Marriage Made of Secrets

His gaze locked on hers, studying every movement like a predator tracking a doomed prey. ‘Now it’s your turn. You know I can’t give you the wholesome family you want. What are you prepared to settle for?’

The white-hot gaze slid down to linger on her lips. She knew exactly what that look meant, and yes, she could have settled for wild, untamed, skin-melting sex. But she knew it would never make her happy. ‘I’m not prepared to settle.’

Her heart thudded as he gathered himself together. His features hardened, closed off as completely as a solid steel door slamming in her face.

‘Then we have nothing left to talk about.’

Pain rushed like an icy river through her veins. Gasping in air, she lowered her head to hide the effect of his words. With numb detachment, she noticed her neckline was gaping, showing the full upper curve of her breasts. Hastily, she rearranged her dress, thankful her hair had loosened enough to cover the heat rushing into her face.

She sensed him coming closer. For a second she thought he would touch her, soothe away his harshly spoken words, but when she risked a glance she saw him veer towards the door.

Anger, gratefully received in place of fruitless hope, roiled through her. She surged to her feet and yanked her dress down.

‘Why?’

He didn’t turn around.

‘Tell me why you still wear your wedding ring but are condemning our marriage?’ She heard the strained bewilderment in her voice and would have given her eye teeth not to. ‘Is it...is it because you don’t love me any more?’

With one hand tensed on the doorknob, he turned. ‘Any more?’

‘Yes. Is that it?’

‘Ava, I desired you. I craved you with a need and desperation that bordered on the unholy. But I never claimed to love you.’

* * *

Ava lay in darkness, sleep a thousand miles away as Cesare’s words played an unrelenting refrain in her head. Words that had cut into her, devastated her so completely that she’d sunk into the sofa, incapable of speech.

Cesare, of course, had walked out after reminding her coolly of their call to Celine the next day. She’d clamped her lips together, begging whatever fates were within hearing distance to help her hold it together until he was out of earshot.

Then a long, hideous whimper had escaped her. The sound had reminded her of a wounded animal, alien and ugly, torn from the depths of her soul.

In that moment she’d hated herself. She’d always been weak when it came to Cesare. Minutes after meeting him, and agreeing to have a drink with him at a wine bar in London, she’d known in a deep, innate part of her being that he possessed the power to make her do things, feel things no other human being could. They’d never made it to the wine bar. He’d taken her to his country pad in Surrey and they’d ended up making love, right there on the bonnet of his car in the middle of his driveway. It had been the start of the most erotic, soul-shaking six weeks of her life.

Yes, he’d enthralled her from the very first look.

But the sex wasn’t why she’d fallen for Cesare. During those six weeks, he’d taken care of her, treated her as if she was the most important thing in his life. And for someone who’d always felt like an afterthought in her family, it’d been like being handed a little piece of heaven.

Ava turned over, punched her frustration into her pillow. For Cesare to deny the man he’d been before their marriage and Annabelle’s birth hurt her deeply. Because that man had been there—she hadn’t dreamed him. Or had she?

She sucked in a shaky breath. Cesare’s accusation that she was pushy, of foisting her dreams on him, cut through her muddled thoughts like deadly acid.

Falling pregnant with Annabelle so soon after meeting Cesare had merely accelerated the realisation of a lifelong desire, because nurturing a family she could call her own had always been her one and only dream. And when Cesare had proposed, she’d thought it’d been his dream too.

How wrong she’d been.

Because, she recalled, for a split second after she’d told him she was pregnant, Cesare had looked like a man who’d just glimpsed his worst nightmare.

‘But we were so careful. How could this have happened?’ he’d asked in shaken disbelief.

Since she’d asked herself that very same question, but with a burgeoning joy, she couldn’t have summoned an answer to save her life.

Ava threw back the covers and padded to the window. Moonlight gleamed off the courtyard flagstones—the same flagstones she’d stood on when Cesare had proposed.