Once inside, he placed a tray on a small card table. He’d brought her chips, tea, and a sandwich.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

He noticed that she didn’t address him. But who was he kidding? If he couldn’t bring himself to break and train her, he couldn’t be upset if she changed the way she spoke to him. He found that he missed hearing that word fall from her sweet mouth.

He thought back to a few days ago when she’d been so scared he’d hurt her, when she’d dropped to her knees in front of him. He left her alone with her food before his hard-on could return.

When he got back downstairs to his office, his butler, Demetri, held out a cordless phone. “It’s your mother, Sir.”

Leo took the phone. What fresh hell was this? “Hey, Ma.”

He’d barely gotten the phrase out when she started blabbering in a nonstop string of excited sentences, some of them running on top of each other.

“Angelo tells me you’ve got a girl, now. Says you’re getting married. When were you going to tell your poor old mother? When we all got there? The whole family is dying to meet her now. What’s her name? Faith? Is she Catholic? Is she a good girl, Leo? What’s her family like?”

“Ma…” Leo said, trying to calm her. This wasn’t good. His family would all be here for a week for Christmas. He hadn’t known exactly what he was going to do with Faith. As horrible as it would be for her, he’d considered locking her downstairs in the dungeon for the duration and having Demitri take her meals down. At least he wouldn’t risk questions that way. Maybe by next year he could trust her enough to let her be with the family under one pretense or another, maybe as a new household servant or nurse for his practice.

But he’d already known sending her to the dungeon would terrify her and make him feel like a monster. He was almost glad hiding her wasn’t an option now. Surely Angelo hadn’t implied Leo had known Faith long enough to propose marriage? That had to be something that had gotten into her head from somewhere else.

The women in his family were a bunch of gossips. You could start out with the simplest story and end up with illicit affairs, murders, and a funeral with a missing body by the end of it.

“I mean it, Leo. I’m very unhappy you didn’t tell me about this. And if she’s living at your house like Angelo said, you better be marrying her! You know I don’t like my boys living in sin.”

He knew she was thinking of Angelo and Davide. He could practically hear her crossing herself over the phone. The shock of his brother coming out had about killed her and she still wasn’t over it. Of course. That was why Angelo had told her Leo was getting married—to take the heat and attention off him this year.