The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain
She had shown the temerity to reorganize her schedule for something she felt was important and he had gone ballistic. Not only that, he just assumed that her reasons for saying they needed to divorce had to be spurious and selfish ones. Why? She had given him everything she had to give as his wife, even if he had not realized it. When had she ever made any choice related to him out of selfishness? Even her decision to marry him had been made with the knowledge that she could be the kind of wife he wanted.
She had loved him, but she would not have married him knowing he did not love her if she had believed she would not be the right kind of wife for him. Looking back at how much she had agonized over what was best for him and how little time she had spent worrying on her own behalf, she wondered if she was some kind of masochist or a real idiot, or both.
But then she’d spent her whole life trying to please other people. First her parents, each of whom had a different agenda for her life. She’d fulfilled her mother’s because it had seemed the only one she had a chance at succeeding at.
Mother had said time and again that Therese’s beauty and poise were her greatest assets, that she was to play those assets carefully. That had been easy to do. The physical beauty was a gift of Providence and the poise was something that no diplomat’s daughter could survive her school years without.
Those attributes had won Claudio’s attention, but even her perfect manners and political savvy added in had not been enough to sway him toward the marriage vote. He’d wanted to be sure she would not disappoint him in bed and had tested her on that score.
She remembered Maggie saying Tomasso had done the same thing. Not in those exact words, of course, but she’d known what the other woman meant. After all, Therese knew these Scorsolini men. She’d been shocked by Tomasso’s behavior only because it had been so obvious to her from the beginning that he really cared about Maggie.
He loved her and no one in the family could doubt that fact. Not now. Not ever, in her opinion.
But Claudio did not and had not loved Therese when he had been courting her with an eye for marriage. He’d kissed her and touched her with searing passion, evoking a response that she had learned to accept, but which had at first shocked and terrified her. To be so at mercy to her body’s desires had gone against her need for control and the way she had been raised to suppress any deep emotion.
Truthfully she would probably never have allowed her love for Claudio to bloom fully if he had not evoked her latent sensuality. It had broken through her every emotional barrier and laid her heart bare to his influence.
Now she would pay the price for her weakness.
Vulnerability always came with a cost. Hadn’t her father told her that time and again, and her mother…though in different words? Yet, she’d been powerless to stop herself falling in love with the prince who had a heart made of stone.
The cost of that love was her own shattered heart.
Learning of King Vincente’s illness had added another level of pain to the maelstrom of hurt inside of her. She loved her father-in-law in a way she’d never been free to care for her own father. But then King Vincente had accepted her as her father had not. He admired her feminine strength and told her so. He enjoyed her company and told her that as well.
He commented on his son’s dedication to duty in less than complimentary ways when he thought she was being neglected. He had been her ally for three years and if she lost him to death, it would tear her apart. It would also mean her husband’s need for an heir would be even greater.
Claudio had said the older man was stable, but she knew how unpredictable a heart condition could be. And no one had even known that King Vincente had suffered from one. As unfair as she’d felt Claudio’s accusations about her behavior had been, if she had known her father-in-law’s health was at risk, she would have waited for her husband’s return from New York to talk about their marriage.
Because she cared too much for King Vincente, who was a better father to her than her blood relative to have ever allowed for the possibility that he might end up alone in a hospital room worried for his life.
Her own fears in that regard were enough to make her heart quake. On top of that, she was still reeling from the way Claudio had smashed her every hope that she meant anything more to him than a body in his bed and a political sidekick of the necessary sex.
She honestly did not think she could stand an ongoing war of silent hostility with her husband in addition to everything else. Though once she explained about her endometriosis at least that would end. He might be bitterly disappointed. He might even see her as a complete feminine failure, as she did herself, but he would no longer be furious with her.