Oh, God, the pain that ripped through her. And then the panic. It was all there in her battered, frightened heart as the depth of her love finally screamed unfiltered to the surface.
Massimo was the love of her life. How could she ever sleep again if he slipped away for good? How could she ever breathe properly?
The tears that had threatened to unleash since she’d woken in his arms filled her eyes. She no longer had the strength to hold them back.
Hugging her knees to her chest, Livia bowed her head and wept.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE SKY HAD turned golden when Massimo disappeared under the canopy of trees.
He hadn’t planned to go in search of Livia. He’d fixed the business problem that had cropped up and had intended to keep working but the silence Livia had left when she’d slipped away without a word had been louder than the ocean. It had deafened him. Every time he’d looked at his laptop, nothing had penetrated his brain.
The disjointed feelings had returned with a vengeance.
He’d decided a brisk walk on the fine white sandy beach was in order but he’d barely taken ten paces when one of his workers had rushed up to tell him Livia had gone off in search of the freshwater pool in the forest.
He’d shrugged the message off and walked another ten paces when an image of Livia lost and alone in the forest had formed in his head. He’d performed an abrupt about-turn.
Mercifully, the worker knew exactly where the pool was located.
The forest canopy cast everything in shadow and he increased his pace, praying he was heading in the right direction and not meandering from the route.
How long had she been here? She’d walked away from their chalet a couple of hours ago. Had she even found the pool? The island was small but the forest was dense and large enough to lose yourself in.
Perspiration clung to his skin when he finally found the clearing but he didn’t know if it was from the heat or the fear that had gripped his heart. The sky had turned a deeper orange in his time in the forest. There was little daylight left.
He exhaled a long breath of relief to see her there. She was sitting with her feet in the pool gazing down into the water.
On legs that felt strangely unsteady, he stepped over and crouched beside her.
Other than a long, defeated sigh, she made no reaction to his presence.
He followed her gaze to peer into the still, clear water. He couldn’t see what had captivated her attention so greatly.
Long moments passed before she turned her face to him.
He sucked in a shocked breath.
Even under the fading light he could see the puffiness of her red eyes. Her cheeks and neck were blotchy.
‘Have you been crying?’ he asked in a hoarse voice.
Eyes dark with misery met his. Her pretty nose wriggled, her chin wobbled and her shoulders shook before her face crumpled and tears fell like a waterfall down her face.
Massimo froze.
Not once in the entirety of their marriage had he seen his wife cry.
A tiny fissure cracked in his heart.
Working on autopilot, he twisted round to take her into his arms and held her tightly. She clung to him, sobbing into his chest, her hot tears soaking his T-shirt.
Something hot and sharp stabbed the back of his eyes and he blinked violently to clear it.
‘Tell me what the matter is,’ he urged, kissing the top of her head and strengthening his hold around her. Livia’s vulnerability was something he’d always sensed rather than seen, something she’d always striven to mask. To witness her like this, with all her barriers and defences stripped away...
The fissure in his heart splintered into a thousand crevices all filling with an emotion so painful it felt as if his insides were splitting into pieces.
Her shoulders shook and she slowly raised her face to look at him. There was a despairing quality when she whispered his name before the ghost of a smile flittered on her tear-drenched lips. ‘For such a clever man you can be incredibly stupid.’
He never got the chance to ask what she meant for her lips found his and he was pulled into a kiss of such hungry desperation that his senses responded before his brain could stop it.
Desperation had formed in his own skin too, an agonising ache of need for the woman whose tears hurt him in a place he’d never known existed.
In a crush of arms they tumbled to the sandy ground. There was no attempt or need for seduction or foreplay, that hungry ache to be as one all-consuming. Deep inside him breathed a wish to crawl into Livia’s skin and rip out every demon that had filled his beautiful, strong wife with such desolation.
Together, their hands tugged frantically at his shorts and her bikini bottoms, anguished passion there in every touch and every kiss.
They clung to each other as he drove deep inside her, their mouths crushed together, bodies fused tightly. There was a hopeless urgency in their lovemaking he had never experienced before and it flowed through them both, every soft moan of pleasure from her mouth a cry, every gasp a sob, a feeling in his soul that his world was on the verge of collapse, all of it combining to heighten the pleasure and shadow it with despair.
Only the despair racked him when it was over and the heady sensations had seeped away from him.
But his heart still thumped painfully when he pulled away from her and covered his face.
This had to stop.
They were over. Over.
Why prolong the pain? Hadn’t they hurt each other enough?
Long moments passed in heavy silence before he rolled onto his side and got to his feet. Pulling his shorts on, he muttered, ‘It’s getting dark. We should get back.’
She didn’t answer, simply rearranged her clothing and ran her fingers through her hair. As she did so, he noticed something that made him pause, perplexed. One of her nails was missing...
He snatched at the diversion from all the weight crushing him. ‘What happened to your nail?’
She shrugged. ‘It fell off.’
‘They’re false?’
She nodded.
He had no idea why this disturbed him so much. ‘Since when do you wear false nails?’
More to the point, since when did she bite her nails?
Livia had always taken pride in her nails. Even when she’d worked as a nurse and been forced to keep them short for practical reasons they’d been buffed and polished. This nail was so short and ragged the nail bed was exposed.
She shrugged again. ‘They needed doing.’
Shrugging the subject away with the same indifference she’d dismissed it with, Massimo reached into his pocket for his phone and turned the torch app on. It was bright enough to lead them back through the forest in relative safety but, all the same, he made sure to keep Livia close to him as they headed back along the route he’d taken to reach her, resisting the urge to take her hand.
No more touching her. He would dine alone and sleep in a cabin far from her. Far from the temptation he’d proven himself incapable of resisting.
But those tears...
Where had they come from? Surely she hadn’t been crying about them?
It disturbed him to recall how close he’d come to tears too. He hadn’t cried since he was a small child.
When they emerged from the forest and into the young mangroves, the first stars had emerged in the night sky.
Livia looked up at them and wished their shining brilliance could penetrate Massimo’s heart and make him see that what they had could shine with that same brilliance too.
The incoming tide had covered most of the beach and she sat on the stone wall that acted as a barrier and looked up again at the vast night sky.
She had no idea what the time was.
Time was slipping away from her as fast as Massimo was.
Her fight to save them was a fight she was losing. She could feel it in her soul.
She could still taste their lovemaking on her lips but here he was now, sitting beside her at a distance that meant she would have to stretch her arm out to touch him.
‘Did you know I fell in love with your family before I fell in love with you?’ she said into the still air. ‘Before I met them, I was stone inside. I’d had to fight and work for everything I had, escaping the Secondigliano, getting into nursing, supporting myself through my degree...even getting my placement in oncology so I could be a cancer nurse was a battle. Keeping myself detached while not losing my compassion for my patients and their families was a constant fight.’
She’d worked hard and fought her entire life. But her marriage? She’d thrown that away with hardly a whimper and now she feared she’d left it too late to repair it.
He shifted, stretching his legs out. The lapping tide drew in inches from his toes.
‘Your grandfather was the first patient I ever became attached to. His home was so warm. All those photos of you all everywhere...’ She sighed to remember the feelings being in that home had brought about in her. Jimmy had been her third private placement after she’d been head-hunted by the agency to work as a private oncology nurse. ‘I was used to family members dropping in for regular short visits with the other placements, but your family were always there. They fed him, watched television with him, read to him. They lifted his spirits better than any medicine. The love they all had for each other opened my eyes to what a family should be like: built on love and support and just being there for each other. I wanted that so badly I could taste it. And then I met you...’
She clasped her hands together, remembering how it had felt to lie naked and cocooned in Massimo’s arms that first night, the beat of his strong heart thudding against her... Nothing had ever felt more right in her life.
It made her soul weep to think she might never feel that rightness again.
‘I fell so hard for you,’ she whispered. ‘When you proposed, I imagined a family life like the one your family had. I imagined babies and lots of visits to and from your parents. I assumed your detachment from them was a result of you being a single man living on the other side of the ocean and that once we were married you would want to spend more time with them. It took me a long time to realise that my assumptions had been delusional.’ She filled her lungs with the fresh salty air. ‘I could have coped with all that if you hadn’t started detaching yourself from me. It scared me, Massimo. I could feel you slipping away and I didn’t know how to bring you back and I made everything worse with my reaction to it all. I knew you didn’t respond well to confrontation but I still kept on confronting you because that’s the only way I knew to deal with things. Growing up was a survival of the fittest. If someone upset you, you confronted them. You learned to never show weakness. To back down made you weak and made you a target. I try so hard not to be that woman any more.’
Those confrontational traits had become her default position, a cycle she hadn’t known how to break out of.
‘You have two ears and one mouth for a reason,’ Massimo had once said to her on one of the rare times she’d been able to spark a reaction out of him.
Those were words she’d carried every day since she’d left him.
She’d stopped supporting him in his work. She’d become resentful of his work. All the wonderful qualities she’d fallen in love with...she’d forgotten them because he’d hidden them away. He’d turned into a recluse from her and she in turn had become a shrill person she despised.
Fresh tears welled behind her eyes.
She let them fall.
There was nothing to hide any more. This was her, stripped bare of the things she always kept locked away from him, the vulnerabilities she’d hidden as she’d always hidden them since she was too young to even know what vulnerability meant.
‘I remember us going to that technology awards ceremony you were guest of honour at. I got talking to one of the other trophy wives...’
‘You were never a trophy wife,’ he interrupted tightly.
‘Not to begin with but that’s how I felt in the second year. The wife I was talking to asked me how many lovers you’d had since we’d married. You should have seen her face when I said none. She thought I was delusional. All rich men have lovers. But not you. I never doubted you. Even when you spent nights in your office rather than come home to me, I never once had suspicions you were seeing other women. It would have been easier to compete with a flesh and blood woman but your mistress was always your business and I grew resentful towards it. I hate myself for walking away and not fighting harder for us. I hate that I became so needy and resentful. We could have the marriage we once dreamed about but we both have to want it and work at it.’
Massimo had never felt the thuds of his heart as clearly as he did right then. The crash they made in his ears reverberated with the distant crash of waves and sluiced through his entire being.
‘But that’s the problem,’ he said harshly. ‘I don’t want it. We did try, Liv, but it wasn’t enough then and it wouldn’t be enough now. You might not want to hear about our marriage being reduced to a scientific formula but everything that drove us to marry in the first place was because of the heightened chemicals overpowering our rationality. What you’re feeling now is a reignition of those chemicals brought about by—’
‘Don’t you dare,’ she interrupted with a tearful edge. ‘Don’t tell me what I feel. I know what I feel. I love you. I’m well aware that the early days of a relationship are driven by heightened emotions and hormones—that’s what normal people call the honeymoon period—but for you to keep reducing the love we shared to science is an insult to every memory we created together. If you simply stopped loving me, at least have the guts to say so.’
Nausea swirled violently inside him. ‘I don’t know if what I felt for you was love or not. I don’t know if it was real. The feelings I had for you were the strongest I have ever felt but you must see that even if it was love, it doesn’t solve anything. The problems we had would still be there eating away at us.’
‘I don’t see that. Not if we’re both prepared to work at it.’ The hitch in her voice made his heart contract but he made himself stay focused and strong.
This was for the best. One day, when the intensity of everything they’d shared these last few days had subsided, she would see that too.
‘I’m afraid that I do see it like that,’ he said in as even a voice as he could manage. ‘I’m not prepared to return to a marriage that’s a proven failure. I’m not prepared to put myself through that again. It isn’t worth it.’
There was a moment of silence until, without any warning, she jumped off the wall and waded out into the ocean until she was standing thigh high in the water. The moon had risen, bathing her in a silvery glow.
‘Do you know what I don’t understand?’ Her voice carried through the breeze and the waves. ‘How you can work so hard to save the world we live in when you’ve no intention of enjoying anything it has to offer. And I don’t see or understand how you can put your mind to anything and make it succeed when you won’t put a fraction of that energy into saving our marriage.’
‘A marriage is not a business.’
‘You’re right. A marriage involves feelings. A business won’t care for you when you’re sick or lonely.’ She rolled her neck and turned. Treading slowly through the water, she seemed to become magnified as she neared him.
The expression on her face sent coldness snaking up his spine and through his veins.
‘You might not think our love worth it or know if it was real or not but I do. My love was real. I left you and I fell to pieces. I don’t know what was worse—living with the ghost you’d become or living without you. Being apart from you felt like I’d had my heart ripped out. Every day was a battle just to get out of
bed. I have no idea how I kept the charade going when I visited your family or Gianluca.’ As she spoke, her voice grew steadily colder to match the expression on her face. ‘I don’t care what you think about your feelings for me but don’t you ever lie to yourself that my love for you was anything but pure. You were my whole world. I gave up everything to be with you but I wasn’t even worth fighting for, was I? You just breathed a great sigh of relief to be rid of me and got on with your life. My God, I’ve been pathetic.’
She took a step back and brought the hand with the missing nail to her face and stared at it as if she were seeing it for the first time before looking back at him. ‘I’m no better than my mother. She would sit at the kitchen table late at night biting her nails while she waited for my father to come home.’
Massimo had seen many emotions from Livia in their time together but this was the first time she’d ever looked at him with contempt.
‘And you’re no better than my father.’
As insults went, that was the worst she could have thrown at him. A hot cauldron of anger rose in him. ‘Do not compare me to that man.’
‘His work, if you can call it that, came first in his life, just as yours does.’
Rising to his feet, Massimo flexed his hands and leaned forward to speak right into her face. ‘Your father was killed in a gangland shooting. That was his work. You dare compare it to mine? My work has the potential to save the world from catastrophe!’
‘And that’s all that matters to you,’ she spat back but still in the same controlled voice. ‘Your work. At least my father loved his family.’
‘Love?’ He burst into a roar of incredulous laughter. ‘You were terrified of him!’
‘I was terrified because he was a monster but even monsters can love their family. He loved us and he wasn’t afraid to show it but you... You shut out everyone who loves you. You want to know why I cut my hair?’ She turned and parted her hair at the back of her scalp.
His heart throbbing madly, his guts cramped, confounded and disjointed that his temper was fraying at the seams while Livia had hers under such tight control, he blinked rapidly and leaned forward to see what she was showing him. Even with only the moon and the stars to illuminate them, he could see the exposed section she’d parted contained a small bald patch.
A Passionate Reunion in Fiji Page 13
