Stefano went still inside. He knew Ricco was right, and he was also wrong. Fate was strange—one moment giving no hope and the next handing the world to a man. Not the world—a glimpse of what might be. He sighed. Who was he to lecture his brother? He’d done a few crazy things, but not publicly, not so if he ever found a woman to call his own, he would be ashamed. Binding a woman to him, forcing her to accept his life, was going to be a difficult enough task, but he would do it. Now that he knew there was a possibility of having her, he would make it a reality. There was no other choice for him—or for her.

“You have a point,” he conceded in a low voice. “It is your life, Ricco, and what you choose to do is for you to decide. Just know that if your woman does walk into your life, asking her to live with our name, within the rules of our family, is a big enough curse. What else do you have to offer her?”

Across from him, Vittorio stirred. “Are you certain this woman is one that you can bind to you?”

Vittorio. Always the peacemaker in the family. Stefano smiled at him. It wasn’t an easy smile because Stefano, even with his own family members, rarely felt like smiling, but it was there all the same because Vittorio was such a good man. Stefano was always proud of him. They needed to hear how the miracle had happened. They knew, from watching other family members, that finding a shadow rider outside the family was a rare phenomenon and none of them had ever believed it would happen to them.

Stefano knew his brothers needed hope. Ricco especially. He was wild. Sometimes out-of-control wild. Not with the family business, of course. Then he was stone cold and all about business, but he took risks. Too many. He was the best driver in the family, and they were all good, but Ricco often needed the adrenaline rush of fast speeds just to keep him sane.

In another family, Ricco would have been an artist. In their family, creativity was only about the ability to find ways to carry out their work. Ricco had turned to the erotic form of Shibari to satisfy both his need for creating art as well as his sexual needs. He was darker than his brothers, and more prone to violence and chance taking, yet his work was impeccable.

Stefano sighed. His brothers needed to know there was hope. “I felt an electrical charge in the air and found it disturbing. I thought it was a bad thing, a premonition of something coming that our family would have to deal with. The need to stay there was so strong, I couldn’t leave. Even knowing we had to be on a flight for work didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered enough to make me leave.”

Stefano didn’t know why he admitted to his brothers how little control he had had when he should have gotten into his car and driven straight to the airport, but he knew he had to tell the truth. To be precise about the facts. It was important.

“I was standing by my car, out in the street by the driver’sside door. If I had ignored that compulsion to stay, I would have gotten in, driven away and I would never have seen her.” That needed to be said. His brothers had to stay alert. Be aware.

“There’s a tradition in our family,” Vittorio said. “When the first arrives, the others will follow.”

“It didn’t happen for our cousins in London,” Ricco said. “None of them married or had children. Nor did the ones in Sicily.”

Stefano kept going. He could give them this. A moment in his life he knew he would never forget. He would share what he considered a private, perfect, almost frightening moment. “I heard her voice first. She responded to something Joanna Masci said to her. That note in her voice turned the key, unlocking something deep inside of me. I felt it like a terrible wrenching inside. Everything in me reached for her. For that note she left hanging in the air. I heard the music in me answer.”

He fell silent a moment, reliving that moment in time that had changed everything in his world. His heart had pounded in his chest. Hard. So hard it actually hurt. Physically hurt. He could go into a room full of enemies and his heart rate never once elevated, yet hearing that musical note in the air had acted like a key, unlocking a matching note in his body and throwing his iron composure.

“It wasn’t snowing, but it was icy cold. The ground was wet and covered in puddles. Time seemed to slow down, but I was aware of everything, yet only her. I saw and recognized who and what she was by her shadow—by the tubes connecting her to everything. Every step she took, I could feel the channels opening everywhere until she took the one step that finally connected us.”

His fingers closed, one by one, into a tight fist, as if he could hold her to him. He’d had a primitive desire to throw her over his shoulder and carry her to a dungeon, one with a lock so she could never escape. He couldn’t give them that moment, that connection when they joined. That was for him alone. That was private. The jolt was intense. Sexual. His body had reacted, his cock hard and urgently full. Everything protective and primal in him had risen to meet her. To claim what he knew absolutely was his.