Chapter Eight #2
He held her gaze through her silent investigation, a raised eyebrow, rueful, challenging and open.
As if he was saying, Have at it, look all you want.
It was a dare, like when they’d been kids, and a strange wave of humour swept over them, pulled at the edges of his mouth, just as it drew on her heart.
Her mouth wobbled, trying not to smile. And then it passed, just like the tide, leaving a long stretch of emptiness behind it.
The smile fell from her lips and the humour from her heart.
She watched the little curve at the edge of his lip flatten, as a sense of weight, of heaviness settled between them. Seriousness. Something old and something responsible. As if she felt all the years since their childhood pass between them in just a few seconds.
And then she was hit by such an intense wave of longing.
Oh, nothing like Paris, nothing as obvious as attraction.
But for what they could have had. What it could have been.
It could have been something beautiful between them.
If he hadn’t left her. If he hadn’t chosen Gio over her, just like every other member of her family.
They could have had this. And it could have been so wonderful.
This time, the wave brought sadness and loss.
An older grief, just as known, just as familiar, a sadness she’d never quite got over.
As the faint smell of incense and candle wax mixed with the wildflowers from her bouquet, and the priest pressed on with readings as familiar to her as the names of her family members, she saw it in his gaze too. The hurt, the anger, the sadness. The loss.
His naked emotions shocked her, but not enough to override the rising anger.
He looked at her as if it were her fault.
As if she’d done this to them. But she hadn’t.
He was the one who had left. He was the one who had disappeared off the face of the planet, so that she’d been alone with no one to count on but herself.
‘Do you have the rings?’
The priest’s question jerked her out of her thoughts, severing the strange, hypnotic moment that had locked them together, excluding everyone around them.
She turned to look at where Ivy and Antonio sat in the front pew—her stony-faced parents on the other side of the aisle. Everyone was either grim faced or fascinated, as if waiting to see if she would really go through with it.
Her gaze returned to Micha, who reached into his pocket and retrieved a small black velvet box without missing a beat. As if they hadn’t just shared…something.
She just about stopped herself from pressing her hand to her stomach, to their child, to reassure them both that this was the right thing to do, that this would give them the protection and security they would desperately need if the Gallos decided to turn against them.
The priest continued with the ceremony, sharing words of commitment, of love, of honour, and she wondered whether she would ever have those things now.
He despised her. That’s what she’d seen in the emotions Micha kept locked away.
He resented her for this. But it didn’t matter, because she knew that he would love their child with the same fierceness and that was all she needed, she told herself as she repeated after the priest, ‘I do.’
Micha had kept quiet, even for him, throughout the short reception that had followed. Well. The reception was short for him and Maria. By all accounts the Gallos were drinking the bar dry at his considerable expense.
‘Do you not think they’ll notice if we leave so early?’
It was the last thing she’d said to him, which was perhaps not that surprising given his response.
‘Do you think a single one of them will actually care?’
The moment the car had pulled into the gated driveway of his villa, he’d flung the door to the car open and stepped out into the night.
Cristo, he needed a drink. He’d not trusted himself or them to have one in front of the Gallos at the reception, and now…
? Well, Maria was now a Rufina, he supposed. If she chose to take his name.
The thought pulled him up short, but he dismissed it as a problem for another day. Without waiting to see if she followed him, Micha marched up the stone steps to where the large front door was being held open by his housekeeper.
‘Felicitazioni!’ Benito proclaimed, ignoring both Micha’s frown and the growl that would have scared a lesser man. But Benito had been with him for nearly eight years now, and had seen pretty much all there was to see.
What little was left of Micha’s conscience forced his steps to slow and to at least ensure that Benito greeted his new wife—his wife—with the respect that her family clearly hadn’t afforded her.
‘Signora, welcome home,’ Benito said.
The words struck Micha like an anvil, and for a single moment, his eyes connected with hers, took in the sight of her in a wedding dress, hovering on the threshold to his home, her home, before he let out another growl, stalked into his study and slammed the door behind him.
Of course, he should have known better than to think that Maria would leave him to his peace.
Less than five seconds later, she threw the door back open, only to come into the office and slam it behind her. It had taken more than he’d care to admit to stop himself from flinching from the sound of the door hurtling against its frame.
She stood there like one of the furies, her fists on her hips, glaring at him as if she had the right to be mad at him.
‘Go to bed, Maria. It’s too late for this.’
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Before opening it and then closing it one more time.
‘How…how dare you send me to bed like a child,’ she whisper-hissed.
How dare he? Cristo, if she only knew that he was trying to spare her from the thoughts he was struggling to contain.
‘Va bene. Out with it,’ he commanded.
‘You can’t ignore me like this, Micha. You’ve been furious with me all afternoon. You didn’t say a single thing to me through the wedding breakfast or reception.’
He shrugged off his tux jacket. ‘And?’ he said with his back to her.
‘And?’ she asked, eyebrow arched in surprise. ‘So much for everyone believing this marriage is real,’ she said.
He clenched his teeth together and turned, leaning back against the table.
‘Don’t do that.’ She gestured angrily to where he perched and turned her back on him.
‘Do what?’ he demanded.
‘Do that, lean back like that.’
‘Madonna mia, Maria, this is my office, and I just need—’
‘What? What is it that you need? Tonight. On your wedding night?’ she demanded angrily.
‘Space!’ he shouted, swallowing immediately and regretting his outburst. It wasn’t that he was angry. It was that it was uncontrolled, and she would know that and he was so tired of fighting her.
‘Do you think I wanted this?’ she accused.
‘Do you think I did?’ he fired back. ‘Seriously Maria, do you think that I wanted this either? Me, whose mother had to sell her own body to put food in my mouth. Do you think that I would have ever, ever, wanted to force a woman to marry me?’
The shock on Maria’s face would have stopped his words, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the dam was well and truly burst and now everything was pouring out.
‘Just the thought of it horrifies me, Maria. It fills me with the kind of self-hatred I wouldn’t wish on anyone,’ he growled, slashing his hand through the air between them.
‘I will do everything in my power to protect you and our child, but damn it Maria, do you actually think I’m enjoying this?
Contrary to what you and your family think, I’m not actually a monster and I do not enjoy forcing women against their will to do something they don’t want to do.
Of course, I appreciate that it would be hard, no, near on impossible, for you to credit that one day, one day, I might actually have wanted to be with someone who had chosen to be with me because they cared for me. And now, that is impossible.’
He shook his head and huffed out a bitter laugh.
‘I could never bring myself to regret what happened in Paris,’ he admitted, ‘because I would never regret what led to the birth of our child. But by my word, I wish you’d never come to my office that night.’
For just a moment, he thought he might have seen a flash of hurt in her gaze, but he must have been imagining it. He stared into the fire that Benito had lit just before they’d arrived.
Maria stared at him, her aching heart bound by the confining silk of the wedding dress as she drew in breath after breath as if she’d run a marathon. She knew, in that moment, that she would never forget his words as long as she lived.
He was, just like her, trapped. Not by their child, but by this situation that had spun so wildly out of control.
She wanted to cry just from the agony in his tone when the confession that he’d hated himself that much was wrenched from his soul.
She could see it. Could see the torture pulling him from each side.
The need to be a better parent, a better man than the bastard that had abandoned him and his mother, but the anathema of having forced her to marry him had damned him all the same.
And she was more than just complicit in that. She was integral. She had done that to him.
Guilt came thick and fast. She had done it to them when she’d gone to Paris determined to punish him.
All she’d wanted was some kind of reckoning for her broken teenage heart, and instead, she’d doomed them both.
But despite the shocking vehemence of his words, she couldn’t leave it like this.
She couldn’t let him ignore her like her father, and she couldn’t say nothing like her mother.