The Sicilian's Christmas Bride

A woman had once filled his head to the exclusion of everything else. And, damn her, she was still doing it.

The realization shot through him. He felt his muscles tighten, as if all the adrenaline his body could produce was overwhelming his system.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Charlotte said, “don’t look at me that way! I was only joking.”

He knew she hadn’t been joking but he decided to go along with it because it gave him something to concentrate on as he walked her back to their table.

Eva greeted them with a coy smile. “Well,” she said, “what have you decided? Will we see you in Aspen?”

For a second, he didn’t know what she was talking about. His thoughts were sucking him into a place of dark, cold shadows and unwanted memories.

Memories of a woman he thought he’d forgotten.

Then he remembered the gist of the conversation and his promise to Charlotte.

“Sorry,” he said politely, “but I’m afraid we can’t make it.”

Charlotte shot him a grateful look as she took her seat. He squeezed her shoulder.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Going for a cigar?” Dennis said. “Russo? Wait. I’ll join you.”

But Dante was already making his way through the ballroom, deliberately losing himself in the crowd as he headed for one of the doors. He pushed it open, found himself in a narrow service hallway. A surprised waitress bumped into him, murmured an apology and tried to tell him he’d taken a wrong turn.

He almost told her she was right, except he’d taken that wrong turn three years ago.

He went through another door, then down a short corridor and ended up outside on a docking bay. Once he was sure he was alone, Dante threw back his head and dragged the cold night air deep into his lungs.

Dio, he had to be crazy.

All this time, and she was still there. Taylor Sommers, whom he had not seen in three years, was inside him tonight, probably had been for a very long time. How come he hadn’t known it?

You didn’t want to know it, a sly voice in his head told him.

A muscle knotted in his jaw.

No, he thought coldly, no. What was inside him was rage. It was one thing not to let your emotions rule you and another to suppress them, which was what he had done since she’d left him.

He’d kept his anger inside, as if doing so would rid him of it. Now, without warning, it had surfaced along with all the memories he’d carefully buried.

Not of Taylor. Not of what it had been like to be with her. Her whispers in bed.

Yes. Dante, yes. When you do that, when you do that…

He groaned at the memory. The need to be inside her had been like a drug. It had brought him close to believing in the ancient superstitions of his people that said a man could be possessed.

He was long past that, had been past it by the time she left him.

It was the rest, what had happened at the end, that was still with him. Knowing that she believed she’d left him, when it wasn’t true.

He had left her.

He’d never had the chance to say, “You made the first move, cara, but that’s all it was. You ran away before I had a chance to end our affair.”

She didn’t know that and it drove him crazy. Pathetic, maybe, that it should matter…but it did. Obviously it did, or he wouldn’t be standing out here in the cold, glaring at a stack of empty produce cartons and finally admitting that he’d been walking around in a state of smoldering fury since a night like this, precisely like this, late November, cold, snow already in the forecast, when Taylor had left a message on his answering machine.

“Dante,” she’d said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel our date for tonight. I think I’m coming down with the flu. I’m going to take some aspirin and go to bed. Sorry to inconvenience you.”

Sorry to inconvenience you.

For some reason, the oh-so-polite phrase had irritated him. Was inconvenience a word for a woman to use to her lover? And what was all that about canceling their date? She was his mistress. They didn’t have “dates.”

Jaw knotted, he’d reached for the phone to call and tell her that.

But he’d controlled his temper. Actually, there was nothing wrong in what she’d said. Date implied that they saw each other when it suited them. When it suited him.

So, why had it pissed him off? Her removed tone. Her impersonal words. And then another possibility had elbowed its way into his brain.

Maybe, he’d thought, maybe I should call and see if she needs something. A doctor. Some cold tablets.

Or maybe I should see if she just needs me.

The thought had stunned him. Need? It wasn’t a word in his vocabulary. Nor in Taylor’s. It was one of the things he admired about her.

So he’d put the phone aside and gone to the party. Not just any party. This party. The same charity, the same hotel, the same guests. He’d eaten what might have been the same overdone filet, sipped the same warm champagne, talked some business with the men at his table and danced with the women.

The women had all asked the same question.

“Where’s Taylor?”

“She’s not feeling well,” he’d kept saying, even as it struck him that he was spending an inordinate amount of time explaining the absence of a woman who was not in any way a permanent part of his life. They’d only been together a couple of months.

Six months, he’d suddenly realized. Taylor had been his mistress for six months. How had that happened?

While he’d considered that, one of the women had touched his arm.

“Dante?”

“Yes?”

“If Taylor’s ill, she needs to drink lots of liquids.”

He’d blinked. Why tell him what his mistress needed to do?

“Water’s good, but orange juice is better. Or ginger tea.”

“That wonderful chicken soup at the Carnegie Deli,” another woman said. “And does she have an inhalator? There’s that all-night drugstore a few block away…”