Chapter Ten #2
She’d overheard him. His conversation with Marcus. He shook his head and let out the breath that had been locked in his lungs for what felt like an eternity.
Erin watched as he pulled his tie loose from his neck in three quick yanks and huffed out a bitter laugh.
She wanted to be surprised that he hadn’t taken her up on her ‘offer’.
The thought of it turned her stomach. But she’d known.
In the back of her mind and the quiet of her heart, she’d known that he wouldn’t.
And in that moment, all the anger and all the fight went out of her. The fury that had fuelled her to get her to this point burned out with a desperate last indignant flame before sinking back into thick smoke and charcoal in surrender.
‘You heard the conversation with Marcus,’ he stated.
‘Yes,’ Erin confirmed, ready to surrender everything to him.
‘How fitting. It was after all how I found out about your intended deceit. And Sam? He is your lover, perhaps?’
‘No,’ Erin said, bruised by the bitterness in his tone and unable to bring herself to correct him.
He nodded to himself as if her answer hadn’t really mattered to him. Standing there, the moon picking out the white in his shirt like a beacon, he looked impossibly even more handsome than ever, which was just cruel.
‘What was this,’ he asked, gesturing to what had just happened between them. ‘Some kind of test?’
‘Maybe,’ she admitted, unsure herself now. ‘Perhaps it was a bit like a helicopter ride, or a shopping trip. Or an awful dress,’ she said, forcing the words out of her mouth.
He plunged his fists into the pockets of his dark trousers and turned away from her as if he couldn’t bear to look at her.
‘What was it? That you were going to get out of marrying me?’ he asked, his gaze firmly on the night sea. The past tense he’d used made her flinch, distracting her from the thread of hurt she imagined in his tone.
Shame overwhelmed her. He’d wanted her broken, and that was how she felt.
‘I could never quite work it out,’ he confessed as if half impressed. ‘You signed the prenup, so it wasn’t money.’
‘No. I... I was promised that if I married you then Charterhouse would be mine.’
‘Charterhouse?’
‘A publishing company.’
He frowned, finally turning back to her. ‘The project you told me about? You did all this for a business ?’
She hurt from the harshness of his tone, but knew she deserved it. ‘It belonged to my family, before my father sold it.’
‘What the hell does that have to do with me?’ he demanded angrily.
She swallowed. ‘I... Gio Gallo,’ she whispered.
That seemed to stop Enzo in his tracks. He blinked as he processed the information, his face a reflection of his confusion.
‘Gio Gallo? My grandfather?’
‘Yes,’ Erin said, nodding once. ‘He owns it, and offered to sell it back to me if...’
She didn’t need to finish her sentence. The rest was painfully clear by now.
‘That man is nothing to me,’ Enzo exclaimed. ‘He wasn’t when I was a child and isn’t now. Why would he have any interest in who or when I married?’
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.’
‘So, let me get this straight. You agreed to marry a complete stranger, in exchange for a company?’
She nodded. ‘There were conditions,’ she said, trying to explain. ‘I wasn’t allowed to tell you, otherwise I would have. And the business was...it was in my family for generations before it was sold. I made a promise to my mother that I would get it back. I wanted so desperately to make it happen.’
‘That was supremely na?ve,’ he bit out, utterly unmoved by her motives.
She clenched her jaw, taking the critique as utterly deserved.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, very sorry. I thought you were like him,’ she said, needing Enzo to understand in part. ‘At the beginning. I thought you were like my father. Careless and lazy and flippant and selfish. I thought you were all the things that you had been painted in the press.’
‘Does that make it okay to you?’ he demanded.
‘No. There is nothing I can say or do to make it okay,’ she admitted truthfully. ‘There is nothing about any of this that is okay,’ she said, wiping the tear from her cheek, hating that he’d seen how affected she was by this. Hating that she was affected, when he didn’t seem to care at all.
‘Crocodile tears, cara ? Really?’
‘They’re not,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh,’ he scoffed loudly, his hands coming to a prayer position in front of his chest. ‘You expect me to believe that this was real? That you fell in love with me along the way?’
His words were cruel and punishing and so much more painful because they were the truth. ‘Yes,’ she said, determinedly. Because this was it. She knew that. There was no coming back from this. He’d never see her again and it was her only chance to tell the truth. No more lies. Never again.
Enzo struggled and fought with the desire to believe her. But he didn’t know which Erin she was. The innocent, the con artist, the seductress, the fury... He had seen so many different sides to her and that he had fallen for them all was acid in a wound so deep it knocked the breath from his lungs.
Her apology should have been meaningless. The declaration of love meaningless. But it wasn’t. And that was warning enough.
‘Annulment. Was that how you planned to get out of the marriage? I’m presuming you would have left me as soon as you got what you wanted?’
She held his gaze, refusing to hide a single one of her emotions from him now. They were as clear as the brightest stars in a clear night sky. And he wished to god that he didn’t see a single one of them.
She nodded.
Yes. That had been clever.
He had just one question left. He shouldn’t ask it. That he did it anyway was just proof of how low she had brought him.
‘Was anything you told me the truth?’
‘Yes.’
Madonna mia , he wanted to believe her more than he wanted his next breath.
‘And for you?’ Erin’s quiet question exploded into the night.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, playing ignorant despite knowing exactly what she had meant.
‘Was any of it true for you? Somewhere in all the lies and games, was any of it real? Because, in some ways, I was more me with you than I have ever been, and I...’ she said haltingly, ‘I wondered whether...maybe...’
‘No,’ he lied. ‘None of it was true, and nothing was real.’
It couldn’t have been.
It couldn’t have been because that would mean he was just the same as that small child he’d once been, standing by himself, waiting to be enough, waiting to be loved for who he was and not what he could do or give.
And he couldn’t be that same sad child. He wouldn’t.
He stared out at the darkness, the clouds covering the stars and horizon in such a way that made him feel empty and hollow. He didn’t know how long he stayed like that, but when he turned back Erin was no longer there on the upper deck.
In some distant part of his mind, he was conscious of her leaving the yacht and the marina, safe in the knowledge that his staff were good and well paid enough to make sure that wherever she was going, she’d be safe and okay.
He didn’t want to know where she went, he told himself. He didn’t care. His overheard conversation had brought an abrupt end to a plan that no longer needed to be fulfilled. Whoever Erin Carter was, she’d learned her lesson.
As had he. When things looked too good to be true, they generally were.
And thrusting all thoughts of her from his mind, he turned his attention to the man who had been behind the whole thing. Gio Gallo. His mother’s estranged father.
Now that was a target who could bear the weight of Enzo’s anger. What on earth was the old man up to? He had, until now, shown absolutely no interest in either his daughter or his grandson. His kin . As far as Enzo was concerned, the man didn’t deserve the time of day.
But clearly Gio Gallo had resorted to extreme methods to get his attention. For what reason? Enzo was still none the wiser. And neither did he care.
The old man’s plans had been thwarted and that was enough.
Enzo was done being manipulated by the people around him, he decided, digging his heels further into the solitary island he had put himself on long ago.
The only thing that would make him feel better would be to return to his eminently enjoyable lifestyle as if none of this sordid mess had ever happened.
Erin wheeled her suitcase into the empty airport. It had taken her very little time to pack her bags, and write a note for Frederick, asking him to return all the clothing that she’d purchased that day in Positano using Enzo’s card.
The member of staff that had found her a cab hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but she needed to disentangle herself from Enzo and anyone with him.
It was three o’clock in the morning and after she had used her phone to buy herself a ticket on the first flight out from Cannes to Heathrow, she found the ladies’ bathroom, checked that it was empty, locked herself in a stall and collapsed against the door, letting the tears fall.
Fist pressed into her mouth, just in case anyone did enter the bathroom, she let the silent sobs wrack her body, from the inside out.
All the anger that she’d felt in the club, first hearing the ruthlessness of his plan had fled under the immense weight of her own guilt.
She had lost Charterhouse, but it didn’t even compare to losing him .
She had seen him, standing there all alone on the upper deck of his yacht, and her heart had torn in two. She didn’t believe him, when he said that it had all been lies. She knew that she’d hurt him terribly. And she deserved to see that, to know his pain on top of her own.
Oh god, how had she got this all so wrong?
It had started off wanting to help her mother.
Wanting security. But she’d done that at someone else’s expense.
And she knew better than that. She did, she told herself as another tear rolled down her cheek.
She had become just like her father, she realised with horror.
Wanting something so desperately that it didn’t matter who she hurt in the process. Only it did matter.
Her heart broke, not for herself, but for him.
For the little boy that had been so appallingly used, by his parents, as if he were a chess piece in the game of their relationship.
And she had done the same. Until she had seen differently.
But it had been too late. He had been brutally hurt by her.
And she knew that there was no coming back from that.
And she’d live with the guilt of having done that to an admirable man, a kind man, a funny man, a man who had brought her alive under his attention.
A man she loved.
Her chest ached and her tears ran and she ignored the phone buzzing in her purse until she couldn’t. She checked the screen, hoping that it might be Enzo and hating herself for being disappointed to read the name.
Still, she hit the button to accept the call.
‘Oh, Sam. I’ve really messed things up.’