“Just go, okay? I’ll stay alone in your wretched house hosting pity parties for myself the way I’ve been doing for months and you can go live your life of righteous double standards.” She wiped angry fingers under her wet eyes before yanking up the handle of her bag, bouncing and rattling its wheels over the stones toward the front door.#p#????#e#
Over her shoulder, she continued acridly, “Go sleep with your future wife and conveniently forget to mention you have a baby on the way with another woman. I’m glad you don’t believe me. I hate all of you, the way you stick together and act like your sexual needs are more important than our hearts. No, you’re not invited in.”
She barred the door when he tried to come in. Pointing to the stoop, she only let him set down her remaining bags then dragged them inside to thump into a pile around her ankles.
“Let me carry them up the stairs for you,” he cajoled.
“I’ll manage.” Standing in the crack of the door so only half of her was visible, she let him glimpse the hollow point in one smudged copper eye. She was devastated, but what was worse was the flatness. Until this moment, he’d always seen a certain reliance and confidence in her eyes when she looked at him. As though she knew she could count on him. Now there was only dejection and betrayal.
“The keys are with the car. Goodbye, Paolo. This time I mean it.”
She closed the door and he heard the electronic lock hum into place.
He lifted his finger to hover it over the keypad, determined to go inside and explain—What? How could he defend himself, or Ryan for that matter? His ex-wife had lied to him. He knew what betrayal felt like. It didn’t just undermine your belief in everything you’d been raised to see as inviolable, it crushed your ego. At least he had heard it from his spouse.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, hating himself.
Walk away, part of him urged. Let it go. Let her go.
Why in hell had Ryan done it? No man in his right mind would cheat on her. She was...
He rubbed the back of his neck, refusing to let himself dwell on exquisite memories of lips supple as rose petals, nipples so turgid and aroused he could hardly stop sucking on them, a wet pocket of heat so sensitive she’d climaxed the first time he’d pressed his finger inside her.
Breathing hard, he made himself return to the car when everything in him was screaming to go inside and take.
Who was he kidding? She’d claw his eyes out. And wasn’t it painfully funny how the thought of fighting past her defenses to the passionate woman beneath made the blood in his arteries sting with the urge to battle through and conquer.
This was the problem. His primitive self, so unpredictable and given to self-destruction, wanted things that were no good for anyone.
He drove back to Milan in a state of unrest, trying to convince himself it was for the best that she hated him. Maybe Ryan had been a cheat, but it didn’t make sleeping with the man’s wife okay. It didn’t mean Lauren was telling the truth about the baby.
Wallowing in his foul mood, he cursed passionately over tiny inconveniences like his shirt bringing the hanger with it as he pulled it off the rung. His cuff buttons refused to release and then, as he finally removed the shirt he was wearing, Lauren’s mobile phone dropped out of his shirt pocket onto the carpet. He stared at it for a long moment, striving for control, then eventually swore tiredly.
Searching out the number for the villa, he called her. It rang four times before she answered cautiously, “Buenasera.”
“It’s me. I have your mobile. I’ll bring it out tomorrow,” he told her.
Nothing.
“Lauren?”
She swallowed audibly and said a strained, “I’m sleeping,” then hung up on him.
She wasn’t sleeping. She was crying. Damn you, Ryan.
Damn himself. He shouldn’t have left her like that, but the last time he’d tried to comfort her—
Dio! What an untenable situation. Why hadn’t he said something to Ryan at least? Chastised him?#p#????#e#
Because he hadn’t seen Ryan more than three or four times since that night. Occasionally he had received an email reading something like, Hey Buddy, I have a layover in Amsterdam. Come by for a beer? It was even more seldom that Paolo had been able to make it.
When they had sat down, it had been a rehash of glory days and whatever chances Ryan was taking on his missions and ruthless ribbing about how staid and responsible Paolo had become. They were both well past the age when they bragged about women, so the topic was avoided. Still, all the wild talk out of Ryan had often left Paolo wondering when his friend would grow up.