The Sicilian's Proposition Read Online Free PDF Page A

me without so much as a backward glance.”
    He detected a flicker of regret in her eyes. Maybe she was sorry and now regretted her actions. She stretched across the table, placing her hand on his. “Please let me explain, Dante…”
    He hesitated for a moment and drew his hand away. “What’s the point, Carla? I just don’t care, to be honest.” She had well and truly snuffed that candle out.
    “Please,” she implored.
    He looked at her tear-stained eyes. “Okay,” he said, “but first we eat, then you explain.” No matter how hurt he was, he needed closure for himself in order to move on with his life. This was as much for him as it was for her.
    She nodded as if grateful he allowed her an audience.
    After dinner, which in the end he hadn’t the appetite for, he ordered two coffees. He gazed at her with new eyes. How could he have known so little about the woman he had wanted to share the rest of his life with?
    Oh, he’d known all the essentials about her family, her upbringing, her career. But he knew nothing at all about her feelings for Giuseppe. Ponti was twenty years her senior. He gulped when she revealed the affair had been going on for the past ten years, sick to his stomach that Carla had only been a sixteen-year-old school girl when it started, whereas Ponti was a thirty-six-year-old married man. If it wasn’t for her tender years at the time, he wouldn’t be listening to this right now.
    “I tried to break it off, Dante,” she explained. “But he wouldn’t allow it.”
    He narrowed his eyes. “Wouldn’t allow you to?”
    “You don’t understand what it was like…when I was young he threatened to ruin my reputation. It would have killed my parents, my family…” She was starting to sob now. “He continued to have a hold over me. I had broken it off when I met you, but I feared he would tell my secret to others and it would only be a question of time…”
    “So why did you go back to him?”
    “Because…he kept promising me he would leave Angelina, and when he actually did it, I felt guilty for splitting up his family. Like a fool, I believed he loved me so much that he’d done it all for me. But when I left you and we moved into his town apartment, things went wrong within a short space of time.”
    Was she expecting him to feel sorry for her? The woman who had taken his heart when she abandoned him? Why hadn’t his sister told him that when Ponti left home, he was with Carla? Maybe she hadn’t wanted to hurt him when she was in so much pain herself.
    “How did I fit into all of this then, Carla?” He scratched his chin. She seemed oblivious to his grief.
    “I’m sorry, Dante, I wasn’t thinking about you at all. Can’t you see I’d waited years for Giuseppe to show his love for me, and I thought now he had at last?”
    “Thought he had?”
    “Yes. After we’d been together for a few weeks, Angelina called at the apartment, asking to see me. At first I didn’t want to see her, but then I let her in and we sat and had coffee and talked. She told me I wasn’t the only young woman Giuseppe had been seeing for the past ten years.”
    That figured. Ponti lived a life close to the edge and knocked around with all sorts of gangsters. There had even been rumors of him running a brothel. Angelina had never accepted any of it, pushing all thoughts of her husband’s misdemeanors to one side. Maybe it was because she enjoyed the lifestyle she lived and was able to box it all off.
    “Why aren’t I the least surprised?” He scowled.
    Carla drew a breath. “I was amazed Angelina didn’t seem angry. I discovered he hadn’t left his wife and family for me as I’d thought. His wife had plucked up the courage to throw him out and commence with divorce proceedings…”
    “Oh…” was all Dante could manage to say.
    He hadn’t realized she filed for divorce; he was so caught up in his own pain…he felt awful now. He resolved to be more supportive in the future now Ponti was