Unfortunate?
The blurring in her brain cleared. Everything that had softened, hardened again. ‘At least you’re agreeing you made a bad decision,’ she said shakily. ‘I suppose that’s a start.’
He eyed her with extreme caution, as if she were a bomb he didn’t quite know how to defuse. ‘If I’d known how upset you were going to be, then obviously I would have chosen differently, but the negotiations on the Caribbean deal were at an extremely delicate stage.’
Delicate? Laurel thought of herself, alone in the hospital bed, being told the news. He had no idea, she thought numbly. No idea what she’d been through and she hadn’t even bothered telling him because it had been irrelevant. ‘So you’re saying that it was only a bad decision because of my reaction. If I’d been a tolerant Sicilian wife then prioritising your work over everything else would have been acceptable.’
‘That hotel has been our most successful. Had I not shown up that day we would have lost the bid.’
‘So what you’re actually saying is that the business was more important than me and you don’t actually regret it because it’s making you a nice profit.’
‘Once again you are twisting everything I say!’
‘Nothing is twisted. Everything is straight in my head.’
‘It is done, now. Finished. I don’t see the point in looking back.’
‘Well, it’s nice to know you’re not beating yourself up over it,’ Laurel said stiffly. ‘I’d hate to think your guilty conscience was keeping you awake at night.’
His eyes glinted. ‘I’m just saying that it is a useless waste of energy to dwell on the past. It can never be changed.’
‘True, but it can be used as a useful indicator of how to behave in the future. It’s called learning from mistakes. Something you’re not so good at, presumably because your ego blocks the view.’ Galvanised into action by his total lack of self-awareness, Laurel jumped out of bed and stumbled over to her suitcase, which lay abandoned on the floor.
Shocked and horrified by how close she’d come to allowing herself to be seduced right back to where they’d come from, she yanked at the zip, aware that he was watching her with incredulity.
‘What the hell are you doing now?’
‘Getting out of here. It’s what I was trying to do before you barged through that door and used sex as a weapon.’
‘I did not use sex as a weapon.’ His jaw hardened and his eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. ‘Unless you count using it to try and crack that tough outer shell of yours.’
‘I have that tough outer shell to protect myself from people like you.’
‘I loved you. I still love you.’ His voice thickened as he exposed his soul. ‘I made the ultimate commitment, but apparently that meant nothing to you. And still means nothing to you.’
‘You never loved me, Cristiano. You loved the challenge, the chase—’ She flung open the case. ‘Maybe you loved the fact I was the only woman who didn’t stare when you walked past, that I wasn’t impressed by the money and the status. I don’t know—but I do know it wasn’t love. The only thing you love is your work. That comes first for you. Nothing turns you on like winning a deal.’
His jaw was rigid. ‘I loved you. But you were afraid of that. Your problem is that you can’t let yourself need someone.’
‘And that drives you mad, doesn’t it? You can’t have a relationship with someone who doesn’t need you. You don’t want an equal, you want a dependent because it makes you feel big and macho.’ They were fighting and both of them knew that the reason the emotion was so agonisingly raw was because they cared so much. ‘You made me need you. You pushed and you pushed until you made holes in the armour I’ve spent all my life creating and then you walked off and left me exposed and I hate you for that.’ She tugged a T-shirt out of the case.
‘Then why didn’t you tell me instead of just walking out? That was cowardly.’
‘It was survival.’
‘I arrived home after that trip, ready to offer you support and you sat there in silence. You said virtually nothing except, “I’m leaving you.”‘
She’d had no words to communicate what she’d been feeling. She’d been swallowed up by emotions so huge and terrifying that she’d barely been able to function.
‘There was nothing to say.’ Laurel was pulling on her clothes. Not the silky bridesmaid dress that still lay abandoned where he’d dropped it so carelessly, but the skinny jeans she’d jammed into her suitcase moments before he’d crashed his way into the room. ‘This conversation is over. My flight leaves in an hour.’