Page 75 of Sasha’s Secret

She’d known this would come eventually. “Go on.”

“I should warn you—it’s a long story.”

She didn’t care. She’d willingly listen to him for the rest of her life. “We have all the time in the world.”

He hugged her more closely to his side. Sasha rested her head against his shoulder and laid her palm flat on his abdomen. The ridges of muscle, hard beneath her fingertips, helped to ground her, even though she was cold and shivering inside. She’d never felt so emotionally vulnerable before, not even when Jack had been dying in front of her.

“My mother—Claire—met my father when she went to Sicily for a holiday with some friends, a final fling before they all went their different ways to university. She wandered off on her own, got lost, and my father was a member of the search party that went looking for her—or so the story goes. You probably think I’m going to tell you it was love at first sight, but I think there was rather more lust than love.”

Sasha smiled to herself. “Isn’t that usually the case, though—when you meet someone new, exciting, and attractive? Especially when he’s saved your life.”

She felt Rocco shrug. “I suppose so,” he said without emotion. “She wanted to stay behind when it was time for them to go home, but her friends talked her out of it. Apparently, they complained loud and long about not seeing much of her after she met Dario.”

“How old were they? When they met.”

“She was nineteen, I think. He would have been twenty-three.”

“That obviously wasn’t the end of it, though.”

His chest vibrated with a brief chuckle. “Obviously. At the end of her first year of university, she decided to go back to Sicily, but this time, she went on a working holiday.”

“And Dario was waiting to meet her off the plane?” It was a ridiculously romantic notion, but Sasha couldn’t stop herself asking the question.

“Not at all—he didn’t know she was going. Although they’d spent all that time together, she had no idea where to find him, because he’d always gone to the hostel to meet her. She assumed he must have lived close to the area where she’d vacationed a year earlier, and she hoped—somehow—their paths would cross.”

“Wasn’t that risky? Going all that way alone?”

“She didn’t think so, until my father found her in the bar where she was working. When she told him what she’d done and why, he put her over his knee and spanked her until she couldn’t sit down… right there, in front of all the customers.”

Sasha opened her mouth to speak, but for a few eternal seconds, nothing came out, until her stunned brain finally rediscovered its ability to think. “What happened next?”

“He kissed her. Then he told the bar owner she was no longer working there, and eventually he took her home to meet my grandparents.”

“Isn’t that a bit Neanderthal? And eventually? What does that mean?”

“It was a lot Neanderthal, and that was exactly what she told him as soon as they left the bar. And eventually he took her home, because everyone came out of the bar to enjoy the spectacle of Dario’s sweet English rose giving him hell. They all knew he’d been totally besotted with her since their initial meeting, because he’d done nothing but talk about her for the whole damn year.”

If she hadn’t known what kind of man Rocco was, she’d almost have thought he was making it up. “So, did she spend the summer there, or…?”

A shadow of sadness fell over Rocco’s expression. “That summer, and the next decade. They were married as soon as it could be arranged. The Gramps gave her hell for it.”

“The who?” Sasha could guess who he meant, but confirmation wouldn’t hurt.

“The Gramps—a collective noun for my maternal grandparents. As they saw it, she’d cheated them out of the big white wedding they’d always wanted for her. There was more to it than that, though—she’d also deprived them of a socially acceptable son-in-law. They bore that grudge right up until the day they died. Not being able to reconcile with them hit my mother hard.”

“Did they refuse to see you, too?”

“Not at all. In spite of my… heritage, I was the grandchild they’d always wanted. When my parents’ marriage broke down, my mother took me back to England, and even though her parents wouldn’t see her, she sent me to see them every Sunday until I was old enough to recognize the atmosphere between them for what it was.”

Sasha’s heart contracted with aching sadness for what the young Rocco had gone through. “What happened then?”

“I was almost fifteen by that time, and when I finally understood what their attitude was doing to my mother, I refused to go again.”

“What about your father? What happened to him?”

“He never got over losing her. He tried all ways to get her to go back to him, and when she died, he started on me, telling me I needed to go back to Sicily permanently, for the sake of my birthright.”

As she listened to the delicious tones of his accent, Sasha realized that what he’d told her was only the tip of an intensely private iceberg. She had so many burning questions, but she had no right to ask them.