But then she squeezed him tightly, looked up at him, and expressed the very same thought. “I know how spoiled I sound, moaning because I got to the age of twenty before life threw me a curve. I’m sorry.”
This was why she was perfect—because when she wasn’t, she knew it and wanted to be better. Lia always tried to be better.
What could be more perfect?
Alex bent down and kissed her.
~ 14 ~
For years, Nick and Beverly had hosted Christmas Eve dinner at their house. At first, their guests had been blood family only, both sides of the Paganos in Quiet Cove—descendants of Lorenzo Pagano, Nick’s father, and Lorrie’s brother, Carlo.
When Lorenzo and the eldest Pagano brother, Beniamino, took over their father’s business and begun to build an empire in the dark as well as the light, Carlo had broken with them and gone his own way. Since then, they’d always spoken of two sides of the family, divided visibly by where they sat at Christ the King Church every Sunday—the two sides of the pews.
Now, with their fathers dead, it was Nick who presided over one side of the pews, with Carlo Jr. the patriarch of the other. Like their fathers before them, their relationship was tense but respectful, founded on familial connection and the love borne in shared blood, but not in true affection. Not since they were young had they been truly friendly with each other.
Since Trey, Carlo’s eldest son, had come to Nick’s side of the pews, Carlo and Nick had chilled more. They’d been tolerant of each other but not much more than that.
But they were family, so they shared important family celebrations. Like Christmas Eve.
Nick had been an only child. Carlo was the eldest of six, and almost all his siblings had stayed in the Cove. His youngest sister, who hadn’t, came home often with her husband and children.
But there was family who weren’t part of the Quiet Cove calculation of Paganos: Beniamino’s three daughters had all left home as young women and established lives at a distance—a fact which had pained Ben every day for the rest of his life.
After Ben’s death, none of his daughters had ever returned to the Cove. The annual Christmas card and letter each sister sent to Nick and to Carlo was their only connection to the place they’d been born.
Standing in his living room, considering the array of guests in his festively decorated home, Nick remembered those cousins, daughters who’d run from the dark world of their father, and thought of his own eldest, Elisabetta, who had run from him in the same way.
She stood now across the room, talking pleasantly with her cousins Teresa and Ben. She was dressed for the party and the Mass to follow in a demure red dress that showed her willowy form. Everything about her seemed liable to get swept away in the first brisk breeze.
Elisa had been a fretful child, deeply affected by others’ worries and suffering, fearful of dangers real and imagined. When she was small, they’d expected her to grow out of it. When she grew and did not, they’d tried to help her, and they did, to some degree, but she would always be anxious, always feel things more strongly than she could bear.
She was studying medicine because she wanted to ease suffering, but Nick couldn’t imagine how his fragile girl would overcome her fear to face the pain she wanted to heal. She couldn’t even overcome her fear enough to stay with her family—or trust her father.
From the time she understood the purpose of and reason for the guards at the house, the guards who sometimes followed her through her day, and the sealed room in the cellar, she’d looked at Nick differently. With love, as always, but a new fear had begun to quiver beneath it. And, he thought, suspicion, too.
After the Cove had been attacked and he’d been shot, all she’d wanted was to be away. His heart still burned in the place where he’d agreed to let her go.
For the first time since then, Elisa was home, for the holidays, but the time away, and the miles of the whole country, had only widened the chasm forming between them. The love for him in her eyes was dimming, taken over by that suspicion and fear.
He’d wanted her home for Christmas, had pressed her hard to come home. He’d pressed Beverly hard to get her home.