The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain

He had known his lack of outward affection had hurt Flavia, but he had told himself he could do nothing to mitigate that.

Yet, the feelings inside him grew until he was desperate to find a way to deny them. Finally, in a state of confused grief both for what he had lost and the state of his current marriage, he had betrayed his promise of fidelity. Flavia had found out and while she had been willing to suffer a marriage with love on only one side, she had refused to tolerate infidelity.

Proving she had not been raised to put duty above all, she had taken all three boys to her parents’ home in Italy and filed for divorce. Out of shame, King Vincente Scorsolini had done nothing to prevent his wife divorcing him. He’d made up the fiction of the Scorsolini Curse to soothe his aching conscience and lacerated pride shortly after the divorce.

He had even believed it until he woke up to reality at Tomasso’s wedding. They’d been walking along the beach with the children afterward. Vincente had taken a long look at the woman who had given birth to his third son as she chatted away with their grandchildren.

For some reason he still did not understand, but had confided to Claudio that he thought it might have been a premonition of things to come, everything had fallen into place after more than two decades of idiocy. Or so he had labeled it.

Claudio did not know what to make of his father’s revelations, or why the older man had made them to him. But he knew that his father had finally accepted his love for Flavia and was prepared to act on that love. If Claudio knew his father as well as he thought he did, his stepmother’s days as a single woman were numbered.

Provided King Vincente survived surgery.

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN they reached the palace, Therese managed to get out of the car and walk side by side with Claudio all the way to their private apartments without so much as making a second’s eye contact or allowing her hand to brush against his. It bothered him. He did not like being ignored by his wife and she still was his wife, no matter if she wanted to pretend otherwise.

He followed her slender form into the apartment, a sense of being ill-used riding him with the tenacity of a jockey in the last leg of the Melbourne Cup.

She looked so damn lost though and it infuriated him that even amidst his own turmoil, he cared. “You should have come back to the palace with Tomasso and Maggie.”

“I didn’t want to,” she said in that soft voice that even now impacted his libido. Damn it, she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman…except faithful.

But had she been unfaithful? Was she only thinking about it? Was her request for a divorce in preparation to entering another relationship? The questions blindsided him with the possibility that while her heart might have strayed, her body might yet remain his alone.

“I noticed,” he ground out, frustrated by her on more than one level and several he did not want to examine too closely.

“I wanted to be there if anything else happened,” she said with a sigh as she slipped her shoes off and padded across the sitting room in stocking feet.

The longer she went without looking at him, the more irritated he became. The fact that he found himself following her like a puppy dog did not improve his temper any, either. “You being there could have made no difference.”

“That isn’t what you said when we were in New York.”

“I was angry.”

“And taking it out on me. I noticed.”

And who did she think he should have taken his anger, spawned by her request for a divorce, out on? Rather than ask a question for which he did not want an answer, he said, “I do not like the idea of you sleeping on a sofa in the waiting room. You were so out of it, you did not even notice me coming into the room.”

She’d cuddled into his suit jacket, though, whispering his name as she did so and he’d felt like someone had kicked him in the gut. How could she still seek his comfort in the night when she wanted someone else?

They were in the bedroom now and she went to the cupboard to pull out a nightgown. “Security was on duty the entire time.”

His tie was already long gone, but he shrugged out of the suit jacket that carried her scent mingled with his own. Like their bodies did after making love. He did not like remembering that. For reasons he could not fathom, he wanted her now more than ever.

He should be disgusted by the thought of touching her. But far from it, since considering the alternative that she was still his alone in a physical sense, the need to stamp that possession on her body once again grew with every breath he drew in. “That is not the point.”

“There is no point…not to arguing about it now.” She headed for the bathroom, clearly intent on finishing her changing in there when only days ago, she would have undressed in front of him quite naturally. “What is done is done.”