Public Wife, Private Mistress

She swallowed hard, her mind venturing back to a time she'd trained herself to forget.

He drew in a breath, reading her mind. "This reminds me of our honeymoon.'

She closed her eyes. 'No, Rico—'

She didn't want to go there. This wasn't about revis­iting the past. It was about healing Chiara and then moving on. And she had no doubt that this playful dis­play was entirely for Chiara's benefit.

'It's a long time since I saw you laugh like that.' His voice was rough and he lifted a hand and stroked her fiery hair away from her damp forehead. 'When I first met you. you never stopped laughing. You were always laughing. Usually at entirely the wrong moment. You were irrepressible.'

Breathlessly conscious of the heat of his body against hers, of his fingers in her hair, Stasia struggled to breathe. 'When I first met you, you laughed too. On our honeymoon, you laughed.'

And no one had been watching.

His hands slid up to cup her face. 'So what hap­pened?'

'Are you asking me when we stopped laughing?' She looked away from him, the pain so acute that it compromised her breathing. 'I suppose it was when we went back to Rome. You were working. I was working. We were both stressed—'

'If you hadn't insisted on working too then the stress would have been less—'

'Damn it, Rico!' She freed herself and glared at him. 'Don't let's start that again! I wanted to work. You knew that. Painting is part of who I am.'

'I never tried to stop you painting.'

'But you never encouraged me. You didn't want other people to enjoy my work. You didn't want me to have any sort of career.'

He frowned. 'You didn't need a career. As you your­self have just pointed out, our lives were very stressed. Your insistence on carrying on a full career merely added to that pressure.'

'So why did I have to make all the sacrifices? You were just thinking about yourself and what you needed. Well, what about what I needed? I needed a useful oc­cupation. I'm no good at sitting around looking deco­rative just in case you happen to come home for sex.'

He stiffened. 'That is not how it was.'

'That is exactly how it was. You married me, Rico. You knew the person I was. And yet for some reason the moment we were married you expected me to be­come someone else. You expected me to fit the mould of the perfect Italian wife.'

'I did not expect you to fit a mould. I gave you ev­erything you could possibly have wanted. I provided you with everything you needed. Your life should have been perfect.' He sucked in a breath. 'Our marriage should have been perfect.'

She stared at him with frustration. 'What I needed wasn't material things but you were so self-centred that you couldn't even see it.'

He shot her a look of pure male incomprehension. 'What is the point of landing yourself a billionaire if you then go out to work?'

'For an exceptionally bright guy you can be impos­sibly dense, do you know that?' She clenched her hands into fists to prevent herself from hitting him. 'I don't just work for the money, as you would know if you'd bothered to talk to me occasionally instead of just strip­ping me naked on each occasion we met.'

He was staring at her as if she'd actually thumped him instead of just imagining it and for once he seemed at a loss for words.

She glanced around her and gave a humourless laugh. 'Do you realize how ridiculous this is? We've never even discussed this properly before, and suddenly we're tackling the subject in the middle of the sea when it's all too late.' She glanced across the sand and saw Chiara stand up. 'She'll know we're arguing if we're not care­ful. We should get back.'

Without waiting for his reply, she waded out of the sea and sprinted across the sand towards his sister.

She didn't want to talk about this any longer. What was the point? They both knew that their marriage was long since over. And once Chiara recovered her mem­ory she and Rico would go their separate ways.

And if that thought just tortured her, well, she'd have to get

used to it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rico paced the length of his study, wrestling with feel­ings that he didn't want to acknowledge.

It was happening again.