Octavia pushing him away as she was doing, however, was the exact sort of chaos Primo had hoped to unleash.
“No one has ever accused me of so many dishonorable things,” he muttered. “But I am guilty of one thing only, Octavia, and that was trusting the wrong man.”
Her mouth twitched before she firmed it into a stubborn line. There was something else in her demeanor, however. Something bleak. “I thought he might be lying, but...” She searched his eyes with indecision clouding her own.
The air thickened as he instinctively sensed something worse coming.
“He said you only got me pregnant for the bonus my father offered you. That you didn’t care about how my pregnancy was going so long as Lorenzo delivered alive.”
“Porco cane,” he muttered, cursing his cousin while his mind exploded. “That is—” He had to move away and dig a hand into his hair. He clenched enough of a handful to hurt. Dio, at this rate his own security team would have to take him down if he was ever within five meters of his cousin. Otherwise he’d be jailed for first-degree murder.
“I was terrified for both of you,” he said, voice hoarse as he revisited those hours between being informed that she needed emergency surgery and arriving to hear they’d come through safely. “He deliberately played with me, leaving me hanging with partial information. It was a nightmare.”
She searched his expression and, just for a moment, he let the agony retake him. He let her see that he might not have been beside her, but he’d been with her.
But going to that place was dangerous. He couldn’t control his reaction to having been sent there by someone he had thought he could trust. He slammed the door on that torment and looked away.
“He wanted to hurt us and we can’t allow it. We can’t let him destroy our marriage, Octavia. We can’t let him win.”
She swallowed, face pulling into lines of torture, chin dipping to hide her crumple of composure. She pulled a tissue from the box on the table. A tear fell as she quickly tried to swipe beneath her eyes. Her misery was a tangible thing he could taste on his tongue. An empathic sting in his throat and constriction in his chest gripped him, making breathing difficult.
He had to go to her, offer the comfort he should have given her all along. He pulled her into his lap as he sat on the sofa and mio Dio he wanted to kiss her so badly—
She stiffened as he gathered her so he only pressed his mouth to her temple, subtly drinking in her scent and parting his lips enough to taste her skin. She trembled and curled her fingers into his shirt, face tucking into his neck where he could feel the dampness of her cheeks against his throat.
She shuddered once, catching back a sob.
He cradled her closer, tighter, hoping the pound of his heart reached her. That she understood he wished he’d been here.
The separation of the past months had distanced them. They’d already been practicing abstinence as a precaution against miscarriage. Alessandro had fallen into a routine of working late then working out, blood afire in his veins, body craving hers like an addict withdrawing from drugs.
He’d borne it because he’d had to. Staying in Naples had made it easier, physically. Maybe a part of him had even wanted to prove he could stay away. Had it been ego-driven? He could still hear Primo’s askance comment, “You’re going to fly all this way to cuddle her?”
Now he wished he had. She was tense in his lap, accepting the embrace, but only marginally.
Rejection squeezed him in a dank hold. He ran the flat of his hand in a reassuring circle against her back, coaxing her to relax. Coaxing her to remember they’d had something. She could trust him.
“I was so scared,” she whispered.
“I’m here now,” he said, trying not to crush her, but he was anxious to imprint her with his presence.
She sniffed and her hand slid up, curling around his neck. Her torso angled so her breasts became a soft, erotic pressure against his chest. Her plump bottom was a sweet weight that shifted against an organ swelling and aching with pressure.
He started to seek her lips, hand shifting to the side of her face, but his mother’s voice intruded from upstairs. She was looking for them. Dinner was ready.
“You need to eat,” Alessandro said, heart racing as he snapped himself from a lascivious mind-set and loosened his hold, gently helping Octavia find her feet as he rose.
She clung for balance. The tightness of her shaking grip and the small flinch that arrived as she stood told him how sore she was at her incision. She released him quickly, folding the edges of her jacket across her breasts and hugging herself. She seemed very young in that moment and he reminded himself that she wasn’t even twenty-four.