The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain

“Your Highness?”

“Could you please shut the door?”

Her answer was the quiet snick of the door latch catching.

She felt her control slip another notch as the nominal privacy of the shut door registered with her emotions. She’d been holding herself in check for so long; forcing herself to bite back the words of love she’d wanted to utter, to hide her distress at the frequent separations from Claudio brought about by their schedules, and for the past several months pretending that the horrific pain of endometriosis did not exist.

At first, she’d convinced herself it was just the period pain made more intense by going off the pill. But then, one night when Claudio had been gone on yet another business trip, she had fainted from the cramps and when she woke up on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood, she’d known she had to find out what was wrong.

She’d gone to see her doctor in the States, a habit she’d developed early in her marriage to protect her privacy. Trips abroad were easy enough to justify in her schedule that she found it quite easy to hide the purpose of her stopovers in Miami.

Her doctor’s initial prognosis had been utterly disturbing. He’d thought she was probably suffering from endometriosis, but the only way to tell for sure was to perform a laparoscopy. She thought she could handle it and accepted a prescription for painkillers, only to give in the following month and schedule the outpatient surgery.

She’d gotten the results the day before along with a big bucket of ice water to dash her hopes that she would be one of the lucky ones who wasn’t impacted too heavily by the disease. Apparently she’d had it for quite a while, but being on the pill had mitigated its effects. There was major tissue build up on both of her ovaries and even with the surgery to remove it all, her chances of getting pregnant without IVF were less than ten percent. Even with IVF, there were no guarantees.

Those were not the kind of odds Crown Prince Claudio had been counting on when he had her take fertility tests before announcing their engagement. A future king had responsibilities to the throne and one of the most important ones was providing an heir to carry on his lineage. He expected her to be able to do that with one hundred percent success and for all intents and purposes, she was infertile.

After seeing the way the press and the Scorsolini family had reacted to Marcello’s supposed sterility, Therese knew there was no chance her proud husband would willingly suffer similar vilification for her sake. And she wouldn’t expect him to.

If he loved her, it would be different, but then so much would be. Love was not an emotion that could be faked, nor could it be replaced with a sense of duty.

Claudio might offer to remain married, but his heart wouldn’t be in it and she could not live with the knowledge that she was a burden around his neck…a source of humiliation to his royal pride.

A sob snaked up from deep inside her to explode out of her mouth and she had to clamp her hand over her lips to keep the sound from traveling to the other room. Feeling like an old woman, she pushed herself to her feet.

She would take a shower…she could at least have privacy for her tears in there.

Once she’d shut the door, then the door on the shower and turned the water on full blast, she cried herself hoarse. She grieved the loss of her marriage, the loss of her hopes of motherhood and stopped fighting the pain that came from loving a man who did not and never would love her.

She ruthlessly quashed any hope that everything would be okay. Deep in her heart, she knew it would not be. After Claudio’s reaction to her unexpected departure from her schedule, she didn’t even have the tiniest hope that her marriage could or should survive this setback.

And that was destroying her. All along, she had harbored the foolish hope that she was wrong, that somehow they could weather the treatment for her condition and the problems it would bring. She hadn’t admitted it to herself because it would have hurt too much, but now that she was faced with the final end to her marriage, she had no choice but to acknowledge the living flicker of hope as it died a painful death.

Claudio could not have made it more obvious he did not love her if he had tried. His every action pointed to the carefully defined roles she played in his life, none of them connected to his emotional needs. Unless she counted sex and even if he did…she didn’t.

She’d had such hopes when they married. They would make a family and she would know the love she had never known with her parents at least with the children that would come. She had also hoped that eventually Claudio would come to love her. She had wanted it all and now there was nothing but the dead ashes of a fire that had consumed her for almost three years.