Chapter Four #2
She’d walked away from it all without looking back.
He was only here in her flat now because she’d wanted to collect some clothes when she was discharged.
He’d resisted saying it would be over his dead body before she came back to this shithole.
Instead, he’d offered to collect whatever she needed to save her fragile body from traipsing to the other side of London and back.
He was quite sure she’d agreed only because she knew how much he loathed the place.
And also because she’d seen the sense in what he was saying.
He’d known better than to offer to buy her a new wardrobe of clothes, especially as this had come on the heels of his promise not to discuss their future together.
She hadn’t needed to see him cross his fingers to know his promise had been a false one and that he was simply biding his time…
A framed photo on one of her bedroom shelves suddenly caught his eye and cut through his train of thought.
He pulled it down and studied it closely.
It was a picture of Marnie as a child, maybe aged five or six, with her cheek pressed against a woman who looked so much like her she had to be Marnie’s mother.
Or maybe her grandmother. Her age was hard to determine.
Both subjects were smiling, but it was the window behind them that had really caught his attention, and he carried it to the living room and held it in front of the window there, slowly moving backwards as he compared what was in the photo with what lay before him.
His heart lurched.
The windows were the same. The photo had been taken in this room.
Domenico’s prediction that Marnie’s sickness would get worse before it got better proved prophetic.
Despite the anti-sickness medication and all the other things she’d been prescribed, it wasn’t until the fifteen-week mark of the pregnancy that she began to hope she was turning a corner.
It was catching the scent of lamb cooking and her stomach barely twitching in reaction that gave her that hope.
Strong scents had been as triggering as strong tastes.
For close to three months she’d survived on the blandest foods imaginable, topped up with nutritious supplements specifically designed to be tasteless.
After weeks and weeks and weeks of exhaustion, she now, at sixteen weeks, was regaining her energy too, and had spent much of the day looking forlornly out of her bedroom window at the rain lashing down on Domenico’s gorgeous garden.
She wished she could be out in it. Summer had stretched into autumn without her even noticing.
If she hadn’t kept such a firm hold on how far along she was with the pregnancy—she’d been surprised to learn the due date being taken by the date of her last period meant she was further along than she’d assumed—she’d have lost track of how long she’d been back here under Domenico’s roof.
Eight weeks. She’d never imagined when she agreed to stay with him that it would stretch so long.
The twelve-week pregnancy mark had come and gone with unspoken relief from them both that the baby had survived that far.
There had been much left unspoken between them since her temporary return, the future being the biggest unspoken ‘thing.’ Domenico’s work schedule was as manic as it always was, but he’d reduced his social life to nothing.
He left her medical care to the experts, but in the evenings that he was home, he plonked himself in her room.
He intuitively knew if she was having a good or bad day.
If she was having a bad one, he quietly got on with checking his investments and seeing if he’d had another billion added to his net worth since his last check.
When Marnie had first realised the extent of his vast wealth, she’d wondered why on earth he continued running his law firm.
She’d soon come to see that he thrived on all that came with it, not just the pressure, but that when practising law, there was always a clear-cut winner and loser.
Domenico thrived on winning, and it was this competitive aspect of his nature that kept her guard high, especially when she’d had a reasonably good day and he spent the evenings good-humouredly regaling her with tales from the office or giving a running commentary on whatever sport he happened to be watching on her TV.
Marnie had beaten him in their divorce, a loss that was anathema to him, and as far as he was concerned, her waiting for their divorce to be finalised to take the pregnancy test was on a par with cheating.
To Domenico’s mind, the pregnancy meant the game had been reset. He was simply biding his time. When he judged the time to be right, he would restart the game. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. What she didn’t know was how far he was prepared to go to win, not now that the stakes were so high.
Currently, he was flying back from Washington, where he’d spent five days overseeing the lobbying of the federal government for one of the firms he represented.
Once upon a time, Marnie would have been all over the details of it, and it still saddened her to remember how he used to joke that she knew more about his clients and corporate law than he did.
He’d never realised she had zero personal interest in his branch of law and that she’d soaked in all the details for him, not to impress him, but to make life easier for him and save him time.
If he needed a fact or figure on a case or client, she could produce it in an instant, and she’d been devastated when she’d realised marrying him meant she would no longer be working for him.
‘You don’t need to work now,’ he’d said with his easy charm two days after their wedding when she’d joined him for breakfast dressed for the office. There had been no time for a honeymoon for the newlyweds.
Their first full day as a married couple had been spent, at Domenico’s insistence, making a dent in the credit card he’d presented her with, shopping for a wardrobe fit for Domenico Cannavaro’s wife.
He’d come along with her, given much constructive feedback on the selected items without showing a hint of boredom, and even taken her for lunch at one of London’s most exclusive hotels.
If she’d had a brother, she imagined that’s what going shopping with him would have been like.
Fun, but with zero physical affection or intimacy.
‘But I love my job,’ she’d protested that second morning, taken aback as he’d never given a hint that he wanted her to stop working for him.
He’d smiled indulgently. ‘I know, but when you get pregnant, I’m going to need to find a replacement for you, so it makes sense to start as we mean to go on.
Being my wife and the mother of my children is your job now, Marnie, and I know you’re going to be as great at it as you were at being my assistant. ’
In the blink of an eye, she’d gone from spending regular ten-hour days with him and seeing much of the world by his side to being the little wife at home.
Had she stood up for herself and insisted on continuing with her job until their first baby came along?
Of course she hadn’t. She’d fallen into line because that’s what she always did, and when he’d left for the office without her, she’d given herself a good talking to and vowed to be the best wife it was possible to be, just as he expected.
What she should have done was pack her bags and leave him, but her love blinkers hadn’t fallen off at that point, only become a little smudged.
The irony that her love blinkers finally fell off around the time Domenico, increasingly desperate for her to conceive, cut down on his international travel and joined her in her bed every night he was in London was one she would have laughed at if she hadn’t come to hate him.
There hadn’t been any big drama over the loss of her blinkers.
In all their marriage, they’d never exchanged one cross word.
No, it was more that the blinkers had become so smudged that eventually they’d fallen off under the sheer weight of grime stuck to them, and suddenly she’d seen herself as he’d seen her: as his chattel, a walking, talking, Domenico-pleasing doll, invisible to the eye unless needed for playing with, and devoid of life and needs of her own.
He didn’t want her any more than her parents had. He only wanted what he’d pigeon-holed her into being for him.
By the time she’d left him, Marnie had been resentful of every orgasm he’d brought her to.
She’d never understood why she’d missed him so badly. And she didn’t understand why she missed his presence so badly now.
Domenico swept through his front door, rubbing the rain from his hair as he exchanged a friendly greeting with Clive, his butler, and was updated on pertinent household news. About to climb the stairs to see Marnie, Clive cleared his throat and said, ‘Ms Ware is in the orangery.’
If there was one thing Domenico hated, it was his very English butler’s new way of referring to Marnie, and if there was one thing he hated more, it was that he couldn’t correct him as she wasn’t his wife anymore and had dropped his surname when she’d filed the divorce papers.
Biting back the burst of piqued fury, he nodded his thanks and headed off.
The orangery was a sprawling conservatory-type room that wrapped around the east wing of the house.
It was a room he rarely visited; had only refrained from turning it into an indoor tennis court because his mother liked to pretend she was English gentry when she visited and take afternoon tea in it. His mother didn’t even like tea.