The Italians: Cristiano, Vittorio and Dario: Once a Ferrara Wife... / A Dark Sicilian Secret / Blackmailed Bride, Innocent Wife

He wanted it all.

Everything they’d lost, and more.

Holding her still, trapping her with his strength, he took her chin in his hand and turned her tear-streaked face to his. ‘Now tell me you’re not in love with me.’

Laurel lay in shock, wrung out from the deluge of emotion and the mind-blowing sex. Emotionally and physically spent, she just wanted to roll over and bury her head in the pillow but he lay in a position of domination, the muscles of his sleek, powerful shoulders bunched as he protected her from his weight, waiting for her response to his all male command. She tried to pull herself back, to separate herself, but they were entwined in every way possible. She could still feel him, hard and heavy, and her body tensed around him, drawing a soft curse from his lips.

‘Don’t move—’

‘You move then—’

‘I’m not going anywhere until you admit the way you feel—’ His voice was a thickened growl and she knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t going to back off until she’d spoken the words he wanted to hear.

And she had no intention of doing that. ‘You’re heavy. I can’t breathe properly.’

The connection was sweet and terrifying at the same time and her hips moved without her consent, the unconsciously sensuous movement dragging another curse from his lips.

Drawing in a long breath, he closed one strong hand over her hip, holding her still while he struggled for control. ‘I said don’t move.’

‘I need fresh air.’ ‘Coward.’

Was she a coward? No, she wasn’t. She was strong. She’d survived an upbringing that would have wrecked many people but the grim, cold reality of her early life had taught her one important lesson: that life was about choices. And she’d been fiercely determined to make the best choices she could.

So what was she doing back in Cristiano’s bed?

Bad choice, she thought desperately, but then remembered that the length of time he’d allowed her to make that choice could have been measured in milliseconds.

‘You’re a very attractive guy, Cristiano, no woman is likely to dispute that. So we just had sex.’

‘I noticed.’ His mouth curved into a satisfied masculine smile and he shifted his body just enough to make her gasp. ‘So what does that make you?’

‘Stupid.’

Despite the fact she wasn’t saying the words he wanted to hear, he was still smiling, but this time there were hints of the sardonic about the curve of his mouth. ‘You’re not stupid, but you are a liar, tesoro. And you are in love with me.’

‘You’re so arrogant. The world does not begin and end with you.’

‘It does to you. Admit it.’ He held her trapped and she squirmed beneath him and then stilled as she felt him grow harder.

‘Get off me or I’m going to have to hurt you.’

‘You’re strong, but I’m stronger.’ He spoke through his teeth, clearly as affected by their physical connection as she was. ‘Tell me why you walked out on us. Why didn’t you just yell at me and fix it?’

‘Because I didn’t want to fix it.’ She wasn’t used to feeling helpless and he made her feel helpless. ‘You’re a selfish bastard and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with you. We’re not good together.’

‘No, you’re right. We’re terrible together.’ His mouth was right up against hers, his words blending with her lips, his breath warm and seductive. ‘I may be a selfish bastard but I love you.’

Her heart melted. He always did this. He always knew exactly what to say to thrust her off balance. ‘You’ll get over it.’

Choices, she reminded herself. It was all about choices.

His low laugh was accompanied by the slow, sneaky brush of his mouth against hers. ‘Just for the record, how many men do you scream underneath in an average week?’

‘You’re disgusting.’

‘I’m honest. And maybe a touch possessive,’ he conceded, ‘but I have no problems with you being the same. I happen to believe what we have is worth fighting hard to protect, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ Strong fingers caught her chin and the humour died in his eyes. ‘Say it. Say I love you.’

‘Because we just had sex? Your superior technique was supposed to have the same effect as a mind wipe? It was a physical act, Cristiano. It had no emotional meaning.’

He swore under his breath and finally shifted his weight. Rolling onto his back, he jabbed his fingers into his hair in a gesture of frustration. ‘You drive me insane, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Likewise.’ She’d wanted him to let her go, but now that he had she felt the loss of it keenly.

That was the way they’d always slept, she remembered, holding onto each other. She’d never depended on anyone, ever, but the way she’d slept with Cristiano had been the nearest she’d come to relaxing that rule.

It had made night her favourite time.

She felt herself weaken.

She was about to turn to him when he rose from the bed, gloriously indifferent to the fact he was naked. He was completely comfortable with himself. His ego had been nurtured by an adoring family and fattened by the admiration of all who came into contact with him. He was the golden boy. The Prince.

The muscles of his torso rippled as he moved and she felt her instant response, although how she could even contemplate more sex after what they’d just shared she had no idea.

Even so, everything inside her softened and melted and when he turned his dark, proud head to look at her she felt the same connection that had drawn them together the first time they’d met.

‘Why do women always turn everything into a major drama?’ His exasperated question was so unexpected that Laurel froze.

‘Sorry?’

‘So I made a mistake—’ He spread his hands in what she assumed was intended as a gesture of apology. ‘I should have been there, but I wasn’t. Why does this have to become an insurmountable barrier between us? Yes, it was unfortunate, but you would throw everything away because of one day when I made a bad decision?’

Unfortunate?

The blurring in her brain cleared. Everything that had softened, hardened again. ‘At least you’re agreeing you made a bad decision,’ she said shakily. ‘I suppose that’s a start.’

He eyed her with extreme caution, as if she were a bomb he didn’t quite know how to defuse. ‘If I’d known how upset you were going to be, then obviously I would have chosen differently, but the negotiations on the Caribbean deal were at an extremely delicate stage.’

Delicate? Laurel thought of herself, alone in the hospital bed, being told the news. He had no idea, she thought numbly. No idea what she’d been through and she hadn’t even bothered telling him because it had been irrelevant. ‘So you’re saying that it was only a bad decision because of my reaction. If I’d been a tolerant Sicilian wife then prioritising your work over everything else would have been acceptable.’

‘That hotel has been our most successful. Had I not shown up that day we would have lost the bid.’

‘So what you’re actually saying is that the business was more important than me and you don’t actually regret it because it’s making you a nice profit.’

‘Once again you are twisting everything I say!’

‘Nothing is twisted. Everything is straight in my head.’

‘It is done, now. Finished. I don’t see the point in looking back.’

‘Well, it’s nice to know you’re not beating yourself up over it,’ Laurel said stiffly. ‘I’d hate to think your guilty conscience was keeping you awake at night.’

His eyes glinted. ‘I’m just saying that it is a useless waste of energy to dwell on the past. It can never be changed.’

‘True, but it can be used as a useful indicator of how to behave in the future. It’s called learning from mistakes. Something you’re not so good at, presumably because your ego blocks the view.’ Galvanised into action by his total lack of self-awareness, Laurel jumped out of bed and stumbled over to her suitcase, which lay abandoned on the floor.

Shocked and horrified by how close she’d come to allowing herself to be seduced right back to where they’d come from, she yanked at the zip, aware that he was watching her with incredulity.

‘What the hell are you doing now?’

‘Getting out of here. It’s what I was trying to do before you barged through that door and used sex as a weapon.’

‘I did not use sex as a weapon.’ His jaw hardened and his eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. ‘Unless you count using it to try and crack that tough outer shell of yours.’

‘I have that tough outer shell to protect myself from people like you.’

‘I loved you. I still love you.’ His voice thickened as he exposed his soul. ‘I made the ultimate commitment, but apparently that meant nothing to you. And still means nothing to you.’

‘You never loved me, Cristiano. You loved the challenge, the chase—’ She flung open the case. ‘Maybe you loved the fact I was the only woman who didn’t stare when you walked past, that I wasn’t impressed by the money and the status. I don’t know—but I do know it wasn’t love. The only thing you love is your work. That comes first for you. Nothing turns you on like winning a deal.’

His jaw was rigid. ‘I loved you. But you were afraid of that. Your problem is that you can’t let yourself need someone.’

‘And that drives you mad, doesn’t it? You can’t have a relationship with someone who doesn’t need you. You don’t want an equal, you want a dependent because it makes you feel big and macho.’ They were fighting and both of them knew that the reason the emotion was so agonisingly raw was because they cared so much. ‘You made me need you. You pushed and you pushed until you made holes in the armour I’ve spent all my life creating and then you walked off and left me exposed and I hate you for that.’ She tugged a T-shirt out of the case.

‘Then why didn’t you tell me instead of just walking out? That was cowardly.’

‘It was survival.’

‘I arrived home after that trip, ready to offer you support and you sat there in silence. You said virtually nothing except, “I’m leaving you.”‘

She’d had no words to communicate what she’d been feeling. She’d been swallowed up by emotions so huge and terrifying that she’d barely been able to function.

‘There was nothing to say.’ Laurel was pulling on her clothes. Not the silky bridesmaid dress that still lay abandoned where he’d dropped it so carelessly, but the skinny jeans she’d jammed into her suitcase moments before he’d crashed his way into the room. ‘This conversation is over. My flight leaves in an hour.’

‘Then they’re leaving with one less passenger.’ His rough, raw tone would have stopped a lesser woman in her tracks but Laurel jammed her feet into her shoes.

‘I’m going to be on that flight and if you dare try and stop me I’ll call the police.’ She ignored the fact that the Chief of Police regularly dined with the Ferraras. ‘The divorce is already going ahead. I saw Carlo this morning and signed everything you wanted me to sign.’

‘That’s irrelevant now.’

‘What do you mean, irrelevant?’ She zipped her jeans and freed the long sweep of her hair from the neck of her scarlet shirt. His eyes followed the movement and she tried not to remember how many times he’d buried his fingers in her hair as he’d kissed her.

‘Italian law expressly declares that a separation must be physical to be valid. A couple has to be formally separated for three years before a decree can be issued.’ His eyes slid from her hair to her mouth, his intimate and deliberate gaze reminding her of what they’d just done.

As the meaning behind his statement slowly sank in she felt a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Had she inadvertently sent the clock back to the beginning? No. Not that. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Even if we hadn’t just proved that we can’t be apart for that length of time, there is no way I’d be giving you a divorce now.’ His voice was like steel and she was suddenly aware of her heart hammering against her chest.

‘There’s no one you can’t influence. You could arrange it if you wanted to.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Yes, you do! You hate me for leaving you.’ Desperately she tried to stoke his anger but he was maddeningly cool.

‘And you hate me for going into one more meeting when I should have flown home to be with you. We both made mistakes. Being married is about fixing them and moving forwards. That’s what we’re doing.’

He was so smug, she thought desperately as she zipped the suitcase shut and grabbed the handle. So arrogantly sure that all he had to do was snap his fingers and whatever he wanted to happen would happen. So confident that he could wipe away the past.

‘You think we can move forward, but you have no idea what happened on that day.’ She was shaking with the stress of thinking about it. ‘You don’t know how I felt.’

His icy exterior splintered. ‘So tell me how you felt. Tell me now. Don’t hold anything back.’

The suitcase landed on the floor with a dull thump. ‘It started with a pain, low in my stomach.’ Her voice was remarkably steady given the fact that this was the conversation she’d thought she’d never have. ‘I thought to myself, This isn’t right. I called you, but your PA told me that you couldn’t be disturbed.’

His jaw tightened, like a fighter bracing himself for a punch. Clearly these weren’t the feelings he wanted to hear.

‘Laurel—’

‘I don’t hold that against you.’ She didn’t give him time to speak. It was her turn now and she intended to use it. ‘The first message didn’t get through but that was her fault, not yours. And my fault for not being more forceful about needing to speak to you. I called the doctor and he told me to take painkillers and go back to bed and rest for a while, so I did that and the pain grew worse. I knew no one else in Sicily. Your mother was staying with her sister in Rome, Santo was with you in the Caribbean. I was alone. And frightened.’ Her emphasis on that word triggered an indefinable change in him. ‘I called you again. This time I was forceful. I insisted on speaking to you and she put me through—’ Her heart rate doubled and she was back in that room; back with the pain and the panic. She remembered again the terrifying sense of isolation. ‘You asked me if I was bleeding and when I said I wasn’t you spoke to the doctor and between you, you decided that I was a neurotic woman.’

‘That is not true. At no point did I accuse you of neuroses.’ He sprang to his own defence but Laurel wasn’t in the mood to listen.

‘You were always labouring the fact that I found it hard to tell you how I was feeling. “Trust me,” you said in that same seductive voice you always use when you’re determined to get your own way. So I did. On that day, I put all my trust in you. I told you I thought something was badly wrong and that I didn’t trust the doctor. I told you I was scared. That’s the first and only time I’ve admitted that to anyone. For the first time in our relationship I put my trust in you and your response to that enormous risk on my part was to dismiss my concerns as less valid than the doctor’s and return to your meeting. With your phone switched off.’

She saw the exact moment he recognised the impact of that decision.

His breathing turned shallow. His bronzed handsome face lost some of its colour. ‘It was a particularly bad moment—’

‘It was a particularly bad moment for me, too.’ This time she wasn’t letting him off the hook. ‘When you said, “I have to go now, but I’ll call you later. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” how did you think I’d feel?’

‘I was trying to reassure you.’

‘No, you were trying to reassure yourself. You needed to convince yourself I’d be fine in order to justify staying there and not immediately flying home. You made the judgement that I was overreacting. You didn’t once think about the fact I had never asked you for anything before. You didn’t think of me at all, so don’t talk to me about love. Even if I hadn’t lost the baby, the fact that I’d asked for your help when I’d never, ever called you at work before should have been enough.’ The words poured out of her along with her feelings and there was nothing she could do to stop it now because her control had been swept away by the violent force of her emotions. ‘You say that I killed our marriage by walking out but it was your empty, useless verbal pat on the head that did that. It was the first time in my life I’d asked another human being for help. And you dismissed me. And because I was panicking, because I couldn’t actually believe that you’d done that, I phoned you one more time, only to discover that you’d turned your phone off.’

He stood immobile, as if every shot she’d fired had gone straight into his brain. ‘You didn’t tell me that you felt that way.’

‘Well, I’m telling you now. And do you know the worst thing?’ It had been hard to open up but now that she had, the hard part was stopping. ‘Because I had allowed myself to trust you, depend on you, for one horrible minute I actually thought that I couldn’t handle the situation without your help. I actually had to remind myself that before you came along and insisted on being the macho protector, I did perfectly well by myself. Once I’d reminded myself of that fact, I calmed down and took myself to hospital.’ She emphasized the word ‘myself’ but it was the word ‘hospital’ that drew his attention and had his brows meeting in a deep frown.

‘You went to the hospital? Why was that necessary?’

‘Because neither my doctor nor my husband believed anything was wrong. Fortunately I knew differently.’ She watched the tension spread across those wide, powerful shoulders.

Standing there naked, he should have looked vulnerable but Cristiano didn’t know how to look vulnerable. Even in this most sensitive of situations, he was the one in command.

‘I had no idea you went to hospital. You should have told me.’

‘When? When was I supposed to tell you? I tried telling you but you had switched your phone off to avoid the inconvenience of talking to your neurotic wife. By the time you finally fitted me into your demanding schedule, I’d coped with it by myself. There was no point in telling you.’

‘Now you’re being childish.’

The accusation robbed her of breath. ‘I asked for your help, you didn’t give it. I told you I was scared, you didn’t come. Did you really think I was going to carry on begging for attention? I did what I’ve always done. I sorted it. That isn’t childish, Cristiano. It’s adult behaviour.’

‘Adults don’t walk away from a difficult situation.’ A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘Even given the difficult circumstances, there was no excuse for sulking.’

‘Sulking?’ Her voice shook and she could barely say the words that needed to be said. To steady herself, she took a slow, deep breath. ‘God, you have no idea. I don’t know why I’m even wasting my breath having this conversation. You say I don’t talk but the biggest problem is that you don’t listen. I say, “I’m in trouble” and you hear, She’s neurotic; she’ll be fine. If that’s love, then I don’t want it or need it.’ Dragging her phone from her bag, Laurel punched in a number and ordered a taxi in shaky Italian, shocked by the powerful and utterly alien urge to leap on him and do him physical harm.

Watching her through eyes glittering with frustration, Cristiano dragged in a driven breath. ‘You will not leave this room until we’ve finished talking.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Basta! Enough!’ His face as pale as Sicilian marble, his muscular frame taut, he blocked her path. ‘I realise that a miscarriage is a shattering experience for a woman. I, too, was very upset at the loss of the pregnancy, but it’s important to keep this in perspective. These things happen. My mother lost two babies and then went on to have three healthy pregnancies. Our problem is not the miscarriage, it is our marriage. If we can sort that out then we will have more children.’

Laurel stood still, frozen by the chill of her own emotions, wondering how someone so emotionally expressive could be so monumentally insensitive towards the feelings of others. ‘We won’t be having more children, Cristiano.’

‘I made you pregnant the first time we had unprotected sex. After tonight you could already be pregnant. You probably are.’ His unquestioning confidence in his own virility increased her tension tenfold.

‘I’m not pregnant.’ Her lips were stiff and the blood pounded through her skull. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘A miscarriage doesn’t—’

‘I didn’t have a miscarriage.’

His brows met in a frown. ‘But—’

‘I had an ectopic pregnancy.’ Just saying it brought back the memories and she had to pause and hitch in her breath, which surprised her because she’d thought that by now the experience should have been nothing more than a bad memory. She pressed the flat of her hand to her abdomen, to that part of her that had malfunctioned with such devastating consequences. She thought of their child. ‘If I hadn’t followed my instinct and gone to hospital when I did, there is a strong chance I would have died when the tube ruptured. As it was, they operated within fifteen minutes of my arrival and they saved my life. I owe them that. They were brilliant.’

The silence was shattering.

She’d never witnessed Cristiano at a loss. She’d never witnessed him unsure and out of his depth.

But she was witnessing it now.

The blistering self-belief was nowhere in evidence and he actually shifted his position as if he needed to rebalance himself, the foundations of his rock-solid confidence severely shaken by her unexpected admission.

Deciding that it was only fair to give him the right of response, Laurel waited.

And waited.

No sound emerged from his lips. His face was the colour of pale marble and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides. He looked utterly shattered by her dramatic revelation.

‘You should have told me.’ His hoarse exhortation shattered the silence. ‘It was wrong of you not to.’

Any sympathy she might have felt dissolved in that unguarded, judgemental comment. Even now, it seemed, the fault was hers.

‘If you’d been here, I wouldn’t have had to tell you,’ she snapped, her hand closing round the handle of her suitcase. ‘The doctor would have told you. And he also would have told you that I can’t have more children. They removed one tube and the other is such a mess there is no way it’s up to the job, so you’ll have to find someone else on whom to publicly demonstrate your astonishing virility.’ Eyes stinging, throat dry, she hauled the suitcase towards the door, knowing that the taxi would already be waiting. If there was one thing you could depend on in a Ferrara hotel, it was efficiency and attentiveness to the needs of the guests. It was just a shame that same attentiveness hadn’t spilled over into their marriage. ‘Don’t follow me, Cristiano. I don’t have anything left to say to you.’

CHAPTER SIX

THE door slammed.

Cristiano flinched, the sound reverberating through his skull.

He stared at the empty space that moments before had held Laurel and her suitcase. A furious, fire-breathing Laurel. Even when he heard the revving sound of an engine vanishing into the distance he still didn’t move. He was incapable of moving. His brain and body felt disconnected, frozen at the point she’d made her shocking confession.

Ectopic pregnancy?

She’d almost died?

As the stark, shocking truth sank into his brain he stumbled through to the bathroom and was violently ill.

His brain produced a kaleidoscope of vile images. Laurel clutching her phone, confessing that she had a bad feeling. Him, switching his phone off while he went into one more meeting. And the worst image of all—a bunch of gowned surgeons battling to save the life of the woman he loved.