The Marriage He Must Keep

by Dani Collins

  “Oh, Sandro,” she said with exasperation, closing the door so his mother wouldn’t overhear, then marched forward to the front of his desk. “Yes, she’s gone over the top. But it’s a nice day. Come enjoy it with your family.”

  “Ah, yes, my family. How’s Papa? Got himself covered up after doing the deed with my mother in the garden this morning?” he asked with false pleasantry.

  “Don’t you dare embarrass her by telling her you saw them.” She pointed her finger at him so he would know she was serious.

  “I’m trying to forget that I did. I want to gouge out my eyes.”

  She rolled her own, trying not to fall into another fit of giggles at the way he’d reacted this morning. He’d been holding Lorenzo as he’d glanced out to greet the day and had abruptly let loose a string of very blue language. He’d turned away so appalled she was still snickering.

  Now she tucked her chin and said, “She’s happy. Isn’t that the most important thing? Would you rather she was unhappy?”

  “No,” he said, disgruntled.

  “Just not that happy? Are you jealous?” she asked as it occurred to her.

  “What do you mean?” His gaze cut up to hers in a way that made her think she was on to something.

  “Because she’s with someone besides your father.”

  “No,” he denied firmly, shrugging that off with a rearrangement of things on his desk. “She began auditioning replacements about three months after he was in the ground. I got over that distress very quickly.” He sounded as though he was telling the truth, but...

  “Did you?” she pressed.

  “I honestly don’t care who she sleeps with.” He stood, signaling that he would prefer to put an end to this conversation. His gaze came up, flat and hard. “I just didn’t like watching her throw herself into relationship after relationship only to come away with a broken heart.”

  “I don’t think he plans to break her heart. He seems as madly in love as she is.” If anyone was jealous, it was Octavia. The way the count gazed at Ysabelle as if she was made of sunsets and jewels and exotic foods made her yearn to see the same undisguised feelings in her own husband’s face. They had come so far, but she was greedy. She wanted more.

  She wanted the dream.

  Patience, she reminded herself.

  “Loving someone madly is exactly what leads to broken hearts,” Sandro muttered. “It’s like watching a pair of trains headed for a collision that can’t be avoided.”

  She stilled as a suspicion struck her like a freight engine: that she would never see undisguised love on her husband’s face. She knew him better now, understood his aversion to deep emotion and it hit her that he wouldn’t welcome the vulnerability of love. He had wanted an arranged marriage to avoid the emotional pitfalls of a love match.

  Had that been one of the reasons he had chosen her? Because he knew he’d never really love her?

  The heart that had been creeping onto her sleeve was suddenly yanked from the washer still damp, shaken and strung up on the line. She loved him. Irrevocably. While he, she suspected, would never, ever let himself love her back.

  “Do you honestly feel like that?” she asked numbly, not wanting to hear it, but knowing she had to face it if it was the truth.

  He started to say something then paused, seeming to read something in her face that sobered him. His tongue touched his bottom lip and tension gathered around his eyes. As the silence lengthened, the significance of the moment grew.

  “You do,” she said, and her heart began to tremble and crack. “We’ll never have that. Will we? What your mother has. Because you don’t want it.”

  If there was a man with a stronger willpower than Sandro, she hadn’t met him.

  Despair crashed into her heart like his runaway train, spreading pain outward. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do this again. When she’d had hope, it had been different, but she couldn’t offer love again and know without doubt it would forever go unrequited.

  “Cara,” he began in that oh-so-careful tone that meant he wanted to let her down easy. “You don’t want it, either. You see her happy now and think it’s worth it, but when you feel that much joy, you feel the loss of it that much more cruelly. I’m protecting you. What if something happens? I wouldn’t want to leave you in the sort of pain she’s known.”

  Octavia was in pain all right. She looked away, sucking in a tight breath that burned her lungs. “I don’t know why I thought— No, I do know why I thought you might come to love me. Because you’re capable of it. I’ve seen it. You love your son and your grandfather and even your mother, despite the fact she drives you crazy. So I thought you might come to love me, but you don’t. Do you?”

  “Octavia.” He reached across, but she backed up.

  “No.” She shook her head in denial. “Sex isn’t enough. I told you that before we came home from London.”

  “You also told me you didn’t expect love,” he reminded grimly.

  “It doesn’t mean I don’t want it! No,” she said, holding him off with an upraised hand as he came around the desk. “You don’t get to kiss me into thinking we’re okay. I’m not okay, Sandro. My marriage was supposed to be better than my mother’s. Why do you want yours to be worse?”

  “We are better, cara. You know that. We’re solid. Unshakeable.”

  “No, we’re stationary. That’s what I’m realizing right now. Are you really going to stand there and tell me to be happy because you’re willing to love everyone around you except me?”

  “Cara, you know I care about you very deeply.” Pressure was drawing a white line around his mouth. “Do I really need to make love to you in the garden to prove how much? Be sensible.”

  “Don’t mock her for loving so freely,” she shot back, lips quivering and throat aching. “You told me you were coming back to this marriage wholeheartedly and you’re not. You lied to me.”

  He flinched, head going back as if she’d slapped him.

  Beyond the door, Lorenzo began to cry.

  Octavia cast her husband one last baleful look and walked out the door. But it wasn’t enough. As she gathered Lorenzo close and his warm, tiny body failed to drag the pieces of her heart back together, she knew she couldn’t sit on the terrace and be the only person there whom Sandro would never love.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SANDRO STOOD ROOTED to the floor, eyes closed in a wince, trying to take back the past five minutes.

  And go back to what? Pretending this was never going to happen?

  It wasn’t supposed to! From his earliest forays into relationships, he’d known he didn’t want to fall in love. All his affairs had been lighthearted and his goal for marriage had been to find a compatible partner he could respect without putting his heart on the roller coaster his mother had endured.

  Octavia had been perfect. She’d come from the right background, had an honestly earned fortune and a conciliatory nature that hadn’t provoked strong feelings in him.

  Except in bed.

  And then out of it.

  Yes, he couldn’t deny that his feelings for her had been growing from those first weeks of his marriage. He’d tried to stay them, had left her in London and convinced himself he hadn’t missed her, but since Lorenzo’s birth he’d been unable to effectively keep himself from growing more and more attached.

  The attraction was never supposed to have deepened like this. Why should it have when he’d chosen her for logical reasons and they really didn’t have that much in common? It was a one in a million shot that she would turn out to capture his interest so thoroughly.

  But her quiet, thoughtful nature had revealed itself to also be vulnerable, then sassy. She was complex, far more intriguing than he’d first suspected. Smart and funny and loving. That was the part that had really gotten to him. She lo
ved their son, loved his family—hell, she loved her friend from the hospital and her friend’s baby.

  She loved him.

  That was the problem with emotions. With a curse, he slapped his hand on his desk so his palm stung. Why couldn’t he control this? Why couldn’t she? This wasn’t supposed to happen. They were entering territory where real hurt could happen. Couldn’t she see that?

  Of course she had. When she had walked out, her last look had pulled his flesh from his bones before throwing his skin away. He’d been right back in London, seeing whatever she had felt for him shredded to nothing.

  They were already in the danger zone. Hell, if he had been serious about protecting her heart, he should have left her in London when she had asked. He shouldn’t have pressed and cajoled and seduced her into coming back here with him.

  He shouldn’t have made her fall in love with him.

  Which was what he’d done. Not consciously. He’d told himself he wanted her trust. Her body. Her affection and acceptance of him.

  But it was her heart he’d been courting. He wanted her love, damn it!

  Because he loved her so much it was unbearable to think of being the only one this deeply invested.

  He clenched his fists, trying to contain the massive rush of feeling as he admitted what he’d been denying. Love, thick and hot as lava seared his arteries, wrenching his heart. Who wanted this much need and anguish and possessiveness welling inside them?

  Who wanted the power to hurt another and feel as though you’d punched a hole in your own chest when you did? Who wanted to be driven to open a door and go in search of a woman before he even knew what he wanted to say?

  He took the back stairs because they were closer, checking Lorenzo’s room and finding it empty. He tried their new bedrooms in the renovated master suite. It had a long private balcony that wrapped the corner of the topmost floor of the castello, offering nearly a full 360-degree view of the Ferrante lands.

  It also looked onto the front terrace where his family was congregating. Octavia wasn’t there, but another level below it, in the courtyard where the fountain burbled in front of the stairs at the entrance to the house, his wife was about to put his son’s car seat into the backseat of her mother’s car.

  His heart dropped into the center of the earth.

  “Octavia!” he bellowed.

  She jerked and swiveled, hugging the car seat to her chest protectively. Her chin came up, up, up as she found him at the top of the house in some kind of reverse Romeo and Juliet satire.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He was shouting far louder than he had to, but all he could think was that there were too many flights of stairs between them for him to reach her before she got away. His voice had to pin her exactly where she was.

  Immediately below him, his family looked up. His sister, standing near the rail, glanced down to the drive, saw Octavia and turned back to the rest of them. Her mouth and eyes formed a round O.

  * * *

  Octavia was aware of faces appearing across the lower terrace, but the Roman god standing at the top of the house catching thunderbolts and threatening to hurl them at her held most of her attention.

  “I’m going to my mother’s. I need time to think,” she said. And, because Lorenzo was getting heavy, she set his car seat on the backseat inside the open door of the car.

  “Do not—” Sandro roared, “—put that baby in that car.”

  Her mother’s driver took a long, deliberate step back. Inside the car, her mother said, “Octavia, I don’t like this.”

  On the terrace, Ysabelle’s count looked up at his stepson-to-be and said, “Sandro, you need to take control of yourself.”

  His mother put her hand on the count’s sleeve, face turned up to her son, and said, “No, bello. We’re going to let this happen. It’s been a long time coming.”

  For some reason, that made hope squeeze Octavia so tightly she ached. Part of her was terrified—not because her husband looked as though he was on the last peg of his control, but because she was afraid he wasn’t. She was afraid he was merely upset about her taking Lorenzo, that it had nothing to do with her.

  So she did the unthinkable. She goaded him.

  “Fine!” she shouted, picking up the car seat and moving it to the bottom of the front steps where she set Lorenzo safely in the shade. “That’s all you ever wanted from me anyway. Keep your son, then. But I’m leaving!”

  She pivoted and marched to the car, throat so tight she couldn’t breathe. This was too big a gamble. What if he let her go? She forced herself to turn at the open door of the car to shoot him a last, defiant look. To see what he thought of her threat.

  He was no longer standing on the balcony. He’d climbed over the rail and was dangling from the bottom of it.

  She clapped her hand over the squeak that left her mouth, terrified as he dropped onto the upper terrace with a thump.

  “Nonna just rolled over in her grave. She hated when you did things like that,” Sandro’s sister told him as he straightened.

  He ignored her, parting the crowd with nothing more than his unwavering sense of purpose as he headed for the rail overlooking the lawn. He vaulted as casually as he’d dropped from the top balcony, landing on the grass in a low, agile crouch.

  Octavia’s heart finally started again. She sucked in a stunned breath, gaze fixed on him to be sure he was okay.

  He straightened to his full height and gave his shirt a nonchalant pull across his shoulders then tugged each cuff, gaze flashing silvery and livid. “Now. Explain to me again what the hell you think you’re doing.”

  She had wanted to unleash the beast. Here he was, control shattered to reveal the dangerous inner animal that operated on pure instinct. Hunter, warrior, slayer. He was terrifying in his magnificence.

  She did the only thing anyone could do when faced with such an untamed force. She turned and ran like hell.

  Except she was wearing terrible shoes and his long strides crunched louder and faster behind her making her scream even before his arm snagged her. She started to buckle, but he caught her and the world spun. She wound up over his shoulder like a sack of flour as he strode back to the house.

  She screamed again, kicking this time, and punched at his backside. “Put me down!”

  “No.”

  She gripped around his waist so she wouldn’t bounce and opened her mouth against his back.

  “Bite me, cara, and I will bite you right back,” he warned.

  “You’re making a fool of yourself!” she cried.

  “I’m making a fool of both of us. Someone bring Lorenzo inside. Look after him while I deal with my wife,” he said as they approached the front steps.

  “Sandro, her surgery,” Octavia’s mother reminded in a surprisingly strong assertion, standing outside her car, purse gripped anxiously in her white hands.

  He swore and paused on the stairs. The world spun again as he swung Octavia into the cradle of his arms. “Did I hurt you?” he asked with real concern.

  “No. Yes,” she corrected, so devastated by his rejection of her heart, she could barely look at him, but she did. She let him see how he’d stripped her down to a naked bud then crushed her under his heel. She wanted his love so badly. How dare he withhold it from her?

  His expression twisted with remorse.

  Above them, Ysabelle said dreamily, “I remember the first time his father carried me kicking and screaming into the house. Sandro was born nine months later.”

  Sandro bit out a curse and hefted Octavia higher against his chest as he climbed the rest of the way up the stairs and jiggled the door open.

  He carried her over the threshold.

  She caught her breath, sentimental enough to be ridiculously delighted by the action. Her eyes blurred with tea
rs and the interior was dark after the brightness of the day. She could barely see, but he didn’t hesitate as he crossed the foyer. He held her tighter as he took the stairs two at a time and didn’t stop until they were in their room. There he kicked the door shut and crossed to set her on the bed.

  She scrambled up and off it just as quickly as he dumped her there. He moved to close the balcony doors, but kept an eye on her. There was no way she’d make it to the hall door before he would be on her again.

  Part of her was tempted to make that happen. It would turn into sex. In this moment, feeling as upside down as she did emotionally, turning this into a sexual battle seemed like the safer bet. Words might be hard. They might hurt. Sex would feel good, if empty.

  She lowered her gaze and pressed her knuckles to her quivering lips.

  Sandro’s feet came into her line of vision.

  “Guilt is not fun, cara,” he said heavily. “I hate being fallible and I am. I’m human. I try to forgive myself for being a child, for having to learn the hard way the consequences of my actions, but I still blame myself for my father’s death. If he had lived, my mother never would have had to scrape herself up so badly falling in and out of love with other men. I blame myself for that, too.”

  “It’s her choice,” she mumbled. “She’s happy. Maybe she doesn’t care if it hurts along the way.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t, but I do. I’ve never wanted to go through that same sort of wringer and I’m built to. I have that temperament and I knew if I ever loved and lost, I would be just like her—completely broken. Who would ever want to feel like that?”

  She turned her face to the side, struggling to hold back her flinch and the tears that flooded up into her eyes. I’m broken, she wanted to cry.

  “I just find it really hard, Sandro.” Her throat was so tight she could barely force her reedy voice to work. “Because I’m willing to take that risk. I love you. A lot. And I don’t think I can bear it if you’re never going to love me.”

  He touched her chin, gently drawing her to look at him.

  “I do love you, cara. I knew I was in trouble the night we met, when I danced with you. I felt the chemistry and thought for a moment that the safer choice for me would be to let you marry Primo.” His mouth twisted, but his gaze never wavered. “I wasn’t about to let you go to anyone, however. And that scared me.”