Loving the Enemy

by Connelly, Clare

  “And I didn’t realise you were using me either. Using me to help dad, in our first marriage. And using me to…”

  He moved closer – dangerously close – and her heart lurched sideways. “What? Prop up my ego? Do you think my manhood is so fragile I would need your adoration to secure it?”

  She felt about an inch tall. She stared at him, bewildered and hurt.

  “I’ve seen the way women look at you. I know your ego is plenty big enough without me.” She grabbed another handful of clothes just for something to do, pushing them into the already overfull bag and lifting it onto her arm.

  He ground his teeth together, not responding.

  “I just don’t understand why you did this.”

  “This marriage? Yes, you do. Our baby –,”

  “Oh, I get that,” she interrupted impatiently. “You were very rational and clear about why our marriage would be good for this child. But then we got married and everything changed. It wasn’t enough for me to be your wife; you had to possess me in every way. You had to own me, right down to the centre of my soul.”

  He stared at her, clearly not understanding.

  “We could have been married and lived together as two acquaintances, but that wasn’t enough for you. You couldn’t leave me alone, you couldn’t give me space. Your ego demanded that I submit to you fully –,”

  “Submit?” His voice showed disgust. “What kind of Victorian melodrama are you writing here?”

  She glared at him without interrupting. “Sharing a bedroom, sharing your bed, sleeping with you – you took over everything –,”

  “No,” he lifted his hand, slicing it through the air with fierce determination. “I left everything in your hands. Believe me, Alessia, if I had taken over everything as I sorely wanted to do you would not have had a night in this bed since returning to Rome.”

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  “I have subjugated my own desires at almost every turn out of respect for your needs so do not stand there and say I have made you submit to me.”

  She could see that she’d hurt him. If she were less angry, she would apologise for that but emotions fired inside of her and instead of being regretful she felt a flash of gladness. It was right that she’d hurt him after how he’d made her feel.

  “This whole marriage was an exercise in submission,” she snapped. “I don’t mean sexually. I mean in every way, you have infiltrated my life. Instead of us keeping to our own corners and living as two people who will have a child in common, you have wanted me to give all of myself to you. Why?”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “Oh, come on, Max. What the hell has been happening here?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “It was never enough for you that I agree to be your wife. You want me to treat you as I did before. You want me to worship you and adore you. You want me to love you, right?”

  His temple throbbed, but he didn’t deny it.

  “You are such a selfish bastard. That’s what I mean by my total submission, not sexually, but all of me. You want me to love you and yet you have no intention of ever loving me back, do you?”

  He looked at her as though she’d started speaking a foreign language.

  “I can’t believe I fell for this.” She shook her head angrily and moved towards the door, trying to think of anything else she might have forgotten. But as she approached the door, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror and remembered the necklace. Awkwardly, because of the over-sized, over-filled bag she was holding, she reached up and unclasped the stunning jewel.

  “You have more money than sense. To pay Sam a million dollars, to give me what you have, without realising that it means nothing to me…”

  She placed the necklace on the foot of her bed then returned to the door.

  “Don’t go,” he said with a quick movement, coming to stand behind her. But she shook her head urgently.

  “I can’t stay here. I can’t believe I trusted you again. I can’t believe any of this. After our first marriage, why didn’t I learn my lesson?”

  “This isn’t what you think.”

  “You know what the worst part of all is?” She ignored his interruption. “You’re so good at this. It worked. I fell right back in love with you, like a stupid little fool. I thought I was different to the girl you first married but apparently old habits die really hard.”

  His eyes showed surprise but he regrouped quickly.

  “If you love me, then stay.”

  She squared her shoulders, tilting her chin defiantly. “With a man who doesn’t love me? Who doesn’t love anyone or anything except his ability to exercise power to get his way? No. Not in a million years and not for ten million euros.” She moved to the stairs, grabbing the railing. “I fell in love with you, Max, but God knows you don’t deserve it.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “YOU DON’T LOVE ME.”

  It wasn’t a question yet she was staring at him, awaiting confirmation. He couldn’t give it. He had no idea what to say. Alessia had been like a sister to him for a long time; she was a part of his family. He loved her father, Carlo, a hell of a lot more than he did his own father.

  None of that explained what he was feeling now.

  She shook her head from side to side, anguish in her features. “You’re so messed up, Max, and you don’t even realise it.”

  Something punched him hard in the gut – she was right, and she was wrong. “I know.” How could he not know? His life had been a series of decisions that served to highlight that.

  “Just say it.”

  He didn’t immediately understand.

  “Say you don’t love me.” She swallowed hard. “Set me free. Please.”

  God. The ‘please’ was the hardest thing he’d ever had to hear.

  Set me free.

  He was hurting her – the exact opposite of what he’d intended.

  “I want this marriage to work.”

  “It can’t.” She was working her teeth into her lip so hard that he thought she might draw blood. Her eyes were huge and hollow in her face. “It can’t work. I fell in love with you and living here now would be a special kind of torment. Even you must be able to see that.”

  She’d fallen in love with him. He should feel something about that, shouldn’t he? Instead of this pervasive numbness? Instead of an ache spreading through him, and a sense of failure? This had never been about love.

  But his head was screaming at him, his body exploding with pain and – strangely – joy.

  “I’ll stay in Rome.”

  She’d already moved on, as though it were a fait accompli. What could he say to fix this?

  “I’m sorry about Sam.”

  She stopped chewing her lip, her eyes widening.

  It was hopeful.

  “I’m glad I got him out of your life, but I should have told you much sooner. I intended to, but you already seemed to feel that you were somehow deficient.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So it was better to let me think he’d just woken up and decided he didn’t want me any longer? You thought that would make me feel better about myself?”

  He hadn’t seen it that way.

  “Don’t pretend any of this was for me.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You blackmailed him to get out of my life – and it cost you a fortune. I’m furious that you did it, furious that he took the money, but at least I know why now. You could have told me at any point in the last six weeks but you didn’t.” Her features were pinched, her skin pale. “You told me – you swore to me – that you would tell me only the truth. Do you remember that?”

  He did. Of course he did.

  “I know.”

  “And yet you’ve been lying to me –,”

  “I know. Christo, Alessia, about this, yes, I have lied, but only this, and only for a time. It has always been my intention to tell you the truth.”

  “The problem is, I find that almost impossible t
o believe.” She straightened her spine and he had that trickling sense of fear running through him once more – she was disappearing from him before his eyes, becoming someone he barely recognised, withdrawing and resisting effortlessly.

  “You – my father – Sam. I am so sick of men. So sick of men thinking they know better than I do. You think I can’t make my own decisions and look after myself? You’re wrong.”

  He ground his teeth together, denials flying through his mind. She was strong; he knew that. But every single one of his actions had made it seem as though he felt the opposite. So what did that mean?

  She turned away from him, so he wanted to grab her wrist and spin her back to face him; he needed to see her face. “I’m going to a hotel,” she said quietly. “I need to think.”

  “Stay here,” he growled. “I’ll go to a hotel if you must be alone.”

  She shook her head. “This house is so full of memories now – not good ones. I need to get out of here.”

  He could see everything unravelling. More than his marriage, everything he held dear in this world. He stared at her, desperately trying to grab hold of the threads of his life and pull them back together, but they stayed just out of his reach.

  Massimo couldn’t let her leave.

  “No.”

  She blinked, her eyes hypnotic and beautiful, and swirling with obvious confusion.

  “Did you just say ‘no’?”

  He compressed his lips, cursing inwardly. “This doesn’t change anything.”

  * * *

  She felt as though the bottom was falling out of her world. “I beg your pardon, it changes everything.”

  “Your engagement was over before London. Our reason for marrying has nothing to do with Sam, nothing to do with anyone except us.”

  “How can you be so fanciful?” she reached behind her for the wall, needing a form of support. “You broke up my engagement. London would never have happened if you hadn’t done that. I would never have become pregnant, and we’d never have needed to get back in this situation.”

  “You didn’t need to get back in this situation,” he said, with a softness that was all the more resounding for how it reached inside her heart. His eyes held hers, making it impossible to look away. “You didn’t need to marry me. You chose this – you wanted this.”

  She opened her mouth to deny it, knowing how important it was to defend herself. He was right, though. She knew that, but she wouldn’t admit it. “You made it impossible for me to do anything but fall in with your plans. Yet again.”

  His eyes narrowed cynically. She felt at a disadvantage even when she’d said something that should have scored points.

  He crossed his arms over his chest, regarding her for several long, silent seconds. “I don’t know if you’re lying to yourself or just to me, but you are lying, Alessia.”

  She snorted inelegantly.

  “You agreed to marry me because you were still in love with me. You wanted our marriage to work this time, because you want – more than anything – to raise our child as part of a family. We both wanted that, with all our hearts.”

  She expelled an uneven breath. Her eyes moved beyond him, focussing on a point on the wall. “Being part of a family isn’t all that matters,” she said, eventually. “And we’re not a family, anyway. Our daughter wouldn’t be fooled just because we had some rushed wedding ceremony.”

  His eyes flashed, rejecting that statement.

  “You can’t fake a family,” she said more clearly. “For a few hours, perhaps, in a public setting. Even for the year we were married, when we would go to Villa Fortune, I felt as though the whole world must be able to see how unhappy we were.”

  He visibly bristled at that description.

  “But not for a lifetime, and not with a child living in your house. I don’t want her to see this – us – and think it’s normal.” She tilted her chin defiantly. “My mother and father were so in love, and they wrapped me up in that love so I always felt safe and knew where I belonged. I haven’t really had that for a long time but I’m not going to settle for an illusion of that.”

  “Nothing of importance has changed,” he continued, as though she hadn’t. And the words, spoken so calmly, were her undoing.

  What he lacked in visible emotion she more than made up for. “Everything’s changed, Max. When I thought this was just a sensible, contractual agreement, I honestly believed I could do it.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m in love with you,” she reminded him, the words digging beneath his skin now. “And a pretend marriage, a pretend family, will never work. You have to let me go.”

  Silence. It wrapped around her now, tight and strangulating. “Our child deserves for us to try. We can become friends, Alessia. We can make this work.”

  Even as he said the words he knew she wouldn’t agree.

  “You don’t get it. I don’t want that. I thought – I thought this convenient arrangement was worth a try, for our daughter’s sake, but it’s not. It’s better for her to see us separated than to grow up in the cradle of misery.”

  “The cradle of misery?” He repeated, shaking his head, swearing in his own tongue. “I can make you very, very happy…”

  “Can you?” She shook her head, denying that. “You look at life as though it’s an equation – if you give me expensive clothes and jewels and take me to bed whenever you think I feel like it, then I will have enough? I don’t want that. I want a connection with someone. I want to feel as though the person I’m married to can’t go a day without holding me in his arms. As though he can barely work for thinking of me. I want to be the reason someone smiles out of nowhere, the person who can fix anything for someone. I want more than to be a bought bride – sold into marriage by my father, taken on by you because of loyalty to him.”

  “This isn’t that.” The words held a warning – but of what?

  “Not this time,” she said on a small sigh. “But really, that’s just semantics. You’ve married me for our daughter now, not my father, but it has as little do with me as the first time around.”

  Her eyes flashed with pain, and she looked away from him, her throat moving as she swallowed.

  “My mother left everyone she knew, everything she knew, when she met my dad. They fell in love and she gave up her life in the States to come to Italy and be with him. Their love was immense and beautiful.”

  His silence showed agreement.

  “I think about mom often. About what she’d say, how proud she would have been on the day I graduated, or when I saved someone’s life for the first time, delivered someone’s baby for the first time; I imagined the smile she’d have for me, the way she’d hug me and make me feel as though I could do anything. And now I imagine what she’d say about this and you and I can’t believe I ever agreed to go along with it.”

  “What do you think she’d say?”

  That was simple. “She’d tell me I deserved better.”

  Max’s eyes swept shut, his stomach feeling as though he’d been punched, hard. When he opened his eyes and fixed Alessia with a cool gaze, it was born of resignation. “And she’d be right.”

  She’d never really moved in. He hadn’t realised that until she’d left, but now, her absence was glaring.

  The first time, during their first marriage, she’d brought things with her. Photographs of her and her parents, with her mom at the beach one summer, knick knacks like an apron and a heap of fiction books, a New York Yankees cap that had been her mother’s, and over time, she’d begun to buy things – blankets, cushions, candlestick holders, little items that had been dispersed over the house when she’d lived there.

  When she’d left the first time, she hadn’t packed any of those things up, so Max had packed them away, neatly, calmly, shifting them into a box labelled ‘Alessia’. He told himself it was just a part of his life – a box like the school assessments Yaya had kept and clearly labelled, or the trophies he’d won as a school child which were still
packed away somewhere. He told himself he’d send them to her, or give them to her when she asked for them – but she hadn’t, and so the box was still somewhere up in his attic.

  There was nothing in his house now. True, they’d only been married a matter of months, but there was nothing to show for that now.

  She’d lived here, but she’d never really settled. Had she known this marriage might not last? Had she always intended to keep one foot out the door?

  It made sense. It was why she’d kept to the spare room. Why she’d tried to keep him at arm’s length.

  What didn’t make sense was the gaping hole inside of him, filling him with the sense that everything was wrong. He felt angry – but with no one but himself.

  You have to let me go.

  He’d let her go. He’d let their child go. He moved to the attic without realising it, as though his legs were being pulled there on autopilot.

  Boxes were lined up neatly, including the one with the Christmas decorations, making him feel as though arrows were firing hard through his chest, for no reason he could think of. He scanned the writing on the boxes until he saw the one he was looking for.

  Alessia.

  He pulled it down carefully, his expression grim as he looked at the tape and ran his hand along it. He’d been so angry the day he’d sealed it – angry at her betrayal, her lack of loyalty, angry that she’d acted as she had.

  He hadn’t taken even a moment to look at his own actions to see his errors. He had been so damned arrogant. So sure everything was Alessia’s fault when in truth, none of the blame laid with her.

  He closed his eyes as he opened the box, almost as though he were afraid to see what was inside.

  And with good reason.

  Here was the visual proof of how much their first marriage had meant to her. She hadn’t come to Rome expecting it to be temporary or fake. She’d brought the most important things with her when she’d arrived – the sorts of things one might grab from the house if a fire threatened.

  But it was more than what she’d brought. It was the things she’d accumulated and kept. The candlesticks were the kind that should sit at the centre of the dining table to mark special family events. They were a talisman to the future she’d envisaged, that he’d never intended to give her.