‘He bullied you into marrying me,’ she murmured, her eyes locking on the view beyond the window. She had to focus on this conversation or she’d fall apart.
A muscle jerked in Pietro’s cheek at her characterisation of their marriage. ‘He asked me to help him.’
She pulled a face. ‘To help him manage me? God! This was meant to be my decision. My first step to freedom.’
There was a throb of anxious silence, and if Emmeline had lifted her eyes to Pietro’s face she would have seen the aching sympathy there. But she couldn’t look at him. His face was now inextricably linked with betrayal.
‘He was worried about how you’d cope. He didn’t want you to see him unwell.’
Emmeline stared out of the window, the lump in her throat growing bigger by the minute. Was he in pain? Was the housekeeper Miss Mavis looking after him? Was he scared? Tears filled her eyes and she didn’t bother to blink them away.
‘I didn’t agree with his decision, but I had to honour it.’
She whipped her head around, barely able to see him through the fog of her grief. ‘Don’t say that. You can’t have it both ways! If you didn’t agree with his decision then you should have told me.’
‘I wanted to tell you.’ A frown was etched across his face. ‘I’d decided I would tell you one day, when the time was right.’
Her laugh was a harsh sound of fury. ‘You just said he has months, maybe weeks, to live. What were you waiting for?’
‘Excuse me, signor? Signora?’ An attendant practically tiptoed down the centre of the plane, her expression professional. ‘We’re ready for take-off. Can I get you anything to eat? Drink?’
‘No,’ he snapped curtly.
‘Yes. Scotch. Neat,’ Emmeline demanded. ‘And some aspirin.’
‘Yes, signora.’
Pietro leaned forward and put a hand on her knee once privacy had been restored. ‘This changes niente—nothing about what we are.’
‘Like hell it does!’ Her disbelief was a force-field of shock. ‘You have been lying to me this whole time. This whole time.’ She sat back in her seat, all the fight in her evaporating as quickly as it had appeared.
When the attendant appeared with her drink she threw it back, then lifted the aspirin.
‘Don’t take those,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve just had a ton of alcohol...’
She glared at him angrily and tossed the pills into her mouth. ‘Go to hell.’
* * *
She woke somewhere off the coast of the States. Her head was pounding, her eyes were scratchy and there was a heaviness in her heart that didn’t initially make sense. She was disorientated and confused.
She blinked her eyes open and looked forward.
Straight into the brooding stare of her husband.
The smile that was always so quick to come to her lips when she saw him did not come.
Sadness and grief sludged through her instead, and then it all came rushing back. The lie. The secrecy. The betrayal. Her father’s cancer.
The fact that he was going to die.
And she hadn’t been with him.
Instead she’d been living in Italy, believing everything was amazing, pretending she was normal, truly thinking herself to be happy.
‘You told me I could trust you,’ she said, so quietly he had to strain to hear the words. ‘Do you remember?’
‘Si.’
‘You were talking about Bianca and the other women. But I took it to mean you were generally trustworthy.’
‘Your father trusted me,’ he said softly, darkly, the words slicing through her resolve.
The betrayal—by both the men she loved—cut her to the quick.
‘I can’t believe he told you and not me. How dare he? How dare you?’
‘He was concerned that you would be very vulnerable when he is no longer with us. You will inherit an enormous fortune, and he felt you hadn’t had the experience necessary to remain safe from less desirable elements. He wanted to know you were protected. Is that so awful?’
‘Yes!’ she spat angrily. ‘He was afraid of wild dogs and so he sent me to live with a wolf.’
Pietro’s eyes flashed with suppressed frustration.
‘Don’t you get it? I will never believe anything you say again. You begged me to trust you and I did. Apparently I was just as naïve and stupid as Daddy thought.’
She glared out of the window, her heart thumping hard when land appeared below. She was back in her country—or the airspace above it, at least—and she never planned to leave it again.
She was home. At least, that was what she told herself.
* * *
‘Oh, sugar.’ Miss Mavis pulled the door inwards, her face lined with tears. Her middle was comfortingly round and she pulled Emmeline against her, holding her tight. ‘I’m so sorry.’