A Hunger for the Forbidden - By Maisey Yates Page 0,18
seen you not looking beautiful.”
The compliment, careless, offhanded, sent a strange sensation through her. “Oh. Well. Thank you.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Well, thank you again.”
She wasn’t sure what to do, both with him being nice and with him giving her a choice on what to wear to the wedding. Such a simple thing, but it was more than her father had given her when it came to Alessandro.
“As long as it doesn’t have lace,” she said.
“What?”
“The wedding dress.”
“The dress for your last wedding was covered in it.”
“Exactly. Hellish, awful contraption. And I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose any of that.”
“What would you have chosen?” She shook her head and looked down. “Does it matter?”
“Why not? You can’t walk down the aisle naked and we have to get married somewhere, so you might as well make the choice.”
“I would wear something simple. Beautiful. And I would be barefoot. And it would be outside.”
He lifted his hand and brushed it over his short hair. “Of course. Then we’ll have it outside at the palazzo and you may forego shoes.” He lowered his hand and she saw a slash of red on his palm.
She frowned and stepped forward. “What did you do?”
“What?” He turned his hand over. “Nothing. Just a cut.”
“You look like you got in a fight.”
His whole body tensed. “I don’t get in fights.”
“No, I know. I wasn’t being serious.” Tension held between them as they both had the same memory. She knew that was what was happening. Knew that he was thinking of the day she’d been attacked.
But she wanted to know what he remembered, how he remembered it, because it was obvious it was something he preferred to ignore. Not that she loved thinking about it except … except as horrible as it had been to have those men touching her, pawing at her, as awful as those memories were, the moment when they’d been wrenched from her, when she’d seen Matteo … the rush of relief, the feeling of absolute peace and certainty that everything would be okay, had been so real, so acute, she could still feel it.
She’d clung to him after. Clung to him and cried. And he’d stroked her cheek with his hand, wiping away her tears. Later she’d realized he’d left a streak of blood on her face, from the blood on his hands. Blood he’d shed, spilled, for her.
He’d been her hero that day, and every day since. She’d spent her whole life saving everyone else, being the stopgap for her siblings, taking her father’s wrath if they’d been too noisy. Always the one to receive a slap across the face, rather than allow him near the younger children.
Matteo was the only person who’d ever stood up for her. The only one who’d ever saved her. And so, when life got hard, when it got painful, or scary, she would imagine that he would come again. That he would pull her into impossibly strong arms and fight her demons for her.
He never did. Never again. After that day, he even stopped watching her. But having the hope of it, the fantasy, was part of what had pulled her through the bleakness of her life. Imagination had always been her escape, and he’d added a richer texture to it, given a face to her dreams for the future.
He’d asked if she always spoke her mind, and she’d told him the truth, she didn’t. She kept her head down and tried to get through her life, tried to simply do the best she could. But in her mind … her imagination was her escape, and always had been. When she ran barefoot through the garden, she was somewhere else entirely.
When she went to bed at night, she read until sleep found her, so that she could have new thoughts in her head, rather than simply memories of the day.
So that she could have better dreams.
It was probably a good thing Matteo didn’t know the place he occupied in her dreams. It would give him too much power. More than he already had.
“I’m not like my father,” he said. “I will never strike my wife.”
She looked at him and she realized that never, for one moment, had she believed he would. Her father had kept her mother “in line” with the back of his hand, and he’d done the same with her. But even having grown up with that as a normal occurrence, she’d never once imagined Matteo would do it.
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“Yes.”
“And how is