Maddie frowned and stooped to retrieve the picture that had fallen out along with everything else. She held it up to the light.
Staring back at her was a fair-haired woman with full lips and bright blue laughing eyes. There was something knowing about those eyes. And an undeniable sensuality. The woman was looking down at whoever was taking the picture and her lips were parted...teasing, tempting.
Maddie shivered—because now she knew. She walked over to Leo, who had sat up, and showed him the picture.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked lightly.
Leo stilled. He reached for the photo without bothering to look at it and stuck it on the bedside table.
She’d hoped he would say it was no one of any importance, but a steely resolve had washed over his features when he turned back to her.
‘That is my ex-wife.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘YOUR EX-WIFE,’ MADDIE said woodenly, folding her arms, colour draining from her face faster than water going down a drain. ‘You were married. And you didn’t think that it was important enough to tell me?’
Suddenly restless, Leo vaulted upright, gloriously and unashamedly naked. He grabbed the nearest item of clothing, which happened to be his boxers, and stepped into them.
‘How is it something that impacts on us?’ His voice was cool and toneless, and that said more than words alone could ever say.
That woman in the picture was his wife, who had meant so much to him that he couldn’t even let her name pass his lips. This was the mysterious reason why he wasn’t interested in love. Because he’d been there before. He’d given his heart to someone else and he no longer possessed one to give to anyone who followed.
All Maddie’s dreams and hopes about time working its magic and building the sort of love in him for her that she felt for him had been castles in the sand, now washed away by grim reality.
‘“How is it something that impacts on us?”’
Maddie stared at him with incredulity and Leo had the grace to flush.
‘It’s in the past.’
‘But don’t you think it’s a past you should have told me about? I mean, you know all about mine...’
‘You chose to tell me,’ Leo pointed out, with the sort of remorseless logic that set her teeth on edge. Caught on the back foot, Leo always fell back on his automatic instinct to defend himself.
‘I chose to share my past with you.’
‘The implication being that I should return the favour?’
‘Most normal people would.’
‘Haven’t you deduced by now that I don’t play by the same rules?’
Yes, Maddie thought miserably, yes, she had. She had just opted to ignore it.
She flung on her dressing gown and stared down at her bare feet, at the pale pink of the polish she had put on her toenails the evening before.
‘Where is she now?’ she asked stiffly, wondering if she should be on the lookout for the sexy blonde he had loved popping out from the nearest wardrobe or lurking behind the bushes wearing nothing but that sexy, sexy smile.
‘Things didn’t work out.’
‘“Things didn’t work out”? But you still keep a picture of her in your wallet?’
What sort of response was that? What did things didn’t work out even mean? Obviously whatever had happened he had been bitterly hurt and fatally scarred.
‘Where are you going with this, Maddie? That part of my past has nothing to do with us. You have to trust me.’
Maddie swallowed back her hurt. She had agreed to marry this man and she loved him. He had his past, just as she had hers, and marrying him would mean living with that and dealing with it, but she couldn’t live without him.
She knew what would happen if she got into a flaming row with him over this. He would vanish. To his office or out in the Jeep to a beach, or into the garden... Anywhere just as long as she wasn’t there, because he wasn’t going to deal with her hysterics.
Dealing with her hysterics and her jealousy wasn’t part of their business transaction.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she said, turning away.
Leo nodded and said nothing. What was there to say? He had closed the door on that slice of his past and he wasn’t going to re-open it. What would be the good in that? Maddie would have to trust him.
But he had glimpsed that shattered expression on her face as she had turned away and something inside him had twisted painfully.
He didn’t wait for her to emerge. Instead he flung on some clothes, headed down to the pool and washed away his restlessness by swimming lap after lap after lap until every muscle in his body was aching.
When he returned to the villa it was to find her in the kitchen, seemingly back to normal.
‘Where were you?’ she asked from where she was standing by the stove, putting on a saucepan with some butter, ready for the eggs that stood on the counter nearby.
It must have taken so much for her to act as though nothing had happened, but she managed it.
She also managed to smile at him.
‘I’m making us some of those eggs we bought at the market this morning.’
Leo looked at her, trying to gauge her mood and feeling a little disconcerted that there was nothing to gauge. If she’d been hurt by his silence then she’d recovered fast. He frowned, not knowing how that speedy recovery made him feel.
‘Okay. Great. I was in the pool.’
He hovered, for once indecisive. Should he revive the subject of Claire? He frowned, because it wasn’t like him to backtrack on any decision once that decision had been made—and he’d made the decision not to start babbling on about his past, on which the door had been shut.
‘It looks lovely out there,’ Maddie said gaily, a broad smile pinned to her face.
She sounded like a Stepford Wife. All that was missing was the gingham apron.
‘Anyway, breakfast will be ready in about five minutes. Does that give you enough time to change?’
Leo grunted and disappeared, duly reappearing in under five minutes in a pair of faded blue Bermuda shorts and a white tee shirt, barefoot as always. He couldn’t see the point of wearing shoes in the villa when the floor was so warm.
He gritted his teeth and wondered how it was that he was about to bring up a subject he had only minutes before sworn to avoid.
‘About Claire...’
* * *
Maddie looked at him seriously. Really? He wanted to talk about his ex? Did he think that she actually wanted to hear about how much he had given himself to a relationship that hadn’t worked out? Did she need an explanation as to why he could never give again?
No way. That would not only be a dagger to her heart, but a dagger twisting and swivelling and causing maximum damage. Thanks, but no thanks.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘I don’t want to talk about her. Like you said, that’s your past and this is the present. We both know why we’re going into this...er...arrangement. We both know that it’s not the sort of marriage that most people dream about. But it’s the right thing for us to do. I know that. Like I said, I’ve seen for myself what a good dad you would make, and we might not be a traditional couple, with all the traditional hopes and dreams, but we get along all right and that’s the main thing.’
Said out loud, it sounded like a poor excuse for a union. But then she thought of her life without Leo, and the horror that image conjured up reaffirmed why she was doing what she was. He would never love her. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he just didn’t have it in him. But she would always love him.
She was surprised to see that Leo didn’t look relieved and elated that they were on the same page. The look on his face was more...dissatisfaction.
He swept aside her response. ‘We have something else going for us.�
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‘What’s that?’
‘This.’
He pulled her towards him and kissed her. Kissed her until she was drugged with wanting him and on fire to have him touch her the way only he could.
When he did this—kissed her and held her and let his body do the talking—she forgot everything. Forgot the fact that she was in love with a man who’d given his heart away to someone else. Forgot that she felt like a hypocrite, hiding her aching heart under a cheery smile.
She grunted with pleasure as he pushed down her shorts so that he could caress her swollen belly.
Her pregnancy fascinated him, and his fascination thrilled her. He slid his fingers lower, taking his time to caress her intimately with slow, rhythmic movements that left her panting with pleasure.
He whispered in her ear what he wanted to do to her, where he wanted to touch and feel and taste, until Maddie was giddy with desire. Then, still taking his time, he sat her on the edge of the table and she supported herself, hands stretched out behind her, palms flat on the smooth, polished wood.
He tugged off the shorts, taking her knickers at the same time, and pushed up her tee shirt so that he could see her breasts. Then he undid his zipper and dropped his shorts to the ground.
Her eyes were closed and she sighed and moaned softly as he slid into her, angling her body so that he could take her in a few thrusts. Quick, hot sex that swept away everything in its path.
‘I can’t get enough of you...’ he growled, when they were both sated and normal business had resumed—although the eggs were burned and had had to be chucked.
Enough of the sex, Maddie completed in her head. But she couldn’t get enough of that either. And that, if she was going through the pros checklist, counted for a lot.
‘Well, you’ll have to make do for the moment,’ she told him lightly. ‘We’ve made plans for today. I’m looking forward to seeing that cove you were telling me about.’
Another bright smile. Her jaw was beginning to ache from the effort of those bright smiles.
Leo kissed the tip of her nose.
‘And then back to Dublin,’ Maddie said, tidying up, thinking of the house she’d left behind, which she knew was now in great order because Leo had been showing her daily updates of the work that was being done. Only the attic needed a bit of sprucing up.
‘But not like before,’ Leo reminded her. ‘This time back to Dublin as a couple.’
Maddie choked down a painful lump. ‘Yes,’ she mumbled, looking away, ‘as a couple...’
* * *
It was another two and a half weeks before Maddie finally made it up to the attic—the final thing on her to-do list. With Leo’s support, everything that had seemed difficult and daunting had become manageable. He had helped in ways that he had said were small and incidental, but when she examined them later she saw they were huge and fundamental.
The house was near completion and new staff had been hired at the store and renovations had begun. The cobwebby elegance of a past era was being replaced by a modernist vision, but it was going to stay as the store it was meant to be.
The attic was her final as yet unexplored territory, which was why now, at a little after six in the evening, with Leo due to come over in an hour, Maddie was sitting on the ground surrounded by...stuff.
Boxes of old bills, receipts, random scraps of paper with names on them, which she deciphered as being the names of horses or dogs or whatever it was her grandfather had been wont to bet on. And then there were the pictures. These Maddie took her time with, looking at them one by one. Pictures of her grandmother, her mother—photos dating back decades.
She was barely aware of Leo, padding up the winding narrow staircase that led off from one of the top bedrooms to the enormous attic.
‘You can help,’ she announced, pausing to look at him and then struggling to tear her eyes away, as always happened.
He’d come straight from work. He’d already located premises for his offices, and magically everything had been completed with supersonic speed. His faith in the power of money had not been misplaced.
‘Okay. I’ll arrange for a clearance company. They can come in and remove the entire lot. I’ve never been in such an unmitigated disaster zone in my entire life.’
‘I’ve got some photos here, Leo.’ She shuffled over to where he had taken up residence on the floor and sat next to him, going through the pictures, marvelling at the past unfolding in front of her. Her mother had been quite remarkable-looking—as had her grandparents.
‘He went bad after your grandmother died,’ Leo said neutrally.
‘Your grandfather told you that?’
‘There was bad blood between them before that, with the acquisition of the store premises, but I believe there was some scattered correspondence between them for a while after. When your grandmother died the old man went down a different road.’
‘You’ve not mentioned any of that before,’ Maddie murmured absently, sifting through the photos and at the bottom finding a slender stack of envelopes. Maybe five.
Her mother’s handwriting was on them, and Leo reached out to take them from her.
‘Maddie...’
But she was already opening the first letter and Leo’s jaw clenched as he read it over her shoulder—read the pleading note from Lizzie Gallo to her unforgiving father, and knew that the other letters would be along the same lines.
‘Leo...’ Maddie whispered, turning to look at him. ‘I thought...’
‘You did,’ Leo said gravely.
He stroked her hair away from her face, noted the way her eyes had glazed over, the quiver of her mouth. If the old bastard had been around he wouldn’t have seen the light of another day.
‘You knew?’
He nodded on a sigh. ‘Yes,’ he confessed. ‘There were words between Tommaso and my grandfather a long time ago. Probably shortly after your mother had decamped to Australia. Who knows whether she did that to get away from the toxic atmosphere in the house? Tommaso never recovered from Susan’s death. My grandfather got in touch about buying the store. He got a letter back. I won’t bother to tell you what it said. I imagine you can guess the gist.’
‘That he would never sell the store—just like he would never forgive my mother, even though she’d begged for forgiveness. She had it so hard in Australia. Worked her fingers to the bone to earn money for both of us. And he refused to give her anything.’
‘He was a bastard.’
‘You never said...’
‘You had your dreams and I wasn’t going to shatter them,’ Leo told her.
‘I don’t want the store,’ Maddie whispered. ‘It was never a legacy of love.’
‘You don’t know that.’ Leo sighed. ‘Things change when you’re facing the grim reaper. Who knows what was going through the old man’s head when he made that will?’
‘You think?’
‘I do think. Your mother was stubborn, and so was he. He couldn’t bring himself to forgive, but he must have lived a life of regret—hence the gambling and the alcohol.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I couldn’t hurt you, Maddie.’ He drew his breath in. ‘I could never hurt you,’ he continued in a roughened undertone.
He shifted so that he was looking directly at her. The lighting in the attic was dim—just shafts of watery sunshine filtering through the glass of the four Velux windows on the slanting roof.
‘I need to tell you about my ex-wife. About Claire.’
‘Please don’t, Leo. I... I... No, please don’t. I understand how you feel. Things didn’t work out and it hurt you so much that you still can’t bear to talk about it. You loved and you lost and, lest you forget, you keep her photo in your wallet. I get it. I just don’t want the details.’ She smiled weakly. ‘There’s such a thing as too much information.’
‘Silly fool,’ Leo said tenderly. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘What else? No one hangs on to a photo of someone they couldn’t give a hoot about.’
‘I keep that photo as a reminder of the biggest mistake I ever made,’ he said heavily, and Maddie’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘I was young and cocky and I fell for an older woman.’ He grinned crookedly. ‘I was a cliché, in other words. Except I was rich, so I could get the older woman. But she turned out to be a fortune-hunter who had spotted in me the perfect opportunity to feather her nest. And, rich young buck that I was, I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I married her and it lasted about two seconds. It was the most expensive mistake I ever made. She took the money and vanished as a wealthy divorcee, and after that...’
‘You threw away the key to your heart?’
Maddie wanted to keep grounded, but inside she was taking flight, heady with the realisation that her assumptions had been unfounded.
‘I threw away the key to my heart,’ Leo concurred. ‘And I thought that it was for the best. No love and no pretending that I was capable of it. I never banked on you coming along.’
‘Say that again?’ Maddie held her breath and tried hard to look puzzled and yet empathetic when inside her heart was racing and her mouth was dry.
‘I never banked on you coming along. I never banked on falling in love. Really in love. In love so that I can’t think of life without you in it, Maddie. In love so that if anyone tries to hurt you, I will kill them.’
‘Leo...’ Slowly, she smiled, heady and deliriously happy. ‘You’re saying all the right things.’
She reached out and ran a dusty finger across his cheek.
‘I love you so much. I knew that you wanted a pragmatic relationship, and I knew that was the last thing I wanted, but I also knew that I would rather have that with you than have anything else with anybody else. I never thought I would fall in love with you—not after everything I’d been through—but I did. Bit by bit I came to see you for the wonderful man you are. Thoughtful, kind, considerate, funny...’
The Italian's One-Night Consequence Page 15
