The Delicious De Campos: The Divorce Party

CHAPTER SEVEN

LILLY STOOD ON the patio of Charles Greene’s very beautiful, very exclusive Barbados estate overlooking Heron Bay. The sparkling, water-soaked playground of the world’s rich and famous, the bay was dotted with luxury hotels and villas that sat on heavenly golden sand beaches and the most stunning clear turquoise water Lilly had ever seen.

If you were the world’s most famous golfer you took over Heron Bay’s five-thousand-dollar-a-night marquee hotel for a sunset marriage featuring heads of state, rock stars and movie icons. If you were Charles Greene, British billionaire and heir to a heavy machinery fortune, you bought this gorgeous six-bedroom villa on the ocean and kept it for yourself.

Charles and Riccardo had done business together on a few occasions, and had formed a close personal relationship in addition to their working one. With Charles away on business in the UK, the villa was theirs. A private oasis in paradise.

At any other time in her life Lilly would have been ecstatic to be here. But not tonight. Not when she was about to learn the truth about her marriage.

She kept her feet planted firmly on the concrete. Tonight was not about running. It was about facing her demons.

She drank in the sheet of shimmering perfect blue sea in front of her, its color morphing from light to dark turquoise, then to a marine blue the further out the eye traveled. Were relationships like that? she wondered. Were there gradations and depths she and Riccardo had yet to explore? Or would this be the end for them?

“I’m leaving now.”

Mrs. Adams, the housekeeper who had greeted them and shown them to their rooms, appeared on the patio with a bottle of wine and a cooler in her hands. “Mr. De Campo thought you might enjoy a glass of wine while he showers.”

Lilly forced a smile to her lips. “Thank you. He’s off the phone, then?”

She nodded. “He said to tell you he’d be down in a few minutes.” She set the cooler down on the table and took some glasses out of a cupboard. “Did you say you’d been here before?”

“Yes. A year ago.”

Riccardo had come here on business and brought her with him. It had been right after news of his affair had surfaced and she’d spent the whole week trying to convince herself she shouldn’t doubt him. Trying to save her marriage.

Until she’d seen the photos.

“It’s a beautiful island,” she murmured, realizing the woman was waiting for her response. “We stayed further up the coast.”

Her brief response had the desired effect. The housekeeper nodded and stuck her hands on her hips. “I’ll be back tomorrow to cook breakfast. Would you like me to pour you a glass of wine?”

“No, thank you. I can pour it.”

“Okay, see you tomorrow, then.”

“Goodnight.”

Lilly kept the plastic smile on her face until the housekeeper had disappeared into the house. Her body vibrated with a tension that hadn’t left her since they’d climbed aboard the De Campo jet and flown the five hours south to the island—a flight the entire duration of which Riccardo had worked. She pulled in a breath to steady herself, but the shallow pulls of air she managed to take in didn’t help much.

She turned back to the sea and laced her hands together. “Stay in the moment. Allow yourself to feel and move through the pain...” Her therapist’s words were a grounding force when all she wanted to do was run. It had been her coping mechanism since she was a teenager and her parents had been having their no-holds-barred fights to run when she was in pain. To refuse to feel it.

Making herself stand here was like being asked to walk over red-hot coals.

“You haven’t had any wine.”

Riccardo’s low, smooth observation contrasted sharply with the imminent hysteria she felt building within her. This had always been the pattern with them. Him handling everything with reason—with well-thought-out premeditation. Lilly shooting from the hip—driven by emotion.

She turned around, a sharp condemnation on her lips. But he was so breathtakingly handsome in jeans and a navy polo shirt, his square-jawed, dark good looks only intensified by the casual attire, that the words fled her head.

He was beautiful beyond the meaning of the word. Charisma oozed out of him like oxygen for the female race. And she knew then that this had been a big, huge mistake.

Just as it had been to think she could claim ownership over a man every woman wanted.

She turned back to look at the ocean. “You can pour me some now.”

The knot in her stomach grew to an almost incapacitating level as she heard him walk across the patio and pour the wine. The sound of bubbling liquid hitting glass was deafeningly loud on the night air.

He came to stand beside her, the smoky, spicy scent of him wrapping itself around her.

“What’s wrong?”

She swiveled to face him. “You’ve been talking on that phone non-stop since we left. I thought we had a no work rule.”

His mouth tightened. “It’s off now. I just had a few last things to go through with Gabe. By the way,” he added, raising a brow, “he asked Alex out for dinner and she turned him down flat. Said she was going back to Mason Hill for the weekend.” His gaze narrowed on her face. “You two never go home. Is everything okay with your family?”

She blanched. “Everything’s fine. Can we just get this over with?”

He kept that watchful dark gaze on her. Then handed her the glass of wine.

She wrapped her fingers around the stem. The glass shook in her hand.

“Lil—” His eyes moved from her shaking fingers to her face.

“I’m fine,” she murmured. “You—you start.”

He exhaled harshly, the nostrils of his perfectly straight Roman nose flaring.

“What happened the night of the fashion show? Why were you so afraid to do it?”

She blinked. She had not expected that to be his first question. “You know I’ve never been comfortable in that type of setting. I told you that when we first started dating.”

“But you got over it. You thrived on it.”

“I hated every minute of it. I trained myself to do it so I wouldn’t let you down.”

Confusion flickered in his eyes. “Why? Why would a woman like you have confidence issues? You had the position, the wealth, the looks to back you. Why would you feel inferior?”

She gave a twisted smile. “I come from a town of two thousand, five hundred people, Riccardo. I will always feel small-town, no matter how you dress me up or how many places you take me or how many etiquette rules you teach me.” She shook her head. “You swept me up into this glamorous life I had no coping skills for, tossed me into the deep end and expected me to swim.”

He frowned. “But you never said anything. To me—you were just fine.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “I was doing what I had to do. That was my job. My role as Lilly De Campo.”

He exhaled heavily. “No one would ever have known you felt that way.”

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “I became extraordinarily good at faking it. And why not? I faked my way through our entire marriage.”

His gaze sharpened on her face, a dangerous glint firing in its dark depths. “I think you’d better explain that.”

“I never wanted that life, Riccardo. I told you that when you knocked me off my feet in that bar in SoHo. But you wouldn’t listen...you kept pushing until I said yes.”

“We were in love with each other,” he growled.

“We were infatuated with each other,” she corrected. “There was still time to recognize how wrong it was for me. How self-destructive all the attention and criticism was.”

“How so?”

She set her wine down on the railing and pushed her hair behind her ears. “I’ve never been secure in the way I look. It’s always been a tough one for me. But as your wife I couldn’t put on five pounds without the tabloids noticing and pouncing on me.”

“I told you. Stop reading them.”

“That’s overly simplistic. They were everywhere. I couldn’t avoid them all.”

His brows drew together. “But where does it come from, then, this insecurity about your looks? Beyond what the tabloids say?”

She turned away from his penetrating barrage of questions. But her therapist’s words haunted her, refused to let her back away. “Above all be honest, Lilly. Be honest with yourself and those around you.”

She took a deep breath. “I was very unhappy as a teenager. My parents’ marriage was a mess for a long time. The farm wasn’t doing well and the stress of having no money was getting to them. The kids—we had no life. We spent all our time helping out on the farm. We barely had time for schoolwork, let alone social lives.”

“I knew you weren’t happy at home and that’s why you left,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t know it was that bad.”

She nodded. “My parents’ fights would dissolve into screaming matches. Plates would fly and my mother would threaten to leave. My dad had an affair with the farmer’s wife down the road.” She hugged her arms around herself and looked up at him. “It was a disaster. A huge mess.”

There was a pregnant silence. His face paled. Yes, she thought viciously. That’s why what you did hurt so much.

She kept going, afraid that if she stopped she’d never tell him the truth. “David seemed immune to it all. Lisbeth was too young to know what was happening. Alex dealt with it by getting into trouble—running with the wrong crowd. I internalized it. I thought if I could control everything about my life beyond them, beyond what was happening at home, I’d be okay.”

Her mouth felt wooden, her lips thick, and the desire to stop talking was so strong it was hard to make herself form the words. “My big thing was food. I hated the way I looked so I controlled everything I put in my mouth.” She swallowed hard. “To the point where I was hardly eating.”

His eyes darkened with an emotion she couldn’t read. “But you can’t ever have been fat. Why in the world would you hate yourself so much?”

“I was a ‘chunky, healthy, solid-boned farmgirl,’ as my mother would say,” she said with a derisive smile. “And I hated it. No one wanted to date me. No one wanted to be with me.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I bloomed. Came into myself. You met me not long after that.”

He frowned. “So why is it still so bad? I’ve seen men lust after you, Lilly. You know they do. That must give you some confidence.”

“Yes.” She turned back to look at the brilliant sunset staining the sky now, the giant ball of orange and red sinking into the horizon. She swallowed past the hard, round mass in her throat that felt as if it was choking her, as if revealing her shameful secret might bring her to her knees. “But not before I developed anorexia.”

There was a long silence. He scraped his hand over his jaw and stared at her. “I had no idea.”

She made a face. “It’s not something you drop into casual conversation, like the fact I had a dog named Honey when I was little.”

“Dio, Lilly.” He stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. “That’s not what I’m talking about. This is key to who you are. Essential information I need to know about you. I would never have put you through any of this if I’d known that.”

She lifted her chin. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why?” He threw up his hands. “Because for once I might see who the real Lilly De Campo is?”

“No, I—”

“Lilly, we’ve been as intimate as two people can be. We’ve spent hours devouring each other. Yet you still can’t tell me these profound truths about yourself? No wonder we’re messed up.”

She shook her head and took a step back. “Sex and intimacy are two different things.”

“They most certainly are,” he agreed tightly. “And the minute you turned into the Ice Queen and froze me out any intimacy we had was blown to bits.”

She winced. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to protect myself. My anorexia was my deep, dark secret. It was the thing no one knew about me in my new life. The thing I never wanted anyone to know about me. Most of all you.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Why?”

She pressed her lips together. “You’re a perfect human being, Riccardo. Everything about you is so damn perfect that everyone wants you, everyone admires you. I’ve never felt I could live up to it. Be that woman who’s worthy of you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

She stamped her foot. “It’s how I feel, dammit. Everything—everything about my life with you was about keeping up appearances. Making sure we were that Golden Couple. And the balance I’d tried so hard to inject into my life in order to stay healthy went out the window. How could it not when I was constantly in the spotlight? Constantly being judged?”

He raked his hand through his hair. “I wish you’d told me so I could have helped you.”

Her heart throbbed in her chest. “I didn’t want to add myself to your list of issues. You had enough going on with De Campo business.”

He shook his head. “Did I ever put any pressure on you about your weight?”

“You never reassured me.”

“I always told you how gorgeous you looked.”

“Yes, but when I said things like, ‘I feel fat,’ to get some reassurance from you, you told me to go to the gym.”

“That’s because that’s what I do when I feel like that. I work out, get the tension out, and I feel better about myself. Hell, Lilly...” He was staring at her as if she was a creature from another planet. “Has there ever been any doubt about how much I love your body?”

Her gaze skipped away from his. “I’ve put on weight since we were together.”

“And that scene the other night wasn’t enough to convince you I like the changes?”

“Why wasn’t I enough, then?” She yelled the words at him, her control snapping. “If you think I’m beautiful, if I’m enough for you, then why did you have to have an affair with Chelsea Tate?”

All the color drained out of his face. “It didn’t happen. You’re the only woman I want, Lilly. Chelsea never came close to meaning anything like that to me.”

“Then tell me the truth,” she raged, pointing a finger at him. “This is my life, Riccardo. Not a tabloid page. When I left you I was in the fetal position for three days. Three days. And if Alex hadn’t come along to dig me out I might still be there. So do not tell me any more lies. I can’t take it.”

He stared at her with the glazed look of a man who didn’t know where to go. What to do. She watched him take a deep breath and steady himself and felt her heart sink into the depths of hell.

“You need to give me a chance to explain...”

She bit back the bile that rose in her throat. “Believe me—you have my full attention.”

He raked a hand through his hair and set his jaw. “Chelsea and I were once close—you know that. But once I met you that all ended and you were the only woman in my life. The only one, Lilly.” He frowned when she gave no reaction. “When things got so bad between us I was completely at a loss as to what to do. It was impossible to believe a marriage could go from one-fifty to zero in a matter of months—but somehow ours did, and I couldn’t figure out why or what to do about it. You refused to be with me, my pride was stinging, and I think we were both questioning our marriage.”

She forgot to breathe. Forgot she had to.

“I was hurt at what had become of us. Angry at what you were doing to me.” His mouth flattened into a grim line and his eyes half closed, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “So I called Chelsea and invited her to dinner.”

Lilly felt as if a train was headed for her, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything to avoid it.

“I wanted to prove I didn’t need you—I didn’t love you,” he continued hoarsely. “And maybe I wanted to hurt you too. Make you hurt as much as I was hurting.”

Lilly pressed her hands to her ears, but he stalked forward and dragged them away.

“I drove her home, I went up to her apartment with every intention of taking her to bed. And then I kissed her and everything felt wrong.”

Lilly felt the ground sway beneath her and, cursing, Riccardo scooped her up in his arms. He carried her over to the bench and sat down with her cradled against him. A tortured expression filled his eyes as he stared down at her. “You haunted me. No matter how much you pushed me away you were the only one I wanted.”

She sat there in his arms like a strange, disembodied presence that could hear what he was saying but couldn’t actually register it. When she managed to speak, her voice was low and thready. “You kissed her but you didn’t sleep with her?”

He nodded. “I came home to you and never saw her again.”

Something reached inside her and tore her heart out. “What kind of a kiss was it?”

He cursed low under his breath. “You can’t torture yourself like that.”

“Yes, I can!” she shrieked, stumbling off his lap and facing him on shaking legs. “You betrayed me, Riccardo. I saw those photographs. You didn’t just kiss her. You had sex with her!”

He frowned. “There were no photographs taken of us. We were in Chelsea’s apartment.”

“There were eight. Eight photos of you in various states of undress. Dammit, stop lying.”

He stood up and took her by the shoulders. “You will watch your tongue and tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Lacey Craig,” she threw at him, knowing this might well put the final nail in their marriage, but past caring. “After we got back from Barbados I called her up and asked what proof she had to support her story. She showed me photos of you and Chelsea. Intimate photos of you. And she let me buy them to spare me the humiliation of having them splashed across every gossip magazine in the country.”