For an answer she turned and walked into the dressing-room. There was a twisted kind of irony in the way she bent to pick up a cardboard box still half unpacked and carried it into the bedroom. She placed it on the bed, then started opening drawers to toss things into it.
‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ Enrico lanced at her.
‘Packing,’ she answered. ‘Getting out of your life.’
Only this time she would do her packing herself.
He strode across the room and wrenched her round to face him. He looked as pale as death. ‘You believe that I will let you do this? You believe I am going to let you walk away with my son?’
His son—his son. It had always only been about Nicky. She’d only ever been a means to an end, with a bit of good sex thrown in! All his nasty thoughts about her and Luca he had so carefully stored up to keep him in touch with his reasons for marrying the likes of her at all!
Where had her brain been? Lost in the clouds, she answered her own stupid question. Living out a three-year-old dream, when everyone knew that dreams didn’t come true!
‘I will not let you do it to him.’
Ah, the big one. The one and only reason fit to make her stop and think. Nicky adored this man. He loved his newly extended family. Could she rip him away from all of this…?
‘If I can overcome what I witnessed three years ago and marry you for our son’s sake, then you can overcome that today I seem to have made a mistake about you and Luca.’
Hedging his bets, Freya noted bleakly. She just knew he was going to check her story out before he really let himself believe a single word that she’d said.
His fingers bit into her arms when she said nothing, her eyes glassed over like ice. ‘Are you listening to me?’ he demanded roughly. ‘Nicolo deserves that you do this. He has a right to the life I can offer him and which you cannot!’
And that, Freya thought, was the real bottom line. Enrico had everything with which to give Nicky the life that he deserved, and she could not take that away from her son.
She took a step back from him, swiping his fingers away as if they made her skin creep. ‘I want you out of this bedroom,’ she quivered out. ‘I don’t want you to touch me ever again.’
‘That’s just—’
‘The way it is going to be from now on, Enrico,’ she cut over him. ‘Because I will not pay the price any more for what your rotten cousin did to me. And I will not be the victim of your lack of trust. You wanted a marriage of convenience for Nicky’s sake? You’ve got one—on my terms. So now, get out.’ With that she turned and walked into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.
Sizzling with helpless rage, Enrico turned and stormed out the bedroom door, wondering how he had got it so wrong.
Fredo was waiting downstairs in the hallway.
‘Get your informant on the bloody phone!’ Enrico raked at his bodyguard on the way to his study.
Fredo already had his mobile to his ear as he followed his boss. Two minutes later, digital photographic evidence of the redhead caught on camera as she entered Luca’s hotel suite flashed up on Enrico’s computer screen.
Silence followed while both men stared at the image. Then the bodyguard released a soft curse that just about covered the way Enrico was feeling. ‘It’s not her,’ Fredo muttered.
He also sounded relieved.
Enrico wasn’t relieved; if anything he was all the more angry. He had just made a complete idiot of himself and totally alienated Freya at the same time! Two weeks of careful planning had just been tossed out of the window.
Now what did he have?
He looked down at
the broken frame resting on the desk in front of him. His eyes burned in his head as he reread the details of his son’s birth then the message inscribed on the frame.
She had done this for him. She had thought it through and prepared this wedding gift because finally she had been ready to trust him.
In doing so she had given him everything he’d believed he wanted, but now it felt as if he had just lost everything.
I still see the man I loved standing there condemning me instead of defending me.
Por Dio, could she have been telling him the truth?