‘Even if we hadn’t just proved that we can’t be apart for that length of time, there is no way I’d be giving you a divorce now.’ His voice was like steel and she was suddenly aware of her heart hammering against her chest.
‘There’s no one you can’t influence. You could arrange it if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Yes, you do! You hate me for leaving you.’ Desperately she tried to stoke his anger but he was maddeningly cool.
‘And you hate me for going into one more meeting when I should have flown home to be with you. We both made mistakes. Being married is about fixing them and moving forwards. That’s what we’re doing.’
He was so smug, she thought desperately as she zipped the suitcase shut and grabbed the handle. So arrogantly sure that all he had to do was snap his fingers and whatever he wanted to happen would happen. So confident that he could wipe away the past.
‘You think we can move forward, but you have no idea what happened on that day.’ She was shaking with the stress of thinking about it. ‘You don’t know how I felt.’
His icy exterior splintered. ‘So tell me how you felt. Tell me now. Don’t hold anything back.’
The suitcase landed on the floor with a dull thump. ‘It started with a pain, low in my stomach.’ Her voice was remarkably steady given the fact that this was the conversation she’d thought she’d never have. ‘I thought to myself, This isn’t right. I called you, but your PA told me that you couldn’t be disturbed.’
His jaw tightened, like a fighter bracing himself for a punch. Clearly these weren’t the feelings he wanted to hear.
‘Laurel—’
‘I don’t hold that against you.’ She didn’t give him time to speak. It was her turn now and she intended to use it. ‘The first message didn’t get through but that was her fault, not yours. And my fault for not being more forceful about needing to speak to you. I called the doctor and he told me to take painkillers and go back to bed and rest for a while, so I did that and the pain grew worse. I knew no one else in Sicily. Your mother was staying with her sister in Rome, Santo was with you in the Caribbean. I was alone. And frightened.’ Her emphasis on that word triggered an indefinable change in him. ‘I called you again. This time I was forceful. I insisted on speaking to you and she put me through—’ Her heart rate doubled and she was back in that room; back with the pain and the panic. She remembered again the terrifying sense of isolation. ‘You asked me if I was bleeding and when I said I wasn?
??t you spoke to the doctor and between you, you decided that I was a neurotic woman.’
‘That is not true. At no point did I accuse you of neuroses.’ He sprang to his own defence but Laurel wasn’t in the mood to listen.
‘You were always labouring the fact that I found it hard to tell you how I was feeling. “Trust me,” you said in that same seductive voice you always use when you’re determined to get your own way. So I did. On that day, I put all my trust in you. I told you I thought something was badly wrong and that I didn’t trust the doctor. I told you I was scared. That’s the first and only time I’ve admitted that to anyone. For the first time in our relationship I put my trust in you and your response to that enormous risk on my part was to dismiss my concerns as less valid than the doctor’s and return to your meeting. With your phone switched off.’
She saw the exact moment he recognised the impact of that decision.
His breathing turned shallow. His bronzed handsome face lost some of its colour. ‘It was a particularly bad moment—’
‘It was a particularly bad moment for me, too.’ This time she wasn’t letting him off the hook. ‘When you said, “I have to go now, but I’ll call you later. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” how did you think I’d feel?’
‘I was trying to reassure you.’
‘No, you were trying to reassure yourself. You needed to convince yourself I’d be fine in order to justify staying there and not immediately flying home. You made the judgement that I was overreacting. You didn’t once think about the fact I had never asked you for anything before. You didn’t think of me at all, so don’t talk to me about love. Even if I hadn’t lost the baby, the fact that I’d asked for your help when I’d never, ever called you at work before should have been enough.’ The words poured out of her along with her feelings and there was nothing she could do to stop it now because her control had been swept away by the violent force of her emotions. ‘You say that I killed our marriage by walking out but it was your empty, useless verbal pat on the head that did that. It was the first time in my life I’d asked another human being for help. And you dismissed me. And because I was panicking, because I couldn’t actually believe that you’d done that, I phoned you one more time, only to discover that you’d turned your phone off.’
He stood immobile, as if every shot she’d fired had gone straight into his brain. ‘You didn’t tell me that you felt that way.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now. And do you know the worst thing?’ It had been hard to open up but now that she had, the hard part was stopping. ‘Because I had allowed myself to trust you, depend on you, for one horrible minute I actually thought that I couldn’t handle the situation without your help. I actually had to remind myself that before you came along and insisted on being the macho protector, I did perfectly well by myself. Once I’d reminded myself of that fact, I calmed down and took myself to hospital.’ She emphasized the word ‘myself’ but it was the word ‘hospital’ that drew his attention and had his brows meeting in a deep frown.
‘You went to the hospital? Why was that necessary?’
‘Because neither my doctor nor my husband believed anything was wrong. Fortunately I knew differently.’ She watched the tension spread across those wide, powerful shoulders.
Standing there naked, he should have looked vulnerable but Cristiano didn’t know how to look vulnerable. Even in this most sensitive of situations, he was the one in command.
‘I had no idea you went to hospital. You should have told me.’
‘When? When was I supposed to tell you? I tried telling you but you had switched your phone off to avoid the inconvenience of talking to your neurotic wife. By the time you finally fitted me into your demanding schedule, I’d coped with it by myself. There was no point in telling you.’
‘Now you’re being childish.’
The accusation robbed her of breath. ‘I asked for your help, you didn’t give it. I told you I was scared, you didn’t come. Did you really think I was going to carry on begging for attention? I did what I’ve always done. I sorted it. That isn’t childish, Cristiano. It’s adult behaviour.’
‘Adults don’t walk away from a difficult situation.’ A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘Even given the difficult circumstances, there was no excuse for sulking.’