Chapter Six #2
‘It’s getting too hot out here, so I’m going back in,’ she said without looking at him. ‘I don’t want to fight you, Dom. I never did. I just want to live my life peacefully and for our child to have that same peace too.’
Back in the villa, Marnie went straight to her room. The peace she craved seemed a long way away. The adrenaline that had carried her through that awful but necessary talk with Domenico had barely lessened in the walk back, and she paced the room, unable to settle in body or mind.
She would have happily lived the rest of her life never thinking of that night again, never mind talk about it, but now that it had been brought up between them, it played as vividly in her head as if she were living it all again.
The intensity of the emotions and feelings she’d experienced that night was terrifying to remember. The violence of her emotions. The way she’d screamed at him.
It was like the coil of her misery that had wound tighter and tighter during her marriage and the awful months that followed, months where her hate for him had grown in direct proportion to the depth of how badly she missed him, had snapped, and all her suppressed emotions had sprung free.
She’d never wanted to believe herself capable of acting like her mother, and only because she’d spent her life terrified of being anything like her did Marnie refuse to blame her behaviour on the wine she’d been drinking.
She knew the alcohol had played its part, wished she’d never given in to the need to numb the pain of the decree nisi, but it had been her mouth that had shouted obscenities at Domenico.
Not her mother’s. Her words. Her actions belonged to her alone.
More shameful was remembering how alive she’d felt in his arms, and as she paced her room, she could feel the embers of the wild hedonism that had possessed her.
The passion that had unleashed that night was a passion she’d spent the whole of her marriage aching for, and it hurt unbearably to know that once she’d finally tasted it, it was a passion born of furious hate and not love. His hate and hers.
Her door opened without any warning.
She spun around.
Their eyes caught. Locked.
Her heart swelled into her throat.
His jaw clenched.
His handsome features taut, Domenico reached her in four long strides. There was no time to react before he cupped her cheeks in his giant hands and brought his face down to hers.
‘If you think that’s the end of the matter, then you don’t know me at all,’ he ground out harshly.
The heat of his breath danced over her skin a beat before his mouth claimed hers, and in the next beat Marnie was lost in a kiss so possessive and demanding that she was helpless to do anything but fall head first into it.
Electricity zinged through her veins, the first sweep of his tongue against hers zinging her senses back to life, and she wrapped her arms tightly around him, devouring his mouth with the same fury he was devouring hers.
The sensation of his fingers diving into her hair to cradle her head as he deepened the kiss was heavenly; every movement of his mouth on hers, every stroke of his tongue, every touch, it all the fed the flame of the ache she’d carried for him for so many years she could barely remember a time when it hadn’t lived inside her, and it was only by forcing herself to remember the strength it had taken to walk away and the agony of it all that she was able to wrench her mouth away and push at his chest.
‘What are you doing?’ Her demand came out like a wail.
She’d been scooped into his arms before she even realised he was swooping to pick her up and carried onto the bed before she could gather the wits to protest. Domenico was a tall and physically intimidating man, but he had the agility of a gymnast, and when he laid her down, his head came down on the pillow beside hers, and she was being spooned into him before she could take a breath.
‘Now you listen to me, Marnie Cannavaro,’ he said roughly…
and yet somehow gently…into the top of her head.
‘I don’t care what a piece of paper says, you are still my wife.
I know I was a terrible husband to you. I am selfish and spoilt, and one of the reasons I chose you as my wife is because I arrogantly assumed you would be happy to continue spoiling me and bending your life to my will—you called that right.
I was very much aware that you had a crush on me, and I took advantage of that, but for all my selfishness and arrogance, I chose you because I like you.
I’ve always liked you. Mine is a high-pressure life, and your presence brought calm to it.
When you took your annual leave, I always felt your absence, and not just because your supersonic brain wasn’t on hand when I needed to know something immediately. I missed you.
‘When I knew it was time for me to remarry, there was no one else, only you, but you’re right that if I’d known what exploded between us that night could happen, I would have chosen someone else, and I spent the six weeks after that night determined to forget about you because what happened that night was so far from what I wanted for us you would not believe.
But it did happen, Marnie, and we made a baby through it, and I am prepared to do anything to bring you back to me.
I told you the concessions I was prepared to make, but you need to think of them as the opening salvo in a one-sided negotiation that you hold all the cards to. ’
There was no loosening of the rigid, too-bony back Domenico’s chest was pressed against. And no loosening of the tightness inside his chest or slowing of his thumping heart.
He hadn’t meant to kiss her. He hadn’t even meant to touch her.
He’d only decided to take the day off work when he’d taken her breakfast into her room and found her pretending to be asleep again. Did she seriously believe he didn’t know when she was faking sleep when he’d spent so many hours watching over her these last two months?
Something inside of him had snapped, and he’d decided there and then that he’d had enough.
The staff all spoke glowingly about the clear effect the Italian air was having on her and how well she was recovering, but the minute Domenico was home, she hid away in her bedroom and pretended to be asleep.
It wasn’t like when they’d been in London and he’d been able to use the excuse of watching over the patient to sit in her room every night while she recovered.
She was no longer ill. No, Marnie was hiding. From him.
No more hiding, he’d determined. They needed to talk, and that wasn’t going to happen unless he forced it.
And so he’d forced it, and then he’d watched her walk back to the villa with so many damned feelings coursing through him.
His placid little wife… Dio, she saw him more clearly than anyone else ever had, and it was the most unsettling sensation, to be truly seen and to be found wanting.
Not even Carmela had made him feel that.
That’s when the anger at Marnie’s flat refusal to listen and her self-appointed role as his judge, jury and executioner had hit him. She said he only heard what he wanted to hear? Well, what the hell was she doing if not the same thing?
Increasing fury had propelled him to his feet, and he’d followed her into the villa determined to repay her with some home truths of his own because he’d gone out of his way to be gentle in the way he’d pointed out her habit of keeping her unhappiness bottled up.
Hell, she kept everything bottled up, only letting it out when it was too damned late to do anything about it.
And then he’d barged into her room and she’d spun around to face him and there had been such starkness in her expression that everything he’d angrily psyched himself into letting rip at her had melted away under the weight of emotion that had filled his guts.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled the sweetness of her shampoo and rubbed his nose into the silky tresses.
Marnie’s scent was as soothing as he used to find her presence, and as he thought of her soothing presence in the past tense, Domenico forced himself to admit that for the two months she’d been back in his life, it had soothed him in a very different way to know she was back under his roof.
Her presence had stopped being soothing the longer the months of their marriage had passed. It had been such a gradual process he couldn’t pinpoint when he’d had to force his good humour in the meals they shared or when going into her bedroom had become an act of torture second only to leaving it.
The torture had come from the unwanted notion that the more he made love to her, the more he wanted to make love to her and the stronger the sense that she was slipping away from him.
He had felt her slipping away. It had been there in her responses to his lovemaking, the sensation he was making love only to a body, the mind attached to it closed off and locked away from him.
He just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, had fought against acknowledging that the perfect marriage he’d created as a means of creating a family was cracking.
He’d been cracking too, he acknowledged painfully.
His increasing desperation to impregnate her had come because he’d subconsciously known he was losing her.
Get her pregnant and then she’d never be able to leave him, that’s what his subconscious had demanded, and now she was pregnant and still she would rather live in a flat in one of the most dangerous areas of London than come back to him.
But it had been more than desperation to impregnate her that had seen him go to Marnie night after night, and for the first time, he forced himself to consider the possibility that in the long months of their marriage, he’d fallen for his wife.
It was a notion that brought perspiration to his face.
It was just pregnancy hormones, he valiantly assured himself, because there was no way he could have fallen for her, not when he’d spent their whole damned marriage ensuring that didn’t happen.
Sure, he wasn’t the one carrying their child, but he’d spent two months watching Marnie suffer and being unable to do a damned thing to ease it.
That had to affect a man. He cared for her and felt protective of her because he wasn’t a monster.
That didn’t mean he needed to look back into the past and start seeing things there that didn’t exist.
Closing his eyes even tighter, he filled his lungs again with Marnie’s scent and spooned himself even closer so his knees bent into the back of hers. Only the awareness she’d only so recently stopped feeling nauseous at every little thing stopped him tightening his hold around her.
‘Give me a week,’ he said, breaking the long silence. ‘Let me spend this time proving that I can be the husband you want me to be.’
She took so long to respond that he began to think she really had fallen asleep, and when she did speak, her voice was so faint it was barely audible. ‘But it won’t be real.’