The Marriage He Must Keep

“It was a precaution,” he said. “I wanted to marry eventually, and you and I were well suited.”

“No, we weren’t! Not if this was the real reason you proposed!”

“Don’t get upset—”

“I am upset!” she said in such a burst, her stomach hurt.

“Octavia, calm down.” He sounded so patronizing she wanted to smack him. “Today was very stressful and you’ve just had surgery. Let it all sink in and tomorrow you’ll have a clearer view.”

“He tried to take our baby because you took the wife he wanted,” she stressed. “Why aren’t you upset?”

“I am.” The words snapped like a flag in a stiff breeze, but he didn’t look or sound upset. But then, this was a man who had approached marriage so cold-bloodedly, she couldn’t even let herself think of it yet. “But you don’t have to worry about him ever again. The police have taken him for further questioning. The hospital is pressing charges for interfering with the baby tags and I will make a formal complaint when we get back to Naples for the death threats. He will be too tied up in legal proceedings to bother us and certainly won’t have a place in our lives or any sort of position in the corporation. We’ll put all of this behind us very quickly.”

She stared at him, stupefied at how easily he thought this could be shaken off like dirt from a rug. It was something her parents would have done. The puppy was a nuisance, Octavia. Those old books were in the way. That friend of yours needn’t visit again once school finishes.

You’re just a marble I won from my cousin, Octavia.

Discussion over. Move on.

She wanted to curl up into a ball and cry, but she had a son to think of. Failing to fight for a better situation had nearly cost her the chance to raise him herself. She couldn’t afford to be acquiescent. Not anymore.

“I’m not going back to Naples with you,” she said firmly.

CHAPTER FIVE

“BUT THAT’S WHERE our son will be. Surely you’d prefer to be with him?”

He shouldn’t have said it. He’d been down to his last vibrating nerve, already feeling so guilty his self-respect had been consigned to the London sewer. Her refusal to come home with him had snapped his leash. He’d seen himself losing what Primo had tried to cost him and he’d reacted with the sort of ruthless aggression he’d been suppressing all day.

He would not let his cousin win.

Octavia had stared at him in stunned, hurt silence, her face the furthest thing from the amenable expression he was used to seeing there. Beneath her crushed anguish, her eyes had blazed with singular fury. Raw emotion that had sparked off his own.

For a moment he’d scented the fight he was itching for.

Then a cool contempt had flickered in her face before she’d rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.

It had taken everything in him not to wrench the rail from her bed and drag her around to continue hashing things out, but the nurse had come in. Lorenzo was hungry.

Octavia left without a backward glance and didn’t return.

Why the hell had he allowed himself to lash out like that?

He’d managed to hold his temper for hours in his mother’s sitting room, as the police had pulled one vile act of insurgence after another from Primo. His cousin’s resentment had festered here in London, to the point where he’d taken pleasure in torturing Alessandro by recounting the way Octavia had begged for her husband while she writhed in labor, sweating and scared.

“Does that bother you, Sandro? I’m surprised. You only married her to stop me from doing it.”

Not entirely true. He had had a clear view of the board when a chance remark from their accounting VP had tipped Alessandro off to Primo’s contemplation of marriage. Alessandro had gone to that charity gala in search of ammunition to protest the union     and circumvent any power plays Primo might have made.

Perhaps he should have acknowledged the seeds of his own mistrust then, but he hadn’t seen Primo’s actions as overtly aggressive, merely that if his cousin married well there was potential for trouble. It was Alessandro’s habit to look for such signs and nip them in the bud. In all sides of his life, he forestalled the potential for damage wherever he could.

The idea of proposing to Octavia hadn’t struck him until he’d talked with her on the terrace. He had gone out there to discover how determined she was to marry Primo, but marriage hadn’t been on his mind. He’d always had a distant awareness that he had a duty to produce an heir at some point, but that was a future thing that he would get to when he was ready. And it wasn’t as if he was waiting for a woman to steal his heart. Quite the contrary. He’d already decided to arrange a marriage when the time came.