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“Don’t worry.”
She was a little worried.This wasn’t good.
“I know what you think.Your sister and I were engaged to be married when she was fifteen.I never met your sister,” Lorenzo said.
This surprised her.She thought he would have at least met her sister.“Why not?”
“I didn’t want to.”
This made her frown.“Even though everyone who saw her said she was beautiful.”
“She was fifteen, and I’m not ...I’m not a man who falls for girls that young,” he said.
“Oh,” Clarissa said.This made her frown.“What?”
“You do realize the reason I didn’t come to see you was because you were a kid, and there was no way I would be able to go through with the marriage, don’t you?”he asked.
“No,” Clarissa said.“I thought you didn’t want to see me because you didn’t want to be married to me.”
Lorenzo sat back.“Your sister was fifteen.You were fucking ten.”He shook his head.“Look, I know some men are all into the young women and all that, but I’m not.I didn’t want to have to do my duty, thinking of you as a kid.I had to know you as a woman.It’s why I waited until you were twenty years old.”
“I had no idea,” she said.This was news to her.Her parents had told her he didn’t want her.She filled in the blanks by assuming he was disappointed it was her.
He laughed.“Fuck me.I never met your sister, and yes, we were meant to marry, but I was not your sister’s.”
“But if nothing happened to her, you would be married to her.Trust me, she was beautiful and nice and kind and you would have loved her.”
“I want you,” he said.
“You can’t know that if you’ve never met her.”
“I know you,” he said.
She shook her head.
“You need to stop feeling guilty.This marriage was going to happen, even if you had another sister and something happened to you.”
Clarissa knew that.Her parents had told her that.
“You’re not doing anything wrong.”
It still felt like a betrayal.
“Tell me, did your sister ever ...talk about me?”
Clarissa shook her head.“No, she didn’t.”The truth was, there was no time.They learned of her engagement a few days before the incident.“Can we not talk about this?”She didn’t want to think about what happened.
“No, we don’t have to talk about it.However, when you’re ready, we can.”
She looked toward Lorenzo and was surprised he was willing to let this go.Usually, she wasn’t allowed to let things go.Her parents would always force her to go out of her comfort zone, even when she wasn’t ready.
The truth was, she missed her sister so much.She’d been her best friend for the first ten years of her life.The connection she had with Liana, Mia, and Tatiana wasn’t the same.She wasn’t the same woman.They didn’t know she was once talkative and happy.There was a time you would catch her in the garden playing around rather than in a sewing room.But she wouldn’t change who she had become.All she would change was the fact that her sister wasn’t here.
****
There had been a lotof revelations the previous night.Possibly more than Lorenzo could handle.His wife talking about being stiff in the bedroom because she didn’t know what to do.That was what she’d been told to do.Her mother had never seemed like a caring person.Clearly, Clarissa’s grandparents had taken care of her the most, and the subject of sex hadn’t come up, or what it was supposed to be like in the bedroom.
He needed to go slow, but for now, sex would come.They didn’t have much of a choice, seeing as they were now married, and there was no way they were going to get out of this with divorce.
