Somebody's Angel (#5 in a Military Romance / BDSM Romance series) (Rescue Me) (27 page)

M
arc sat in a corner of the hotel restaurant, watching as each male patron entered. None seemed to be searching for anyone they didn’t know. He glanced at Gino’s Breitling on his wrist. Marc had worn it since he’d met Staff Sergeant Anderson at Adam’s wedding. He hadn’t wanted that tangible a reminder of Gino before, but he’d forgiven his brother and begun to make peace with his loss that day. Being here in Tuscany, the neighboring province to his native Lombardy, he’d thought a lot about his brother this morning while expending some nervous energy walking around Siena.

The man was late. Figured. About thirty-four years late, to be exact, not that Marc wanted any kind of father-son relationship with him after all of these years.

Granted, he was in Italy where time had very little meaning. He’d grown up in a society obsessed with punctuality, not to mention his time in the Navy.

He just needed to know where he came from. He’d spent much of his early years feeling as if he didn’t belong. Perhaps this man could provide the missing clues to his identity. His past.

He’d stopped in at a jeweler’s this morning in search of something special for Angelina, thinking a Lady Breitling would be nice. Her watch was the most unreliable thing ever assembled.

Angelina hadn’t been far from his thoughts, either. Everywhere he went he wished he could be sharing the sights with her. So why hadn’t he brought her here with him?

Would she be waiting when he arrived home? He hoped so but couldn’t blame her if she’d bailed. He’d treated her badly. Problem was he didn’t have a clue why he’d refused to let her get any closer. What was he so afraid of happening?

Her leaving him.

Well, how’s that working for you?

Another ten minutes passed. Apparently, meeting his son wasn’t high on Paolo Solari’s list of priorities today, if Marc had been even a second thought for him. Marc began to feel like a fool for having contacted the man. He’d never even managed to speak with him over the phone. A house servant had finally returned Marc’s call this morning and relayed messages between the two men to arrange this meeting location. Did Solari intend to show up or had he just given a time and place to get Marc off the phone?

Did he even remember he had a son? Shit, two sons. Marc had been three when his mother died and Gino three years older. In several decades one could forget a lot of things, but his own sons? Marc couldn’t fathom that.

A tall man in a white silk suit entered the room and commanded every ounce of attention in the very air around him. Exuding confidence, not a strand of his silvering hair straying onto his tanned forehead, the man’s gaze didn’t scan the room. Instead, he gave a female server the once over, eliciting from her a blush and a smile. Taking the response as an invitation, he went up to her, bent down to whisper in her ear, and pinched her ass. She giggled and jotted something on a piece of paper, handing it to him.

He was old enough to be her grandfather. Marc felt a tightening in his gut. No doubt this man was Marc’s father—birth father. Suddenly, the thought of conversing with him made Marc want to run out the back door, mainly to avoid the feeling of looking at himself in the mirror twenty or thirty years from now. Until Angelina had come into his life, Marc had an early history of treating women as his personal
smörgåsbord
, just as this man seemed to do.

Chip off the old block.

Until Angelina had changed him.

Before he could bail out on this train wreck in the making, as if in slow motion, the older man scanned the room slowly and zeroed in on him. Fighting the urge to flee, Marc heard Angelina’s voice.
Keep breathing
. The time for running was over. He needed to face his past if he was going to avoid a similar fate for his future. He couldn’t move forward with Angelina until he knew who he was, good or bad.

While he would have hated for Angelina to see the man whose sperm had contributed to making him, he wished Angelina was here with him. Her steady presence or a comforting touch of her hand. She would have given him much-needed courage right now to face this man from the past who slowly approached Marc’s table.

“Marco Solari?”

The name jarred him for a moment, but he recovered and stood, automatically extending his hand and trying not to flinch as the man shook it. Firm grip. Eye contact. “Marc D’Alessio.” He’d never carry
this
man’s name.

“Of course. Good-looking young man.
Tutto tuo padre
.”

Even though Marc thought the same thing when he’d first seen Solari, he detested being compared in any way to the man who had spawned him. He hoped the similarities ended at the facial features. Motioning for Solari to be seated, Marc resumed his own seat.

They ordered drinks and dinner before staring silently at each other a moment, both at a loss for words. After an awkward period of time passed, Marc broke the silence. “So I take it you knew I’d come looking for you one day.”

Solari shrugged. “I figured you’d have a healthy curiosity and might wonder about your origins someday. Though it took you longer than I expected.”

Marc ignored the censure in his voice. “I didn’t really know about you until recently.”
And now I wish I’d never heard about you.

An arched brow told him he’d surprised the man. Solari nodded. “I guess you were a bit young when your mother took you back. She always regretted giving you to her sister to raise.”

His words confused Marc. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that his mother was his aunt. “What do you mean?”

“Well, times were different then. Here in Italy, it was frowned upon for a single girl to turn up pregnant.”

Marc grew even more confused. “I thought you and Emiliana married before Gino was born.”

“Indeed. I’m talking about
your
mother. Your grandmother had encountered the stigma and shame of carrying an American Marine’s
bastardo
after the Second World War. When Natalia got pregnant, your grandmother forced her to give you to Emiliana to raise with our son, Gino.”

Marc’s heart began to pound. Hearing Paolo call Mama—Natalia—a bastard bothered Marc, but more upsetting was hearing a radically different story from the one Mama had told him. Who had lied? Or had he just gotten this increasingly complicated story confused?

“Maybe it would help if you started at the beginning.”

The server who had probably slipped Solari her number or address earlier came to the table and brushed her hip against his father’s arm, distracting the man from the conversation. After setting plates of antipasti in front of them, she winked at Marc and walked away. Marc turned his attention back to his father.

No, Solari. Papa was the only father Marc had ever or would ever know.

“You were saying.”

“Well, I’m sure Natalia filled you in on most of this. She and I slept together once—our hormones got away from us, I suppose—but that indiscretion resulted in you.”

Mama had said she’d dated this man before her sister had married him, but he insinuated something had transpired between Mama and her brother-in-law years later. The knot in Marc’s stomach made it impossible for him to eat, and he set his fork beside his plate.

“Terminating a pregnancy back then was unheard of here, so your mother went to live with an old schoolmate for the duration of her pregnancy while Emiliana pretended to be pregnant when in public.” He popped a kalamata olive into his mouth and leaned forward. “My wife detested being pregnant, real or make-believe, so that was not a happy time in our marriage.”

Marc couldn’t help but feel the man was blaming him for that inconvenience in his life when Marc had had nothing to do with the choices of three screwed-up adults.

Solari leaned back in his chair and took a sip of wine. “Seven months later, you were born and came to live in my household.”

The cold way he described his beginnings rankled Marc. Love hadn’t been part of the equation. He was merely a problem to be passed off to another couple.

At least one person in that household had cared about him at one time, anyway. “Gino is my half-brother then.” Well, according to this man’s account.

“Yes. He doted on you. There was no chance of him having a brother any other way. Emiliana had quit fulfilling her wifely duties to me by that point.”

Judging by the man’s roving eye, no doubt he hadn’t lacked for female companionship. For all Marc knew, any number of half-siblings could be running around Italy with his father’s genes.

“You know Gino was killed in Afghanistan.”

Without emotion, Solari nodded.
“Sì.
Natalia sent me a telegram. Sad business that war.”

The man hadn’t bothered to show up at his son’s funeral. That was even more sad, although Gino had never mentioned this man, so perhaps he’d also considered Papa to be his only real father.

Marc took a long, slow draw from his pinot bianco before nailing his father with his gaze once more. “Tell me more about Gino as a boy.”

Solari shrugged. “I didn’t really have a lot to do with either of you growing up.”

Big surprise.

“I suppose Gino was a typical boy. I do remember how protective he was of you when…well, especially when Emiliana became ill.”

An image of a frail woman in a bed flashed and faded as quickly as it had come to mind but not before Marc felt the urge to flee.

“Marco, andiamo alla nostra tana!
Gino’s boyish voice, calling out to him to go their lair, sounded loud in his ears, as if he could turn and find his brother standing next to him again. Sweat broke out on his upper lip as adrenaline rushed through him. Marc gripped the stem of his glass and attempted to regain control of his emotions.

Good boy. Keep breathing
.

Hearing Angelina’s grounding words helped calm him. After taking another sip of wine, he decided he needed to know more if he was ever going to understand his past. “Tell me what happened to Emiliana.”

The man waved off the question. “Jealousy. Insecurity. She was a mess even before she got cancer. Emotionally unstable. I left her for good a few months before she died.”

You must be very proud of yourself.

The image of the woman lying on the bed must have been Emiliana. That this man would abandon his dying wife and two small sons spoke volumes to his character—or lack thereof.

“Gino found her. He was only about six.”

“They found you hours later in that rat’s nest hiding place in the woods behind the house. I doubt you remember much about that night.”

Jumbled images from his childhood, but who knew which had happened that night and if any of them were even real. Might be dreams. Rat’s nest didn’t sound right. Marc had no memory of a favorite hiding place.

Dio
, poor Gino. He’d been the one to find their mama lying dead. The backs of his eyes burned as he lifted his glass, drained it, and refilled both glasses from the bottle left at the table. Gino hadn’t deserved to be cast aside by Marc over some gold-digger opportunist like Melissa. He also hadn’t deserved to die on that mountainside in Afghanistan. Marc couldn’t remedy any of that. He just needed to—

“Your mother was nothing like Emiliana.” Solari’s smile made Marc uncomfortable but pulled him back into the conversation with slight relief. He didn’t want to think about Gino right now, for some reason.

“Natalia had a passion for life. She was strong, willful. Much more difficult to break.”

Marc didn’t understand the last statement but remained silent to let the man continue uninterrupted.

“Of course, our affair only complicated things between the sisters. There never had been much love lost between the two of them.”

Affair? When the man didn’t seem intent on continuing, Marc knew he needed more information.

“You had an affair with your sister-in-law?”

Solari waved his hand in the air. “More of a one-night thing. Imagine our surprise when you were the result of one lousy lay.”

Blood pounded in his ears. He had no intention of discussing Mama’s affair—or one-night stand, which sounded more accurate—with this philanderer who had fathered him.

Did Papa know Marc might be her son and not her nephew? Curiosity nearly won out, but he decided he didn’t want to confront Mama about any of this. Not yet, anyway. He needed time to sort it out and determine what questions he wanted to ask. Then he’d talk with Mama. Later.

Would she be any more honest with him the next time? Marc wanted answers. He needed to find out who the fuck he was. But an equal part of him wanted to put off the confrontation he expected. He’d never liked drama.

When Solari began paying more attention to the server than the conversation with his biological son, Marc settled the check without any offer from Paolo to pay.

“You know, I’m not opposed to sharing.” Marc thought he was talking about the bill but realized the man’s gaze focused again on the server. “That one might be more than one man can handle.”

Marc thought he was going to lose his meal. He pulled the bills out of his wallet, not wanting to wait for a credit card to be processed. “I’ve got some things I need to attend to.”
Like getting as far away from my past as possible, namely you.