The Italian Billionaire’s Nubian Queen

Chapter 10

“Bree? What’s wrong?”

Alyssa looked up, startled, to see her sister running into the shop.

Brianna was a mess.

That was a shock in itself. Brianna was always perfectly put together. Alyssa was the one who might be a mess now and then, not Brianna.

“He’s… He’s gone.”

Brianna braced herself against the counter and tears ran down her face. Alyssa glanced at Diane, who got the hint and made herself scarce. There was nobody else in the shop, thankfully. She’d just finished ringing up a sale for a family dinner, and she’d been planning a family dinner of her own. She’d just come to the conclusion that she’d been neglecting her family and that they would help her forget about the strange three weeks in her life.

The first week, when she’d met the man who had stolen her heart. The second week, when he’d come back into her life and made her feel more alive than she’d ever felt until then, before breaking her heart and walking out of it again. The third week, when all the color and happiness had leached out of her world, and she’d begun to wonder if she was alive, after all.

Family could help her fix some of it. At least, Alyssa hoped it could, desperately. She needed it.

But seeing Brianna’s distress, Alyssa set her own heartbreak aside.

“Who’s left? Adam?”

“No. Not Adam. Adam left before. Gabriel, he’s left.”

“What do you mean, Bree?”

“He called me this morning and said he’s going back to Italy. He said he won’t be coming back. He said he won’t be seeing me again.”

“Oh, Bree. I’m so sorry.”

Damn those Colombo brothers, thought Alyssa, but she didn’t say it out loud. Brianna didn’t need to hear that.

“I don’t know what I did wrong. What did I do wrong, Bree? Why do people keep leaving me? What’s wrong with me? Why am I not enough?”

Ah, the Benjamin sisters, thought Alyssa, as she flipped the sign to closed and tried not to think of that time when everything in her life had changed after doing just that.

“Come on. Come on, sit down. There we go. Now cry it out. Rant if you want to. Scream. Let it out.”

“I don’t know why this is happening. He was so kind, Aly. He was so kind and so attentive. I thought it was leading somewhere special. Do you think he left because I wouldn’t sleep with him?”

“No, Bree. If he did, then he’s not worth it, anyway, is he?”

“I think I was… I don’t know. Was I falling for him? I wish I knew. I don’t know how I feel anymore. I wouldn’t sleep with him because…”

“You’re still married to Adam.”

“I wanted to betray Adam. Like he betrayed me. But I couldn’t do it, Aly. I couldn’t do it. Why is it that men can let us down but we can’t betray them? Why?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did.”

Liam had let her down in every way it was possible for a man to let a woman down. He had ignored her, cheated on her, blamed her for everything that went wrong, called her when convenient, chipped away at her self-worth like it was his long-term project.

Matteo had…

Maybe it was worse, what Matteo had done. He’d just ignored her. He’d just ignored who she was and what she wanted, and acted as if she was a doll placed in the world to fit into his life.

That had hurt her more. At least she’d understood that Liam was a selfish man who loved himself so much that there was very little room left for him to love anybody else. Matteo had loved her, in his own way. But it had been the kind of way you love an ideal you could take with you. Not the way you loved a person with dreams and flaws of their own. The way Matteo loved her had been scary. And she’d had run.

So Alyssa let Brianna cry on her shoulder, until she cried herself out.

“Why don’t you come home with me tonight? Stay with me tonight. I could use the company, to be honest. It’s been a pretty hard few days for me, too.”

“What’s wrong, Aly? You don’t seem like yourself. You look… like you’re missing part of you.”

Alyssa chuckled ruefully.

“Let’s not get carried away here. I’m not missing any part of me. All of me is right here. It’s just been a difficult few weeks. You know, it’s funny. That weekend? It was supposed to be awesome. I’d been looking forward to it for so long. But everything went wrong there, didn’t it? I mean, things kind of got messed up for you before that, but the weekend was supposed to make things better. Do you think Lane cursed us or something? We should ask Naomi. Maybe we dismissed the whole witch thing too easily. Maybe she can do something to get rid of whatever hex this is that’s been ruining our lives.”

Brianna chuckled.

“What’s wrong with your life? I thought you were happy. I haven’t been there for you, have I? I’m sorry, Aly.”

“No, you have to live your own life, Bree. I guess… Well, I kind of went and fell in love with Matteo, so there’s that.”

“What!”

“Yeah.”

“But you said… And I sent… Oh God.”

The two sisters sat there and thought things over. Now that they were together, some of the fog cleared from their brains and some things became clear.

“He played us.”

“Gabriel. He played me, you mean,” said Brianna, slowly.

“And Matteo got in the middle and got rid of him somehow. I don’t know the details but there are a whole bunch of really stupid—what are they called, codicils? Or whatever, attached to their father’s will. Something about Gabriel’s inheritance, and Matteo’s inheritance being tied to him having a legal heir, or something of the sort. Except I thought Matteo made most of his money himself so it must have been one hell of a will. I don’t have a clue. And before I forget, he thinks that his dead great-grandmother predicted that he and I would meet and has been in our dreams or something of the sort.”

Brianna looked at her as if she wondered if Alyssa was crazy.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that. He’s the one who said it, not me. I told him it was crazy, too. But, well, crazy as it is, we did have the same dreams. From that first night at the vineyard, we had the same dreams. Maybe there were hallucinogens in the wine, did you have dreams of storms and people looking for you and the wrong people finding you?”

Brianna shook her head slowly.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”