‘I’ve been reading. I guess the book engrossed me,’ she lied. What was it even called? She folded it closed carefully, without attempting to stand. ‘Did you have a good night?’
There it was again! That expression of uncertainty. Of wrongdoing. Her stomach churned and she looked away, unable to meet his eyes but knowing she had to speak honestly about how she felt. She needed to know where she stood.
‘Have you been with another woman?’ The question was a whisper. A soft, tremulous slice of doubt in the beautiful lounge of his villa.
‘Oh, Emmeline...’ He moved quickly to her and crouched down at her feet. ‘No. Of course I haven’t.’ He put a hand on her knee, drawing her attention to his face. ‘I had dinner with Rafe.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded jerkily. ‘I know. He called hours ago, to say you’d left your jacket at the restaurant. He said he’d drop it by later in the week.’
Hours ago. Pietro understood then why his wife was so uncertain.
‘I had to go back to the office to finish something,’ he lied.
He’d needed to think. And he hadn’t been sure he could face his wife with the knowledge he held—the lie he was keeping from her. What had seemed so simple was now burning through his body, making each breath painful.
‘You can’t seriously think I would be seeing anyone else?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said softly, her eyes not able to meet his. ‘I mean, I knew what I was getting when I married you...’
‘No, you didn’t. Neither of us did,’ he said simply. ‘I thought I was marrying the boring, spoiled daughter of a dear friend. I didn’t expect my wife to be you. I thought I’d want to carry on with my life as before...’
‘But you don’t?’ she pushed, her eyes huge as finally they met his.
‘Not even a little bit,’ he promised. He stood, holding a hand to her. ‘You have to trust me, Emmeline.’
Guilt coursed through him. How could he ask that of her?
Emmeline bit down on her lip. She trusted Pietro with her life, sure, but her heart...? And it was her heart that was involved now. Her whole heart. It had tripped into a state of love without her knowledge, and definitely without her permission, and she couldn’t say with any certainty that he wouldn’t break it.
Not intentionally, but just by virtue of the man he was.
‘Trust me,’ he said again, cupping her face. ‘I don’t want anyone else.’
‘It’s crazy,’ she said softly, doubt in her features. ‘We only just met...’
He dropped his mouth to hers, kissing her with all the passion in his soul. She moaned into his mouth, wrapping her arms around his neck. So much for not responding, she thought with an inward snort of derision. She couldn’t be in the same room as her husband and not feel as though a match had been struck.
‘We’ve known each other for years.’
He kissed the words into her mouth and they filled up her soul.
‘But not really.’ She pulled away, resting her head on his chest, listening to his heart.
‘I remember the first time I saw you,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d come for your mother’s funeral. You were a teenager, and I think even then I knew that I was looking at you in all the wrong ways.’ His smile was apologetic. ‘You had just come home from school, do you remember?’
Remember? Of course she remembered. Her father’s handsome young friend had looked at her and a fire had lit in her blood.
‘Yep.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You were the most gorgeous person I’d ever seen,’ she said with mock seriousness. ‘You fuelled all my teenage fantasies.’
His laugh was a soft rumble. ‘No wonder you never met a boy you liked,’ he teased. ‘Who could live up to me?’
It was a joke, but Emmeline was falling back in time, her mind tripping over those painful years in her life.
She covered the direction of her thoughts with a flippant response. ‘Who indeed?’
‘I thought at the time that it was strange you were still at school. Your mother had just passed away, and yet you were carrying on with your life...’
‘People handle grief in different ways,’ she said softly. ‘I needed to be around friends. The familiar. Sophie was a godsend.’
‘How come you’ve never told your father what you know about Patrice’s death?’
She looked up at him, her eyes awash with emotions. A part of him—the part of him that wanted his wife to be happy and at ease—felt he should back off. But the rest of him—the part that so desperately needed answers—pushed on with his line of enquiry.
‘He thinks you believe she simply crashed.’
‘She did crash.’ Emmeline’s smile was tight, her tone dismissive.
‘But she drove into that tree on purpose.’
‘Probably drunk,’ Emmeline said, with the anger she tried so hard to keep a tight rein on taking over for a moment.
She stepped away from Pietro, pacing towards the window that overlooked the city. Her eyes studied its beautiful glow but she hardly saw it.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she was always drunk at the end.’ Emmeline bit down on her lip but the words were bubbling out of her almost against her will.
Pietro frowned. ‘Your father has never mentioned that. There was no hint of it in the media.’
‘Of course there wasn’t,’ Emmeline said wearily. ‘Daddy controls the local press, for the most part. And the coroner’s office.’
Emmeline spun around to face Pietro, bracing her back against the glass window behind her.
‘If she’d hit another car, hurt someone, then I don’t think even Daddy would have been able to keep it hushed up. But as it was only Mom died, and no one could have gained anything from seeing our family name disgraced.’ She swallowed, her throat a slender pale column that was somehow so vulnerable Pietro ached.
‘How do you know about her drinking?’ Pietro murmured.
Emmeline swallowed, looking away. Years of silence kept her lips glued shut even now.
‘How do you know?’ he insisted, staring at her lowered face, waiting for her to speak.
‘Because she couldn’t hide it towards the end. She was a drunk. A mean drunk,’ she added quietly.
Pietro’s eyes narrowed. ‘Mean, how?’
Emmeline expelled a shaking sigh. ‘Just mean.’
‘To you?’ he prompted.
‘Of course. With Daddy away at the Capitol for much of the time, I was the only one around to be mean to. Well, other than the servants—but they were paid well and put up with it.’ Emmeline swallowed back the sting of tears and pressed her palms to her eyes. ‘I could never do anything right by her.’
She shook her head angrily.
‘Everything about me offended her. Especially as I got older. I remember there was one dinner and Congressman Nantuckan made some throwaway comment about how beautiful I was, that I was going to be every bit as pretty as my mom when I grew up. I must have been all of twelve. He was probably just being kind,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But Mom was furious. Furious. As though I’d planned some elaborate betrayal and laced her dinner with cyanide.’
A dark and displeasing image was forming for Pietro, but he took care not to react visibly. ‘What did she do?’
‘Nothing. Not straight away, anyhow. Mom would never show her hand publicly. But once everyone left she pulled all the clothes out of my wardrobe. She told me I was on the right track to becoming an A-grade whore if I didn’t watch out. She—’
Emmeline gasped as a sob escaped her, and lifted a hand to her mouth to block it.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, shaking her head desperately. ‘I never talk about this! But I’ve ripped off the Band-Aid and I don’t seem able to stop...’
‘I don’t want you to stop,’ he assured her, fighting the urge to close the distance between them. He wanted to comfort her, but he suspected that it would cause her to stop sharing, and he desperately wanted to understand more about her life.<
br />
She nodded, but her hands were shaking, and finally Pietro gave up on maintaining his distance. He walked to the bar and poured a stiff measure of Scotch, then carried it to his wife. She curled her fingers around it, sniffed it before taking a tiny sip. Her face contorted with disgust and she passed the glass straight back.
‘Yuck.’
His smile was indulgent, but impatience burned inside him. ‘You were twelve, and on the cusp of changing from a girl into a young woman...?’ he prompted.
She nodded, pulling at the necklace she always wore.
‘She couldn’t stand that. When I was young she was such an attentive, affectionate mother. We were very close. But from around ten or eleven, as I shot up and started to develop a more mature body... Mom saw it as some kind of act of defiance. She started to see me as competition, hated the time I spent with Daddy. When people came to the house she’d send me to my room. I wasn’t allowed to wear anything that drew attention to myself. Cosmetics were forbidden. So was dying my hair or having it cut into a style.’
‘Yet you were still beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘And anyone would have been able to see that.’
Emmeline’s eyes met his with mockery. ‘You didn’t. You specifically told me that I didn’t look good enough to be your wife.’
He groaned—a sound of deep regret. He had said that. ‘Emmeline, I saw you as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking straight the night you came to my office. And, if anything, I suppose I was...annoyed.’
‘Annoyed?’ she prompted.
‘Si. Annoyed that you went to such effort to cover up your natural beauty.’
‘Even after she died it was a habit. I don’t know... I guess I got very mixed up. Any time I would even think about wearing something other than what she’d chosen for me I’d hear her voice, hear the things she’d called me, and I’d know I could never do it.’ Emmeline blinked, her enormous eyes round and golden in her face. ‘When you told me I needed to change how I looked...’
‘I was a bastard to say that to you,’ he said gruffly.
‘Yes. An arrogant bastard,’ she agreed, although the words were softened by her smile. ‘But you freed me, in a weird way. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for someone to shake me out of that mind-set. To remind me that she was gone and the power she’d exerted over me had gone with her. There was an article in the papers not long after she died. It compared me to her and the headline was Dull Heiress Can’t Hold a Candle to Dead Mother. Can you believe that?’
His snort was derisive. ‘Ridiculous journalists.’
‘Yes, and a ridiculous story. They’d taken a heap of long-lens shots of me leaving school, playing baseball—you know, generally the worst, most unflattering pictures. A normal girl would have been devastated by that.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No. I saw it as a tick of approval. I was doing just what I was supposed to. Mom would have been proud of me.’ She shook her head again. ‘It took me a long time to unwrap those thoughts and see them for the idiocy they were. For many years I couldn’t gain that perspective...’
His eyes swept closed and he processed what she was telling him. He thought of the way he’d criticised her appearance—first telling her she was too conservative and then accusing her of looking too ‘available’ when she’d dressed as he’d suggested.
‘You are beautiful to me no matter what you wear—and to any man. Your mother was playing a foolish and futile game, trying to hide you like that.’
‘She wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders,’ Emmeline pointed out with a grimace.
‘I cannot believe your father wasn’t aware...’
‘He doted on her,’ Emmeline said wistfully. ‘There was a significant age gap between them, as you know. She was his precious, darling wife.’ She shook her head bitterly from side to side. ‘He had no idea.’
‘I can’t understand that.’
Emmeline shrugged. ‘I think it’s quite common. A lot of people who love someone with a dependency issue fool themselves into thinking nothing’s wrong. They don’t want to admit the truth, so they don’t.’
‘But—’
‘I know.’ She lifted a finger to his lips, her smile distracting. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ She dropped her finger lower, digging the tip into the cleft of his chin. ‘The first thing that’s gone right for me is actually...um...’
‘Yes?’ he prompted, the word a gravelled husk.
‘This. Marrying you. It must seem crazy to an outsider but here...with you... I feel so alive. For the first time in a long time I’m myself again. Thank you.’
Guilt was heavy in his chest.
Tell her. Tell her now.
He wanted to so badly, and there was only one way to stop the words galloping from his mouth. He crushed his lips to hers, taking possession of her mouth with his, pressing her against the window, making her his once more. Here, like this, everything made sense.
Nothing and no one—no truth kept or lie uncovered—could hurt what they were.
CHAPTER TEN
THE NIGHTCLUB WAS full to overflowing and the music was low-key, electronic. It thumped around the walls. The lighting was dim. Even dancing with her husband, his arms wrapped around her waist, she couldn’t make out his face properly.
‘So this is where our wedding guests came?’
He nodded. ‘I believe so.’
His hands dipped lower, curving over her rear, holding her against the hint of his arousal. Her eyes flared with temptation and desire.
‘It’s nice...’ She wrinkled her nose as she looked around, studying the walls that were painted a dark charcoal and featured beautiful black and white prints of Italian scenes.
‘I am going to take a stab in the dark and say it’s not your usual scene,’ he teased, kissing the top of her head.
‘Not exactly!’ She laughed. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn to like it.’
‘There is no need. I don’t come here often.’
‘But you have something to do with it?’
‘I financed it,’ he agreed.
‘Uh-huh. That would be why they treated you like some kind of god when you walked in here.’
‘Or it could have been because of the incredibly beautiful woman on my arm.’
She shook her head, her smile dismissive. ‘I’m sure I’m not the first woman in a nice dress you’ve brought through those doors.’
He slowed for a moment, hating it that she was right—hating it that his past was as colourful as it was. Not once had he questioned the wisdom of the way he lived, but now, married to Emmeline, he wished more than anything that he hadn’t slept with any pretty woman who’d caught his eye. He wanted to give her more than that, but he couldn’t exactly wind back time.
‘Have you spoken to your father lately?’
‘Ah...’ She expelled a soft sigh. ‘A change of subject, I see. I take it that means I’m the hundredth woman you’ve come here with, or something?’
He compressed his lips, angry with himself and, perversely, with Emmeline for pushing this line of enquiry. ‘Does it matter?’
She blinked up at him and shook her head. ‘I guess not.’
She looked away, but the pleasant fog of sweet desire that had wrapped around them dissipated. A line had been drawn and she’d stepped back over it, warily.
‘I was just thinking,’ he said gently, ‘that I wish I had come into this relationship with less baggage.’
‘Fewer ex-lovers, you mean?’ she murmured, moving in time to the music even as most of her mind was distracted by the idea of Pietro ever making love to someone else.
‘Si, certo.’
‘But why?’ she asked softly, and stopped moving, staring up at him.
‘You deserve better than someone like me.’
He was surprised to hear himself admit that. Until that moment Pietro would have classified himself as supremely confident and self-assured.
‘But perhaps you wouldn’t be such a sensat
ional lover without all those women you’ve been with before,’ she quipped, winking up at him.
His laugh was gruff. ‘So practice makes perfect?’
‘Yes. But now you get to practice with just me.’
‘And you are perfect,’ he said quietly.
He kissed her gently then, and the world stopped spinning, the music stopped playing. Everything was quiet and still—a moment out of time. A moment that resonated with all the love in Emmeline’s heart.
And in his too?
She didn’t dare hope that he loved her. She knew that what they were was changing, morphing, shifting every day. That he looked at her as though he’d never seen a woman before. That he held her after they’d made love until she fell asleep. That he was always holding her, still, in the soft light of morning.
She knew that he was choosing to work fewer hours in his office and instead spending time in the villa. Oftentimes he was propping up a laptop, but generally near her. By the pool, in the lounge, in their bedroom.
And that was the other thing. Since they’d come back from the farmhouse she hadn’t slept in her own room once. His room was becoming ‘their’ room.
Still... Getting close to one another was one thing. Falling in love was quite another. Emmeline wasn’t going to get her hopes up. Life had taught her that there was safety in low expectations and it was a hard lesson to shake.
The song came to an end, fading seamlessly into another.
‘Are you hungry?’ he murmured into her ear.
She looked up at him, her eyes meeting his with sensual heat. ‘Not for food,’ she said quietly.
His laugh set her pulse firing. ‘Then let’s get out of here.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I just have to see Leon—the owner. Want to come?’
‘Not particularly.’ She smiled at him and he smiled back, and the world was quiet again, spinning softly around them as if Emmeline and Pietro existed in their own little space. ‘I’ll wait in the car.’
‘Five minutes,’ he promised, holding up his hand and flexing his fingers.
She nodded, watching as he cut through the crowd effortlessly. Or did it part for him? Either way, he moved unencumbered through the hundreds of dancing guests. Once he was out of sight she turned and made her way in the opposite direction, towards the doors of the nightclub.
Her Wedding Night Surrender (Harlequin Presents) Page 12
