“Ah, yes, my family. How’s Papa? Got himself covered up after doing the deed with my mother in the garden this morning?” he asked with false pleasantry.
“Don’t you dare embarrass her by telling her you saw them.” She pointed her finger at him so he would know she was serious.
“I’m trying to forget that I did. I want to gouge out my eyes.”
She rolled her own, trying not to fall into another fit of giggles at the way he’d reacted this morning. He’d been holding Lorenzo as he’d glanced out to greet the day and had abruptly let loose a string of very blue language. He’d turned away so appalled she was still snickering.
Now she tucked her chin and said, “She’s happy. Isn’t that the most important thing? Would you rather she was unhappy?”
“No,” he said, disgruntled.
“Just not that happy? Are you jealous?” she asked as it occurred to her.
“What do you mean?” His gaze cut up to hers in a way that made her think she was on to something.
“Because she’s with someone besides your father.”
“No,” he denied firmly, shrugging that off with a rearrangement of things on his desk. “She began auditioning replacements about three months after he was in the ground. I got over that distress very quickly.” He sounded as though he was telling the truth, but...
“Did you?” she pressed.
“I honestly don’t care who she sleeps with.” He stood, signaling that he would prefer to put an end to this conversation. His gaze came up, flat and hard. “I just didn’t like watching her throw herself into relationship after relationship only to come away with a broken heart.”
“I don’t think he plans to break her heart. He seems as madly in love as she is.” If anyone was jealous, it was Octavia. The way the count gazed at Ysabelle as if she was made of sunsets and jewels and exotic foods made her yearn to see the same undisguised feelings in her own husband’s face. They had come so far, but she was greedy. She wanted more.
She wanted the dream.
Patience, she reminded herself.
“Loving someone madly is exactly what leads to broken hearts,” Sandro muttered. “It’s like watching a pair of trains headed for a collision that can’t be avoided.”
She stilled as a suspicion struck her like a freight engine: that she would never see undisguised love on her husband’s face. She knew him better now, understood his aversion to deep emotion and it hit her that he wouldn’t welcome the vulnerability of love. He had wanted an arranged marriage to avoid the emotional pitfalls of a love match.
Had that been one of the reasons he had chosen her? Because he knew he’d never really love her?
The heart that had been creeping onto her sleeve was suddenly yanked from the washer still damp, shaken and strung up on the line. She loved him. Irrevocably. While he, she suspected, would never, ever let himself love her back.
“Do you honestly feel like that?” she asked numbly, not wanting to hear it, but knowing she had to face it if it was the truth.
He started to say something then paused, seeming to read something in her face that sobered him. His tongue touched his bottom lip and tension gathered around his eyes. As the silence lengthened, the significance of the moment grew.
“You do,” she said, and her heart began to tremble and crack. “We’ll never have that. Will we? What your mother has. Because you don’t want it.”
If there was a man with a stronger willpower than Sandro, she hadn’t met him.
Despair crashed into her heart like his runaway train, spreading pain outward. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do this again. When she’d had hope, it had been different, but she couldn’t offer love again and know without doubt it would forever go unrequited.
“Cara,” he began in that oh-so-careful tone that meant he wanted to let her down easy. “You don’t want it, either. You see her happy now and think it’s worth it, but when you feel that much joy, you feel the loss of it that much more cruelly. I’m protecting you. What if something happens? I wouldn’t want to leave you in the sort of pain she’s known.”
Octavia was in pain all right. She looked away, sucking in a tight breath that burned her lungs. “I don’t know why I thought— No, I do know why I thought you might come to love me. Because you’re capable of it. I’ve seen it. You love your son and your grandfather and even your mother, despite the fact she drives you crazy. So I thought you might come to love me, but you don’t. Do you?”
“Octavia.” He reached across, but she backed up.