“And here’s a blue garter,” Phyllis tittered, swinging the ruffled item around on one finger until it twirled like a demented merry-go-round about to take flight. “Wear it below the knee, dear, in case Baron wants to remove it with his teeth.”
God forbid! Chloe thought miserably, awash with memories of the clever things Nico could do with his teeth. The thought of any other man taking such liberties made her flesh crawl.
“I didn’t wrap mine because we’ve been using it,” Charlotte said, coming to sit beside her. “I’m the ‘old’ part, Chloe—in more ways than one, as I’m sure you’re aware!—and I’m giving you my mocha set because I know how much you’ve always loved it. I had planned to give it to you when you and Nico…” She stopped and pressed her lips together a moment, the way a woman might, to control the onset of tears. “Well, that’s another story altogether, and I’ve learned it doesn’t do to put things off, or the chance to give pleasure to someone you love might not come around again. So enjoy this in good health and happiness, my darling, and think of me when you use it.”
Chloe opened her mouth to thank her grandmother, and burst out crying instead.
“Oh, nice going!” Monica teased. “You really know how to turn a party into a howling success!”
“I’m so sorry,” she choked. “Please forgive me. It’s just that everything’s suddenly…too much….” Because the person whose forgiveness she should really be seeking was Baron.
“Pre-wedding jitters,” Phyllis pronounced sagely. “I’ve seen it often. You’ll be all right, dear, once you start down the aisle. One look at Baron, and you’ll forget you ever heard the words ‘nervous bride.”’
“Exactly,” Jacqueline said, with dismaying good cheer, as if all the doubts she’d formerly expressed had disappeared overnight. “Dry your tears, and I’ll open another bottle of champagne. I think we could all use it.”
Blotting her face with her napkin, Chloe pushed herself away from the table. “Let me. It’ll give me something to do besides make an idiot of myself.”
But her mother had already disappeared and was in the butler’s pantry before Chloe caught up with her. “Go back to the party, Chloe,” she instructed, stooping to retrieve another bottle of Bollinger from the wine cooler. “I can manage this perfectly well on my own.”
But, “I’m not leaving,” Chloe said flatly, “until you clear up something which has me totally confused.”
“Sure, if I can.” Jacqueline spared her a passing glance before concentrating on stripping the foil from the neck of the champagne bottle. “What’s on your mind?”
“Why are you going along with all this celebrating when, more than anyone, you’ve been trying to dissuade me from marrying Baron?”
“Well, there’s not much point in beating a dead horse, is there, dear?” her mother replied airily. “You insist you know what you’re doing, so I’m taking you at your word. If you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors, it’s your bed and you’re the one who’ll be lying on it.” She set about untwisting the wire restraint securing the champagne cork, her face the very picture of innocence. “You do know what you’re doing, right?”
“What have I done?” she’d moaned, after it was all over and they’d made themselves presentable again.
Nico, stationed at the window with his hands jammed in his pockets, had turned and fixed her in a disturbingly blunt stare. “Do I have to spell it out for you, cara? We just made love. I know that, for you, it’s been a while since the last time, but you surely can’t have forgotten how it feels?”
“No, we didn’t go quite that far,” she’d protested, making a hopeless bid to acquit herself.
“Because I wasn’t inside you when I came?” Self-loathing colored his reply. “That’s a questionable technicality at best, and I refuse to hide behind it.”
“But we didn’t actually… I wasn’t totally unfaithful to Baron.”
But Nico wouldn’t let her get away with that specious line of reasoning. “In your mind you were,” he said implacably. “In your heart, too, if you were telling the truth when you said you’re still in love with me. Any woman who admits that to a man other than her fiancé is guilty of infidelity, no matter how she tries to rationalize it.”
Limp with despair, she’d sagged against the kitchen counter. “So now what do I do?”
“That’s not my decision to make, Chloe.”
“Is that all you have to say?” she’d cried, desperation lending a shrill edge to her reply. “It’s not your decision to make? I didn’t notice you backing off so discreetly a few minutes ago, so why the sudden reticence? Are you saying that you’re washing your hands of me, now that you’ve had your daily fix?”
Utter disgust transformed his face. His mouth—the same mouth which had seduced her so expertly minutes before—tightened in anger, and his eyes, recently smoldering with passion, glowed with unbridled contempt. “If that’s all I wanted, there are women who would gladly accommodate me, for a price—one considerably less than you’re going to exact, I suspect.”
He’d never before spoken to her so harshly; never adopted so cold and cruel a tone. But then, much about him was changed from when they’d been married. He’d become harder, tougher, in every respect. More brutal, less compassionate.
This was how he’d achieved success in business negotiations, she’d realized, standing her ground with difficulty: unwilling to compromise; uncaring that he might leave his opponents crushed. “If, by that, you’re suggesting I’m going to cite you as co-respondent in what just took place between us, you can relax, Nico,” she said, drawing on what few scraps of pride she still retained. “Our dirty little secret is safe with me simply because I’m too ashamed to speak about it to anyone, even a priest!”
“You think keeping quiet about it will absolve you?” He made a sound midway between a sneer and a jeer. “Then I pity the poor unfortunate marrying you on Saturday! And I pity you, Chloe. I thought you were possessed of more backbone and decency than that.”
His disdain lacerated her. “It’s easy to despise something you don’t understand, Nico, and you’ve never understood me. Never understood that I don’t have your strength or your bold courage.”
“And you think admitting to weakness exonerates you from honesty, and justifies deceiving a man like Baron?”
She looked away, unable to meet the absolute lack of respect she saw in his eyes. “You seem willing enough to deceive him. I don’t hear you offering to come clean with him about the way you behaved, the minute his back was turned.”
“I’m not the one marrying him. Nor do I have a fiancée waiting for me at home. I am free to do as I please, with whoever chooses to be with me at the time. And you came to me of your own free will, cara mia.”
He turned the endearment into an insult. Shame-faced, she whispered, “I know that.”
“And do you also know how you’re going to act like the willing wife, on your wedding night? Have you thought about how you’ll feel when your husband climbs into bed beside you and exercises his conjugal rights, and you cringe from his touch because he’s not the man you really want?”
“Baron would never force himself on me!”
“Perhaps not, but he’d be less than human if he didn’t expect you to cooperate when he finally gets you between the sheets.”
“You’re a pig, Nico Moretti, do you know that? You reduce everything to the level of…of…”
“What?” he’d snarled. “A common Italian laborer, who grew up in a four-room apartment over a bakery, and should have known better than to think he could lay his dirty hands on a rich American princess?”
She clamped down hard on her lower lip, to the point that her teeth drew blood. But even that punishment wasn’t enough to still her trembling chin. “Don’t you dare label me a snob, on top of everything else! I loved you for yourself, not for what you did or didn’t have. And I’m sorry I made that remark about your home. You know I didn’t mean it. I’d have lived in a cave,
if that’s the best you could have given me, and counted myself fortunate to call myself your wife.”
“Until I made the cardinal mistake of proving myself fallible and no more capable of sparing you tragedy than any other man,” he raged, “and then you couldn’t wait to boot me out of your life! So much for your protestations of love, Chloe!”
“That wasn’t why I left you,” she flung back.
“Don’t tell me it was for another man—for Baron. I’m not sure I can survive the irony, given this afternoon’s events.”
“How dare you even suggest such a thing! I invested everything of myself in you, my marriage, my son. Everything! But losing him ripped a hole in me that never healed. It left me with nothing to fall back on. I couldn’t help you or myself. I was of no use to anyone.” The anger fueling her words dwindled into quiet despair. “Divorcing you had nothing to do with not loving you. It had to do with my own emptiness. I had nothing left to give you, Nico.”
“You have nothing to give Baron, either,” he said mercilessly. “I feel sorry for him, always trying so hard to please you. He will end up ‘dominato dalla moglie’ just like his father.”
“Dominated?” she exclaimed, latching onto the one word that had some meaning. “By me?”
“Exactly by you. He will be chicken-bitten.”
For a moment, she’d stared at him, bewildered. Then, understanding dawned. “Henpecked, you mean?” she said, so outraged she could barely enunciate. “You’re actually accusing me of being just like Mrs. Prescott?”
He gave a careless shrug. “They do say men marry women who remind them of their mothers. I suspect you’ll prove the truth of such a legend.”
“You bastard!” She flew at him, hell-bent on wiping the smug expression off his face.
But his reflexes were quicker, and he fended her off easily enough with one hand by planting it squarely in the middle of her chest. This time, there was nothing seductive in the way his fingers splayed between her breasts, nor anything the least bit pleasurable. Instead, the two of them remained caught in a tableau defined by disillusionment and ugly recrimination.
At length, as the fight seeped out of her, he lowered his hand and said, “Enough of this. It serves no useful purpose.”
“No,” she agreed, turning away from him, embarrassed. “None at all.”
Only in the exhausted aftermath of their own fury did they realize that the storm outside also had subsided. The rain had stopped and the shredded clouds thinned sufficiently to allow a pale suggestion of moonlight to touch the windows.
“Dio!” Nico said softly, staring out at the dark, sodden garden. “Is this what we’ve come to, that we lash out at each other and utter hurtful words that can never be taken back? How do two people who once were so closely attuned, find themselves so far apart that they cannot leap the distance between them?”
“I don’t know,” she’d wept, the ache of all they’d lost gnawing at her and laying bare her frailty. “I just wish things had ended differently. Then we wouldn’t be in this place now. You wouldn’t feel such disgust for me, and I wouldn’t be carrying a burden of guilt that nearly kills me.”
“It wasn’t all bad. We knew some good times, didn’t we, before everything fell apart?”
“Yes,” she said, aching for those lost, enchanted years. Remember it all, she’d chided herself. Remember the pain, as well as the pleasure, or how else will you ever go on?
But memory was selective and chose to settle on the whispered words of endearment they’d shared, the tight interlocking of bodies, the deep, intense silence of completion. Of love. Of absolute faith in the future.
She let out a painful sigh. “I wish we could turn back time, that we could find our way back to what we once had.”
“But we can’t. We can only go forward.” He shot back his shirt cuff to look at his watch. “And speaking of time, it’s almost eight and we should head back to your mother’s. Shall we stop somewhere for dinner, first?”
“If you like,” she said, snatching at any chance to delay the inevitable. To experience another stolen hour with him, because that was the most he was prepared to offer.
Soon enough, she’d have to face the fact that, the second she confessed she was still in love with him, her already jeopardized future had spun completely out of control. Any hope she’d entertained that she could make a life with Baron had gone up in flames.
And what had been Nico’s reply to her admission of love? “I do not have the words!”
But although she’d listened, she hadn’t heard. Hadn’t wanted to. Because what he’d really said was that he couldn’t return her sentiments. He might still have found her desirable enough that he’d lost control of himself sexually, but not enough to say he still loved her, too.
He’d stripped away the intervening years, all the healing she thought she’d accomplished since their divorce, and left her with nothing. Having convinced her that marrying Baron would be her biggest mistake yet, he considered his work done, and was willing to walk away, and leave her to live with the consequences.
“It’s taking you a long time to answer,” her mother said, wrapping the champagne bottle in a clean white towel. “Are you quite sure you know what you’re doing?”
Chloe lifted her shoulders in a hopeless, defeated shrug, ready to spill out the entire truth in all its ugliness and beg her mother’s help, when the door to the butler’s pantry swung open and Baron came in.
“Charlotte told me I’d find you in here,” he said, pulling her back to lean against him and nuzzling her neck. “How are you, Chloe?”
“Surprised,” she said, chill with horror at what he might have overheard, had he arrived a moment later. “I wasn’t expecting you until later this afternoon.”
“We came back early. Last night, as a matter of fact.” He dropped a kiss behind her ear. “The weather changed at Whistler, making it pointless to hang around, so we headed back to town.”
“You should have let me know.”
“I would have, but by the time I’d stopped by the new house to show my parents where we’d be living, then taken them to dinner, it was getting pretty late.”
She went cold all over. “You stopped by the town house?”
“Yes.”
Totally unaware of the potential fall-out from his revelation, Jacqueline hoisted the wine bottle. “And you got here just in time to join the party, Baron. Care for a glass of champagne?”
“Sure,” he said, after a momentary hesitation. “It’s not every week that a man gets married. By all means let’s celebrate.”
But Chloe, still reeling from his alarming disclosure, couldn’t let it drop. “What time? What time was it when you got to the town house?”
“I can’t say precisely. Eight, maybe? Half past?” He shrugged unconcernedly. “Somewhere around then.”
“Seems no one was aware of time passing last night,” Jacqueline remarked slyly. “Strange how that happens sometimes, isn’t it?”
Chloe shot her a quelling glare. Not noticing, Baron said, “What was even stranger is that when we arrived, half the lights in the place were on. How come, Chloe?”
“I forgot I hadn’t turned them off,” she said, guilt at what had really distracted her causing unpleasant pinpricks of perspiration to speckle her skin. “The storm caused a power failure.”
“So they told us, when we got to the hotel.” His brow furrowed in surprise. “But that happened around seven. What were you doing, still hanging around at that hour?”
Her mouth ran dry and her lungs contracted. “We—um, that is, I…” She coughed lightly to cover her embarrassment, and tried again. “Well, I was…”
“I drove her into town, since I was going in myself anyway,” her mother said, finally coming to her rescue, “but I ran into car trouble and wasn’t able to pick her up on time.”
A completely truthful answer riddled with lies, Chloe thought despairingly. Where would it all end?
“Oh.” Baron n
odded sympathetically. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help out.”
Not nearly as sorry as I am, she told him silently. If you’d been here, I might still be able to look you in the eye without flinching!
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thursday, August 27
JACQUELINE came to see him early that morning, banging on the door just after seven o’clock. “Do you know what day it is, Nico?” she demanded, when he answered.
“Sì. I am well aware.” He retraced his steps to the kitchen, leaving her to accompany him or not, as she wished.
She wished, following so close on his heels that she almost tripped him. “Then you realize we’re running out of time? That if something doesn’t happen in the next forty-eight hours, we’ll have left it too late to avert a disaster?”
When he didn’t reply, but simply continued preparing his morning meal, she planted herself squarely in front of him. “Listen to me! I’ve tried everything with Chloe—reason, sarcasm, persuasion. As a last resort, I’ve even changed tactics and started acting as if this marriage is the best thing to come along since the invention of the wheel. But none of it’s working, and I’m fresh out of ideas, Nico. It’s up to you, now.”
He heaved a sigh and swung away from her accusing gaze. “I have done enough, Jacqueline,” he told her, pouring boiling water over the coffee he’d measured into the press-pot and lowering the plunger. “In all conscience, I cannot continue to make Chloe’s life a living hell. I have endeavored to open her eyes to the truth of what she is doing. I believe she knows that marrying Baron Prescott is no longer feasible, and that canceling the wedding is her only option. But I cannot make the choice for her.”
“You could, if you offered her an alternative.”
“Then let me rephrase my reply. I will not make the choice for her. I will not be the reason she does not go through with this wedding. That is a decision she must arrive at on her own.”
The Moretti Marriage Page 10
