An Inheritance of Shame - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,39

He didn’t answer, just shook his head. Again. ‘You can’t love me, Lucia,’ he said. He sounded like a broken record, but hell, he didn’t have anything else.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘That is the answer.’

‘All right,’ she said evenly, ‘I’ll ask a different question. Why do you think I can’t love you? And I want something more than “because.”’ He heard a slight quaver in her voice, and knew, despite her quiet, utter sincerity, this was hard for her. Maybe as hard for her as it was for him. And he knew then if she could be honest enough to admit that she loved him, then he could be honest enough to admit why he didn’t think she could.

‘Because,’ he said, his gaze averted, each word drawn slowly, painfully, from him. ‘No one’s ever loved me.’ He set his jaw, wished the words right back. Could he sound more pathetic, whining about how nobody liked him?

Lucia didn’t answer, and he forced himself to meet her gaze, to see the pity that was surely reflected there. He didn’t see pity, only sorrow and a surprising determination. ‘Then,’ she answered, ‘I’m lucky to be the first.’

He blinked back the sudden sting of tears. God help him, he was practically crying. ‘No,’ he said, and that was all he could manage. He forced back all that awful emotion and met her gaze once more. ‘What is this really, Lucia? When I first saw you in the hotel—when I brought you up to my office—you didn’t tell me you loved me then. You wouldn’t even admit to being angry at me. You acted like you didn’t care about me at all.’ And he’d believed her then. Even now, with everything she’d said, he still believed.

‘Loving you,’ Lucia said, ‘isn’t the same as wanting to love you.’

‘Ah.’ Well, maybe that made sense. Of course she wouldn’t want to love him.

She sighed and shook her head. ‘Angelo, I didn’t want to love you because I knew—I know—you don’t love me back. Who wants that?’

He shrugged, hating this conversation. ‘Nobody, I suppose.’

‘Exactly.’ She hesitated, and he felt the heaviness of the words she wasn’t saying. He just didn’t know what they were. ‘I said, I didn’t want to love you,’ she said quietly. ‘But then, in just the past few days, I started thinking…’ She trailed off, biting her lip, and Angelo suddenly, desperately, wanted to know what she’d started thinking about. He needed to know.

‘You started thinking what?’ he asked brusquely.

Her teeth sank in deeper to her lip and he saw cloud-coloured shadows in her eyes, hiding the true emotion underneath. ‘I started thinking that maybe I never gave you a chance,’ she whispered.

‘A chance? A chance for what?’

‘To love me.’

The words seemed to hang in the air between them, a hope, a challenge. A chance to love her.

What the hell was he supposed to do with that? ‘Lucia…’

‘I’m not asking you to love me,’ she said quickly. ‘Not just like that. But…but if you do actually want to be with me, then I won’t take some affair, some kind of sordid arrangement. If you want to be with me, then you be with me. You get to know me again, you ask me out on a date.’

‘I did ask you on a date,’ he objected, nettled. ‘I asked you out to dinner at a proper restaurant.’

‘In order to convince me that I don’t love you! What was behind that, Angelo? Did you think if I decided I didn’t love you, I’d think desire was enough and I’d hop into bed with you? Is that how your twisted mind works?’ She spoke with an edge but also with humour, and he actually blushed.

Yes, it appeared that was how his twisted mind worked.

‘Love complicates things,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s messy.’ And scary. And awful. And loving people usually meant they didn’t love you back. They didn’t love you at all.

‘You think I don’t know that?’ she answered, still with the edge and the humour. ‘My life would have been a whole lot simpler, a lot cleaner, if I’d never loved you.’

He bristled instinctively. ‘So don’t.’

‘I’ve tried.’ She met his gaze squarely, her eyes blazing truth. ‘But I can’t stop, because I love you too much.’

Her words made him breathless, as if he’d been punched in the gut. He was quite literally winded. ‘So why are you telling me this now?’ he asked after a moment, when he trusted his voice. ‘When you’ve been denying it all along?’

‘Because