Chapter 12 #2
If not for that hangover and the memories of how badly her inhibitions had been lost that night, she’d probably be sitting in a corner somewhere drunk.
Oblivion sounded like the dream. Drink away the pain. Drink away the tortured thoughts plaguing her. Drink away the tortured emotions ripping her insides to shreds.
He would come home at some point, when he’d dragged himself out of whoever’s bed he’d fallen into. Dragged himself off whichever woman or women he’d spent the night screwing.
She couldn’t trust herself drunk. Couldn’t trust she wouldn’t do or say something to betray her desolation, and this self-awareness had her kicking at the base of the island in anguished fury.
How could she have developed emotions for Tommaso Esposito that induced such pain at him doing what Tommaso Esposito always did? He screwed around. That’s what he did. He jumped from one woman to the next without an ounce of conscience.
But it had always been him for her, she thought miserably, barely feeling the throbbing pain in her big toe from the kick.
Her stupid heart had attached itself to Tommaso Esposito when she’d been seven years old and had never let go.
Her one lover before him had come the day after his thirtieth birthday party, when she’d been so frightened of how their dance had made her feel and of the sickness at seeing him disappear into his hotel room with another woman, that she’d gone to a nightclub, the kind of nightclub he’d never be seen in, and did what Tommaso did as effortlessly as he breathed.
It had been horrible. The worst night of her life. It didn’t matter how much she’d begged her body to respond, it had refused to feel anything but revulsion. The direct opposite of how it responded to Tommaso. Only Tommaso.
Spooning the tiramisu into her mouth, she closed her eyes and welcomed the bitter sweetness hitting her palate. She needed that sweetness so badly, needed it to help drive the sickening images of Tommaso with another woman that kept forming in her mind.
His friend had quipped in Gino’s nightclub that Tommaso had been obsessed with her.
Maybe he had been. There had long been something there between them, but whatever it had been on his part was clearly over, and she wished desperately that it were the same for her because her obsession with him had taken a life of its own.
Maybe kissing her had been as vomit-inducing as he’d joked with his family. Or maybe he’d just got her out of his system and become bored, and, oh, God, the agony of thinking that.
She rammed another giant spoonful of the sweetly bitter creamy deliciousness into her mouth.
There should be no pain. Not for him.
She needed to toughen up. Find the belligerence she’d entered this marriage with and loosen the chains binding her so tightly to him.
But the chains weren’t the ones that came from their farce of a marriage. They were forged from her own heart, and she crammed yet more tiramisu down her throat and willed it to settle on her heart and soothe it. Prayed for it.
She’d methodically made her way through half the dessert when her ears pricked up. The kitchen overlooked the front of the house, and she carried the bowl to the window and looked out.
The car Edoardo chauffeured Tommaso in was pulling up outside the front door.
Only dimly aware that her toe was throbbing, she hurried back to her stool and spooned more sweet goodness into her mouth, praying with all her might for it to soothe her nerves as well as her now painfully cantering heart.
She would be calm. She would be collected.
She would be nonchalant. She would give nothing of any emotion away.
She would ask him if he’d had a nice evening.
However he responded, she would act with serene dignity and then wish him a goodnight and go up to bed.
He wouldn’t want her after sating himself in Lord knew how many other women.
She was still schooling herself on how she was going to behave when he entered the kitchen. A beat before their eyes clashed and her nostrils were invaded by the scent of another woman’s perfume, she spotted the smear of deep red lipstick on his cheek.
Tommaso took one look at Gabriella sitting at the kitchen island, her hair loose, beautiful face free from makeup, her pink dressing gown wrapped tightly around her, and his heart ballooned.
Smiling, she lifted her chin and, with a strange sing-song quality to her voice, said, “How was the party? Did you have a good time?”
How was he supposed to answer that? With the truth?
He couldn’t begin to understand the truth.
She dipped her spoon into the bowl he assumed contained the dessert they should have shared, and put a heap of it into her mouth.
“Gabba…” He swallowed in an effort to temper his thumping heart.
She finished her mouthful. “I thought you wouldn’t be home for hours. I wasn’t even sure if you’d be back for breakfast.” She offered the spoon out to him. “Want some? It’s delicious.”
Watching her closely, disarmed by her casual attitude, he shook his head.
She shrugged and dug the spoon back into the bowl. “More for me, then.” She gave another smile. “What was her name?”
He shook his head, but before he could speak, she said, “Thinking about it, don’t tell me.
I’m sure the day will come when you’re compelled to wheel me back out in society, and I don’t want to find myself pitying every Monica or Angiolina or Francesca I meet thinking they were the ones to suffer your sexual attentions. ”
His chest and throat filled with the pounding of his heart, he held her stare. “There wasn’t anyone, Gabba.”
She stilled a moment before looking away and sliding the heaped spoon into her mouth.
She was holding it with such tight control he could feel the metal’s resistance not to snap, and with it he felt the truth.
Her casual attitude was a front. Beneath it, Gabriella was tight and brittle.
She was hurting. Badly. Feeling the resistance she was exerting not to snap too, something inside of him broke.
He moved a step closer to her and starkly said, “I shouldn’t have left you behind.”
She ate another spoonful without responding.
“I’m…” He sighed heavily and tilted his face to the ceiling.
Words were collecting at the base of his throat, but he couldn’t put them in order to get them out.
He didn’t even know what order to put them in, knew only that the ache that lived in him for Gabriella had never been stronger.
“Finish the dessert, Gabba, and let’s go to bed.
” Maybe if he wasn’t looking at her, the words he was trying to put into order would arrange themselves for him.
“Is that an order?” Her stare whipped back to him. Colour darkened her face. “Is it? Because if it’s an order, then I have to obey, but if it’s merely a request, my answer is go fuck yourself. I’d rather sleep in the bath than share a bed with you reeking of another woman.”
Whatever had broken inside of him splintered. “There was no other woman…”
She moved so quickly he didn’t see her hands grab the bowl or see her lift it off the table; saw nothing until it flew in an arc past him and smashed onto the tiled floor.
He jumped back, out of the way of the shards of glass and splodges of dessert flying in all directions.
“You liar!” she screamed, no longer on the stool but on the glass-ridden floor in her bare feet. “You come home smelling of another woman’s perfume and with lipstick smeared on your cheek and tell me you haven’t been with anyone else? What kind of fool do you take me for?”
His feet moved before his brain did. Capturing her cheeks, he brought his face close to hers, drinking in the anguish he could feel vibrating through her skin. “Nothing happened, Gabba, not with anyone, I swear.”
Her face twisting in his hands, her body wriggling like a captured eel, she kicked his shin. “Stop lying! It’s the whole reason you left me behind.”
“I’m not lying,” He pressed her thrashing body against the kitchen island. “Look me in the eye. Look me in the eye and tell me I’m lying.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yes, fuck me. Fuck me for thinking I ever had an ounce of control over my feelings for you.” Cradling her head, he held her steady until she had no choice but to open her eyes.
The pain in them lanced him more deeply than he’d have believed an emotion could.
“I did leave you behind with the intention of screwing someone else.”
The whimper that came from her throat at this hurt like the wound from a knife.
Pressing his forehead to hers, he pulled in a long breath and then let the words that had formed at the base of his throat run free.
“I have no control over my feelings for you, Gabba. I try to hate you for what you were planning to do to me and my family, but I can’t.
It’s impossible. What I feel for you is impossible.
I try to fight it, but it’s there – you’re there – in every part of me, a sickness that has no cure.
You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted with more than my cock, and I know that sounds crude, but it’s the truth.
I want you with every part of me, and I hate that you’re only mine because you chose life over death, and I hate that I’m only yours because I’m all you’ve got left.
I want to be your everything just as you’re my everything, because you are my everything. You’re my whole damn life, Gabriella.”
Gabriella tried to resist. She tried to resist believing him. Tried to resist the longing infused in the whole of her being, but with the solid heat of Tommaso’s body pressed against hers and the warmth of his breath on her skin, the fight for resistance wasn’t with him but with herself.
How could she believe him? Worse, how could she want to believe him?
She gazed into the black eyes burning with wild, emotion-fed passion, and her heart ached for the unthinkable.
If what Tommaso felt for her was impossible, then what she felt for him was so hopeless she did not dare put a name to it, not even in her most private thoughts.
Deep lines furrowed on his brow. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered, words that sounded like they’d been torn out of him. A breath later, his lips slanted onto hers, and with a groan that came from the same tortured place as his words, he was plundering her mouth.
Incapable of doing anything but yield to the demanding passion of his kisses, Gabriella closed her eyes. Her resistance going into free fall, her heart exploded and sweet, heady sensation burned through her.
His hands skimmed away from her hair to frame her face, their hunger deepening into a kiss so deep and meaningful that when he pulled his mouth away, she swayed.
Lips trembling…her whole body trembling..., she met his searching stare.
Gazes locked together, he pressed the tip of his nose to hers and smoothed her hair at her temples. “Will you come to bed with me, Gabba?” he asked hoarsely. His sensuous mouth twisted. “Not out of any obligation to the deal we made, but because you’re as crazy for me as I am for you.”
Her chest clutched in on itself, and now she was searching Tommaso’s stare, not even knowing what she was looking for until she found it.
Her heart exploded all over again.
This was how she’d imagined him looking at her when her adolescent dreams had been the fuel that got her out of bed each day, before the truth about their fathers had broken her heart and shattered her dreams.
She’d dreamed of him looking at her as if she were the only woman in the world.
Her heart clutching and her pulses soaring, Gabriella placed her hands flat on his chest and absorbed the strong, rapid beat of his heart, and suddenly the world melted away, and all that was left was them. Her and Tommaso, just as she’d spent so many years dreaming of.
Sliding her hands up to grasp the collar of his shirt, she tilted her face and gently rested her lips on his.
His eyes closed, and as his fingers slowly speared her hair, she felt the tremor in his huge frame.
“Yes,” she whispered into his mouth, before wrapping her arms around his neck.
There was a muffled noise from his throat, and then the air around her moved as she was lifted effortlessly into his arms.