Chapter Nine
CATARINA WAS AS still as death as Massimo’s footsteps disappeared down the hallway.
She didn’t move as she heard the creak of his door.
But when the door slammed shut, she rolled onto her back on the bed, a place that was supposed to be her own.
This room had always been a refuge, but as she took a deep breath, his intoxicating scent still lingered everywhere.
Catarina wanted to scream. She wanted to cry.
Most of all, she wanted to run far away from this man who made her weak.
I’ll take care of you. Massimo’s words had taunted her with a promise she so dearly wanted, and now they haunted her.
It had taken her a moment before she realized that he was simply referring to sex, nothing more.
He seemed completely unaware that they were the words that her father had used in their marriage discussion.
He was simply clarifying that he would make sure this first time would hurt as little as possible, and he had shown her a tenderness that had evoked that stubborn hope that she couldn’t seem to shake, the hope for more.
Catarina balled her fists in frustration.
Even if his promise had only been for this one act of intimacy, it was still a lie because right now, everything hurt worse than she ever dreamed it could.
Worse than it should have. Massimo had shown an unexpected passion, and somehow it made this ending even more heartbreaking.
She had been so very right to be wary of his autocratic statements because the moment the evening took an unexpected turn, the tenderness disappeared, and the cold demands returned.
But his demands weren’t the most disturbing part of the awful ending of their encounter.
The hardest part to digest was the fact that, as he walked away, she’d had to bite her lip to stop herself from calling out to him, begging him to come back.
Her body craved his. She craved his touch, his warm, hard chest against her, his big hands splayed across her back, holding her close, and the long, hard length of him deep inside her.
She needed him again. There must be something wrong with her, she decided, to want someone who had completely and treacherously turned on her.
Because the last thing she wanted was to start a family with a man who clearly could not—no, would not—love her. Who would not give her the respect she deserved.
Catarina blinked up at the ceiling as outrage competed with the intoxicating memory of his mouth everywhere.
She needed to sleep. Everything would look better in the morning.
She pried herself out of bed to wash the tears from her face, then returned to bed, burying herself under the covers until somehow she fell asleep.
Her sleep was fitful, her dreams, vivid, erotic and haunting, but when she awoke in the morning, the music returned.
It was playing through her head with the clear ring that she used to awaken to every day.
But the tune that played was one that had captured her imagination in her teens and then haunted her dreams in the days after her mother’s passing, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor.
Now it called to her with an intensity she could not ignore.
Yesterday she had sat on the piano bench, the familiar cool wood under her welcoming her back as the music filled her, but she had not been ready to let it out, to reveal the emotions that brimmed inside her.
Today was different. Today they would not be contained.
They seeped through her defenses, through her carefully constructed facade and made her vulnerable.
And in the same way Massimo’s kiss had taken over yesterday, consuming her, she felt consumed by the need to play.
Something deep inside ached, something that, if she was honest, had ached for years, begging to be free.
She had been an obedient daughter and ignored this wild intensity inside, but last night something had shifted.
She might carry a child of her own. She could no longer sail through her life, allowing the winds around her to guide her course.
Catarina owed this child her protection, the protection her father had not given her, despite his good intentions.
Catarina didn’t bother to dress or wash her face or do any of the things that she was taught to do to make herself presentable. She simply rose from her bed, brushed her hair from her eyes and descended the stairs, her gaze fixed on the piano.
Outside the window, the wind had let up, and the fjord was just visible through the fat flakes of snow that fell like feathers, drifting back and forth in the gray morning. A soft, diffuse light lit the piano as she approached it, as if it were calling to her.
Catarina opened the bench and rustled through the music until she found the right piece.
Her heart pounded as she propped it on the music stand, took a deep breath and played the first notes of the Prelude that had haunted her.
The music seemed to swell inside her. She began with the heavy chords, feeling the foreboding that echoed in each one.
When the chords changed into arpeggios, picking up speed and turmoil, all in that haunting minor key, she was swept away into the turbulent progressions up and down the keyboard until they came to the end in a clatter of chords.
She entered the final lines, heavy and absolute.
Breathless, her hands hovered over the keyboard.
She expected to find herself crying. That had been her worry the previous morning, that her music and her sorrow were inextricably intertwined.
But what she felt was more complicated than sorrow.
The room came back into focus, and Catarina was suddenly aware that she was not alone. She looked over her shoulder and saw Massimo, standing at the base of the staircase, his expression inscrutable.
Awareness shuddered through her, that now-familiar lick of hot desire, along with the protective urge to suppress all signs of it.
The best course of action was to put all of these thoughts aside and examine them later when they had returned to Milan and she was in the safety of her room.
She could sort them out the way she always had, alone.
But even the thought of returning to her father’s house, back to safety, was no relief.
She attempted to school her features, to push down her feelings the way she had spent years practicing, but Catarina found that she…couldn’t. Something had broken free inside her, something she could no longer suppress.
“What were you playing?” he asked, his voice so much gentler than she’d expected.
“Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor,” she said, and she could hear that her voice was still tinged with the dizzying turmoil of the music that had started to untangle the mess of emotions knotted inside her. “It is said that the composer wrote it after a dream of his own death.”
“That was…stunning,” he said, and his eyes now seemed to be filled with open admiration.
Her breath caught in her throat as the knot tightened inside her once again.
Would he simply talk to her like this, as if nothing had happened?
Yesterday he had dangled a different kind of future in front of her, a future that included long evenings of food and conversation and unspeakable passion, and then, when the condom broke, he had so viciously yanked it away.
And now he was complimenting her on something she held so dear.
What was she supposed to do with this man?
“The piano holds no judgment of me for the times my thoughts are less palatable to those around me,” she replied, and her voice wavered with emotion.
Why couldn’t she say this in the careful tone she had practiced her whole life?
How could she have let herself get this out of control, exposing herself, making herself so vulnerable in a way that she could no longer take back?
She had meant her comment as a subtle reference to her less than generous feelings toward him, but if he understood this, he didn’t take offense.
In fact, in his gaze she found something that looked like understanding.
Real understanding. Maybe he was looking for a way forward, a way to talk through the possible consequences of the broken condom.
The flicker of hope wasn’t nearly as strong inside, but it was still alive.
The room was quiet, and he said nothing, just gazed at her.
And in that moment, a roller coaster of emotions raced through her, one that seemed to mirror what she saw in Massimo’s dark eyes.
She saw hope. Fear. Joy. Frustration. And with every peak and valley was that insistent desire that never seemed to go away with Massimo.
The air seemed to charge between them, but before she could think through this, he looked away.
“The storm seems to have abated,” he said, gesturing out the window. “I imagine I will be able to contact my helicopter soon, and we will return to Milan. I expect that things will be clearer then.”
She could hear the implication behind these words, that the moment she faced her father and the trappings of their lives again, she would soon bend to his will.
Frustration took over, and Catarina looked away, trying to hide any traces of the sinking feeling that she had been mistaken.
Even misled. This conversation, this connection, was simply a lead-up to the next step in his plan. And her job was to fall in line.
“I find that things look perfectly clear from here,” she said tartly as she tried to shut off every other complicated feeling that had been building inside her.