CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SEBASTIANOWATCHEDTHE host of emotions flitter over Layla’s beautiful face and, without any warning, the anger he’d been containing by the skin of his teeth erupted. ‘Tell me!’ he shouted, getting to his feet and slamming his palm on the desk. ‘Tell me why you have gone behind my back after everything we discussed, everything we agreed, you conniving—’ He bit back the curse he wanted to hurl at her and took a large lungful of air.
His instincts had been right all along.
Layla had been keeping a part of herself separate from him. A major part.
His perfect wife had gone against his wishes and behind his back to provide herself with the perfect bolt-hole to raise his child without him,
‘I have given you everything in this marriage, Layla. Everything. And this is how you repay me. With deceit.’
‘Deceit?’ Eyes wide, she shook her head tremulously. ‘I didn’t go ahead with the house purchase because I was being deceitful or conniving—I bought it because I’ve spent our entire marriage terrified of the day you wake up and decide I’ve served my purpose, and get your big fancy lawyers on me and leave me with nothing.’ Her voice caught. ‘I’m sorry if you feel betrayed but that money was all I had that you couldn’t touch. I needed to put it in a home that would provide safety for me and my baby if the day ever came that we needed it.’
‘Safety from me?’ he roared, incredulous. ‘After everything I’ve done for you?’
‘Done for your own conscience you mean,’ she countered before closing her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she fixed her stare back on him and gave a helpless shrug. ‘I never asked for any of this. All I ever wanted from you was support for my baby.’
‘Our baby,’ he corrected, unmoved.
The expression on her face at this would have made the stoniest heart laugh, but all he could manage was one laced with bitterness. ‘Yes, Layla. I know the child is mine.’ The truth had been knocking at him for so long...right from the start...that he couldn’t pinpoint when he’d accepted it in his heart, but the emotions that had swelled in him to feel it kick against his hand earlier had blown the last of the denial out of him. ‘I feel it here.’ He slammed his palm onto his heart. ‘Right in the place I used to feel you. And now I’m done. I’m done with trying to make you happy and fulfilled when you couldn’t give a damn about me.’
Done with a marriage that had never gone beyond a performance and a wife who made promises she had no intention of keeping.
‘That’s not true!’ she cried. ‘Of course I–’
‘No more lies,’ he snarled before clenching his jaw and dragging air into his lungs in an effort to temper his tone. Never in the whole of his life had he felt infected by such hot, rancid emotions. ‘I’m leaving. You have the night to get your stuff together—the staff will help you. I’ll be back by breakfast. Make sure you’re gone before I return.’
Her mouth dropped open in shock. It took an age for anything to come out of it. ‘You’re ending our marriage, now?’ she croaked.
He looked her dead in the eye.
Dio, he was having to stop himself from shaking.
‘Oh, no,’ he said tightly. ‘Having given it some serious thought I’ve decided we will never divorce. I’m going to hold you to this godforsaken marriage for the rest of your miserable life. It is just that I would rather spend the night in a nest of vipers than spend another night under the same roof as you.’
Layla was trembling so hard she had to cling to the door to keep herself upright. She could hardly believe what was happening, that the man who’d made such passionate love to her such a short time ago could be looking at her with such loathing and uttering words that landed like a wound.
‘I will be in touch with instructions on how we will play things from now on, and you will obey them.’ He gave a smile so cold and cruel it landed like its own wound. ‘Or live with the consequences... Full custody of my child.’
Her heart pounding, she stared at this stranger who’d taken possession of her lover. Of all the ways she’d imagined their marriage ending—imaginings she’d forced on herself because she’d never dared hope this day wouldn’t come—she’d never dreamed it would end like this.
‘Don’t threaten me with our baby, Sebastiano,’ she begged. ‘Please, don’t be that man.’
Something...a glimmer of conscience?...flashed in his eyes.
The cruel smile vanished. His voice stark, he quietly said, ‘At least I never set out to make a home for it without you.’
Of all his accusations, that one landed the hardest. She threw her hands in the air, despair ripping through her. ‘That’s right, assume the worst of me like you always do. The house was only ever a back-up plan for my own peace of mind, and only because I couldn’t shake the fear that I’d be left alone to raise our child just like my mother was left alone to raise me.’
She snatched a moment to gather herself against the emotions battering her. ‘I always knew you believed the truth about our baby but you couldn’t bring yourself to admit it, could you? Because to admit it meant you’d have to accept that you’d failed, and you really can’t bear to fail.’
‘Do not try and deflect things back on me,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘This is all you, Layla.’
‘Is it really?’ She shook her head. It felt like she’d sleepwalked into a nightmare she couldn’t wake herself from. ‘I know I’m scarred. Living with you has shown me just how scarred I still am, but the difference is I acknowledge it, whereas you... Life has been so gilded and effortless for you, success upon success upon success, that at the first hint of failure you take a child’s default position of denial. You denied paternity when I gave you all the proof, and continued denying it. You preferred to believe I must have taken another lover straight after you than admit that at some point during our night together you screwed up. As if the great Sebastiano Russo could have got a lowly bar tender pregnant! What would polite society say about that?’
He made to speak but she wouldn’t let him. She couldn’t bear to hear another cruel word from his lips.
‘If you hadn’t discovered that I’m actually a respectable solicitor, you would never have decided to use me in your game of cover up, although what you would have done to gain vengeance against me I can only guess, and what you’d have done to cover up the money loss, again I can only guess. But you’d have thought of something because there is no way the great Sebastiano Russo would hold his hands up and admit that he’d made such a colossal mistake with those shares, or accept that his actions had backed me into such a corner that I acted in a way I should never have acted.’
She could do nothing to stop the tear that rolled down her cheek or stop her voice from breaking. ‘You broke my heart, did you know that? You cut me off and acted as if that night meant nothing when you know damned well it meant everything.’ Her voice broke again but she forced herself to continue. ‘I know you’ll deny it but something magical happened between us the night we made our child, but you chose to ignore it because you believed I wasn’t good enough for you. I’m glad you didn’t know I was a solicitor because you probably would have deemed me fit to pursue a relationship with and I’d have believed it was because of what you felt for me and not because I ticked the correct boxes for polite society.’ She closed her eyes and clung tightly to the door. ‘And then you really would have destroyed me.’
The silence that followed this was total.
Opening her eyes, Layla took in Sebastiano’s ashen face. Something deep in her heart cracked.
‘Do you have any idea how terrified I was when I found out I was pregnant?’ she whispered. ‘How alone I felt? How desperately hard I tried to reach you? And you have the nerve to act as if you’re the injured party and the nerve to expect me to be grateful?’
Shaking her head, she took one more deep breath then looked at him for the last time. ‘This is your home not mine. You stay. I’ll sleep in a guest house tonight and be gone by the morning.’
Layla walked on autopilot through the sprawling rear garden breathing in the wintry air that was nothing like the wintry air she would be breathing in London come the morning. By the marble statue of the Venus de Milo, she took the path that led to the most secluded of the guest cottages. Pretty nightlights led the way.
At the door, she closed her eyes before knocking on it.
It opened.
Her mother gazed at her before sympathy creased her face and she held out a hand.
Only when the door closed her in did Layla collapse with loud sobs into her mother’s arms.
‘Pack it all up and courier it to London. All of it.’
Those were Sebastiano’s only instructions, his only hint to the staff that Layla would not be returning.
He supposed he should be thinking about loose lips but he was too numb to care. Let them talk if they wanted.
If they were talking it was not within his earshot. The villa had become as silent as a tomb.
It had become as cold as a tomb too.
On his bureau, the handwritten invitation to a Viennese Ball for the end of March. The baby would be born by then so he’d accepted it weeks ago with stray fantasies of Layla in a ball dress, waltzing in his arms. Stray fantasies, too, of making a long weekend of it, the two of them and their baby. Salzburg was a beautiful city, one he was quite certain Layla would fall in love with.
He ripped the invitation into shreds.
Sebastiano’s slightly smiling photo loomed large in the Russo Banca Internazionale foyer.
Layla hunched her shoulders and blocked it out as she had every morning that week.
At her desk, she called the clerk of the court about a case that was being heard on Tuesday. Naturally, her call was held in a queue. It felt like the majority of her time this past week had been spent on hold, and she closed her eyes and suppressed the scream that longed to come out.
It was a scream she’d been suppressing the whole week. The only thing that stopped her releasing it was the baby currently kicking at her ribs. Stress wasn’t good for babies so she was doing her best to portray serenity inside and out. Her best, she was painfully aware, wasn’t good enough, an awareness reinforced when a box of tissues slid beneath her.
Amelia, who’d entered her office without Layla noticing her, caught her eye and gave a rueful smile.
Smiling gratefully in return, Layla dabbed at eyes she hadn’t even realised were leaking and blew her nose. She’d been suffering the most dreadful winter hay fever this past week. The main symptom was leaking eyes. They were like taps she had no control over.
Or so she’d told all her colleagues.
No one knew her marriage was over. Not that her marriage was over in name, just in actuality. She supposed the correct term to describe them was as estranged.
If Sebastiano was true to his word then she would be his legal wife for ever, consigned to live in the purgatory of his whims, brought out like an expensive doll to be draped on his arm whenever duty demanded and then be packed back in a box.
None of that would happen. She knew it in her heart.
For all his threats and the way things had been left between them, she doubted she would see him again until the baby was born. It was the only good thing about the whole sorry mess. Her child really would have a father. And she had a few months to prepare herself emotionally for facing him again.
She was on her third tissue when her call was finally answered.
Late evening, Sebastiano strode to the dressing room that had belonged to Layla. After a day spent avoiding his family’s efforts to visit him and speak to him—whispers must be spreading that his marriage was over—he’d decided to do something constructive and so had decided to turn the dressing room into a room his tailor could use for fittings when he made his three-monthly visit to the villa to measure Sebastiano up for new suits. He would not think that if he were measured today, the tailor would find he’d lost weight.
There was no point in letting the room stand empty with no purpose. It had always been intended as a room for whoever he married. Maybe one day he would marry again and his future wife could have it but until then...
An unexpected blow to his solar plexus almost doubled him over.
It took a long moment to breathe through the pain and straighten.
Where the hell had that come from?
Expelling another breath through his mouth, he turned the door handle. Already his mind was racing ahead, to bringing the master carpenter here to redesign the room. Fresh paint would be needed on the walls too. A new colour scheme. He’d also have to get the ‘her’ bathroom of his suite redecorated. He’d told the interior designer to go with a Japanese theme because he’d remembered Layla once saying she loved the scent of cherry blossom.
He’d never told Layla the bathroom had been created especially for her and only finished the evening before he’d brought her to Sicily.
Kidnapped her, a voice in his head corrected.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The emptiness hit him immediately.
He’d expected it. He’d ordered it be stripped bare.
Seeing it though... Feeling it...
This went beyond emptiness. This was absence.
A scent danced through his senses and into his airwaves and for a moment, just one solitary moment in time, he saw her. Layla. Hair tumbled around her, that perfect lopsided smile that could break a man’s heart at fifty paces on her face.
His beautiful, graceful, witty Layla. The woman who’d entered this cold, palatial villa and filled it with warmth. Filled him with warmth.
The woman rejected before her birth by the father who should have loved and protected her. Rejected by the grandparents who should have loved and protected her too.
And now rejected by him.
God help him, he’d pushed her away. Cruelly. On top of all the other wrongs he’d done to the woman who’d dedicated her life to helping those unable to help themselves. A woman who refused to seek vengeance for fear of creating new victims from it.
A shining angel of light in a cold, dark world.
He’d pushed her away.
The image before his eyes vanished.
The pain that ripped through him was enough to bring him to his knees.
Layla exited the underground and trudged carefully through the sleet falling around her and landing like slush, and was thankful of the small mercy of having enough money in the bank to pay for decent winter boots. Thankful that her mum had a decent coat and set of boots to protect her from the elements too. Thankful for her mum full stop. It was hard to fall deep into despair when you had such unflinching love and support.
That didn’t stop her heart feeling bleaker than the weather or stop her eyes from leaking. A weekend of comedy films and she’d cried silently through all of them, smiling only during the times her baby woke up to play football in her belly, then crying again to know Sebastiano wasn’t there to share it with her.
She couldn’t stop thinking about him and thinking about that awful, awful evening when everything had fallen apart. His ashen face at her home truths. The guilt she felt for going behind his back and buying the house even after she’d agreed not to. She hadn’t made a verbal promise not to but the implication had been there.
So deeply was Sebastiano on her mind that when she walked into the skyscraper’s lobby and stamped the sludge off her boots, it was no surprise that her gaze zoomed straight to his photo before she had the chance to block it.
Lowering her stare, she passed through the usual security checks and turned in the direction of the elevators. A waft of his cologne almost made her stumble but she kept walking, and—
‘Layla.’
Her heart stopped before her feet did.
It took for ever to find the courage to turn around.
It was him. Standing close enough that if she reached an arm out she’d be able to touch him.
Her heart kick-started back to life and suddenly she was clinging tightly to the large bag slung over her shoulder and struggling to breathe.
She should have foreseen this, she realised dimly through the blood rushing in her head. With the size of the building and the infrequency of his visits to it, there had only been a slim chance of their paths crossing here, but she should have prepared herself. After all, she knew better than anyone that the tiniest of odds could play out. Her baby was proof of that.
It had never taken so much to say two words. ‘Hello, Sebastiano.’
His chest rose. It hurt to see it. It hurt to see him. Hurt to see how just eight days apart from him had distorted her memories. She didn’t remember his face being so gaunt or so...pallid. Or his eyes being bloodshot.
‘Can we talk?’
She gaped at him. It was hard to be certain if she’d heard him correctly through the roar in her head. She didn’t remember his voice being so hoarse.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘That’s fair. After the way things were left between us I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk to me.’
Had she said that?
‘I will make it quick.’ The tiniest quirk of his lips that was in no way a smile. ‘I know you need to start work. I’m sorry for doing it here but I only landed an hour ago and I knew you would have left home and I would be more likely to catch you here in the lobby than anywhere else.’
Alone in the empty dressing room, everything had become clear. Hours and hours Sebastiano had sat on the hard floor, paralysed, the depths of what he’d done pounding into him. And then his loss had hit him and all the pain he’d been feeling up to that point was nothing, nothing, compared to the agony that had ripped through him.
He’d lost Layla.
But she’d never been his to lose.
Gasping for air, he’d groped for his phone. He’d called his lawyer, and then he’d called his PA. ‘Get me to London,’ he’d whispered to her, hardly aware that it was two in the morning.
Layla clutched her bag even tighter. She had a vague awareness of people swarming around them, hurrying to their offices, busying themselves for the start of another busy working week, all of them oblivious that her heart was smashing so loudly it had woken her sleeping baby.
He lifted a foot as if to move closer then hesitated. ‘Layla...’ Something that looked much like pain flashed over his beautiful face. ‘I know an apology can’t make up for what I’ve done to you but I have to try. I have to try because you deserve it. I’m...’ He shook his head and ran his fingers through his ungroomed hair. ‘I’m everything you said I am, and more. I am an arrogant, self-absorbed bastard. But you didn’t get everything right. I didn’t cut you off and ghost you because you were a bar tender but because the way you made me feel terrified the hell out of me. What I feel for you is like nothing on this earth. That magic was there from the start and I felt it as deeply as you did but I’m a coward. I don’t know if it would have been different if I’d known who you really were.’ Another quirk of the lips that wasn’t a smile. ‘I think what I felt for you would have made me run whatever I believed you to be. All those months working so hard not to think about you stopped me thinking altogether. That’s the power you had over me even then. I didn’t pay attention to the things that matter as much as I should have and the result...the loss of a billion euros.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose before continuing. ‘I avoided the club for months until I thought it was safe to return. I thought you’d be gone. It wasn’t even a conscious choice. But I couldn’t run from you the second time. What you did that night—I fully deserved it. The way I cut you off was unforgivable—but it brought me to life. Everything I’d been suppressing, all the feelings I’d been hiding from, it all hit me.’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know a force like that was possible. It shook my heart...shook all of me. I was obsessed by you. Unhealthily obsessed. And I schemed and plotted to make you mine and force you into my life, all the while telling myself that it was what you deserved, what you owed me.’ He let out a disbelieving laugh and shook his head. ‘Can you believe I told myself that you owed me? You don’t owe me anything, Layla. You never did. You certainly don’t owe me your trust and that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? I love you and I think a part of you loves me too—or maybe that’s my arrogance rearing up again—but there is no trust. I killed it when I deleted your number from my phone and everything I have done since has only proved that you were right not to trust me. I’m not surprised you went to such lengths to protect yourself. I’m only surprised that you can bear to look at me. But know this—I will go to my grave regretting my treatment of you.’
She wiped away the tears blinding her and saw the contortion of his face.
‘I’m sorry for everything, Layla. And I pray that one day you can find it in your heart to forgive me.’ Swallowing, he reached into his inside coat pocket. ‘These are divorce papers. I’ve already signed my part and postdated it—we have to wait a year to lodge it but I wanted you to have this now so that you can sleep knowing your freedom is in your hands, and not in mine.’
She stared from the envelope in his hand back to his face and whispered, ‘You’re letting me go?’
Tears swam in his eyes. His voice was hoarse when he said, ‘You were never mine to keep. Love without freedom is no love and I cannot endure another day knowing I’ve clipped the wings of so beautiful a spirit and tethered her to me. All I ask is that I be involved in our child’s life—I do want to be a father to it.’
‘Of course,’ she said dazedly. ‘You can be as involved as much as you want to be.’
He gave a pained laugh. ‘I knew you’d say that. It’s so much more than I deserve.’
‘It’s what our child deserves.’
‘I knew you’d say that too. It’s what you deserved from your father and I wish like hell that I could travel back in time and force him to meet you. If he had done...’ He swallowed. ‘There is not a soul on this earth who could resist falling in love with you.’ And then his gaze dropped down to her belly and he sighed. ‘You will keep me updated?’
‘I promise.’
Another pained laugh before he put his fingers to his lips, kissed them and then pressed them against Layla’s mouth. ‘Goodbye, Layla.’
And then he turned around and walked away, and the swarm of workers continued to stream around her, only a few giving double takes at the tears streaming down her face.