Her eyes flew wide, her disbelief obvious in the strain of her features.
“For the year of our marriage I was celibate and tortured by needs for you. If you have spent even a single day of your life feeling undesirable because of my struggle to accept how much I wanted you then I unreservedly apologise. You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful, sensual woman I have ever known.”
A sob was strangled in her throat. She stared across his office, shaking her head a little.
“It’s too late, Max. You can’t undo the damage caused by our marriage.”
“I disagree.” He found the fabric of her shirt and lifted it, so his fingers trailed over her stomach, lifting towards the lace of her bra. “I believe I can demonstrate to you on a daily basis just how desirable you are.”
Her harsh intake of breath burst through the room. His fingers rolled over one of her nipples and she made a soft keening noise, wishing she were strong enough to push him away, but rational thought had deserted her completely.
“It’s too late,” she said again, but tilting her head back, so his mouth brushed the column of her throat, his tongue flicking the pulse point there and a noise that was barely human hummed between them.
“Didn’t London show you how much I have always wanted you?”
And then he claimed her lips with his, obviating the need for a response, and also removing her ability to provide one, his kiss rocking her to the core of her being, the baby between them binding them for all time whether she agreed to marry him or not.
Chapter Five
HE NEEDED TO STOP this. Making love to Alessia was easy – making her forget what they were arguing about by flooding her body with desire was satisfying and pleasurable but it didn’t achieve his goal. He couldn’t keep her chained to a bed and kiss her whenever she realised that perhaps she didn’t want to be married to him after all.
No, he needed to convince her that this could work. He had to show her that a marriage based on respect and desire could make them both happy – particularly when there was a child to consider.
He lifted his head, regret bursting through him as he looked down at her pleasure-ravaged face, eyes that were groggy from the intensity of her feelings, lips that were swollen from the strength of his kiss.
“Christo,” he shook his head, stepping back, regarding her fully. Her shirt had lifted, revealing her bare, gently-rounded belly and his gut kicked in response to that, pleasure at the life growing inside of her swelling his chest. “Do you doubt how much I want you?”
She stared at him, as if not comprehending.
“Do you really doubt we can make this marriage work?”
Her eyes were round, her cheeks flushed. “I – I need to think.”
The temptation to rail against that filled him, but instead, he nodded curtly. “Fine. Then we’ll think.”
“I need to think,” she corrected.
“You have doubts. Let me answer them.”
Her eyes were wary. Something fired in his gut. Confusion was rife. Nothing with Alessia had ever made sense. Not the way he’d found himself wanting her, nor the way he’d refused to indulge that desire. But knowing she was pregnant with his baby was a game changer. It was no longer about her and him, but about becoming parents to this child – he had to get her to see that. He’d do whatever it took but he wasn’t letting his baby grow up without him.
“I don’t know if you can.” She turned away from him, her hands moving to tuck her shirt in, so that when she sat on the edge of his desk, she was dressed once more. But her lips were still swollen and her eyes fevered, so that he couldn’t look at her without an awareness of what they’d been doing a moment ago.
“Try me.” He crossed his arms over his chest, exuding arrogant confidence even when he knew he was entering into the most important negotiation of his life.
“Well…what exactly would our marriage look like?”
He arched a brow, silently encouraging her to continue.
“Where would we live, for example?”
“Where would you want to live?”
“My life is in Ondechiara. My work, dad…”
“So I’ll move to Ondechiara.” He shrugged, the details of little interest to him.
“That doesn’t work either,” she pointed out with a shake of her head, so her blonde hair shifted around her face. “Your whole life is in Rome. You work long hours, you can’t just pick up and leave.”
“I can commute.”
“To Rome? From Ondechiara?”
He lifted his broad shoulders. “It’s a forty minute flight.”
She rolled her bright blue eyes. “Great. So I’ll have the destruction of the earth on my conscience courtesy of your private jet’s pollution.” She gnawed at her lip, her eyes awash with doubts. “It makes more sense for me to move to Rome,” she said hesitantly, and something like relief spread through him, relaxing him, because she was speaking as though she’d already decided how they were to proceed. “If I agree to this,” she added quickly.
“What about your life?” He prompted quietly. “Your work?”
“I guess I’ll take some time off. I’ll want to anyway, to be with her,” Alessia’s hand curved over her belly and that same flame of pride exploded inside of Max.
There was curiosity as well. He’d heard about Alessia through his brothers – little pieces of meaningless information from time to time. But there were still so many gaps – things he’d wondered about over the years.
“Is it everything you’d hoped it would be?”
She stared at him with obvious confusion.
“Being a doctor.”
“Oh.” Her smile lifted a little. “Yeah.” She reached to her side and absentmindedly picked up one of his pens, running her fingers over the cool metallic edges. “There are good days and bad days but most of the time, I feel like I’ve been given this incredible superpower.” Her smile almost knocked him sideways.
“I’m glad.” His eyes roamed her face thoughtfully. “That’s all the more reason we should stay in Ondechiara.”
“Max,” she sighed heavily. “I don’t know if I’m going to agree to marry you. And even if we did get married, I find it almost impossible to believe we could make it work long enough for this conversation to ever matter. But one thing I do know for sure – my replacement’s already been hired on a contract. I was going to finish up in a couple of weeks anyway. So I could, theoretically, come to Rome at the end of the month without inconveniencing anyone.”
He nodded slowly. “Fine. And until then, we’ll be in Ondechiara.”
“No,” she spoke quietly but with a firm insistence. “Until then, I’ll be in Ondechiara and you’ll be here, each of us working out what we really want.”
Mentally he refuted that.
“I’m not kidding, Max. You literally just found out about this baby. Your first instinct is to go all old-fashioned and gallant and offer to marry me but you might change your mind in a week’s time and God knows I need to think this through some more. I walked into our first wedding completely blind to the enormity of what I was doing. I sure as heck didn’t see all the angles. I’m not going to make that mistake this time.”
“Then let me show you the angles,” he said quietly, unable to feel anything but respect for the maturity of her response. He took a step towards her, but paused when she bristled, her spine straightening, her eyes warning him not to overcrowd her.
“You admit you treated me like a child the first time around?”
He dipped his head in a silent gesture of concession.
“How can you not see you’re doing the same thing now?”
“In what way?”
“Acting like marrying you is my only option! I can do this on my own, Max. I don’t need you.”
A muscle jerked at his temple, drawing her gaze, fascinating her, robbing her of breath. “This we have already discussed. Our daughter deserves us to stop thinking in such binary terms. There is no longer a
‘you’ nor a ‘me’. We are to be parents.”
She’d had months to adapt to that idea but hearing it from his lips filled her with a bubbling feeling of excitement. His heavy sigh reached right inside of her. “I’m not treating you like a child,” He spread his arms wide and stepped closer, ignoring her reflexive flinch. “I’m respecting your maturity and judgement, believing you can see that our daughter deserves for us to try again.”
Tears threatened to form a film in her eyes. She blinked and angled her face away, focussing on a piece of stunning sculpture across the room. “I know that.” Her concession filled the room with a pounding sense of anticipation, like the marching of a drum she couldn’t stop. “But you’re saying this like it’s easy and it’s not. Marrying you is the last thing I want.” She turned to face him, hoping the sincerity of her words showed in her eyes.
“It was something you once wanted very badly.”
“Ancient history.” She straightened, moving away from him once more. “And you’re all kinds of chauvinistic to remind me of that now.”
“Chauvinistic?” he lifted a thick, dark brow, his eyes lightly mocking.
She jerked her head in agreement. “I was a stupid kid. I know better now. I remember what our marriage was like and the idea of walking back into that…”
She shuddered involuntarily.
“This would be different.”
“How can I believe that?”
He came to stand behind her, his hands brushing her shoulders lightly. “Because we’ve already become so much more to one another.”
Her skin lifted in goose bumps where he touched, her pulse rushing through her. “Sex doesn’t change anything.”
“Liar.” His laugh sent tingles down her spine.
She spun around, but wished she hadn’t the second her soft curves collided with his muscular firmness. “Is that the ‘angle’ you want me to see? That we’ll have sex?”
“That seemed to be a problem with our first marriage for you.”
“Don’t make light of it,” she snapped, but the words were husky, filled with desire.
“I’m not. I am simply pointing out that this is a problem we can correct.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Then make me understand.” His words were warm, wrapping around her, so that it was difficult to think straight. “I’m asking you to marry me, and telling you I will change. Tell me what you need.”
She couldn’t speak. Her mind was careening into overdrive.
“I want to make this work. I want our child to be a part of a family.”
Her heart turned over in her breast.
But emotional scar tissue was thick there, a pain that had developed over the year of their marriage and had never been possible to shift.
“You want that too?”
She closed her eyes, nodding, but it was an admission that cost her dearly.
“But marrying you…” she shook her head a little, with disbelief. “I just need…”
“What do you need?” He murmured, the words wrapping around her.
“I need you to understand how much I don’t want that.” She swallowed hard. “Our marriage was…every day was…I hated it. I came to hate you. Our divorce was devastating for me.” She looked away from him, so she didn’t register the tightening of his features, the bleakness in his eyes. “The idea of picking up the threads of that life, living in the house in which I was so miserable, waking up beside you, it fills me with an actual sense of panic.”
Max’s face was pale beneath his tan. “I knew you were unhappy, but never to this extent.” He muttered the words, brushing her cheeks with his hands, holding her face still. “How can I make you understand how different this will be?”
“You can’t.” Her smile was brittle. “Our divorce broke me and when I put myself back together, I found that I was completely different. I don’t trust anyone easily, and I will never trust you. Perhaps that’s a blessing in all of this.”
His expression was brooding as he surveyed Villa Fortune. This stunning ancient villa in the Tuscan countryside had belonged to his grandparents, and had been his grandfather’s pride and joy. Now, yaya lived here, and all of the grandchildren came weekly to eat dinner on the terrace beneath the vines, to talk and surround her with love and noise.
But Max was unusually quiet, his expression sombre, his humour poor. It had been a week since he’d seen Alessia and a week had been too long, given him far too much time in his own head.
He vacillated between a self-directed fury at what he’d let their marriage become, and a sense of despair at how long she was taking to decide what she wanted, so that the ruthless tycoon he had earned a reputation for being wanted to pressure her into the marriage using whatever means he could. There were plenty of levers he could pull – her father’s wishes, her father’s health, her father’s finances. Any of these would be sufficient to pressure Alessia into acquiescence, but he wouldn’t do that. Not unless it became absolutely necessary.
Because blackmailing her into marriage was unethical and wrong, and it would have been the final nail in the coffin for a good marriage – and he had wanted their marriage to work. Not in a ‘love and happily ever after’ kind of way – that had never been a part of his wish list and he couldn’t see that changing any time soon – but a happy, respectful partnership that would surround their daughter with safety and security, so she would know she had two parents who adored her so much they chose to make a life together, just for her.
Why couldn’t Alessia see what he could offer her?
Because you hurt her. Badly.
Ironic that he’d spent the years since their divorce smarting over her infidelity, believing the worst of her, when all along he’d been the one who’d carved up their marriage – and her confidence – in the process.
“How’s it going?”
He lifted his gaze towards his cousin Nico, a tight smile on his face.
“Fine.”
“You’re not having coffee?”
“Non.” He lifted his beer bottle a little higher, then returned his gaze to the view. The sky was clear, the stars shimmering against its inky black colour and his gaze instinctively pulled towards the coastline where, if he travelled far enough, he’d arrive in Ondechiara.
“You’re okay?”
He compressed his lips, his cousin’s attention kindly-meant but completely unwelcome. “Why do you ask?”
“You’ve been quiet.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “How’s married life?” He was glad for the change of subject, particularly when Nico picked up the threads and ran with it, enthusing about his wife Maddie, how perfect she was for him, how much he loved every little detail about her. It was enough to make even Max smile, but his heart remained heavy.
He’d always presumed his desire to stay single came down to their parents – two brothers and their wives who’d chosen to take a payment and hand parental control over to yaya and Gianfelice, rather than being a part of their children’s lives. Was it any wonder the myth of happy families was one to which Max didn’t ascribe?
And yet Fiero had fallen hard for Elodie and now Nico for Maddie, and neither of those men had ever seemed at all likely to settle down and fall in ‘love’.
So perhaps his aversion to marriage wasn’t a strike against his parents so much as simply a question of biology. Maybe Alessia wasn’t the only one who struggled with trust? After all, falling in ‘love’ and promising to love someone for the rest of your life seemed like an incredible gamble.
A sensible marriage of convenience was far safer, much wiser. Max dealt in probabilities and risk analyses and where a marriage based on something as whimsical as love was fraught with the possibility of disaster, a marriage based on clear-cut rules just made sense.
Trust or not, he could get this across the line. He just had to return to his basic business principles. There would be a way to gently win Alessia over, he just had to find it.
“You’ve thought of almost everything.” She blinked at him, her eyes huge in her face, her lips parted on a sigh, every inch of her covered in the over-sized flannelette pyjamas she wore. Hardly designed to tempt and seduce and yet he found he could think of little else than her body beneath them.
He focussed instead on the glass of water she’d poured him when he’d arrived, watching the light bubbles fizz against the glass’s sides.
“I appreciate your hesitation to trust me,” he growled the words. “I think it is something we have in common, in fact.”
Her eyes startled to his.
“I find the idea of a traditional marriage to be – strange. So much emotion and uncertainty,” he shook his head. “Ours will be a true partnership.”
“As I can see from this impressive legal document.” She spoke seriously enough but he couldn’t shake the feeling Alessia was laughing at him.
“I wanted to show you that we could have a contract which serves us both. It covers where we’ll live, what our recourse is if we’re not happy there, what your marital trust fund will be, the hours I’ll expect to spend at home –,”
“As I said, you’ve thought of everything.” A little line formed between her brows as she frowned, her eyes knitting closer together.
“Not everything,” he shrugged confidently then reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “Naturally there are things I cannot predict, things that will change without our knowledge, but this is a good start. I want you to feel confident that this is safe and right.”
She shook her head a little, but with uncertainty. It wasn’t a ‘no’. “Why are you fighting so hard for this?” Her blue eyes pinned him to the spot.
“Doesn’t our child deserve that?”
She pursed her lips. “There are lots of way to make a child happy. Why this?”
He pushed back in his chair, regarding her through eyes that gave nothing away. Apparently unsatisfied, she kept digging.
“Because of what your parents did?”
He bristled, his past not something he generally discussed. “Because of what I never had,” he admitted stiffly. “And because of what you lost.” The words were gravelled, gentle, but she startled, her expression shifting painfully. Invoking her mother was important – she needed to see that the family she’d grown up in and lost was something their daughter deserved. He squeezed her hand. “We can give this baby something so special, Alessia. Marry me.”
Loving the Enemy Page 5
