Chapter Seven #2
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered when the tears had finally dried up. ‘I got a little overwhelmed there.’
The arms holding her tightened.
Frightened at how good and right this felt, she disentangled her arms and lifted her upper body.
The moment their eyes locked back together, her heart shuddered.
Slowly, Domenico lifted himself upright too, until his face was only inches from hers.
They stayed like that for the longest time, neither of them speaking or moving, just staring at each other in an unspoken language that made her want to cry again.
But there were no more tears. Domenico captured a lock of fallen hair and tucked it behind her ear before his mouth closed in on hers and captured it.
If his kiss had been as furiously demanding as the one they’d shared when he’d stormed into her room, she would have pushed him away. But it wasn’t. It was achingly, achingly tender.
The tips of his fingers pressed into her cheek, and then he moved his mouth slowly, so slowly, over hers, and gently drew her lips apart.
Closing her eyes, Marnie sank into it. Her senses infusing with the musky scent of his skin, she met the unhurried stroke of his silken tongue and dreamily drank in the exotic darkness of his taste.
Mouths and tongues entwined, the flame of desire that had never died for him flickered as his fingers slid from her cheek and threaded through her hair.
His other hand slipped behind her back and dipped beneath her top to rest on her naked flesh, igniting a thrill of sensation, gently pulling her closer to him.
At the first touch of her tender breasts against his muscular chest, another, deeper, thrill of sensation lazily uncoiled, and she sank even deeper into the kiss, so deep that their faces became meshed together and all conscious thought was lost because she was lost.
She had no idea which of them broke it. One moment she was lost in the most beautiful kiss of her life, the next she was dazedly gazing again into Domenico’s eyes with no recollection of winding an arm around his neck or of how her legs came to be over his lap.
Her heart…she could feel the pounding of its beat everywhere.
His jaw clenched, and his shoulders rose as he took a deep inhalation. But his eyes stayed on hers, and when he opened his mouth, she had a flash of intuition of what he was going to say and pressed a finger to his lips with a shake of her head. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please, don’t say anything.’
Marnie couldn’t bear for the kiss she’d spent the whole of her life waiting for or that joyous moment when their baby had come fully alive for them to be used as a weapon.
Couldn’t bear to hear confirmation that their kiss had come with an ulterior purpose rather than from the pure emotion that had driven her part in it.
She swallowed. ‘I’m willing to try.’
His eyes narrowed, the groove in his forehead making another appearance. But he didn’t speak. Not with his mouth.
‘You’re right,’ she said, even as a part of her shrivelled in fear of the future pain she was going to unleash on herself.
‘Our baby does deserve to be raised with two committed parents, and if you’re willing to try, then so am I.
’ She attempted a smile. ‘You’ve shared the bad side of the pregnancy with me, and it’s only fair you share the good side too.
If that flutter I felt is any indication, then there’s going to be lots of the good side to share.
’ And now that she’d experienced the joy of that flutter and felt the life behind, how could she deny Domenico the chance to share the rest of it?
The baby in her belly didn’t belong to her alone; it belonged to them both.
It needed them both. As much as Marnie had hated the hell of living with parents who despised the air the other breathed, at least they’d tried.
Who was to say her life wouldn’t have been worse if they hadn’t?
What would have become of her if her father hadn’t made that initial effort before abandoning them?
Domenico would never love her, but if she tried hard enough, maybe she could learn to live with it rather than hate him for it.
Maybe he was right, and all that was needed was a change of mindset to make it work, because he was right that their child deserved it, and unlike Marnie’s father, Domenico would never leave it.
He would be there for it, loving it, every day of its life.
Their child deserved for them to at least try. That it had fully introduced itself when they were together made her think their baby wanted that too.
She put her finger back to his lips before he could speak. ‘But, Dom, I’m sorry, I won’t marry you again. I need to know that if…’ When… ‘it doesn’t work out, I can walk away, and I need you to promise that if that happens, you won’t fight it.’
The light brown eyes that hadn’t broken from hers glittered, the sensuous lips pulling in as his features tightened. ‘Our child deserves the security of marriage.’
‘And I deserve the security of knowing I can walk away and that you’ll let me go. You said that I held all the negotiating cards; well, this is me playing them, and I’m doing my best to play them in a way that’s fair to all of us, our baby included.’
The longest time passed before he closed his eyes and expelled a long breath. When he next met her stare, a wry smile played on his lips. ‘You know, you would make one hell of a litigator.’
She tried not to let her chest inflate too hard at his compliment, but she’d always been a sucker for any hint of praise from him, had loved nothing more than having her hard work recognised, which he’d done frequently. She would not let it turn her head now. ‘Does that mean you accept my terms?’
The wry smile remained. ‘I don’t see that I have any choice.’
‘And you promise that you won’t fight me if I choose to walk away?’
His eyes narrowed with thought. Slowly, he said, ‘I will make that promise if you make a promise in return—that if ever you feel you want to walk away, you talk to me first and let me try to fix whatever it is that’s making you feel the need to leave.’
A stab of guilt pierced her chest.
Would things have been different if she’d told him how she felt before she’d left him? She didn’t know because she’d never given him the chance, something that made the guilt morph into shame.
All those long, lonely months maintaining the fiction of being the perfect wife for him while living with increasing misery, resentment and loathing, and not once giving voice to it…
Why was that? Why had she only found her voice once she’d made up her mind to leave?
‘I can agree to that,’ she whispered.
A pulse on his jaw throbbed, and he slowly inclined his head. ‘Then I accept your terms.’
A sensation that was a cross between sickness and excitement exploded inside her, a sensation so familiar to how she’d reacted when Domenico had proposed that she came within a whisker of saying she’d changed her mind and demanding to return to England.
Those old feelings had been on a hiding to nothing from the start.
But there would be no changing of her mind.
She might have no faith that they could make it work, but they owed it to their child to try, she saw that now.
It was all about mindset, just as Domenico had said, and this time her mindset would be that she was entering their arrangement with her love blinkers off and her eyes wide open.
Except it was a hard mindset to maintain when her legs were still draped over his lap and her hand was still cupping his neck and his hand was still touching the naked flesh of her back and he was staring at her with such an intense but unreadable expression.
A new form of sickness rose inside her, another that was painfully familiar, this one anticipation as she held her breath and waited for what came next.
Would he seal their agreement with another kiss? Seal it with something more…?
The anticipation accelerated. Her pulse cantering, Marnie found herself suddenly struggling to breathe.
Eyes still boring into hers, he traced the contour of her ear with a finger. ‘Are you hungry?’
Another emotion lanced her, one as familiar and powerful as all the others that had caught her in their grip since he’d joined her in the rose garden. Disappointment.
He was talking about food.
Mindset, Marnie, she valiantly reminded herself, as what she’d just agreed to flashed before her.
Sex in their marriage had only ever been about making a baby.
Their baby’s actual conception had been an aberration fuelled by bitter anger and rage-unleashed alcohol, one she knew he would never allow to be repeated.
The kiss when he’d come into her bedroom had been fuelled by anger too, the one they’d shared after she’d cried borne from an ulterior motive.
Neither had been driven by genuine, heartfelt emotion. Not from him.
She did not doubt that in his quest to prove himself a better husband and prove he’d listened to her, Domenico would pull out all the stops.
He would make an effort to be more affectionate and attentive.
He would act the good act and treat her more like a partner than background wallpaper.
She didn’t doubt, either, that he would be faithful to her, and she supposed for that reason alone, he would want to have sex with her, and because she was a slave to his touch, had been until the very end of their marriage, she wouldn’t resist him.
He would sleep by her side rather than leave her bed as if she were some kind of doll that could be unplugged and forgotten about.
Passion, though? She could forget that. He would never allow that to happen again. Forget, too, the genuine, heartfelt emotions she’d craved throughout their marriage.
The sooner she accepted this in her heart, the better, because this was what she’d just agreed to, and it was with this in mind that she pulled a small smile to her face. ‘A little.’
He returned the smile, making her heart turn over. ‘Then let’s go and eat.’