Chapter Four
THE ELEVATORS IN Marnie’s tower block were working. However, the stench that wafted out of the nearest when the door slid open was so revolting that Domenico gagged and opted to climb the eight flights of stairs.
Why the hell would any sane person choose to live somewhere like this, he wondered as he neared a group of young adolescents openly smoking cannabis at the top of the seventh flight. They barely looked old enough to have pimples, never mind the bullish swagger they all adopted at his approach.
He gave a nod of acknowledgement as he passed and wondered how much of the stench in this place they’d contributed towards. Then he wondered where the hell their parents were.
Aware of their stares following him and the rude catcalls being aimed at him, he didn’t break stride as he continued up the final flight, rightly judging they were more intimidated of him than they wanted him to be of them, and not for the first time wondered why the hell Marnie had chosen to live in a dangerous shithole like this.
He got that it was cheap, but, hell, surely there were safer cheap places a young woman would choose to live in the capital?
Whatever her reasons, he was damned if his child would ever set foot within two hundred metres of it.
He’d sooner raze it to the ground than let that happen.
Using the key she’d given him, he let himself into Marnie’s flat. It was like entering an oven. Even so, he took a welcome breath of the clean, albeit baking, air inside it.
Despite its godawful location, there was something very soothing about the interior.
The walls in the small living/dining room were plain white, the furniture generic simplicity at its best, but it was in all the soft furnishing and accents that she’d made her quiet mark with soothing pastel shades for the cushions and curtains and an abundance of framed photos, books and scented candles neatly crammed on the plentiful shelves of the living room walls.
The tiny kitchen, he guessed from its style, had last been modernised before Marnie was born, but she’d made her peaceful mark in there too. All the cupboard doors had been painted a soft, dusky pink, the worktops overlaid with a fake white marble surface. Everything was immaculate.
Unable to resist his one chance to observe her in the wild, so to speak, he opened the cupboards and found a surprising variety of tins and jars and packets and baking ingredients, and an equally surprising array of gadgets, the kind of gadgets only people who loved to cook bought.
Neatly stacked on the top of a cupboard were flatpack silver boxes, and he suddenly thought of the cakes she used to bring in if they were in London when a member of the team celebrated a birthday.
Domenico had been born without a sweet tooth, but even he’d been unable to resist those moreish treats she always presented in a silver box.
He’d assumed she bought them at a bakery on her way to the office, remembered once, years back, telling her to give him the bill so he could reimburse her and Marnie shrugging it off with a smile and saying it was her pleasure to do it.
He’d never guessed she made them herself, was certain she’d never told anyone she baked the cakes they all devoured like locusts.
His throat feeling weirdly tight, he looked in the fridge.
It was stocked with an abundance of fruit and vegetables that would never be eaten.
On the kitchen windowsill sat two cherry tomato plants, ripe with fruit, but their stems withered from not being watered in four days.
After filling a plastic box he found with the bounty of the tomatoes Marnie had lovingly grown and cared for, he finally set off to do the job she’d entrusted him with.
He hesitated at the bedroom’s threshold, memories suddenly assailing him.
This was the room they’d conceived their child in.
He’d already been inside her when they’d stumbled over this threshold.
Marnie’s limbs had been wrapped tight around him.
In front of him was the bed they’d fallen onto, still ripping each other’s clothes off as they fucked like a dam whose walls had been breached, their coupling the water pouring in a torrent to flood everything in its path.
He’d never had an experience like it. Not just the sex itself but the feelings that had gone with it, the urgency, the need, the hunger.
The desperation. It had all been there in one hedonistic night of madness.
And it had been in both of them. Marnie hadn’t been the passive bed partner of their marriage.
On the bed in front of him, she’d cradled his head while he’d suckled her breasts and she’d ridden up and down his length.
By the time they’d made love a third time, it would have taken a crane to remove him from the bed. Even if he’d been capable of leaving, the drugged-like need for her had remained alive in his veins. For the first time since they’d married, he’d fallen asleep with Marnie in his arms.
They’d held each other all night long, and then, in the morning, long after the sun had come up, she’d opened her eyes only a beat after he’d opened his.
For a singular moment in time, a connection the like of which he’d never known could exist had flown between them, a connection so powerful that something that had felt close to euphoria had caught hold of him, and he’d smiled from the rush of it all and bowed his head to kiss her.
Their mouths never made contact. In barely a blink, that singular connection between them was severed. Marnie’s beautiful face tightened, almost crumbling before she pulled herself out of his arms and rolled away from. With her back to him, she’d quietly told him to leave.
Only now, back in the room where it had all happened, could he not deny how those words had gut-punched him.
Rejection after a night like that wouldn’t sit well with anyone, but that had felt…
He closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.
In the moments of Marnie’s rejection, he’d felt more sucker-punched than when Carmela had told him she was leaving him for Davide.
He sat on the bed and expelled another long breath.
He’d been careful to ensure his marriage to Marnie was nothing like his marriage to Carmela; had been clear from the outset that it was primarily the mother of his child he’d been seeking in a wife.
He hadn’t wanted a wife as a lover in the traditional sense because that’s when emotions reared, and he would never allow himself to be entangled with emotions again.
He’d been ready for the children he’d always wanted and so needed to marry so his children could have the same love and stability that he’d been fortunate to have, but if he was going to commit to marriage again, he needed to be sure it would be for life.
Domenico had learned the hard way that passion could not be trusted. When passion burned itself out, bitterness rose and marriages fell.
He’d planned it all perfectly. His docile, placid Marnie, his most loyal and conscientious worker, would be perfectly content to fall in line with his plans.
He would share her bed to create the child they both wanted, but they would spend their lives as companions rather than lovers, much as his parents’ successful marriage had worked.
If Domenico wanted hot sex, he would look elsewhere—Marnie wouldn’t mind at all—but to create a successful marriage, it needed to be as companions.
Any love that grew would be a platonic love.
Unlike passionate love, platonic love was stable and reliable. Trustable.
The only doubt he’d experienced throughout the whole thing was when she’d shyly confirmed her virginity. An emotion he still didn’t understand had gripped him, and he’d had a sudden flash of the way she often blushed when he caught her staring at him. His heart had sunk.
It had been because of her virginity and those blushes that he’d left her bed as soon as was decent once the deed was done.
He’d known it was imperative to reinforce the parameters of their marriage immediately, for Marnie’s sake.
Obviously, he hadn’t thought for a moment that she could be in love with him—he hadn’t believed she had the imagination to fall in love…
or, at least that’s what he’d told himself—but at the time, it had felt very necessary, a means of protecting her from herself if she needed it.
You didn’t have to love someone to care for them, and he’d cared for her, and he’d gone out of his way to ensure their marriage was a good one for her.
He’d given her a generous—very generous—allowance along with an unlimited credit card and the use of any car in his fleet that she so wished to use.
He’d lavished her with jewellery and mini-breaks, taken her on regular date nights, called her every evening when he was abroad on business and always brought her gifts back from them.
When he’d joined her in her bed, sex had been—necessarily so—straightforward and perfunctory, but he’d been a considerate lover and had always made sure to bring her to orgasm before taking his own release.
Strangely, despite his pre-marriage imaginings and his certainty that Marnie wouldn’t care, he’d never been tempted to seek hot sex elsewhere, so he’d been faithful too. Not one woman had caught his eye.