The Proud Wife (15 page)

‘And I was always on the wrong side of a door.'

That admission brought his head up, shockingly pale eyes seeming to try to burn right through to her soul. The memory of his raw-voiced
the day you lost the baby
was back, playing over and over inside her head. Reproaching her, reproving.

‘The—the doors were never actually locked,' she managed and knew that her words had hit home only by the sudden clenching of a muscle in the already tight jaw. Nothing else moved. He barely even seemed to be breathing.

‘They might as well have been,' he said at last. ‘They always were in the past.'

‘The past?'

His reply confused her, making her frown.

‘When in the past?'

But then suddenly all the jigsaw pieces fell into place. They had been there in her mind, but she just hadn't known how to put them all together.

‘Your mother.'

She knew she was right by the change in his face but still he nodded, confirming her guess.

‘My parents' marriage was an arranged union between two important families. It should never have taken place—it was a mistake from start to finish. She knew her duty was to give her husband an heir, so she did. But after I was born she took her life back by retreating behind locked doors. She never let anyone in.'

‘Not even you, her child?'

She didn't need an answer to that. She had seen it for herself in her brief time at the
castello.

‘I was not your mother, but your wife,' she managed, and earned herself a swift, silent flash of a glance from those amazing eyes.

‘I have never forced myself on a woman who didn't want me in her life. And I didn't intend to start with my wife.'

The image that flashed into Marina's thoughts was stark, shocking, terrible. A man who easily had the strength to break down any door she had closed between them—should he have wanted to—standing on the wrong side of that door. A door that wasn't locked.

A man who had been hurting for the loss of his child every bit as much as she had. A man who had been barred from his own mother by the way she had locked her door in his face.

A woman who didn't want me
…

‘I—I didn't want to inflict my misery on you when…'

She couldn't complete the sentence, knowing that it had been her need to hide away in her depression that had put those words into his mouth. Had she really built up such powerful but invisible barriers that Pietro—Pietro!—hadn't felt he could break through them? That he hadn't even felt he had the right to do so?

We made that baby together. The only failure is that we did not lose it together.

Behind the concealing shield of the kitchen table, her
hands slipped down to curve over the spot where, too tiny even to notice as yet, her baby—her and Pietro's baby—lay in her womb. Surely fate would be so much kinder this time? But what if it was not? What if she lost this baby too? How would she cope without Pietro?

‘When you came out from behind that damned door,' Pietro was speaking again, low and fast, ‘you looked so lost, so fragile, so
broken
. I felt so guilty—I had done that to you.'

‘The loss of our baby had done that to me!'

‘The loss of a baby in a marriage I'd rushed you into because of the child. It was obvious that you were having second thoughts, that you knew you had made a mistake. Don't claim you didn't,' he accused when she opened her mouth to do just that. ‘You had already come to me once, convinced that I would play away.'

‘I was afraid that you would,' Marina admitted. ‘That I would drive you to it because I couldn't give you what you wanted. But…'

‘But?' Pietro prompted when she couldn't finish the sentence. She felt the heat rushing fierily into her cheeks at the thought of what she had been about to say. ‘But what?'

There was nothing for it but the truth.

‘But I was so convinced that, if I asked you about it, you would just seduce me out of my worries, as you did the first time. That you would kiss me until I couldn't think straight.'

That steely-eyed gaze narrowed even more as his eyes burned into hers.

‘And you would have let that happen?'

‘How could I not?'

She no longer feared letting him know the truth. Knowing that she had loved him and had lost him—that
he was here now with the final divorce papers in that document case—meant she could see no reason to hide any longer. Besides, if she had looked for the real truth in the past, then they might not be in this situation right now. She owed it to herself, to Pietro—and to her child.

So she drew on all her courage and looked him straight in the face, though the blaze of that fierce scrutiny made her wince as she met the full force of it.

‘I never could resist you. Look at the way we came together in the first place—the reasons why we rushed into marriage.'

‘I couldn't keep my hands off you,' Pietro said flatly.

‘And I felt the same way.'

They were words about the past, describing how it had been, she reflected sadly. Words that made it clear how that wild, blazing passion had been there from the start but was now all behind them. Certainly the cool, calm, calculating way that Pietro was still watching her had nothing of that passion in it any more. And the careful distance he was keeping from her showed no signs of the desperate need to take her in his arms and crush her to him.

She had killed all that with her lack of trust in him, her dread of not being enough for him. She had feared he would never love her as she adored him, and with a bitter irony that fear had brought them to this point right here and now.

‘Still do.' Pietro's tone was dry. ‘If that moment of madness in Casalina was anything to go by.'

If Marina's cheeks had been burning hotly, then she knew that lazily drawled comment was enough to drain the entire colour away in a flash. She felt it go and didn't need to see her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall to know she had gone from fiery red to ashen pale in the space of a couple of heartbeats.

‘Yes, well, we both know what a mistake that was. One we'd be real fools to let happen again.'

Did her voice sound the same to him as it did to her own ears? Could Pietro catch the unevenness she couldn't suppress, the way that, in spite of everything she did to hold it back, the tiny note of hunger and yearning was still threaded through her careful words? She might have tried to keep it hidden but she knew that in spite of everything there was still that slightly questioning intonation on what she had said. The one that made it sound as if she was asking if he really meant this. If perhaps there might be another way…

Was she really trying to get him to say that, no, he didn't feel like this? That he wanted to forget about the divorce and stay married? Did she have no pride? He had come here with the divorce papers. Papers he had had prepared for the second time. But the news she had had this morning, the secret she was hiding, changed everything.

If—when—Pietro found out that the time he described so dismissively as ‘that moment of madness' had had permanent consequences, then every decision he had made would have to be reconsidered in the harsh new light of this very different day.

Pietro D'Inzeo—Il Principe Pietro D'Inzeo—was going to want this baby, very much indeed. And not just because the baby would be the heir to the D'Inzeo title, the D'Inzeo fortune, but because he had wanted the child they had lost every bit as much as she had. She had no doubt at all about that.

What she did doubt very strongly was whether he would want the baby's mother in his life or not.

‘W
E BOTH
know what a mistake that was. One we'd be real fools to let happen again.'

If Marina had flung a gauntlet down on to the table in front of him, right next to the leather document case he had brought with him, she couldn't have made things more clear. Which made him feel like a fool—and a naive one at that—for having come here at all in the first place.

He'd spent the last four weeks on some sort of emotional seesaw, going up one minute then down the next. He had fought with himself, with his memories and with the constant nagging ache of physical need that had threatened to drive him out of his mind with hunger. He had ended up feeling almost schizophrenic in his mood swings, never knowing which one was real, which one was going to take hold next, so he could run his life and make the future decisions he needed as a result of it.

He'd left Casalina in a blind fury of conviction that he had done the right thing—the only thing. That conviction had carried him out of the door and away from the cottage, wanting to put as much space between himself and this woman as he could for fear of what he might do, just how easily he might change his mind, if he stayed where he was. It had also sustained him over the next few days, boiling underneath the surface of every-day life, so that
he had found it hard to concentrate and had resorted to punishing runs and workouts in the gym to try to obliterate the memory of Marina's face, her voice, her body, from his thoughts.

But he had never succeeded in doing any such thing. Even when he had driven himself to exhaustion, his mind would still not let go of his fury at himself. Anger at the way that he had misread so badly the way she had been feeling. The fear that lay under her apparent defiance. If she had defied him out of fear during their marriage, then what did that say about her performance—because there was nothing else he could call it—in Matteo's office?

‘Absolute fools,' he echoed, watching her face closely, seeing the sudden change in her expression, the new darkness in her eyes.

So, did she mean what she said or was this another act of defiance, another mask she had put on to protect herself?

‘A real mistake, hmm?'

He held her gaze as he leaned forward, one hand sliding under her chin, lifting her face towards his.

‘But then again…'

There was a flash of something in those eyes, the swift slick of her tongue across her lips. And it was that last revealing reaction that knocked his own response off-balance, made something kick hard low down in his body, heating and hardening in a moment. He couldn't fight the compulsion to bring his mouth to hers, to follow the track of her tongue with his own, sliding its tip along the softly parted line of her mouth, tasting her intimately.

Her faint sigh opened her lips to him even more and he took full advantage of it, bringing his mouth down hard, crushing it with a force that he had had no thought of when he had started this. But the taste of her, the feel of her softness under his kiss, the warmth of her breath on his face,
the scent of her skin, all tipped him over the edge in the space of a heartbeat.

Within a second he had forgotten what had started this. He only knew how it made him feel. How it made him hunger. How it made him ache with wanting before he had even had time to let go of one breath and draw in another. The room, the sun streaming in through the window, the faint sounds from the street, all faded into the heated haze that filled the space where his thoughts had once been. His heart was pounding hard and wild in his chest, his pulse a jerky, uneven thud along his veins. He only knew he wanted more. All of her.

He was not sure just when the mood changed. When the slow, creeping sense of something being wrong, slid through his nerves, when the heat cooled and was replaced with an uncomfortable chill. The sensation forced his eyes open, made him look down into hers.

Tears?

‘Maledizione!'
He muttered the curse against her lips as he wrenched his mouth away, put her away from him with hands that were not quite steady. ‘No!'

Tears! He couldn't remember the last time he had reduced a woman to tears. But his recollection of the way that Marina had hidden her feelings, and most likely more tears from him, went through him like a blade of ice.

‘No,' he said again, stepping back, away from her, putting the width of the table between them. ‘This is not happening again.' Not this way. Not the way he had played it once before. ‘This is not why I came here.'

‘No?' Marina's voice sounded as if it came from a long way away, and he watched her blink hard to bring her eyes and thoughts back into focus. He recognised the struggle because it was exactly the way he was feeling right now.

‘Then just why are you here?' she managed, pressing
her hands down on the worn surface of the pine table so he wouldn't see how they were trembling under the effort she was making to exert control over her emotions. ‘If you have something in here…'

With restless fingertips she tapped against the leather document case that still lay just inches away, where he had dropped it earlier.

‘Something that I have to sign, then let's get this over with.'

‘You're right,' Pietro said as he reached to lift the document case from the table. ‘But perhaps we should move somewhere more comfortable. Do this sitting down.'

Did he mean that she would need to be sitting down for this? Marina wondered. That whatever he had to say would shock her, make her feel weak at the knees? How could anything make her feel worse than she did at the moment? How could anything go one better than the realisation that she had made a total fool of herself and played right into his hands?

But she nodded, gesturing towards the closed door that led to the living room. Then, just as he turned the handle, she suddenly remembered just why she had closed the door in the first place and what lay beyond it.

‘Oh perhaps…'

But it was too late. Already Pietro had pushed open the door and taken a couple of steps into the other room. And from that point there was no way he could avoid seeing the small suitcase she had packed and brought downstairs only an hour ago. As she had known it would, it brought him to an abrupt halt.

‘Your case,' he said sharply, swinging round on his heel to face her. ‘Are you going somewhere?'

How did she answer that? Nerves and the tension in her throat pushed out a response before she was really ready.

‘Obviously.'

No, flippancy was quite the wrong tone; the way that his black brows snapped together in a frown told her that.

‘I mean, yes, I am.'

‘Where?'

That was more difficult. Much more difficult.

‘I…'

But he'd spotted the folder lying on the top of her case. The folder that contained her flight details and the ticket she had printed from the Internet as soon as she had known the truth about her test results.

‘Pietro…' Marina began, forcing herself to move, to take a step forward to try to stop him.

But he'd already reacted, snatching up the documents, opening the file, flicking through its contents. And she knew when he'd spotted the truth because he froze completely for a moment before slowly turning to face her again, his eyes dark with confusion and disbelief.

‘Sicily,' he said on a note of pure incredulity. ‘You are flying to Sicily.'

Even the single word she needed to answer him seemed to have evaporated from her thoughts. She could only manage a short, sharp duck of her head as a form of agreement.

‘But why?'

With an effort Marina stopped herself from bringing her hands up to rest on her body just over the place where new life, his baby, lay in her womb. She knew she was going to have to tell him some time; there was no way she could ever keep this from him. He was her baby's father, after all. And that was why she had been heading for Sicily in the first place. That and so much more. But all that had been turned on its head when Pietro had appeared on her doorstep. So until she knew exactly what he had planned—just what
was in that document case that he felt he had needed to give her in person—she couldn't begin to work out where she stood. If, in fact, she had any sort of standing at all.

So now she took avoiding action, meeting his frowning stare head-on with an expression that she hoped at least looked calm, if not confident.

‘You said you came here for a reason. That you had something to show me.'

Her words fell into a pool of silence so taut and tense she felt it tug on every one of her nerves, stretching them almost to breaking point. But then he nodded and turned away from the revealing suitcase, heading instead towards the red-velvet-covered settee and chairs, tossing the case down on the coffee table but making no move to seat himself on the big squashy sofa.

‘Not show,' he said. Suddenly there was something so very different about him, about his eyes, the set of his mouth and jaw. Even his whole stance spoke of an abrupt change of mood, one that told her they had now come to the real reason why he was here. Marina's legs seemed to have lost all their strength and refused to support her, so she plumped down hard on the wide arm of the settee.

‘I have come to ask something,' he said, and it was such a shock that a weak echo of the word escaped her on a gasp.

‘Ask?'

He nodded slowly.

‘In there…' a wave of Pietro's hand indicated the leather case on the coffee-table top ‘…are the divorce papers ready to sign.'

Marina's heart twisted in her breast. She could only be thankful she was already sitting down because if she hadn't been then she knew she might well have fallen to the floor at this moment, the sense of misery and loss was so strong.
She had barely acknowledged the leap of hope she had felt before it had been snatched away by those fateful words.

‘If that is what you want.'

Want
.

The seesaw of emotion shifted direction once again, slamming down in a way that seemed to drive the breath from her lungs. Carefully folding her hands around each other, Marina rested them on her knees to keep them steady. Coming close to him again like this, she could see the way his pale eyes were flecked with touches of darker blue, could hear the air come and go in his lungs as he breathed. The clean, male scent of his skin seemed to reach out to her like warm smoke, tantalising her nostrils, but she had to focus on what he was saying, not what he made her feel.

‘Is it?'

If she had ever thought he had looked deep into her eyes before, then it was as nothing to the way he did now. His gaze was so straight, so dark, so totally unflinching, that she felt her skin shudder under its impact, her blood seeming to stand still in her veins.

‘Is it?'
he repeated, the fierce emphasis on the words leaving no room for escape, nowhere to run. It was as if the world and everything in it had dissolved, faded into nothingness, so that there was only her and this man and everything he had once been to her.

Everything he still was to her.

But fear had still clamped a restraint around her mouth. She knew what she was feeling must show in her eyes but to actually speak the words was beyond her. And she knew Pietro could read her when he nodded slowly once again.

‘I'll make it easy for you, shall I?' he said, strangely gentle. ‘For myself, I'd rather tear them up and throw away the pieces.'

For a moment Marina felt as if her head was spinning
wildly. Either that or the world had suddenly speeded up so that she felt dizzy, disbelieving—lost. Had he really said…? Slicking her tongue over painfully dry lips, twice she opened her mouth to speak and twice she failed to manage any sort of sound. She could only stare into Pietro's face, trying desperately to read what was written there.

‘Marina, I do not want this divorce. I have tried living with you, and tried living without you in my life, and I know which I prefer.'

‘But…' Marina tried but he simply shook his head to silence her and went on, still in that clear, calm voice.

‘In the moment you walked into Matteo's offices back in Sicily, it was as if my life had started again. As if I had been asleep for almost two years and now I was awake. I was living, really living, in a way that only you can make me feel. That woman…'

To Marina's shock he actually smiled, a warm smile of recollection, as if he was looking back at his memories.

‘That woman was the woman I married, before the doubts and the fears came between us. Before we lost our baby. Before…'

He paused, raking both hands roughly through his hair; Marina felt she knew what was coming. What had to be coming. And she could not let him be the one who said it.

‘Before I shut you out and hid away from you. Before I made you feel that I no longer wanted you.'

She had startled him with that. She knew it from the way his head went back, the way his eyes half-closed for a moment. But then he drew in a deep breath and she knew he was not going to let himself off so easily.

‘I am here to fight for the woman I want. The woman I have never stopped wanting, even when I thought that I should divorce you. I still believe I should… No!'

Leaning forward he rested gentle fingers over her mouth to close off the protest, the denial she had tried to form.

‘I should divorce you if I can't make you happy—and only you can tell me if that is possible. If you can ever be happy with me. Because your happiness is all that matters.'

Another pause. Another look even deeper into the eyes that she couldn't drag from his set, intent face, from those burning eyes.

‘So I have come to ask—and think very carefully before you answer—if you can put the past behind you. I give you my word that it will be different this time. I can only hope that that's good enough. If we can put it out of the way for good—with no lingering doubts—then we have a chance of a future. If…'