Page 34 of Unraveled

“But you don’t want to,” Cara assumed.

She hadn’t realized it was more than the penthouse that he owned.

“I didn’t want this place,” Gian muttered heavily. Sighing, he turned to face her again. “Would you mind exploring on your own for a bit? I have a call to make, and I’ll order us some food, too.”

“Sure,” Cara said.

She could tell something else was on his mind.

Gian was good at hiding it, but she saw it.

Whatever it was.

Cara figured it wasn’t her place to push. She hadn’t come with him for the weekend to pry into his personal life. She had come because, like him, a break from life was just what she needed.

And who the hell said she couldn’t have fun while she did it?

“Is this your grandmother?” Cara held out a black and white glamor shot of a beautiful woman, as Gian walked into the bedroom without a balcony.

“No, that isn’t Aurora. And my grandmother died two years ago. Heart attack.”

Cara’s brow furrowed, as she took in the dozen and one other framed photos on the old armoire. Most held the woman, but a few had children, and some, an older gentleman that looked a hell of a lot like Gian, if he were in his forties or fifties.

“Then who is it? Oh, Louise, right?”

Gian stared at Cara, not saying anything.

“What?”

It took her far too long to realize what he wasn’t saying. A woman named Louise had lived here, and she was not his grandmother. A woman who, guessing by the photos and the statements made about the bedroom, had been involved in a romantic relationship with Corrado Guzzi for years.

The photos of the children caught her attention again.

Decades, actually.

“Oh,” Cara said quietly, carefully putting the photo back. “Well, then.”

Gian shrugged one shoulder, but didn’t move further into the room to join her. “Louise died a decade ago, about the time my grandfather stopped coming for his weekend visits. Apparently, he didn’t want much to do with the place when she wasn’t here, but he also didn’t want to sell it.”

Cara glanced back at the old photos of the children. “What about their kids?”

“Louise had kids—they weren’t my grandfather’s.”

“Huh.”

“You sound … bothered,” Gian said.

Cara’s brow furrowed. “Weren’t you bothered that he had a whole other life, with another woman, in a different city, that wasn’t his wife?”

“It was a secret that was not really a secret in our family. I was told—like everyone else in my family—that it was not a topic we were to discuss, for obvious reasons. I didn’t feel much about it, I suppose it wasn’t my place to. That was, until the deed was handed over to me. Now, I have to consider too much.”

She understood that.

It couldn’t be pleasant.

“Let’s get out of this room, then,” she suggested.

Gian nodded, and stepped back into the doorway, gesturing for her to follow. “Food is here, by the way.”