by Maisey Yates
Far scarier was to admit to herself that it was something she wanted. To be with him because she cared. Because she was choosing it.
It was one thing to make a distinction between her father and Renzo in theory. And to make a case for signing herself up for something completely different from what she had imagined she would do with her life. To sign on for binding herself to a man who certainly had his own agenda and his own idea about things.
Because he had lied to her. And what if she was just walking into the same kind of thing again? To living a life dictated by somebody else. That scared her. But maybe... Maybe love was always scary.
Maybe it was a risk, and it was one that came with sacrifice, with cost.
That thought made her feel panic. She had sacrificed so much. To stay with her family as long as she had, she had ignored so much of herself that she wanted to explore. She had tried so hard to be everything her mother and father had wanted her to be.
And leaving... If leaving her siblings had been painful, just thinking about what might happen if she was forced to leave these children made her insides ache.
Renzo was a rock wall. And she was just so very soft and breakable, no matter how much she might want to fling herself against him and see if she could force a crack. Force a change.
To see if she could get to what she suspected was behind it.
But how could she do that if not even he would admit that it was there? If not even he seemed to know?
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. “But I’m never going to love you the way that you seem to want me to. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be a faithful husband. I was a faithful husband to Ashley in spite of the fact that she wasn’t faithful to me. If you need a demonstration, I will even marry you here. In Italy. Where divorce will be difficult to achieve.”
All of these promises, all of these things, she recognized as things that benefited him more than they did her. At the end of the day, if there was ever any genetic testing done, a judge would find that the children didn’t belong to her. And then what?
Everything had changed so much in the past few weeks. Her life looked like an entirely different one from what she had imagined she would make for herself.
Had it been only four months since she had imagined that she would do the surrogacy and then walk away? That she would go on to go to school and visit exotic places, and do all of these things she had dreamed about without ever once thinking about the children she had given birth to again? Without ever once thinking of Renzo again. She knew now that none of that was possible.
She had trapped herself. Utterly and completely.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. She couldn’t even decide if she wanted out of the fire.
“You did hurt me,” she said, choosing to ignore what he’d said about marriage and divorce, forcing him to discuss the lie. The lie that was, by seconds, growing bigger and bigger inside her.
Because it had been the difference. The difference between captivity and a relationship. The difference between a controlling, autocratic man and a caring, invested man.
Yes, in all of those scenarios he had done the same things, but if he did them from a position of love, if he did them out of caring for her, caring for the babies, it was different from simply wanting to make his life easier.
“That wasn’t my intention. It doesn’t have to change things between us. You want me.” He moved nearer to her, his fingertips brushing over her cheekbone, and much to her eternal humiliation, a shiver of need worked its way through her.
“It’s not enough.” She jerked away from him, shrinking back toward the headboard.
“Why not?” he asked, his tone fraying.
“I want you to be with me,” she said, speaking slowly, trying to figure out a way to articulate what she was feeling, not just to him but to herself. “I want you to be with me because it makes me feel stronger. It makes me feel weaker. Because you make me want things I didn’t even know a person could want. Because you make my body hum and my heart beat faster.” She closed her eyes. “I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I knew what I needed. Then I met you and I had to question all of it. I met you and looked at your eyes and found I couldn’t move. Found that I didn’t even want to. It’s not convenient for me, Renzo. Nothing about this is. I don’t want you because it makes my life easier. I don’t want you because of everything you can give me, but because of all the little ways you have changed me. Because you hollowed me out and created a need that I didn’t know existed before. And none of it’s convenient. Not in the least. But it’s that lack of convenience that makes me so sure it’s real.”
“But why does it matter?” he asked again. “We can be happy here. You can feel all of those things. We will be together, this whole family will be together.”
“What do you feel when you touch me?”
“I want to have you.”
Her throat tightened. “And when you think of me leaving you?”
He closed the space between them then, grabbing hold of her arms and holding on to her tightly. “You won’t. I want to keep you.”
She reached up, brushing her fingertips over his cheek lightly. “And that’s the difference. You want to keep me because it makes your life more the picture that you want. Because it’s good for a man to have a wife, for his children to have a mother. But don’t you understand, that’s the exact reason my father wanted me to stay. The reason that he treated his children the way he did. Because he needed that picture. That perfect picture. Because it was about the way it made everyone look at him. About wanting to possess a perfect image.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t be someone else’s trophy. I can’t be the evidence of their perfect life lived. Not again. Not when it took so much strength to leave it the first time. Because if you’re only telling me you love me to make me happy, then it’s just more control.”
“That isn’t fair,” he ground out. “I’m not talking about denying you anything. I’m not hiding the world from you. I have promised you an education. I have promised to show you all of life. All that the world has to offer.”
“I know. I do...”
“Am I a selfish lover?”
Her cheeks heated. “No. Of course you aren’t.”
“How dare you compare me to the man who spent your life controlling you. It is different. It is different to come to an understanding based on mutual convenience, mutual attraction.”
She lay down, letting misery overtake her, drawing her knees up to her chest and turning away from Renzo. “I need space,” she said, feeling like her head was teeming with noise. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to cut through it.
“I will see you at breakfast,” he said, his tone hard.
She listened for him to leave the room. Didn’t move again until she heard the door to his room close down the hall. And then she let the first sob rack her body.
She felt raw. Deceived. She felt foolish, because she had done exactly what inexperienced women did. She had believed him when he’d said he loved her, and she had used it as a shield. That lie had made her feel impenetrable. Had made her feel as though she could do anything, be anything.
And now, she just felt like a fool.
There was also something gnawing at the back of her mind. About the comparison she had made between Renzo and her father. About her life spent in the commune, and the month she had spent here.
She had known she wanted to escape that life. She had always felt like her home was a prison. She didn’t feel that now, and she didn’t know what that said about her. She wasn’t even sure she cared.
She made a low, miserable sound and buried her face in her pillow. She didn’t want to leave him. It didn’t matter that he said he didn’t love her. She wanted to be here. Wanted to be with him.
It had nothing to do with what he felt, and everything to do with what she felt. Her love wasn’t a lie. Even his admission hadn’t shaken it.
But it still confused her. Still made her
feel like she had to do something, had to change something. To avoid becoming the sad, controlled creature she had once been.
“I don’t want to,” she said into the stillness of the room, a tear sliding down her cheek. She wanted to stay here with him. She wanted to make a life with him, and their children. She wanted him to have what he craved.
But for how long? How long would it take for her to start to feel smothered again?
What had felt like absolute freedom before felt like prison now. And regardless of her confused feelings on whether or not she wanted to leave, she felt trapped now when before she had felt liberated.
It was so easy to see the difference. Love. Love was the difference.
Knowing Renzo didn’t love her, knowing that he never could, made all the difference to her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RENZO SLEPT LIKE absolute hell. He felt every inch like the ass that he was. The things he had said to Esther. The way that he had hurt her. He had lied to her, it was true. Everything he had been through surrounding the loss of Samantha had done something to him. Changed him. If he had emerged from it with an edge of ruthlessness, no one could blame him.
Because he had been involved in a situation where he had allowed others to dictate things for him. But he resisted that now, more than anything. Resisted allowing anyone or anything to have the upper hand when he needed it at all times.
Still, Esther had not deserved his lies. If there was anyone truly good and sweet in the world, it was her. Anyone who had already been badly used by controlling men.
He slammed his cup of coffee down on the table and turned, seeing her standing at the bottom of the stairs. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said, shifting. And that was when he noticed her backpack.
She was back in her old clothes, too. Wearing a tight black tank top and the long flowing skirt, her stomach so much rounder than it had been when he’d first met her.
And he knew. Just what she was doing.
“You cannot leave,” he said, his voice like shattered glass in the still surroundings.
“I have to,” she said. “I’m not leaving town. I promise. But I can’t stay here with you. Not while I’m so confused. I don’t know what’s going to happen between us, and I don’t know... I don’t know how I feel. I can’t sit here where I’m comfortable, where I’m close to you, and think straight. And I owe myself the chance to think straight.”
He was dimly aware of crossing the space between them, of taking her in his arms, much more roughly than he might have done if he were thinking straight. “You cannot leave me.”
“I can. And I need to. Please, you have to understand.”
He took hold of her wrists, backing her against the wall and pinning her there, looking deep into her eyes because she had said once that his looking at her had changed something. He needed to change it now. Needed to immobilize her now. Needed to stop her from leaving him.
“You can’t go,” he said again, more forcefully this time.
“Renzo,” she said, “you can’t keep me here. You don’t want a prisoner. Mostly because you know that I’ve been one. You wouldn’t do that to me, not again.”
Desperation clawed him like an animal. In this moment, he was unsure if there was a limit to what he would do. Because he was about to watch his entire life, his future, walk out the door and away from him. “How can you do this to me?” he asked. “You know my past. You know what I have lost. I entrusted that secret to you. No one knows. My sister doesn’t even know. And I told you.”
“I will never take your children from you. I told you that already. I’m not going to take your chance to be a father. But...I don’t believe that the two of us living together without love is going to give them a better childhood. I just don’t. I grew up in a house that didn’t have love. Where all of the relationships were so...unhealthy. And filled with control. It isn’t going to help your children to live that way.”
“Is the real issue that you want to leave? That you want to walk away? That you don’t want to deal with this thing between us?”
“No.”
“You feel your life will be hampered by raising children. You don’t actually want the babies.” That would almost make it easier. Because he would not expose children to her indifference. Though, he could not imagine Esther expressing indifference toward a puppy, much less a baby.
“This is about you and me,” she said, pressing her hand to his face. She didn’t struggle against his hold. She simply touched him, gently, with a kind of deep emotion he could not recall anyone ever pouring out over his skin. “About what we’re supposed to be. That’s all. I can’t marry you. Not like this. I can’t sign on to a life of being unloved.”
She began to move away from him then, and he tightened his hold on her, desperation like a feral creature inside him.
“I love you,” he ground out, the words coming from deep within his soul.
Suddenly, he was overcome by a sensation that all of the blood had drained from his head. That he couldn’t breathe. That he might fall to the ground, black out, lose consciousness. And he was forced to come to the conclusion that it was because it was true.
That for the first time in his memory he loved a person standing in front of him more than the breath in his own body. That he loved her, in spite of his best efforts not to.
“I love you,” he said again, desperation making it sharp.
“Renzo,” she said, taking a step back. And he let her. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t lie to me. Don’t use my feelings against me.”
“I’m not,” he said. “This is the truth.”
“You already told me that you would tell me you loved me a thousand times if it would make me happy. I imagine you would say it a thousand more if you thought it would help you get your way. But I can’t live that way. I won’t.”
“I won’t live without you,” he said, those words making her pause.
She turned back to face him. “When you can tell me what has changed because you love me, when you can prove to me that this isn’t just another lie. When you can prove to me this isn’t just you trying to keep ownership... Then you come find me. I’m going back to the bar. I’m going back to the hostel.”
Then suddenly he was driven by the impulse to hurt. The wound as bad as if he was being injured. To make her bleed, because he damn sure was. “Run away, then. And tell yourself whatever story you need to tell yourself. About your bid for freedom. But this is just more of the same selfishness you showed when you left your family,” he spat. “If somebody doesn’t love you in exactly the way you wish them to, you don’t recognize it. And you say it isn’t real. Isn’t that the same as your father? You accuse me of being selfish, Esther, but at least I took you at face value. You will not do the same for me.”
She flinched, and he could tell that the words had hit their mark. That they had struck her in a place where her fear lived. Fear that what he said might be true.
“Maybe you’re right. Except, I never lied to you. So maybe this is the one thing you’ll never be able to get over, maybe this is my betrayal to you that you won’t be able to let go. But yours was the first lie. How will I ever know if the words that come out of your mouth are real? How? You told me you loved me without flinching the first time. And then you told me it was all a lie, and now you ask me to believe that this is true. You ask impossible things of me, Renzo. I just wanted to see the world.” She wiped at a tear that had fallen down her cheek. “I just wanted to go to a university and find myself. I didn’t want to be broken. Not again. And that’s what you’ve done. So now I have to go put myself back together again, and if you can come to me and show me, then please do. But if not... Leave me alone. I’ll keep you informed about the doctor’s appointments.”
She moved to the door, holding on to her backpack tightly. “Goodbye, Renzo.”
And then she was gone. And for the second time in his life Renzo felt like he was watching his ent
ire future slip through his fingers. For the second time, he felt powerless to do anything about it.
* * *
When Renzo went to visit his father later that day, he was full of violent rage. Ever since Esther had walked out of his home, he had been angry, growing angrier. Ever since she had left him, the fire of rage had been burning hotter and hotter in the pit of his stomach.
It had fueled him, spurred him with a kind of restless energy that he couldn’t control. And it had brought him here. His parents’ home.
He walked into his father’s office without knocking.
“Renzo,” his father said, without looking up. “What brings you here?”
“I have something to tell you,” Renzo said.
“I do hope that you’ve already married that woman. Because I would hate to hear that things had gone awry.”
“Oh, it’s gone awry. The entire thing is damn well sideways.”
“Do you need me to intervene? Is that it? God knows it’s what I did when your last youthful indiscretion—”
“My youthful indiscretion? You mean my daughter? My daughter I’m not allowed to see, because you, mother and Jillian decided that it would be better that way?”
“As if you didn’t believe the same. You were sixteen years old. You couldn’t have raised the child. Your behavior over the last several years has proved as much.”
His father said that as though it were accidental. As though it never occurred to him that Renzo had perhaps engineered his behavior around proving that very thing. But then, he supposed he couldn’t blame his father for that. Not even Renzo had fully realized that until recently. Until he’d been forced to change what he was, what he wanted, so that he could seize the opportunity to be a father this time around.
“There is nothing youthful about this indiscretion,” Renzo said. “I am not a child. I’m a man in his thirties. And beyond that, the situation is not as it appears.”
“What is going on?”
“It’s Ashley. Ashley struck up an agreement with Esther. Esther agreed to carry my children as a surrogate. Of course, I was not consulted about any of this. And then when Ashley decided that the pregnancy was not going to preserve our marriage, she contacted Esther and asked that Esther have the pregnancy terminated. She didn’t want to do that. Instead, she came to me.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “I lost one child, and I was bound and determined to hold on to this one. To these two,” he amended, an arrow hitting him in the heart as he thought of his twins. “I was also determined to do as you said. To prevent any other scandal. Anything that might come back and hurt them. I was not going to allow my brother-in-law to get control of the company, not when it’s the rightful inheritance of my children. As much as you might have hoped you were appealing to my selfishness, believe me when I say you were simply appealing to my desire to give my children everything they deserve this time around.”
