Chapter Twenty-One
With Julia’s words echoing in his head, Gio stood in the small courtyard behind his father’s old palazzo. It looked as if every part of it was in need of repair. He wondered if it had looked the same nine years earlier when a younger him had stood in that same spot the day he’d come to collect his father’s remains.
He didn’t remember many details from that day, just the anger and hurt that had filled him. He wouldn’t have described his parents’ marriage as warm, but he’d been unprepared for the reality of how little his father had respected it.
While waiting for the paperwork to be completed, his father’s mistress had asked to speak to him. He remembered being enraged by the audacity of her request. He didn’t want to speak to her. He didn’t want her to exist at all.
His mother had predicted that Leora would try to pull him aside. She’d warned Gio that such a woman would say anything to milk them for more money than she’d already taken from his father. “Don’t think she’s above blackmail, George,” his mother had said. “She may threaten to tell her story. You have to keep this out of the papers. The company will suffer enough from your father’s passing. A scandal could do real damage.” Whether her tears were born from anger or loss, Gio didn’t know, but that had been the only time he’d ever seen his mother cry. “I couldn’t handle the shame on top of losing your father. Make it go away, George. Please. Make sure no one ever knows about her.”
And so he’d refused to listen to anything Leora had tried to tell him that day. Instead, he’d threatened to bring the full force of his connections down upon her if she ever spoke of her relationship with his father. She was worried about losing the house, even though his father had promised to leave it to her. He’d assured her that no one was interested in it unless they heard her name again. If they did, he would utilize every lawyer on their payroll to break the will. She would be left with nothing. Unless she kept her silence.
He’d always believed he’d done the right thing. Until now.
He hadn’t told his brothers because he’d wanted to protect them from the truth. He’d heard part of a row once between Nick and their mother that sounded as if Nick knew something. Or suspected. Nick had been confronting their mother about her role in it, which Gio had never understood. No woman deserved the humiliation of discovering her husband had another woman on the side.
Whatever their mother’s response had been, Nick had been furious afterward. Gio had sworn to his mother that he would never tell anyone about Leora, so even when pressed for answers by Nick, he’d kept the truth to himself.
If I did the right thing, why does it all feel so wrong?
What’s real and what’s a lie?
I don’t know anymore.
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Gio was faced, for the second time, with his father’s mistress. This time, however, he saw her as a person and not the embodiment of his father’s betrayal. She was modestly dressed in a blue cotton blouse and matching skirt. Her short hair curled and framed a face that, had he not spent so many years despising, he would have said had aged well. She had a classic, simple beauty, without the artificial enhancements he was used to seeing in women her age.
Was it that beauty that had drawn his father to her? Brought him back to her year after year? What was here that had been worth risking everything—marriage, children, fortune?
He was so lost in the past he didn’t realize she was speaking to him. “Gio? Is that you?”
He froze.
She beckoned him to come closer. “It is you. Come. Come inside.”
At any other time in his life, Gio would have said something cutting and left. But Julia was right. He’d come to Italy for answers, and he wouldn’t find them if he walked away. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be very pleased to see me.”
She opened the door wider. “I’ve waited a long time for you to return.”
He walked up the palazzo’s stone stairs and followed her through the back door of the house and into a salon. The experience was like stepping back into time. From the heavy tapestries on the floor to the ornate wooden ceilings, it was obvious that efforts had been made to retain the charm of the seventeenth-century palace. The furniture was all made from dark wood—simple pieces with worn cloth cushions. But the house was immaculately clean, with no evidence of house staff.
Gio noticed pictures of him and his brothers scattered around the home. On the walls, on the mantel. Everywhere people normally put photos of their family. Nearly ten years after his father’s death. Gio couldn’t understand it. He walked around the room and studied the photos. His father was in many of them, laughing with his boys.
In one photo, the one that stopped Gio in his tracks, his father was holding a baby. Gio looked over his shoulder at Leora.
She nodded and said softly, “That’s my daughter, Gigi.”
“How old is she now?” Gio asked.
“Twenty and away at college. I borrowed monies against this house, but she’s worth it.”
Gio found another photo of his father and the girl, when she was about ten, holding his father’s hand and smiling up at him. “Was she? Is she?” He wasn’t sure how to ask.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Yes, she’s your half sister. She has your father’s eyes. As do you.”
“Does she know?”
“That you’re related? Yes. She’s always known.”
Gio took one of the photos of her off the wall and held it out in question. “And you never told anyone?” So many emotions were rushing through him he wasn’t sure how he felt.
Leora asked, “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“No,” Gio said and a sick feeling came over him. “She wasn’t a secret, was she?”
Leora smoothed her hands down her plain dress. “Your mother had every right to hate me and any child we made. I understood that. Your father loved Patrice, so I did also. I kept my silence out of respect for her.”
Gio laid the photo down on the mantel. “Living with another woman’s husband doesn’t fit any definition of love or respect I’m aware of.”
Leora picked up the photo he’d put down and placed it back where it belonged. “Your mother has always been a complicated woman. She didn’t love your father. She tried to, but she couldn’t fool herself or him.”
Gio turned his back to Leora and looked out the window, seeing but not seeing the boats passing on the Grand Canal below. “Isn’t that what all married men tell the women they screw on the side? That their wives don’t love them?”
“Maybe,” she said softly. “But in this case, it was true. I have nothing to prove to you, Gio. No reason to lie to you. Your mother is a very unhappy woman. She has been for a long time. Happiness is a choice, you know. Like love. You either open yourself up to it or you don’t. Your mother could never let the past go long enough to see what all that anger was costing her. She let a man who loved her slip away to Venice. A man who would have gone back to her if she’d ever let him into her heart.” The words were too similar to those Julia had used for him not to be shaken by them.
He turned back to face her, unable to conceal the bitterness in his voice. “My father made a second family here because he loved my mother so much? Pardon me if I find your take on the scenario tainted by your desire to make it palatable.”
Leora looked at him sadly. “Believe what you want, but Gio loved your mother, and he loved you and your brothers.”
“Why do you call him Gio? He went by George.”
With memories luring her away for a moment, Leora said, “Not when he was here in Italy. In the States, he was who he thought your mother needed him to be. He may have even been happy in that American lifestyle for a while. But in his heart he was always Gio.” She smiled at him warmly. “Here he laughed louder, worried less about what others thought of him, and enjoyed the simple pleasures—like being a father.”
“Father to a bastard child.”
Leora shrugged. “Call Gigi what you want, but it won’t change what we had. Your father loved us. Just as he loved you.”
When Gio said nothing, Leora walked over to a shelf and took down a leather-bound book. “Do you think your father loved you less because he had us?” She handed him the large book. “He kept a scrapbook of you and your brothers. He would sit with Gigi and tell her stories about all of you. He promised one day he would introduce her to you and she would have a large family, as he’d always had.”
Gio reluctantly took the book and opened it angrily. His father had filled page after page with the story of his sons’ childhoods. There were clippings from articles they had been mentioned in, along with notes describing why the event had been important. He closed the book abruptly. “Why didn’t he?”
“Only your father could truly answer that question. Or perhaps your mother.” She studied his face and asked, “Tell me, Gio, why do you choose to use the Italian version of your name? Who are you in your heart?”
“I’m not my father,” Gio said defensively. He thought back to the summer he’d chosen to no longer go by George. It had been during one of his visits to Isola Santos. His cousins had called him by the name and it had felt right. So right that nearly no one called him George anymore. God, how could I have forgotten? All this time I told myself that I hated them, even as I hung on to the one thing they gave me.
My name.
“We are all our parents in one way or another, Gio. The best and the worst of them. Find the good in your father, Gio, and forgive him for what he’s not here to explain to you. And don’t judge your mother too harshly. We don’t know what closed her heart.”
Gio was coming to the uncomfortable realization that after ten years of fearing that he would end up like his father—he’d become something worse.
He was as bitter and closed off as his mother.
And it had cost him just as it had cost her.
It may very well have robbed him of the only woman he could imagine spending the rest of his life with. Julia.
He looked Leora in the eye and asked, “Would you mind if I contact Gigi?”
“I would love that.”
Gio walked around the room again, studying the photos of his family and hers. “My brothers don’t know about you. I thought it was better for them if they didn’t. I was wrong. I’ll tell them about you now. About both of you.”
“You are always welcome here, Gio. Your brothers, too.”
Hitting an overload of emotions, Gio made his excuses and left—promising to return. He walked back to the bridge where Julia had left him and stood there for a long time, replaying the day in his head.
* * *
An hour later, Gio stepped out of a hired car onto a private airfield. The pilot met him and asked where he wanted to go, but Gio didn’t answer.
“Wherever Julia went,” didn’t feel like a sane answer. Was she still in Italy, or on her way back to New York?
A limo pulled up beside them and all four of the doors opened simultaneously.
“Looks like we got here just in time,” Luke said.
Gio shook his head in surprise. “What are all of you doing here?”
A tall blond man stepped out of the car and said, “We came to find you.”
Gio’s eyebrows rose at the sight of the would-be groom. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Stephan smiled sadly. “We postponed the wedding until tomorrow. Nicole understands why we had to.”
Gio looked from cousin to brothers and back. “I don’t.”
Stephan took an envelope out of his pocket and bounced it in his hand as if he were weighing it before offering it. “I found myself in a tricky spot this past summer. A close brush with my own mortality changed the way I look at many things.”
Gio took the envelope. He opened it and read the contents. His name was clearly printed on the top of the deed for Isola Santos.
“I can’t take this,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
“I don’t want it. It should have gone to you. Just be careful, Gio. I spent years chasing it. I thought it was important. It’s just a rock in the ocean. It doesn’t matter. Nicole is what’s important to me now. And my family.”
A rush of emotion filled Gio. Stephan wasn’t pretending to care about him.
He did.
There was so much he wanted to say to him. So much he needed to tell his brothers. He didn’t know where to start. “Perhaps we could be the first generation to share the island. You can have Dominic’s side.”
Stephan choked on a laugh. “That’s cruel.”
In a more serious tone, Gio said, “I was wrong to leave your wedding. Wrong about more than I can even begin to explain now.”
Stephan put a hand on Gio’s shoulder and said, “You are not the first Andrade to make a mistake, and you won’t be the last.”
“Speaking of mistakes . . .” Max looked around and asked, “Did you lose Julia?”
Gio shrugged one shoulder unhappily. “She went back to New York.”
Luke shook his head. “That’s a shame.”
An uncharacteristically sympathetic Nick said, “We liked her.”
“She said I wasn’t ready.”
“And what did you say when she said that?” Nick asked.
Gio shrugged again. “What could I say?”
Nick turned to his cousin. “We can’t lose Julia. I actually like Gio when he’s around her.”
Luke broke the silence that followed his brother’s declaration by asking, “How far could she have gotten?”
Max looked at Gio. “Is she on a commercial flight?”
“Just call her. Maybe she’s not on the plane yet,” Max suggested.
“I broke her phone. And even if she had it, her number is in mine, which is on the bottom of the ocean,” Gio said in frustration.
Luke looked at his oldest brother with a funny expression on his face. “I’m ready to diagnose you, Gio.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You have a severe case of, ‘In love with no fucking idea of what to do about it.’” He shook his head sadly. “It’s the worst I’ve seen.”
“She wanted to leave,” Gio defended himself, even as he kicked himself for letting her leave. “What was I supposed to do? Kidnap her?”
Stephan shrugged. “I’ve seen it work.”
Max said, “And Gio thinks I hang out with a questionable crowd?”
Stephan asked, “Do you love her?”
There were many things that Gio was no longer certain about, but he knew the answer to that question. “Yes, I do.”
“Then go get her. Tell her you love her. Everything else will work out.”
A ray of hope lit and grew within Gio. Could it be that easy? Could he choose love? “You’re right. I have to tell her how I feel. I’m going back to New York. I wish I knew what flight she was on.” He looked at his cousin in apology. “It’ll mean I’ll miss your wedding, but I have to find her.”
Stephan groaned. “I know someone who can find out anything. He could probably tell us if she’s en route or at the airport. He can access almost any database.”
“You mean a hacker?”
“He doesn’t like that term, but yes.” Stephan made a brief phone call, then said, “She has a two-hour layover in Rome.”
Determination filled Gio. “I still have time.”
“Just make sure you’re back for the ceremony tomorrow,” Stephan said in resignation. “Or Nicole will kill me.”
Gio hesitated before he left. He looked at his three smiling brothers and said, “I know I haven’t always been that easy to get along with, but when I get back we need to talk. I need to make some things right.”
Nick made a face at Luke. “Why does love make you sound so much like you’re dying?”
* * *
Julia used some of her time in the airport to check her phone messages via a public phone—an expensive necessity. She needed to reconnect with her life. Now. Her father had called twice. He said there was nothing important but asked that she call when she had time.
She had a couple of messages from friends back in Rhode Island who were wondering how New York was treating her. Only her closest friends were going to hear the real story, and even then she wasn’t sure she’d be able to talk about any of the past week for a long time.
What are the five stages of realizing you just did something too stupid to tell your friends?
Denial: It was not a bad idea to run away to a foreign country with a man I barely know.
Anger: Until he turned out to be a complete jackass who didn’t fall in love instantly the way everyone does in books.
Bargaining: I’ll never do anything like this again if I can just fall out of love with him as fast as I fell in love.
Depression: I can’t believe I did this. I told myself not to. I knew it would end badly, but that didn’t stop me, did it? Instead of doing something important—like saving my family’s company—I go off and get my heart broken by someone who told me he wasn’t looking for anything serious.
But do I listen?
No, I see only what I want to see.
Acceptance? Not likely to happen for a while.
Julia hit the button for the final message. She’d half hoped it would be from Gio, but it was a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize. “Hello, my name is Lisa. I’m Mrs. Rockport’s personal assistant. I’m calling on her behalf to invite you to her house next week. She’s received so many compliments on your necklace that she’d like to commission it in gold and diamonds as well as look at your other designs.”
Julia played the message a second time, and then a third.
I did it.
I found my buyer.
She called her father to tell him. He was happy, but not surprised. He said he always knew she would sell them. She promised to start sending him money as soon as it came in and, just as she knew he would, her father told her it wasn’t necessary.
“Dad, I’ll be able to come back now. I can help you figure out the books and work everything out with the bank.”
“You don’t have to, Julia. I accepted a buyout offer.”
“Oh, Dad. No.”
“It’s okay, Julia. It’s what I wanted. I was hanging on to my factory because I didn’t want to let my employees go. But the new owner says he’ll keep everyone on. I have some money in the bank now and more time to be with your mother. This was for the best.”
The news was bittersweet to Julia. “I’ll come see you next weekend, Dad.”
“We’ll be here, honey.”
Julia hung up the phone and fought back the wave of sadness that filled her. She couldn’t imagine her family without their furniture store.
It also meant there was no longer any reason for her to be in New York. She could create Mrs. Rockport’s orders anywhere. She could return to her apartment in the city, but she wouldn’t be happy there. Not without Gio.
Her flight number was called and Julia walked to her gate. The attendant looked at her ticket, then let her through. Although Julia was lost in thought, she stopped midway down the enclosed ramp and noted that no one was behind her. She hadn’t seen anyone in line in front of her either.
Maybe I’m early?
No, they said it was time to board.
The stewardess at the plane ushered her forward, which put her somewhat at ease. Julia stopped again before the plane door and looked over her shoulder again.
Did I actually think he would come after me?
I’m hopeless.
With that, Julia stepped through the door of the plane. It was empty. She looked around and gasped. Every seat in first class was overflowing with pink roses. She walked down the aisle. Every seat in the next section was also covered with pink roses. She stood in the middle of the plane and started to cry.
“When I pictured this moment, I didn’t imagine you crying,” Gio said from behind her.
Julia spun. She wanted to run and throw herself in his arms, but she was afraid. Afraid to have her heart broken for a second time that day.
He walked to her and held out a hand, but she stood frozen in place. He let his hand drop to his side and said, “I’ve been an ass.”
Julia nodded, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“I’m not good at talking about how I feel.”
Still Julia silently watched and waited.
“I thought I was happy before I met you, Julia. But I wasn’t. I was comfortable with being miserable. That’s not the same thing. I didn’t want to change. I didn’t think I could.” He stepped closer to her and took one of her hands in his. “You told me that I wouldn’t let you in, and you were right. I had gotten used to closing myself off. I forgot how to let anyone in.”
Julia gave his hand a supportive squeeze and held his eyes.
“I didn’t find all the answers I was looking for in Venice, Julia, but I learned something about myself.”
“You did?” Fresh tears poured down Julia’s cheeks.
“Yes. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes my parents made. I don’t want to spend my life hiding what I feel.”
Julia laid a hand on Gio’s cheek and smiled up at him through her tears. “And how is that?”
“I love you, Julia. I can’t promise that life with me will be easy, or that you won’t need to walk me through some of this, but I can promise you that no one will ever love you more than I do.” He kissed her with all the love he’d been holding back, and the last of Julia’s fears fell away.
When their kiss broke off, she said, “I love you, too, Gio.”
“I should have told you what happened on the island. I was angry and I’m used to burying those feelings.”
“What happened?”
He hugged her to him, tucked her beneath his chin, and said, “Alessandro told me that my mother had returned the deed for the island to him. She’d told him we didn’t want the island. All this time I hated him for thinking I wasn’t one of them enough to give it to me, when it was my mother who didn’t want me to have it.”
Julia hugged him tightly. “Why would she do that?”
Gio shook his head sadly. “I don’t know. She never liked my father’s family. That’s actually putting it mildly. She couldn’t tolerate being around them at all. Apparently her hatred of them took priority over the feelings of her sons.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not.” He kissed her forehead. “I needed to know the truth. I was trapped in all the lies. Suffocating beneath them. My brother was right—I needed that smack with a lamp. I needed to wake up.”
“What will you do now?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but I know that we can figure it out together.”
“We . . . I like that. It still doesn’t feel real. Are you really here?”
“I sure hope so, or I paid all of the passengers from this plane a lot of money to find alternate flights for nothing.”
She pulled back in surprise and asked, “You paid everyone to take another flight?”
He pulled her against him again. “You’re marrying a very rich man. I get what I want.”
Julia’s stomach did a somersault at his words. Did he just say? Did he just ask? “Was that a proposal?”
He raised one eyebrow—at first neither confirming nor denying. “You know I don’t ask when the outcome isn’t in question.”
“And what makes you think—”
He cut off her question with a kiss that left them both breathless. “I don’t think. I know. You’re marrying me, Julia. I can’t imagine my life without you in it.”
She raised her hand and touched his cheek softly. “Well, I suppose if I have no choice.”
“Absolutely none.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
A lusty smile spread across his face. “I have plenty of ideas.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Here on this plane?”
He took her by the hand again. “My plane is refueling now.”
“Where to this time?”
“Anywhere you want to go.”
“It’s a shame we missed the wedding.”
“We didn’t miss anything. They postponed it until tomorrow.”
“For you?”
“For us.”
“We should go back.”
He nuzzled her neck. “Tomorrow. Tonight, come away with me, Julia, one more time. We’ll find a quiet place. Just you and me.”
She hopped with excitement beside him, then stopped as a thought suddenly came to her. “Hey, I finally sold some of my jewelry pieces. Can you believe it?”
He pulled her close and hugged her. “With you, Julia, I believe in everything again.”