marisa whispered. Her throat was raw from all her crying. “Rico won’t let anything happen to us.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I do.” She shuffled to press her forehead against her sister’s thigh and lifted a heavy arm to wrap around her. Fresh tears spilt out. “I do know. He’ll keep us safe.”

If she could believe nothing else from him, she could believe that.

Four days later, Marisa’s mother and sister joined forces to compel her out of bed. If it hadn’t been raining, she wouldn’t have let them. Blue skies reminded her too deeply of Rico and how happy she’d been basking under the sun with him .

For the first time since that nightmare conversation, she wondered if she’d ever feel happiness again, and much though she knew she shouldn’t care, wondered if Rico would ever feel happiness again too.

She didn’t want to imagine what he must be going through with the death of his father. Lorenzo Esposito had been the devil hidden in a human body, but he’d been Rico’s father. Rico had loved him just as much as Marisa loved her father.

His grief changed nothing, but it still made her heart cry to imagine it and her arms ache to hold and comfort him.

Allowing herself to be cajoled into the shower, she washed her hair and scrubbed her body, and wished she could scrub Rico from her mind.

Her reflection when she brushed her teeth shook her.

She looked ill. She supposed she was ill.

If her liver or a kidney had been damaged, no one, not even herself, would doubt she was ill.

But it was only her heart that had been damaged, and the damage wasn’t even visible, and so she was expected to heal in a proscribed number of days.

Maybe having a set number of days to heal was a good thing, she tried to convince herself as she rinsed her mouth.

What else was she going to do? Stay in bed for the rest of her life and wallow in her misery?

Continue letting her colleagues down? Continue letting her family worry about her when they had enough to be worrying about?

Her sister should be in her own home with her husband, not back in her childhood home, afraid her little sister was going to wallow herself to death.

She joined her family in the dining room. The table was laden with breakfast foods.

She kissed them all and slipped into her usual chair. Feeling weirdly tongue-tied, she poured herself a coffee.

Luisa broke the ice. “Well, you smell better, so that’s one good thing. I thought we were going to have to fumigate you.”

Marisa caught her sister’s eye, and to everyone’s surprise and relief, her own most of all, she giggled. It was only a small giggle, but it added a tiny shot of light in the darkness living inside her.

It was later that day, when they were all watching an old movie specially selected for its gratuitous violence and zero romance, that the package arrived by courier.

Sofia Rossellini was the one to sign for it.

Marisa doubted she would have even registered its delivery if her mother hadn’t behaved so suspiciously by ramming it in a dresser drawer.

She doubted Luisa would have either, and it was Luisa who said, “What’s that? ”

Their mother’s bright reply of “Nothing,” was so obviously feigned that even their father looked up. But it was the darting of her stare to her younger daughter that betrayed her, and the draining of colour on Marisa’s face that told Sofia her efforts to hide it from her had been fruitless.

There was a long passage of silence. Luisa must have guessed what was happening because even she didn’t speak, just kept a wary, frightened stare on Marisa.

Slowly, Marisa got to her feet. On legs that felt like they were made of lead, she walked to the dresser and removed the book-sized package. It was addressed to her in handwriting she stifled a sob to see.

Without a word, she took it up to her room and sat with it on her bed, remembering how she’d sat on this very spot with all Rico’s letters surrounding her before they’d taken that fateful trip to Accardiano.

Sniffing back tears desperately trying to leak out, she ripped the package open. In it was her copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

A tear fell. She wiped it away and breathed hard to keep the rest contained, because there was also an envelope. On it was scrawled, Marisa, I know you want nothing to do with me, but please, read this letter before burning it. I swear I will never make contact with you again. R.

It took all the courage she possessed to pull the letter out and read.

Dear Marisa,

Of all the letters I’ve written to you, this is the hardest. This is my eighth try. I can’t write the fancy stuff I wrote before. Those letters were cheats. This is all me.

I finished the book last night. It’s funny how I spent all those months dreading that you would want to talk about the books I quoted in our letters (I read so much about them online that I think it would have been quicker for me to just read them), and now there’s a book I do want to talk about with you, but you’re not here.

Did Clare ever remarry, do you think? I hope she didn’t, and I can hope that because she isn’t real.

If she was real then I would have to hope she found happiness with someone else, and I would have to hope that because that is what I hope for you.

I know there is no chance of you coming back to me.

I know I’ve treated you too badly and hurt you too deeply for that.

As much as it kills me to think of you with someone else, it kills me more to think of you spending the rest of your life like a nun.

Don’t let what I’ve done destroy what makes you so special.

You have the purest heart and soul, and there are good men out there (your father is one) who will treat you with the love, care and respect you deserve.

I’m not a good man, but I’m trying to be.

Whatever I do from now on, it will be with your conscience in my mind.

That the Thomas sisters are alive and well is because of you.

My father’s last instruction to me before he died was to take Niccolo’s girlfriend.

It is the only instruction of his I have ignored.

I called all my men back to Naples and then I contacted Georgia and told her of a safe house to hide in.

I don’t know if Niccolo has found his way to her because I disconnected the tracking devices from their phones, but I have hope for them.

My brothers are still wanting vengeance for our father, but I hope they will see sense once the funeral is over.

They have enough fighting to do with each other over who takes over the family empire – they can’t fight a war that will remind the world of who we really are, too (although I’m not convinced either of them sees it in this way).

I don’t know which of my brothers will take our father’s place, but it won’t be me. I don’t want it. I can’t live this life anymore.

Did I ever tell you about the car we found in an old barn that came with the farmhouse my parents bought when I was a teenager?

It was a 1922 Alfa Romeo, and it was falling to pieces.

My father and I restored it together. It was our project, and it was the best time I spent with him.

That what I want to do now. I’m going to buy myself a plot of land and restore old cars.

I can only hope that one day, I will be able to restore my soul too.

I will love you for as long as the world turns and there are stars in the sky.

Goodbye, my angel.

Rico x

The letter was stained with Marisa’s tears when Luisa tapped on the door and let herself in without waiting for an answer.

Silently, she sat beside her and read the letter for herself, and then she let out a sigh so long it sounded like she’d expelled all the air a body could hold and wrapped an arm around her.