Gianni reached out for her and pulled her into his arms, refusing to be held at bay by her resistance. ‘Don’t tear us apart with this,’ he said unevenly. ‘I made some mistakes. OK, I made a bloody huge mistake, but the minute I found out that you’d left Paris, I began looking for you.’
Milly was mutinous, unreachable. ‘Because you had your child as an excuse. If it hadn’t been for Connor, I’d still be out there, lost!’
‘You’re getting very worked up about this. You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Gianni told her with stubborn conviction. ‘OK, I didn’t behave the way I should have after that business with Stefano, but once I came to terms with that—’
‘Can’t you even admit that you were hurt, like anybody else would?’ Milly demanded emotionally, watching his devastatingly handsome features freeze and aching at the knowledge that he still wouldn’t lower his barriers and let her in. ‘Or did you stick me in a little compartment and just close the lid? Did you even manage to deal with it at all?’
Gianni’s lean hands slid from her with a pronounced jerk. ‘I’m going out for a while.’
‘No, you are not! You walk out of this house now and you’ll find barricades up when you try to walk back!’ Milly warned him furiously.
‘You are really angry with me right now. I have got nothing to say in my own defence,’ Gianni spelt out thickly, rigid as a block of wood facing a very hungry bonfire. ‘You haven’t even given me the chance to apologise for misjudging you!’
‘I don’t want an apology. I accept that it looked bad for me that night. I accept that you were already jealous and so that much more likely to misinterpret what you saw. I even accept that Stefano is a convincing liar, and that you trusted him more than you could trust me.’
Gianni elevated an ebony brow with the kind of attitude that made her want to strangle him, stunning dark eyes coolly enquiring. ‘So what can’t you accept?’
‘An emotional vacuum when we could have so much more!’ she responded tautly.
‘Enough is never enough for you, is it?’
‘I’m not playing our marriage by your rules any more. Once I took all the risks, once I was the one who always went out on a limb…now it’s your turn. I think I might enjoy seeing how good you are at expressing anything without sex.’
‘Probably pretty hopeless,’ Gianni admitted, disconcerting her. ‘You want to humiliate me to pay me back for not believing in you three years ago.’
‘Gianni…do you really think I’d do that to you?’
Gianni swung on his heel and strode out of the room. Milly emitted a strangled sob, suddenly wondering where all those crazy demands had come from and whether there was a certain unlovely grain of truth in his contention that she was trying to extract revenge.
She rubbed her eyes, knew she was smearing mascara everywhere, and finally she went off in search of Connor to console herself. But Gianni had got there first. He was in the playroom, sitting on the carpet in front of their son.
‘Does she ask you how you’re feeling all the time?’ Gianni was asking broodingly while he set out Connor’s toy train set. ‘Does she want to know your every thought too?’
Connor gave him a winsome smile. ‘Biscuit??
? he said hopefully.
‘Yes, I suspect that when you share your thoughts with Mamma it works very much to your advantage. Instant wish-fulfilment,’ Gianni breathed reflectively. ‘Do you think it could work that way for me?’
Milly reeled back against the wall outside the room and struggled to contain her laughter. But they looked so sweet together. Gianni chatting away, Connor giving up on the biscuit idea and getting down to play trains with all the accompanying choo-choo noises.
An hour later, Gianni walked into their bedroom. Fresh out of the shower, wrapped only in a towel, Milly fell still. Gianni sent her a disturbingly wolfish grin, exuding confidence in megawaves. ‘Right, what do you want me to start talking about?’
‘Us?’ she practically whispered.
Gianni breathed in deep.
The silence was thunderous.
Milly couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Why did you keep the house in Paris?’
‘If you had ever decided to come back, you had to have somewhere to come back to,’ Gianni pointed out levelly.
‘But in all this time you hadn’t changed anything at all!’
Gianni shrugged. ‘Yes, I kept it like a shrine.’
Milly was poleaxed.