Claiming My Bride of Convenience

And in return he’d broken her.

The worst of it was he had no idea. For all his high intelligence, her husband had the emotional depth of an earthworm. She’d just been too blind to see it.

She closed her eyes and took three long inhalations.

There was no point in driving herself crazy with her thoughts. She had loved him once and while echoes of that love still beat in her heart they weren’t real. She didn’t love him any more. She was only there to honour the promise she’d made to him the day he’d let her go without a solitary word of fight to make her stay.

He’d wanted her gone. He’d been relieved. She’d seen it in his eyes.

Three more deep breaths and she got back to her feet and flushed the unused toilet.

She was Livia Briatore, formerly Livia Esposito, daughter of Pietro Esposito, Don Fortunato’s most trusted clan member and henchman until her father’s gangland murder when she’d been only eight. She’d been raised in the Secondigliano surrounded by drugs and brutal violence and she’d learned from an early age to show no fear. To show nothing.

Escaping Naples to study nursing in Rome had been like learning to breathe. Dropping her guard had not been easy—constantly checking over her shoulder when she walked a street was a habit it had taken many years to break—but she had forged a new life for herself and the joy it had given her had been worth the anxiety that had gnawed at her to be separated from her siblings. Life had gone from being a constant knot in her belly to being an adventure. She’d learned to laugh. With Massimo she had learned to love.

But her old protective barrier had never fully gone. It had sat patiently inside her waiting to be slipped back on.

To get through the next four days she needed that barrier. She needed to keep her guard up, not as protection against Massimo but as protection against her own foolish heart.

She took her seat and was not surprised to find Massimo working again on his laptop.

This time he raised his eyes from the screen to look at her. ‘I’ve ordered us coffee. Did you want anything to eat?’

‘I’ve eaten,’ she answered with strained politeness, not adding that all she’d eaten that day had been half a slice of toast. Her stomach had been too tight and cramped to manage anything else. The countdown to seeing Massimo again had wrecked the little equilibrium she’d regained for herself.

It was hardly surprising that there was an awkwardness between them but they had a long flight ahead and she didn’t want to spend it in uncomfortable silence. ‘How have you been?’

He pulled a face and turned his attention back to his laptop. ‘Busy.’

She dug her fake nails into her thighs. How she hated that word. It was the word he’d always used to justify never being there. ‘Are you too busy to stop working for five minutes and talk?’

‘I have data to interpret and an analysis to send.’

Two years ago he would have explained both the data and analysis to her, assuming rightly that she would find it interesting. The truth was she had found everything about Massimo interesting. Enthralling. The workings of his brain had never failed to astonish her. How could they not? This was the man who’d used his downtime from his computer engineering degree to create a web-based platform game that had taken the world by storm and which he’d sold upon his graduation for two hundred million US dollars. That money had been the linchpin for his move to America, where he’d formed his company, Briatore Technologies, whilst simultaneously studying for a PhD in energy physics, followed by a second PhD in applied physics and material sciences. His company, of which he was still the sole owner, now employed thousands worldwide, creating environmentally friendly solutions for many of the world’s greatest carbon-related threats. He was on a one-man mission to save the planet one invention at a time. That he’d earned himself a fortune in the process was almost incidental. Only a month ago he’d been named in the top thirty of the world’s most powerful people and in the top fifty of the world’s richest.

It would have been so easy for him to make her feel stupid but he never had. Anything she didn’t understand—which when it came to his work was most things—he would explain patiently but never patronisingly, his face lighting up when she grasped the finer details of something, like how a lithium ion battery worked and what carbon capture meant on a practical level.

She had been so thrilled that this man, clever, rich, successful and with a face and body to make the gods envious, had been as seemingly enthralled with her as she had been with him that she’d been blind to his emotional failings. Once the first flush of lust had worn off he’d retreated into the all-consuming world he’d created for himself, hiding himself away from the woman he’d married.

She wished she knew what she’d done to make him back away from her but every time she’d tried to get him to open up, the further into his shell he’d retreated.

The silence, filled intermittently by the sounds of Massimo tapping on the laptop’s keyboard, grew more oppressive.

She watched him work. The familiar furrow of concentration was etched on his brow. How could he tune her out so effectively?

But as she watched him she noticed subtle changes. Flecks of white around the temples of his thick black hair that had never been there before. The full beard, as if he’d given up the bother of shaving altogether. Dark rings around his eyes as if he’d given up sleep along with shaving. Not that he had ever slept much. His brain was too busy for sleep.

Livia swallowed back the pang that had crept through her. Massimo was thirty-six years old; old enough to not look after himself if that was what he wanted.

He reached absently for the strong black coffee on the desk beside his laptop and took a large sip. His attention did not stray from the screen before him. He tapped something else onto the keyboard. The sound was akin to nails being dragged down a chalkboard.

Suddenly she could bear it no more. Jumping back to her feet, she took the three steps to him and slammed his laptop lid down.