Once a Ferrara Wife...

He went utterly still. ‘Do you have any idea what my life was like after you left?’

‘Awkward. I expect a lot of people told you I was a heartless woman and you were well shot of me.’

The flash in his eyes told her how close to the mark she was with that comment and it hurt. He saw the hurt because he was looking for it. ‘I’ve never been interested in other people’s opinions.’

‘I imagined you slowly working your way through layers deep of admirers.’

‘You imagined?’ His hand slid into her hair, his jaw tight as he scanned her tense features. ‘That imagination of yours needs retraining. After you left, the only relationship I had was with the business, apart from the occasional flirtation with the whisky bottle. Reality was me working an eighteen-hour day in the hope that when I eventually fell into bed I’d be too tired to think about you.’ That frank admission made her heart lift.

He’d missed her.

‘Did it work?’

‘No. But we had two record years.’ His eyes gleamed dark with self-mockery. ‘Company profits have trebled.’ ‘So—’

‘No, I didn’t.’ His voice harsh, he slid his hand under her bottom. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘Even anger and pain doesn’t kill love, apparently. I was so angry that you’d walked out on our marriage I didn’t go any deeper than that. If I had, we might have reached this point sooner.’ This point was his hands and mouth claiming her, driving her wild until she forgot everything except the magic they created together.

In the aftermath of another sexual explosion, she lay still, her cheek against his chest, her hair spread over the pillow.

This, she thought, was the part they’d been good at.

The part they hadn’t been so good at was the rest of it.

And the responsibility for that didn’t all rest with him, she acknowledged. She’d been at fault too. She’d guarded herself. She’d been afraid to let him in. She hadn’t even considered such a thing as second chances.

Had she been unfair?

And what about now?

She knew that he was waiting for her to say, I love you. And she couldn’t. She just wasn’t ready.

The past hung between them, an obstacle to everything, including her ability to confide and his ability to understand her.

‘It wasn’t all your fault.’ Her cheek was against his shoulder, her hand resting low on his stomach. ‘I expect people to let me down so it’s better not to trust them in the first place.’

‘I did let you down.’

‘But I gave you one chance.’ The thought that she’d been too harsh knocked the breath from her lungs but his arms tightened as if he sensed her confusion.

‘You were protecting yourself. I understand that. You’ve been let down so badly in the past and I let you down again.’

The sting of guilt about her own part in their break up made her speak. ‘I’ve been there before. I’ve felt the excitement, the hope—that warm feeling of belonging that comes when you think someone wants you to be with them. And when that went wrong, when I wasn’t what they wanted me to be, I hurt so badly I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let it happen again.’

His hand stilled. ‘Are we talking about a man?’

Knowing how possessive he was, it was to his credit that his grip on her didn’t slacken.

‘You were the first man I’d slept with. You know that.’

‘Then who? Who hurt you?’ His voice was rough. ‘Talk to me.’

It was obvious that he wanted answers. And he deserved that much, didn’t he? ‘When I was little I was almost adopted.’

‘Almost?’ He was puzzled and of course he would be because someone like him would have no reason to know that it was even possible to be ‘almost’ adopted.

‘When I was in care a couple visited me several times. They thought I might be “the one”. They’d wanted a baby, but there was no baby and at least I was a girl. They really wanted a girl. For ten years they’d been trying to have their own. Spent a fortune on IVF and then turned to adoption and found that too many years had passed and now they were too old to be given a baby. They’d even prepared the house—done up a room especially. Painted it all in pink with tiny fairy lights. They needed a child to match the room and their dreams. They thought I was that child. I wasn’t blonde and blue-eyed, but I got to spend a weekend with them. They took me home.’ Remembering was hard, even after so many years. She remembered the perfume the woman had worn and her perfect clothes. Two cars in the driveway and space, so much space. ‘I didn’t care about all the pink, but I cared about the books. You should have seen the books.’ She could still picture them clearly in her head, rows of books, colourful spines facing outwards, as attractive as jars of sweets in a sweet shop. ‘Children’s books, fairy stories—everything. I’d never had a book of my own when I was young. Never read a fairy story in my life. And this couple loved books. He was an English teacher and she worked in a florists. There were books and flowers everywhere. And they picked me. They wanted me. I was so excited.’