He snatched up his jacket from the back of the dressing-table chair. ‘Leave your psychoanalysis for someone who gives a damn. You don’t know me as well as you think.’
‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘That’s why we were doomed from the start. You don’t want anyone to get close to you. I can’t be in a relationship like that. I want emotional honesty.’ I want you to love me.
‘Oh, and you’re the big expert on emotional honesty, aren’t you, Alice?’ His eyes blazed with bitterness. ‘You think I’m going to believe you’re suddenly madly in love with me? A few days ago you wanted to gouge my eyes out. What you’re doing is manipulating. Trying to get your future sorted by issuing me with an ultimatum. How about a bit of intellectual honesty, hey? Let’s try that instead. I can’t give you what you want. Simple as that. Take it or leave it.’
‘I don’t hate you. I never hated you.’
He gave a snort. ‘Yeah, well, guess what? I don’t give a damn either way.’
Alice winced when the bedroom door snapped shut on his exit. She listened to the tread of his footsteps as he left her house, her breath stalling in the hope he would stop and turn back. Come back up the stairs and swing open her bedroom door and say he was sorry. That he would sweep her into his arms and say of course he loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
But the only thing she got was silence.
* * *
Cristiano had never felt so flooded with such confusing emotions. Anger. Disappointment. Bitterness. Anger again. A hot cauldron of bubbling feelings was threatening to explode out of his chest. He had to stop to lean over and place his hands on his knees to get control of his breath. In. Out. In. Out. How could she do this to him? Now?
Two weeks.
Two miserable weeks and his shares and the villa would have been secure.
Why? Why? Why?
He’d thought they were fine. He’d thought everything was ticking along just as he’d wanted it. But just like seven years ago she had blindsided him. His guard had been down. He was so thrown by her being taken to hospital he hadn’t seen what was right in front of him. That sexy little crawl over his chest to make him feel secure and then wham! She wanted to control him. Manipulate him into doing things her way.
No way was he going to be her puppet. He’d told her the terms. He’d been honest about what he was prepared to give. She was the one shifting the goalposts.
Just like you did in the past, dropping that proposal on her.
Cristiano swatted away the thought as if it were an annoying fly. So? He’d shifted them right on back. A short-term marriage was all he was prepared to have. And even that was a stretch. He didn’t want the responsibility of maintaining a long-term relationship. He didn’t want the emotional honesty such a relationship demanded.
If he opened up the vault of his heart then that would undo all the work he’d put in since he was that boy of eleven hearing his parents and brother were never coming back. He could not allow himself to be that vulnerable. Not again. Look at what last night had done to him. Rushing into that hospital to see Alice had thrown him into a chest-seizing panic. He’d lain awake most of the night with residual dread still chugging through his veins like jagged cubes of ice. He hadn’t trusted her confession of love last night. If she’d loved him way back then, why had she walked out and never looked back?
You did the same to her.
Cristiano didn’t want to be reminded of how badly he’d handled things in the past. It was better this way. He couldn’t give her what she wanted. He wasn’t that person any more. Maybe he’d never been that person. He was too damaged by the loss of his family. He kept people at a distance. He controlled them because it was the only way he could harness the fear. The fear that clawed at him. The fear that reminded him with sharp little jabs of how easily he could lose the ones he dared to love. It was easier not to love. To not even think about the word. To pretend his feelings were something else. Lust, attraction, mild affection.
Anything but love.
* * *
By the time Alice got to work she had another headache. But the pain in her head was nothing to the pain in her heart. Cristiano had summed up his feelings about her. He didn’t give a damn either way. He could take her or leave her. He had chosen to leave her.
‘Hey, where’s your engagement ring?’ Meghan asked when she came in for the day. ‘My first client wants to see it. She read about you and Cristiano on...’ She frowned. ‘Is something wrong?’
Alice blinked away the moisture in her eyes. ‘Cristiano and I are not getting married after all. We’ve broken—’
‘Not getting married?’ Meghan gasped. ‘Why the hell not? You two are the most in love couple I’ve ever seen. The air crackles like a power station when you guys are in the same room.’
Alice pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling. ‘He doesn’t love me. He’s...oh, it’s too complicated to explain.’
‘What do you mean he doesn’t love you?’ Meghan’s eyes were slit-thin with incredulity. ‘You should’ve seen him when he came here yesterday and found out you were in hospital. I thought he was going to pass out on the spot. He was as white as our deluxe collagen face mask.’
Alice wished it were true. Wished he loved her. But if he loved her he wouldn’t be baulking at commitment. That was what love was all about. Commitment. Trust. A future, not a time line.
‘He doesn’t want what I want. He doesn’t want kids.’
Meghan’s face fell. ‘Oh...well then, that’s a deal-breaker.’ But then she brightened again. ‘But maybe he’ll change his mind. Lots of men do. They come round to it eventually, when they—’