Proof of Their Sin

“Why didn’t you answer your mobile?” he demanded the minute she emerged.

“It needs to be charged,” she said, drying her still-damp palms on her backside before finding the phone in her purse. She walked it to the dock in the corner.

Had she really been wishing he had come with her? Right now his dynamic presence made her feel like her world was crashing in. If she was still sometimes overwhelmed by the effect he had on her physically, at least she was used to it, but there was a fresh intensity to him that seemed like a lasso swirling above her head, waiting to alight around her and yank her in. It made her wary because she knew if it happened, she was done. There’d be no self-protection left.

“What, um, changed your mind about coming?” she hazarded to ask.

“I wanted to know something.” He scowled at the way she circled away from him toward the windows on the far side of the sofa. She could see his reflection, arms folding with dismay.

Not sex, then, and definitely not because he missed her. Lauren looked at her feet, then lifted her head. The view of Milan was a blanket of sparkling lights that her blurring eyes didn’t see.

“You could have called,” she pointed out.

“I wanted to see your face when I asked.”

“Oh, good God, it wasn’t a man, Paolo.” She swung around so he could see the hurt and offense on her face. “It was a friend of my grandmother’s and my half cousin. Or quarter. I don’t know what we are, but she was nice and I’m happy I met her. Okay?”

“Of course it wasn’t a man. Because you love me, don’t you?”

She sucked in a pained breath, feeling tricked into turning around and letting him see what a devastating effect his question had on her. She couldn’t hide the truth, not from him. That sort of dissembling had been peeled away layer by layer over the past weeks of intense physical closeness.

It seemed an especially nasty betrayal that he just stood there staring at her, silently demanding the truth from her. Demanding she bare her soul. Insisting she reveal what she wanted most in this world so he could tell her she couldn’t have it.

Well, damn him anyway.

“Yes,” she declared with a hint of defiance and tried to stare him down, but her brows were twitching and her inner barriers quivering under the onslaught of intense feelings she couldn’t contain.

He was far better at it than her, penetrating into her psyche with a look that burned all the way from across the room.

“How long have you loved me?”

She couldn’t help flinching. His voice was almost tender, but the question was so cruel she could hardly bear it.

“I don’t know.” She realized she couldn’t think of a time when she hadn’t loved him. When his opinion hadn’t mattered. When his attention hadn’t scored her like a knife. When every cell in her being hadn’t been tuned in to him. Her lips trembled and her body convulsed in a shivering shrug. “Forever?”#p#????#e#

“Then why in hell did you marry Ryan?” he asked in a voice that cracked.

She flinched, possibly able to withstand contemptuous fury but he sounded hurt.

“I was young and stupid,” she said defensively, rallying with a pained, “You know what that’s like. You did the same thing. You married that other woman.”

“She wasn’t anyone you knew. I didn’t flaunt her under your nose for five damned years!”

So harshly unforgiving she wanted to cry, but how could she have known it mattered? How?

Paolo could only imagine what he looked like. His hands had been spiking up his hair for the last two hours while he waited for her, getting nothing but voice mail until he was convinced she was in a ditch somewhere.

“I hated you for that, Lauren,” he admitted, finally getting off his chest a weight that had been suffocating him unacknowledged since forever.

She made a sound of extreme hurt, giving him a pinch of compunction, but this particular wound needed flushing before it would close and heal.

“You married the wrong man.”

It wasn’t anything she hadn’t said to herself, but the way he said it, angry and filled with accusation, was new and freshly hurtful.

“You think I should have left my wedding with you.” It was completely illogical, so much easier to say than it would have been to do, but in her heart she believed it, too.

“Yes,” he agreed, a ring of accusation still in his voice.

“I didn’t think you were serious. I believed you hated me.” Her voice cracked and she couldn’t continue. Her hands ached where she clutched them together and she tried again to focus on the Milan skyline, but to no avail. The wall of windows was a black slate with a single lamp reflected in it. It winked as Paolo passed in front of it and came to stand behind her and grasp her shoulders.