by Dani Collins
Alessandro sucked in a long patience-seeking breath, gaze going to the ceiling. “I will work,” he said flatly. “You’ll tell me if you need anything,” he added with a stern look at Octavia.
She nodded, disappointed that he left, even though there was still this rock of tension sitting between them. It didn’t disappear when he did, either, just gave her enough breathing room to relax and chat with her mother-in-law as she began unwrapping Lorenzo’s gifts.
* * *
Octavia rose from a nap before dinner, showered and fed Lorenzo, then used her new baby monitor to listen for him as she went back to the sitting room. She was folding a little vest and placing it on the pile in the bassinet when Alessandro came in.
“The nanny can clean this up, can’t she?” he said.
“I asked her to leave it out so I could look at everything again.” Octavia wasn’t sure why she wanted to, but it made her feel good to touch all the tiny outfits. Everything was so handsome and sweet. She held up the tuxedo on its hanger, complete with ruffled shirt, cummerbund, bow tie and black socks. “Your mother said it’s for your grandfather’s eightieth.”
The event had been planned a year ago and until a few days ago, Octavia had had every intention of attending. Now...
She frowned, amusement falling away into a kind of despair.
Alessandro came farther into the room, bypassing the sofa to turn on the fireplace. The gas gave a low hiss and the flames leaped up, brightening the room that had turned gloomy as dusk dimmed the gray light coming through the filmy curtains.
For a moment the room seemed cheery, the mood between them intimate. Alessandro stood with one hand deep in his pocket, the other braced on the edge of the mantel, head hanging as he regarded the flames.
He was so beautiful. Like a sculpture of a Roman god come to life. And he had that gorgeous way of pursing his mouth when he was thinking, exactly as he did when he was ready to kiss her.
She swallowed.
“The police have requested we stay in London until they finalize their investigation,” he said. “That will likely take us to the end of the month. I’ll hold video conferences with the New York and Paris offices while I’m here, and reassign all of Primo’s duties. That will give Mother plenty of time with Lorenzo and still get us home in time for my grandfather’s birthday.” He straightened and turned, his tone brooking no argument. “I wish we could go home sooner, but at least the staff in Naples are mine. It’s the office I’m least worried about right now.”
Octavia looked away, tempted to let his implacable personality roll right over her. That was the crux of the problem right there. He was such a force, so smooth in his handling of everything, she had fallen in with whatever he had suggested from minute one. Of course I’ll marry you. Anything you want. Lie down on the bed? Here?
She’d given him her virginity, not her spine, she reminded herself, and made herself stand taller.
“I really would rather keep Lorenzo here,” she managed to say with calm assertion. Away from him, she could relearn how to think for herself. “As you’ve pointed out, you have a lot of demands on your time. You won’t see much of him anyway. At least here, he’ll have his grandmother every day.”
Not completely true, since Ysabelle was already talking about returning to her new lover in the south of France. Octavia forced herself to meet Alessandro’s daunting gaze.
“Your parents will want to meet him,” he said.
She pressed her lips together. Her father hadn’t responded to her email informing him of Lorenzo’s safe birth, only made a deposit of a ridiculous amount into her childhood allowance account. Her mother had sent flowers with a tag that read Congratulations. In Octavia’s mind, the word had come across as deeply sarcastic.
“My parents are as capable of climbing onto an airplane as your mother is,” she pointed out, tone sharpening with anger that they hadn’t even called.
“Don’t take out your anger toward Primo on me, Octavia,” Alessandro warned in a low, dangerous tone. “You’re better than that.”
A disbelieving laugh escaped her while an uncomfortable rush of adrenaline burned through her limbs as the moment became a confrontation. It wasn’t like her to push back, but she had to.
“I’m not angry with Primo. I hate him with every cell in my body,” she corrected with a tremble in her voice. “I am angry with you. You left me here with him.”
He absorbed that with a small rock back on his heels.
“I accept that. But I can’t fire my cousin for interfering with my marriage then go home without a wife. You can imagine how things look from a distance. Some are already siding with Primo.” His jaw tightened. “I can’t have that kind of rift, Octavia. You and I must present a united front. You need to show you’re not holding a grudge against the entire family. Together, we show everyone we are prepared to resume our lives without him and everyone will fall into line.”
“You want me to pretend we’re happily married,” she confirmed. “Despite all that’s happened.” She was crushing Lorenzo’s soft new jacket into a ball against her diaphragm.
“I’m not trying to downplay what he’s done, but we have to move past it. We can’t let it impact our marriage.”
A million responses tore through her mind, but the one that came out was an incredulous, “What marriage?”
“We’re not talking about Primo, are we?” he said grimly, expression shuttering. “You think I was dishonest about my reasons for marrying you.” He folded his arms. “You’re turning this into something bigger than it is, cara. Why I married you doesn’t matter. We are married and we’re going to stay that way.”
This was the man she’d caught glimpses of when he spoke with other powerful men, like her father. When she had stood beside him at company events and seen minions leap to do his bidding before he’d finished stating what he wanted. No one said no to him, but she had to. Had to.
“Of course it doesn’t matter to you,” she corrected, blinking and trying to ignore that her eyes were stinging, hoping the low light hid how wet they were growing. “Because I mean nothing to you. I realize that now, thank you, although I admit it was a bit of a shock. I mean, I knew my father didn’t care which Ferrante took me so long as one of you did—he’s never had my best interests at heart—but I thought you, at least, had been more discerning. I thought you decided that night that you liked me, but no.” It hurt so much to face that. Her voice scraped all the way up her breastbone, abrading her throat. “I didn’t go into our marriage expecting love, Alessandro.”
She had to flick her gaze away. The yearning had been there, no matter how self-deluded the wish had been. The death of that hope twisted her lungs in her chest, filling her voice with the wretchedness that gripped her.
“But I expected you to care. Not a lot, but enough to keep me from dying in childbirth on the floor of our bedroom—” It wasn’t even theirs anymore. It was hers.
Her throat seized and her eyes burned. She made herself fold the tiny jacket with trembling hands, refusing to look at him as she pushed her shattered expectations into an armored vault.
“Octavia.” His voice sounded like she felt. Shocked and shredded and tight. Strong hands took her shoulders in a warm grasp as he turned her into him. “I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t want to know,” she charged, knocking his hands away and stepping back. “You certainly never showed up to ask. He told me—” She didn’t want to say it aloud, didn’t want to know if it was true, but she had to face it if it was. “He said you were having affairs. Were you? Is that what happened? Are you in love with someone else?”
The look on his face created a kind of barometric pressure that couldn’t be heard or seen, only felt, making the air go dense around her. Pulsing and thick.
“No,” he said with understated thunder.
; * * *
“I can’t believe you could think for one minute—”
Octavia tensed at his incensed tone.
He cut himself off, doing everything he could to stay this side of civilized. It was a struggle. The picture she painted of her terror during labor, along with the accusation she was throwing at him like tar, clung and burned. He was a man who took his responsibilities seriously, never behaved negligently, but he’d made a mistake. That was hard enough to take, but now this? Accusations of cheating?
“How would I know what you’ve been doing in Naples?” She was different. She’d hardened in the months since he’d seen her. As loving as she appeared toward Lorenzo, that was the only softness in her now as she stared at him, shades of denunciation and rejection skittering behind her eyes.
Something shook in his chest. Like a closed shutter taking a strong wind, testing the locks. It was painful. Disconcerting. Primo had been intent on hurting him. That was painful enough to face, but even more devastating was how effective Primo had been with his attack.
Octavia had been a delightfully easy addition to Alessandro’s life, biddable and filled with a shy passion he had mined with a type of gold fever. He hadn’t had to fight for her. Hadn’t had to give up anything of himself to get what he wanted.
He had taken for granted that he had her. He could admit that he’d been arrogant on that front. But what the fallout from Primo’s actions was rather graphically demonstrating was how nascent his connection to Octavia was. It was a piece of paper that bound their assets. He didn’t have her.
That unsettled him, which was odd because he hadn’t married for a love match. This, what they were enduring, was more angst than he had ever wanted to wade through. He’d deliberately sidestepped the highs and lows of an emotional landscape by marrying a woman who kept her own heart guarded.
Octavia pushing him away as she was doing, however, was the exact sort of chaos Primo had hoped to unleash.
“No one has ever accused me of so many dishonorable things,” he muttered. “But I am guilty of one thing only, Octavia, and that was trusting the wrong man.”
Her mouth twitched before she firmed it into a stubborn line. There was something else in her demeanor, however. Something bleak. “I thought he might be lying, but...” She searched his eyes with indecision clouding her own.
The air thickened as he instinctively sensed something worse coming.
“He said you only got me pregnant for the bonus my father offered you. That you didn’t care about how my pregnancy was going so long as Lorenzo delivered alive.”
“Porco cane,” he muttered, cursing his cousin while his mind exploded. “That is—” He had to move away and dig a hand into his hair. He clenched enough of a handful to hurt. Dio, at this rate his own security team would have to take him down if he was ever within five meters of his cousin. Otherwise he’d be jailed for first-degree murder.
“I was terrified for both of you,” he said, voice hoarse as he revisited those hours between being informed that she needed emergency surgery and arriving to hear they’d come through safely. “He deliberately played with me, leaving me hanging with partial information. It was a nightmare.”
She searched his expression and, just for a moment, he let the agony retake him. He let her see that he might not have been beside her, but he’d been with her.
But going to that place was dangerous. He couldn’t control his reaction to having been sent there by someone he had thought he could trust. He slammed the door on that torment and looked away.
“He wanted to hurt us and we can’t allow it. We can’t let him destroy our marriage, Octavia. We can’t let him win.”
She swallowed, face pulling into lines of torture, chin dipping to hide her crumple of composure. She pulled a tissue from the box on the table. A tear fell as she quickly tried to swipe beneath her eyes. Her misery was a tangible thing he could taste on his tongue. An empathic sting in his throat and constriction in his chest gripped him, making breathing difficult.
He had to go to her, offer the comfort he should have given her all along. He pulled her into his lap as he sat on the sofa and mio Dio he wanted to kiss her so badly—
She stiffened as he gathered her so he only pressed his mouth to her temple, subtly drinking in her scent and parting his lips enough to taste her skin. She trembled and curled her fingers into his shirt, face tucking into his neck where he could feel the dampness of her cheeks against his throat.
She shuddered once, catching back a sob.
He cradled her closer, tighter, hoping the pound of his heart reached her. That she understood he wished he’d been here.
The separation of the past months had distanced them. They’d already been practicing abstinence as a precaution against miscarriage. Alessandro had fallen into a routine of working late then working out, blood afire in his veins, body craving hers like an addict withdrawing from drugs.
He’d borne it because he’d had to. Staying in Naples had made it easier, physically. Maybe a part of him had even wanted to prove he could stay away. Had it been ego-driven? He could still hear Primo’s askance comment, “You’re going to fly all this way to cuddle her?”
Now he wished he had. She was tense in his lap, accepting the embrace, but only marginally.
Rejection squeezed him in a dank hold. He ran the flat of his hand in a reassuring circle against her back, coaxing her to relax. Coaxing her to remember they’d had something. She could trust him.
“I was so scared,” she whispered.
“I’m here now,” he said, trying not to crush her, but he was anxious to imprint her with his presence.
She sniffed and her hand slid up, curling around his neck. Her torso angled so her breasts became a soft, erotic pressure against his chest. Her plump bottom was a sweet weight that shifted against an organ swelling and aching with pressure.
He started to seek her lips, hand shifting to the side of her face, but his mother’s voice intruded from upstairs. She was looking for them. Dinner was ready.
“You need to eat,” Alessandro said, heart racing as he snapped himself from a lascivious mind-set and loosened his hold, gently helping Octavia find her feet as he rose.
She clung for balance. The tightness of her shaking grip and the small flinch that arrived as she stood told him how sore she was at her incision. She released him quickly, folding the edges of her jacket across her breasts and hugging herself. She seemed very young in that moment and he reminded himself that she wasn’t even twenty-four.
Seven years younger than him and not nearly so worldly. Hiding a lot. Why hadn’t she called and shared her worries? What had that been about her father not caring about her best interests? How much had he missed by not being here?
She started toward the dining room and he urged her to pause with a touch on her arm. “Octavia. I should tell you, in case it comes up in future. Your father did offer me a bonus for a live birth. I found it...distasteful, to be honest. Hardly something within my control and not something I wanted a financial reward hanging upon. I told him to pay it out to you if he felt so strongly about it.”
“He did,” she said in a flat voice he found difficult to interpret. “It went into my account the other day and it is distasteful, but at least it gives me options.”
CHAPTER SIX
ALESSANDRO WAS NEVER anything less than confident. Even when he’d been refusing to run the Ferrante corporate holdings there hadn’t been any doubt in him over whether he could do it, only a firm belief he didn’t deserve to. He certainly never backed down from a fight until he’d exhausted all his own options.
He wanted to leap on Octavia’s comment, but now wasn’t the time. She was emotionally exhausted and physically done in. He might not be as effusive as his mother, but they were both in agreement that Octavia needed rest and lots
of it, so he didn’t ask her to come to Paris with him, even though he wanted to.
He hated to leave her for even a minute, now that he realized how badly they’d fallen apart, but work needed piecing back together as much as his marriage.
Still, her remark continued to turn over in his mind, aggravating him even when he returned to his mother’s house and found her napping. She was so different, so serious and perhaps even more reticent than when they’d first met.
By the end of their honeymoon, he’d been captivated by the woman he’d married. She’d been passionate as hell in bed, bright and funny yet thoughtful. There was no sign of that woman now and it was his fault.
He must have come across as smug in those early weeks, because Primo had said, “Lucky you,” with a sneer, and made a remark about how he would be happy to continue steering the ship if Alessandro wanted to go back to playing house.
Alessandro had seen the threat then, he acknowledged now, had even acted by sidelining his new wife in favor of asserting his position at work and within the family. He’d sent Primo to expand the London office and the confident woman who’d begun to blossom had soon been sent to the same cold climate where she’d been stepped on until she was completely closed against him.
He wanted their marriage back to where it had been last year, before he’d gotten her pregnant, when she’d been quick to come forward and kiss him in greeting, hands sliding around his waist as if she’d been waiting all day to touch him.
The way he had waited all day to hold her.
Instead, they were back to the very beginning. In the days leading up to their wedding, she had allowed his touch, but she’d been a lot like she was now: wary and unwilling to look him in the eye.
With a bittersweet smile, he recalled his gentle breaching of her defenses on their wedding night. She’d been apprehensive, but endearingly brave in her determination to overcome her qualms. He had enjoyed teasing her past her reservations one slow step at a time. Dancing to low, erotic music in their hotel room while she got used to the feel of his hands on her body. Undressing in the light of candle flame so her skin glowed as she blushed all over. He’d coaxed her to explore him and she’d reacted as though he was too hot to touch, hands drawn mothlike to his skin, then fluttering away.
