Once a Ferrara Wife... (10 page)

‘I had no idea you went to hospital. You should have told me.’

‘When? When was I supposed to tell you? I
tried
telling you but you had switched your phone off to avoid the inconvenience of talking to your neurotic wife. By the time you finally fitted me into your demanding schedule, I’d coped with it by myself. There was no point in telling you.’

‘Now you’re being childish.’

The accusation robbed her of breath. ‘I asked for your help, you didn’t give it. I told you I was scared, you didn’t come. Did you really think I was going to carry on begging for attention? I did what I’ve always done. I sorted it. That isn’t childish, Cristiano. It’s adult behaviour.’

‘Adults don’t walk away from a difficult situation.’ A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘Even given the difficult circumstances, there was no excuse for sulking.’

‘Sulking?’ Her voice shook and she could barely say the words that needed to be said. To steady herself, she took a slow, deep breath. ‘God, you have no idea. I don’t know why I’m even wasting my breath having this conversation. You say I don’t talk but the biggest problem is that you don’t listen. I say, “I’m in trouble” and you hear,
She’s neurotic; she’ll be fine.
If that’s love, then I don’t want it or need it.’ Dragging her phone from her bag, Laurel punched in a number and ordered a taxi in shaky Italian, shocked by the powerful and utterly alien urge to leap on him and do him physical harm.

Watching her through eyes glittering with frustration, Cristiano dragged in a driven breath. ‘You will not leave this room until we’ve finished talking.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Basta!
Enough!’ His face as pale as Sicilian marble, his
muscular frame taut, he blocked her path. ‘I realise that a miscarriage is a shattering experience for a woman. I, too, was very upset at the loss of the pregnancy, but it’s important to keep this in perspective. These things happen. My mother lost two babies and then went on to have three healthy pregnancies. Our problem is not the miscarriage, it is our marriage. If we can sort that out then we will have more children.’

Laurel stood still, frozen by the chill of her own emotions, wondering how someone so emotionally expressive could be so monumentally insensitive towards the feelings of others. ‘We won’t be having more children, Cristiano.’

‘I made you pregnant the first time we had unprotected sex. After tonight you could already be pregnant. You probably are.’ His unquestioning confidence in his own virility increased her tension tenfold.

‘I’m not pregnant.’ Her lips were stiff and the blood pounded through her skull. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘A miscarriage doesn’t—’

‘I didn’t have a miscarriage.’

His brows met in a frown. ‘But—’

‘I had an ectopic pregnancy.’ Just saying it brought back the memories and she had to pause and hitch in her breath, which surprised her because she’d thought that by now the experience should have been nothing more than a bad memory. She pressed the flat of her hand to her abdomen, to that part of her that had malfunctioned with such devastating consequences.
She thought of their child.
‘If I hadn’t followed my instinct and gone to hospital when I did, there is a strong chance I would have died when the tube ruptured. As it was, they operated within fifteen minutes of my arrival and they saved my life. I owe them that. They were brilliant.’

The silence was shattering.

She’d never witnessed Cristiano at a loss. She’d never witnessed him unsure and out of his depth.

But she was witnessing it now.

The blistering self-belief was nowhere in evidence and he actually shifted his position as if he needed to rebalance himself, the foundations of his rock-solid confidence severely shaken by her unexpected admission.

Deciding that it was only fair to give him the right of response, Laurel waited.

And waited.

No sound emerged from his lips. His face was the colour of pale marble and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides. He looked utterly shattered by her dramatic revelation.

‘You should have told me.’ His hoarse exhortation shattered the silence. ‘It was wrong of you not to.’

Any sympathy she might have felt dissolved in that unguarded, judgemental comment. Even now, it seemed, the fault was hers.

‘If you’d been here, I wouldn’t have had to tell you,’ she snapped, her hand closing round the handle of her suitcase. ‘The doctor would have told you. And he also would have told you that I can’t have more children. They removed one tube and the other is such a mess there is no way it’s up to the job, so you’ll have to find someone else on whom to publicly demonstrate your astonishing virility.’ Eyes stinging, throat dry, she hauled the suitcase towards the door, knowing that the taxi would already be waiting. If there was one thing you could depend on in a Ferrara hotel, it was efficiency and attentiveness to the needs of the guests. It was just a shame that same attentiveness hadn’t spilled over into their marriage. ‘Don’t follow me, Cristiano. I don’t have anything left to say to you.’

T
HE
door slammed.

Cristiano flinched, the sound reverberating through his skull.

He stared at the empty space that moments before had held Laurel and her suitcase.
A furious, fire-breathing Laurel.
Even when he heard the revving sound of an engine vanishing into the distance he still didn’t move. He was incapable of moving. His brain and body felt disconnected, frozen at the point she’d made her shocking confession.

Ectopic pregnancy?

She’d almost died?

As the stark, shocking truth sank into his brain he stumbled through to the bathroom and was violently ill.

His brain produced a kaleidoscope of vile images. Laurel clutching her phone, confessing that she had a bad feeling. Him, switching his phone off while he went into one more meeting. And the worst image of all—a bunch of gowned surgeons battling to save the life of the woman he loved.

A life he hadn’t even known was at risk.

A love she didn’t believe in.

Trying to clear his head, Cristiano lurched into the shower and turned the jets on full force and the temperature to cold.

Minutes later he was shivering, but his brain still wasn’t functioning.

He kept thinking of her alone in a hospital room, her fears dismissed by those closest to her.

Her accusation that he was the one who had pushed her to confide in him and trust him rang loud in his brain. He remembered that single phone call with uncomfortable clarity, including the part where he’d placed all his trust in the doctor’s opinion and dismissed her anxieties.

Phone call. He had to make a phone call.

Cristiano turned off the shower, knotted a towel around his hips and sleepwalked back into the bedroom, trying to remember where he’d put his phone. He stared blankly at his suit, strewn carelessly on the floor in the hot burn of passion.

She’d almost died.

Picking up his trousers, he fumbled blindly in the pockets. No phone. Surely he’d had it with him last night?

Why hadn’t the hospital called him when she was admitted?

Distracted by that question, he picked up his jacket and his phone slid out of the pocket and fell onto the tiled floor with an ominous crack.

Broken,
he thought. Like everything else around him. And all through his own carelessness.

Trying not to compare that livid line now dividing the screen with the state of his marriage, Cristiano punched in the number of the hospital, relieved to find that the phone still worked.

His reputation meant that he was instantly put through to the relevant person.

Unsettled to find that the hand holding the phone was shaking, he sank onto the sofa.

When the consultant at the hospital refused to divulge any information on Laurel’s case without her permission, Cristiano tried asserting his authority but in truth he had none and the man wouldn’t betray patient confidentiality.

Feeling uncomfortably as if he was losing his grip, Cristiano pulled on his clothes from the night before and dropped his shattered phone into the pocket of his trousers.

Nothing the doctor told him would have changed the way he was feeling anyway.

The details about what had happened at the hospital were irrelevant now. Wasn’t he the one who always said that you had to keep moving forward? And here he was, rooted to the spot, beating himself up about the past while she was currently boarding a plane, intent on getting as far away from him as possible.

He had to stop her.

Still in the process of buttoning his shirt, Cristiano grabbed his car keys and sprinted from the villa, leaving the door wide open. He sprang into his sports car and accelerated away, exploiting his skill and knowledge to push the car to the limits of its capability. Dust rose behind him, smothering his stunned security team in a choking white cloud.

Part of him was aware that he was behaving like a madman but he didn’t even care.

She
did this to him, he thought, finally finding focus as he shifted gears. She drove him to behave in ways he had never behaved before. Take marriage—he braked sharply and swerved to avoid an oncoming car—he’d been perfectly happy with his single status until he’d met Laurel.

Santo had employed her to train him for the New York City Marathon and had suggested she advise on the hotel development.

Right from the first moment he’d seen her, Cristiano had been lost.

She’d walked into his office, that chocolate-brown ponytail swinging, and calmly pointed out all the flaws in the plans for the new state-of-the-art fitness centre.

Other people tiptoed around him, intimidated by the power
he wielded. Most of them were too protective of their own futures to challenge him.

Laurel had shown no such reservations. She had absolute faith in her own expertise, a confidence that came from a lifetime of making decisions alone. He’d learned quickly that the only person she trusted in life was herself.

In his head he heard her voice on that day she’d come to his office to give him her recommendations.

‘You hired me,’ she’d reminded him in a cool voice as she’d scored lines through the list of equipment and added more. ‘I presume you want my professional opinion. Your entire model is flawed. No one wants to come to a hotel of this quality and sweat on a treadmill. You need personal trainers. One to one. Everything tailored to the individual. You need free weights, exercise balls, offer Pilates—’ Her list had been carefully thought out. It had been her idea to turn what had originally been a standard gym into an exclusive fitness club, including physiotherapy and links to the spa with massage and beauty treatments. ‘You’ll attract athletes, but also normal people because you’re developing tailored programmes. In an ideal world everyone should have a personal programme and you’re trying to create an ideal world.’

When he’d pointed out the cost of her plans, she’d laughed. ‘Do you want to be the best or not?’

Despite grumblings from his brother, he’d followed her proposal to the last detail, admiring her bold vision and her innate sense of what was possible.

It had been an overwhelming success.

The Ferrara Spa Resort was now one of Europe’s foremost hotels. They did indeed attract top athletes who were able to maintain fitness within the luxurious resort, but they also drew a less physically fit clientele eager to make use of the expertise on offer. Laurel had personally selected the staff, trained them and supervised those opening weeks to ensure
that everything was the very best it could be. She worked like a Trojan.

Cristiano had offered her a small fortune to stay on and run it but she’d turned him down flat.

‘I don’t work for other people.’ She was the most independent, self-reliant woman he’d ever met. Ironic, he mused, that the very quality that had drawn him had been the one that had eventually torn them apart.

Because of him.
Because of his blind, selfish behaviour.

There had been reasons, of course. Reasons for switching off his phone and trying to block out all distractions. Reasons for choosing to stay instead of fly home. But he hadn’t shared those reasons because any explanation he delivered now would be seen as an excuse. And there was no excuse for the arrogant, thoughtless way he’d dismissed her fears.

No pile of bricks, no piece of land was worth the price they’d both paid.

Cristiano released the brakes and fed in the throttle, reaching the airport in record time.

Violating at least three traffic laws, he abandoned the car at the front of the terminal building and strode through the glass doors to Departures.

This part of the airport was unfamiliar to him and it was like walking into hell, a teeming mass of bad-tempered humanity crushed together into a woefully inadequate space.

Tripping over an ill-placed suitcase, Cristiano regained his balance and looked round, desperately trying to spot Laurel in the crowd. It seemed an impossible task. The place was heaving with tourists trying to move enormous suitcases through an unyielding, irritated throng. Faces glowed scarlet from too much Sicilian sun and too little cream, babies screamed, toddlers were fractious with boredom, mothers harassed, fathers bad tempered.

It was a place Cristiano had never had reason to visit before and looking at it now he had no regrets about that.
Why did people come on holiday?
he thought as he took advantage of his superior height to see over the heads of a group of scantily clad, giggling teenage girls.

He was just about to locate someone in authority and demand that they make an announcement over the public address system when he spotted a shiny brown ponytail towards the front of the check-in desk for Heathrow.

Laurel.

Hot and sticky, Laurel handed her ticket to the woman on the desk.

‘I’d like an aisle seat if possible, please.’

She didn’t want to look out of the window. She wanted to read a book and shut Sicily out of her mind.

A different woman would have sobbed all the way to the airport, but Laurel was in full crisis mode, focusing on getting out of Sicily and back to London as fast as possible.

She felt numb, slightly removed from everything that was happening around her.

Because of that, she wasn’t aware of the commotion behind her until she noticed a group of women in an adjoining queue all staring in awe.

Laurel recognised that look.

She’d seen it a million times on the faces of women when they caught sight of Cristiano.

Heart thumping, she turned her head to follow the direction of their stares and saw him forging his way through throngs of gawping tourists. Her first reaction was one of astonishment. She knew for certain he’d never been into this part of the airport before and he looked ridiculously out of place, like a thoroughbred horse in a field of donkeys.

Astonishment changed to alarm as it dawned on her that
there was only one explanation for him being here. He wanted to stop her leaving.

And she didn’t want to be stopped.

She didn’t want to listen to anything he had to say.

As he vaulted smoothly over a pile of suitcases blocking his path, she backed away from him.

‘Go away. I have
nothing
left to say to you.’

‘You may have nothing left to say to me but I have plenty to say to you.’

‘My flight is boarding. I don’t have time to listen.’

His eyes glowed dark and dangerous. ‘If I board that plane I’ll have it grounded.’

Unlike the women hovering close to her, Laurel was unimpressed. ‘Then I’ll board a different plane. There is nothing you can say that I want to hear.’

‘You don’t know that until you’ve listened.’ He appeared oblivious to the growing audience of tourists who, sensing drama, pressed in closer.

‘You want to defend yourself. It’s what you always do.’

He sucked in a deep breath. For a moment she thought he was going to stretch out a hand to her but then he changed his mind and let it fall back to his side. ‘Even I cannot defend the indefensible.’

A woman close to her sighed dreamily, but Laurel ignored her.

‘You are finally admitting that your behaviour may have been less than perfect?’

‘My behaviour was abysmal.’

It wasn’t the words that caught her attention, although they were unusual enough. It was his dishevelled appearance that finally made her think that perhaps his attempts to talk were driven by conscience rather than his usual urge to prove that he was right in everything.

Before this moment she’d never seen Cristiano anything
other than immaculate. But not only was he badly in need of a shave but he’d clearly left the villa halfway through the act of dragging on his clothes. ‘Aren’t those the trousers you wore for the wedding?’

‘I was in a hurry to get here.’ His bronzed face had lost layers of colour, his dark eyes shadowed with guilt. ‘I grabbed the first thing I could find.’

She wondered if he even realised that half the buttons of his shirt were still undone, the result offering those gawping women a tantalising view of the most masculine chest they were likely to see in a lifetime.

‘I appreciate the gesture, but it doesn’t change anything. Go home, Cristiano. I don’t want you.’

From somewhere behind her she heard a woman mutter,
‘If she doesn’t want him, I’ll have him’,
but Laurel wasn’t interested in anyone else’s opinion on the man in question.

His eyes were feverish, the look in them close to desperation. ‘Give me a chance to apologise properly.’

‘Yes, give him a chance, love!’ There was a chorus of encouragement from the growing crowd and one of the women grinned at her. ‘If a man wants to say sorry, never stop him. It’s a rare enough occurrence. Let him speak.’

All they saw was spectacular good looks and wealth and Laurel trusted neither. ‘He’s clever with words.’

‘Lucky you. My husband can’t string a sentence together that doesn’t contain the words “beer” and “football”.’ ‘Whatever he says, he won’t mean it.’ ‘Yes, I will!’ Cristiano interrupted forcefully and sent a dazzling smile towards the already starry-eyed woman. ‘Thank you for your advice. I hope you’ve had a spectacular stay in Sicily.’

‘We have, thank you very much.’ ‘Madam, we have your boarding card.’ The girl at the
check-in desk handed Laurel her passport and the card but Cristiano reached out and took it.

‘We’re holding up the queue. At the very least we should have this conversation somewhere else.’

‘We’re not having a conversation.’

‘All right, I’ll do it here if that’s what it takes.’

‘Do what?’

After the briefest hesitation, Cristiano dragged her against him and kissed her, but this kiss was nothing like the ones that had set her on fire the night before. It was a blatant attempt to dissuade her from her course and it held more than a hint of desperation.

Somewhere in the distance Laurel heard someone sigh and she resolutely ignored the flare of heat that tugged at her belly as she pulled away from him.

‘That is
not
an apology.’