The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain

It had devastated her and that remembered devastation was in her voice.

Tension filled the muscular body cradling hers so close. “This is why you asked for a divorce? Because of this pain and bleeding?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“IN A way, yes.”

“Explain what way.”

“I don’t look terrible anymore?” she asked with some of her old sense of humor.

“You sound so tired you can barely stay awake and I should leave this until tomorrow, but I cannot.”

“Neither can I,” she admitted. She wanted the truth out. She wanted him to stop looking at her as if she’d sold him out to the enemy.

“I have endometriosis.”

“What is that?”

She tried to wrap her muddled mind around the clinical description the doctor had given her. “It is a condition linked to my menstrual cycle.”

“I had figured that much out myself.”

“Yes, well…I’m not a doctor. Explaining diseases doesn’t come easily to me.”

“I apologize. I should not have been sarcastic.”

“It’s all right.” She was glad he wasn’t looking in her face, that their position precluded eye contact because she didn’t think she could get through this if she had to see his reaction to her news.

“I…um…”

“Begin at the beginning. What causes the pain?”

“In clinical terms, it’s where tissue similar to that in my uterus finds its way into other parts of my pelvic area…well, it can go other places, but isn’t as likely to.”

“Che cosa?” he asked, sounding shocked.

“Did you have sex education in school?”

“Isole dei Re requires a certain amount of information imparted in its public school system during the final years before university.”

“And you went to public school?” she asked with interest, never having actually wondered on that point before.

She knew that his brother’s children attended a public school, but Diamante was a small island. She’d never asked if the princes had done the same thing in Lo Paradiso growing up.

“Sì. Of course. If it is good enough for our people, it is good enough for us.”

“That’s not the attitude of most of the world’s royalty.”

“We are unique,” he said, his voice loaded with arrogance.

“Definitely.”

“Enough of the school system, explain this tissue you mentioned.”

“Well, I was going to say, can you remember the pictures in sex ed or health class of the female reproductive system?”

“Sì. I am not so old my school days are a blur.”

“Good. Picture little dots of tissue on the outside of the fallopian tubes, or the ovaries…or lining the vaginal walls.”

The muscular thighs beneath her were rigid with tension. “You are saying you have growths in all these places?”

“Yes.”

He cursed.

She sighed. “It could be worse. I’m actually lucky.” But not as lucky as the women who did not have the added complication of infertility.

“You do not sound lucky. So these lesions cause pain?”

“They aren’t cuts…they’re growths, but they fill with blood during the menstrual cycle. There’s nowhere for it to go and that causes pain. Lots of pain,” she added for good measure.

“This pain…it makes it difficult to make love, no?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

“This is why you have been turning me down so much these past months?” he asked, his voice curiously neutral.

“Yes,” she said on a sigh.

“I do not understand why divorce. Surely you know that if you had told me about the pain, I would not have asked for sex.”

If only it were that simple. “Yes, I knew that.” But knowing it did not change the fact that without the sex she had little value to him.

He might have stayed married to her without the infertility issue, but he would not have been happy about it. She wondered if she had not blundered in her telling, though, if she would ever have known that. She had the sneaking suspicion that his anger had made him more honest than he ever would have been otherwise.

“So, why divorce?”

“My doctor said that between thirty and forty percent of the women who have endometriosis become infertile.”

He sucked in a charged breath and then let it out. “Which means that sixty to seventy percent do not.”

“I am not one of them.”

“What are you saying?”

“The doctor told me that there was almost no chance I could conceive without IVF and even then, there could be no guarantees.”

“But you were tested for infertility before our marriage.”