Chapter Eight
DULCIE OPENED HER EYES, moving from one kind of darkness to another, seeking the cause of her abrupt awakening. And then she realised what it was.
Ettore was gone.
She didn’t try to deny or stifle the disappointment that swelled up inside her chest to fill her ribcage. She was done burying her emotions. And last night, they had risen up inside her like a natural spring.
And out of everything that had happened last night, that was the most surprising part. That despite having clutched her guilt and shame close to her for so many years, telling Ettore the truth about her childhood had been easy.
Not painless, but he had made it easy somehow.
His honesty and support had overwhelmed her, and it had felt like the most natural thing in the world to lean into his hard chest, and for him to stroke her hair and hold her close.
And when he had tilted her face up to his so that his mouth was so temptingly close to hers, how could she not have kissed him?
Or touched his face, his arms, his chest…
She pressed her thighs together around the ache there, a slide of heat cutting through her like a hot knife through butter as she remembered his fingers pressing hers around the post and the feel of his cock as he thrust inside her.
Afterwards, when he’d held her close, it had felt more than just post-coital satisfaction. It had felt like an admission of something. Of possibilities and the potential for a rearranged world order where this lie they were living wasn’t pretence any more.
Because she knew who he was now, and why he had reacted as he had when Oscar had turned up, unannounced, drunk. She had seen his confusion and shock and interpreted it as disapproval. But now she knew that he had seen Oscar as yet another responsibility to add to all his other responsibilities.
She glanced up as the door to the bedroom opened, blinking into the light angling across the floor, and her heart slipped free of its moorings.
It was Ettore.
‘You’re awake.’
She nodded. ‘I just woke up.’
‘Good.’ He nodded, and the hope rushing through her veins slowed to a trickle. He didn’t sound unfriendly, but he didn’t sound like the man who had stretched her hands above her head and licked her throat and sucked her nipples into his mouth until she’d begged him to take her.
‘I have a couple of calls to make but I’ll tell Valentina to bring you up some breakfast.’
‘I can—’ she began, but he had already closed the door.
She had barely managed to press the remote to open the thick curtains that covered the windows before she heard Valentina knock on the door.
‘Buongiorno, Signora.’
‘Grazie, Valentina,’ she said as the housekeeper placed one of those folding wooden trays that you saw in period dramas across her lap. ‘Goodness, what’s all this?’
‘Scrambled eggs and pancetta. And then some fruit and coffee. Signor Ettore said you’d had a restless night, and you might need something for energy. But I can make something else if you prefer?’
‘No, no, no. This is perfect. Truly.’
‘Buon appetito! Would you like me to bring another cup?’
Dulcie looked up from her tray in confusion, wondering why Valentina was asking her that, and was shocked to see that Ettore had returned.
She stared at him mutely, caught in the honeytrap of his golden gaze and that devastatingly beautiful face.
As Valentina retreated, she half expected Ettore to follow her.
But instead, he murmured something to the housekeeper and then closed the door softly.
Dulcie stared at him in silence, waiting for him to disappear through the connecting door back into his room. But he didn’t do that either.
Instead, he walked over to the bed.
‘Have you eaten?’
He nodded. ‘Earlier. I didn’t want to wake you. I thought you needed some sleep.’
‘You mean after my restless night?’ she said softly. ‘Restless?’
She watched his mouth pull up at the corners minutely in a way that made her skin feel hot and shivery and her fingers reached for the edge of the sheet, tightening it around her body.
‘I thought it covered a multitude of—’
‘Sins?’
His eyes found hers and he looked at her with hypnotised intensity for what was arguably an unnecessarily long time, and yet every second that passed felt essential. ‘I was going to say interpretations. Although I think I prefer sins.’
Heat blossomed between her thighs.
He was replaying their night together. She knew because she was replaying it too and, meeting his melting, gold gaze, she was dizzy, light-headed.
‘I just wanted—’ he began.
‘You don’t have to—’ she said.
They both stopped at once. ‘We need to talk,’ he said after a moment. ‘But eat first.’
She had lost her appetite, but then she remembered what that police officer had said to her when Oscar was arrested for causing a disturbance.
She had sat at the police station all night waiting for him to be released and one of the officers had taken pity on her and brought her a bacon roll and a cup of tea.
‘If it’s going to be a long day, I have a fry-up and a cup of tea to fortify myself,’ he’d said.
‘I can’t offer you a fry-up, but I can manage a butty and a brew. ’
Breathing out unsteadily, she nodded. ‘Okay, but could you just sit down?’
He sat on the bed beside her, and she ate her bacon and eggs, nibbled at some fruit and then drank her coffee. As she put down her cup, she forced herself to meet his gaze.
‘So, about last night…’
‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to talk about today.’
She could feel her body tensing. ‘What’s there to talk about? We had sex. It’s what married people do. Unmarried ones, too, as it happens.’
‘I don’t want to talk about sex either.’
Because it was a one-off. He had wanted closure and—
‘I want to talk about us. This. This arrangement we made.’
It was like being blindfolded with her head on a block, waiting for the axe to fall. Except she wasn’t blindfolded. She could see his face and was going to have to look into his eyes as he swung the axe.
‘Are you saying you want to end it?’
‘No.’ His gaze burned into her, his voice fierce and so adamant that she almost flinched. And there were no words to describe what that one word spoken with such assurance did to her then. How it carved through her, hollowing her out with need and hope and fear and yearning all at once.
‘That’s not what I want at all.’
He reached out and pulled her towards him, gently at first and then more roughly, drawing her closer until his lips found hers and he was kissing her then, an open-mouthed, unbound, demanding kiss, his hand tightening in her hair, his mouth hungry, clumsy with hunger as if they hadn’t just spent the night with his body in hers and on hers in a feverish waking dream of touch and relief and release.
She whimpered against his mouth, arching into his body, her nipples hardening as they grazed his chest.
‘What I want is to spend some time alone with you. What I want is it to be just the two of us. Because I am your husband and you are my wife. But my family are here and they’re not exactly shy and sensitive. So, I think we need to go some other place. I think what we need is a honeymoon.’
Ettore felt Dulcie’s body stiffen with shock.
Which was fair.
He had brought her here to Italy to perform a charade of ‘happy ever after’ for his family but a honeymoon had not been mentioned for the very obvious reason that it was extraneous to requirements.
It didn’t feel extraneous now.
It felt like an imperative.
He could see a pulse beating frantically against the delicate skin of her throat and he stared at it, mesmerised, trying to decipher her answer as if her pulse were beating out a message in Morse code.
‘And this is so that everyone thinks that we’re together.’ He could see the wound in her eyes; a wound he had given her. ‘You want to give them concrete proof that our marriage is real.’
‘I don’t care what everyone else thinks. And it’s not about proving our marriage is real. This is about us. It’s about this thing, this thing between us that we don’t have to prove is real. Because we both feel it, dolcezza.’
Dolcezza. Sweetness.
That was what he used to call her, a play on her name and because she made him think of spun sugar. She drew the eye in the same way. There was a lightness about her that made people curious and intrigued.
It had started in Paris that first morning they finally left his room, five days after she had knocked on his door, a need she had never felt for any other man blazing inside her as the storm roared through the empty streets.
They might have walked into the hotel as two strangers but now they were a couple.
Walking the streets, with the pale, serene sun tracking their progress, it felt like the dawn of a new world. Dulcie and Ettore’s world.
There was no evidence of the hailstones that had stopped their flights, but there were signs of the damage they had caused. Boarded-up windows. Torn awnings. Broken slates on the pavement. Cars with dented bonnets.
Only then they walked past a patisserie and there was a Paris-Brest behind the cracked window, topped with cream and a shimmering halo of spun sugar, as delicate and ethereal as stardust and yet it had survived the storm.
Dulcie wanted to stop and look at it, and he understood why. Because he was as fascinated by her as she was by those gossamer-fine strands of sugar. So fascinated that he found it hard to look away.
Pushing aside his memories, he fixed his eyes on her face, the warm, damp, feminine scent of her enveloping him.
It was still hard now.
Her blue eyes searched his face. ‘Will it work?’
‘What? You and me and a room to ourselves with no interruptions?’
She smiled. ‘What about room service?’
He touched her cheek. ‘I know it feels like a big deal, but we’ve done all the hard stuff. How many couples have gone through what we have? We know everything about each other.’
‘What about all of this?’