Chapter Nine #2
This shopping trip with him was a marked contrast to that last one.
Or at least felt markedly different, and it wasn’t just because he kept holding her hand.
When she tried a dress on, he didn’t just give constructive feedback with his mouth but with his eyes too.
It felt like he was looking at her, the whole of her, Marnie, and not just a mannequin in human skin.
This time, it didn’t feel like she was shopping with someone treating her in the way she imagined he treated his sister on a shopping trip.
‘What do you think of this?’ he asked in the sixth store they entered, having shooed away the fawning sales assistants. The dress he’d pulled off the sparse rack was a seemingly simple white dress.
‘It’s pretty,’ she said, running her fingers over the fabric. Sewn into it were thousands upon thousands of crystal sequins.
Less than a minute later, she was stripping off to her knickers in yet another luxury changing room and carefully stepping into the white dress.
Backless, she was able to do the hidden zip up herself as it only ran to the base of her spine, and then she pulled it over her breasts, securing them in the inbuilt bra, and tied the halter-neck straps around her neck, being careful not to catch her hair in it.
Only then did she allow herself to look at her reflection.
Her chest expanded. The dress was beautiful.
By going up a size to what she normally wore, it accommodated her growing belly and breasts—she hadn’t paid much attention to them growing too—without constricting them, giving her an hourglass figure.
The top part of it skimmed her cleavage in a circle, and as the halter-neck straps were gold, it gave the illusion of the dress defying gravity.
When she turned this way and that, the crystal sequins caught the light and sparkled a rainbow of colours.
And then her chest deflated. She was much too plain to wear this. Wearing it made her feel like a mutton pretending to be a lamb.
Just as she was determining to change out of it, there was a knock on the dressing room door followed by Domenico’s voice. ‘Are you okay in there?’
Injecting some lightness into her voice, she called back, ‘I’m fine. Just took a while to get into the dress.’
‘Are you going to let me see?’
‘No point. It isn’t right for me.’
There was something in the way Marnie said it isn’t right for me that made Domenico pause. Wistful. That’s how she sounded.
So far, she’d tried on eight dresses. To his eyes, she’d looked beautiful in all of them, but he’d understood her objections.
Growing up with a fashion-conscious mother and sister had made him aware of the necessity for a woman to not just look good in an outfit but to feel good in it.
Marnie’s it isn’t right for me didn’t sound like one of the usual objections of a dress being too long or too short or too old or too young for her.
‘Can I see anyway?’ he asked steadily.
The answer came via the door unlocking. She pulled it open and stepped back with the same wistful expression on her face as had been in her voice.
Domenico’s heart rose and caught in his throat, and it took a long moment before he could clear it enough to say, ‘Marnie, this dress looks beautiful on you.’
Colour slashed her cheeks, and she rubbed her arms. ‘I love the dress, but…’ She shook her head, the colour on her face darkening even more. ‘It’s too sparkly. It needs to be worn by someone beautiful and vivacious who can carry it off.’
Dumbfounded that she could say that and, worse, mean it, it took another long moment before he spurred himself into action. Stepping into the dressing room, he closed the door. ‘Turn around.’
Her eyebrows drew together in question.
Gently gripping her shoulders, he manoeuvred her until she was facing the mirror and stood behind her.
Putting his hands on her hips, he looked over her head to catch her stare in the mirror’s reflection. ‘Do you know what I see?’
Her eyebrows drew together again.
‘I see a vision of beauty.’ He wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on the top of her head.
She was wearing perfume, and it had mingled with her shampoo to create a scent so divine it was all he could do to stop himself burying his face in her neck and greedily inhaling it deep into her lungs.
Holding her like this was the most he could allow himself.
The most he dared. ‘The dress sparkles, but you, fiore mio, dazzle in it. This dress was made for you, and I don’t understand why you can’t see it. ’
After a long beat, her shoulders rose before she sighed and leaned back into him. Quietly, she said, ‘I just see me.’
‘Then the me you see is different to the me I see. You’re beautiful, Marnie, and you deserve to sparkle.’ Soon, he was determined to understand why she couldn’t see it.
Her eyes glistened, sparkling as much as her dress, but she delicately sniffed the tears back before they could fall. ‘You think I should get it?’
He shook his head. ‘I know you should get it.’
More aware than he’d been when he entered the room of the intimacy of its confines and with the heat of Marnie’s body and her scent all swirling inside him to heat the arousal he was determined to keep under lock and key while she was so fragile, Domenico knew it was time to leave the room.
It was bad enough that he was already torturing himself with his need to hold her the whole night through…
holding her without touching her. Keeping her at a distance that was the opposite of the distance he’d put her through during their marriage.
This physical distance… Dio, he mustn’t think about it.
While Marnie was still recovering from those months of illness, he must keep his desire controlled. She was too fragile.
But he could allow his hands to stroke the length of her bare arms, and he could drop a kiss into the irresistible arch of her neck… Dio, how had he been so blind for all those years?
His blindness had been wilful. That was becoming clearer by the day. By the minute. Blind not only to Marnie’s luminescent beauty but to his feelings for her. Too blind to notice she’d slipped beneath the wall he’d built in the wake of his father’s death and the breakdown of his first marriage…
Clearing his throat, he stepped away from her. ‘I will leave you to change.’
Her eye caught his again in the mirror’s reflection. Her hand rose to her throat. She lifted her chin and nodded.
Feeling as if his heart was trying to punch its way out of his ribs, Domenico closed the door behind him.
The party itself was everything Marnie had expected. Held in the grounds of Matteo and Isla’s magnificent two-storey apartment, barely a five-minute walk from the boutique she’d chosen her dress in, it was filled with more faces that were familiar than unfamiliar.
When Domenico had thrown his parties when she’d been his PA and expected to attend them in that still undefined supervisory capacity, she’d hidden behind her job title, using it as a mask to conceal how intimidated she felt amongst all his glamorous and successful friends.
When she was his wife, she’d been pushed forward, into the throng of the glamorous and successful friends, and it had been excruciating for her.
She’d wanted to cling to Domenico’s coattails the way she’d done since she was eighteen, but this time for real rather than as a metaphorical thing.
Who was she, she’d always fretted, no matter how kindly she was treated, to even think of standing tall amongst these people?
This time, it had all changed again. She didn’t know if it was the genuine warmth she found in his friends’ eyes or the tightness of the embraces she was given, or the genuine gushes of congratulations about them and the baby, or even if it was the beautiful dress she was wearing, but she didn’t feel the need to hide behind Domenico, nor cringe inwardly when approached by anyone.
She felt different in herself. Stronger.
The biggest change was in how Domenico was with her. He’d been attentive and solicitous since their agreement to try again, but this was their first time together in their new incarnation out in society. The changes were subtle, but it was the impact they had on Marnie that made them feel so big.
Parties during their marriage had been spent not just trying to be invisible but feeling invisible to Domenico.
It wasn’t that he’d left her to fend for herself, more that he’d never felt the need to draw her into conversations, had been content for her to hang by his side like a forgotten appendage.
Tonight, he pulled her to the fore, keeping her hand firmly in his or an arm around her waist, making sure she was included in everything, translating when needed, and always ensuring she had a glass of water to sip on. And when she caught his eye…
It no longer felt like it used to, like he was looking through her.
When Domenico looked at her now, it felt like he was seeing the whole of her.
There were even times when their eyes locked, and the longing she just could not shake for him seemed to be mirrored in his stare.
She thought she’d seen that longing in the changing room earlier, that spellbinding moment when it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.
That little kiss he’d placed on her neck…
she could still feel the mark of his lips on her skin.
Still feel the flush of heat that had followed it.
She’d experienced another, deeper, flush of heat when she’d left her dressing room and found him waiting for her on the bedroom sofa.
She could spend a thousand years with Domenico and never become inured to his masculine beauty, but there were times when she looked at him and the effect was like a bolt of lightning straight into her heart.
Tonight had been one such time, and when their eyes had finally fused and she’d seen the pulse resonating from his…
For the first time in her life, Marnie had felt not just beautiful but desirable. The bolt in her heart had spread in a flush of heat so strong that it had taken all her strength not to throw herself into his arms.
‘How are you feeling?’ he murmured into her ear when the group they’d been talking to headed onto the makeshift dance floor.
It seemed like everyone was now on the dance floor, even the hosts’ tearaway children, who’d snuck out of their bedrooms and had been spotted minesweeping the empty glasses.
Marnie remembered doing that once, as a small child.
Her dad had still been there then. She’d got out of bed early and found an empty bottle of alcohol she now knew was vodka and two glasses on the coffee table.
One of the glasses had still been half full.
She’d drunk it all and then spent the day vomiting and feeling wretched.
It had taken two decades for her to get even a little bit drunk again.
That had been the day their decree nisi had come through.
It had been the first time since she’d left him that she’d been unable to ignore the depth of her misery without him.
All the pretence she’d shrouded herself in had stripped away, and suddenly it hadn’t mattered that leaving him had been a necessity, not when the pain of living without him had become so terrifyingly acute.
And so she’d bought that bottle of wine, fully understanding for the first time why her mother had sought consolation in the bottom of a bottle, and for the first time allowed herself to rage and grieve at the loss of her dreams and the loss of the man she’d built her world around.
And then he’d knocked on her door, and the child growing safely in her belly had been conceived.
Was it possible, she asked herself for the first time, that Domenico had come to her that night because he’d been experiencing similar feelings…? Had he felt her loss like she’d felt his…?
Her heart suddenly thumping hard, she lifted her gaze to his. He was still looking at her. Still looking at her as if she meant something to him.
Was it really possible, she wondered dazedly. Being invisible and forgettable was so deeply ingrained that she’d never considered the possibility of Domenico missing her and…dare she even think it…? developing feelings for her…
Close to choking on emotion, she had to swallow to truthfully say, ‘I’m feeling better than I have in a long time.’
Sensuous lips curving, he gently traced the rim of her ear. ‘You’re enjoying yourself?’
Shivers of sensation danced through her, and she squeezed the fingers entwined through hers and nodded. ‘Can we dance?’
The words had come out before she knew she was going to say them, but the longing that accompanied them was as impossible to deny as her longing for him.
They’d danced together only once, at their wedding reception.
It had been a token dance to an upbeat song.
She’d watched Domenico dance at his parties many times before they married, but other than that token dance, never while they were married.
He’d avoided the dance floor until she’d left him.
Why was that? Why had he been so reluctant to take her into his arms for a simple dance? Had it even been reluctance? And why had she never asked him to dance? Why had she been so content to let him take the lead on every single aspect of their marriage?
As all these thoughts and questions flew through her head, his jaw clenched and flexed, and his eyes briefly closed before fixing back on hers. With a tug of his hand, he led her through the dancing bodies to the last available space on the floor and stiffly drew her to him.