Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
T HE FIRST THING Marcello saw when he came back into the bedroom was Victoria, seemingly frozen, half hanging off the bed.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, amused.
That brought her to life, and she scrambled back onto the bed...but not before he saw the photo fall from her fingers.
Their eyes met.
What he saw in her stare made his heart freeze.
She hugged the duvet around herself and whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look. I wasn’t snooping, I swear.’
It took him a long moment to be able to breathe again, and even then it was through a throat that had tightened into rock.
For the first time in a decade, the past and the present collided.
His core knocked off balance and on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, Marcello walked to the mess on the floor made by the drawer he’d knocked out, and picked up the photo. It was the original of the photo he carried in his wallet so it could always be kept close to him.
It was his most treasured possession.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to put the drawer back in place, tuck the photo back into its place inside it, and dredge up a meaningless conversation to skip over the whole thing.
If he was with anyone but Victoria he would do just that, but the starkness in her stare...the compassion and the fear...
His heart heavier than it had been for many years, he sank on the bed and reached for her hand. She shuffled closer to him and, with a quiet sigh, rested her cheek on his shoulder. He could sense her stare boring into the photo and was grateful that she didn’t ask any questions. Grateful for the space she gave for him to compose his thoughts.
He cleared his throat and placed a kiss into her hair. ‘You have not done anything wrong so there is no need to apologise.’
Finally she spoke. Whispered. ‘You’re a father?’
He expelled a long breath and closed his eyes. ‘Yes.’
He could hear her breathing. Could hear the questions whirling in her head.
Releasing her hand, he lightly touched his son’s face. ‘This is my son, Tommaso. He was born eleven years, three months and two days ago. He died when he was three days old.’
Although her heart had already known the child had passed away, Victoria still covered her mouth to stop her horror escaping.
‘He had what is known as newborn meningitis. They believe it was caused by a bacteria he caught from Livia during the birth. Completely harmless to the mother but to the newborn child...’ His shoulder rose against her cheek. ‘The first symptoms developed ten or so hours after this picture was taken. He did not want to wake to feed. From there...’ His shoulder rose again, his accent becoming more pronounced. ‘He went downhill very quickly. They did everything they could for him but he was too little. Too vulnerable. His immune system was not strong enough.’
Hot tears swimming, Victoria swallowed them back as hard and as silently as she could, utterly devastated for Marcello’s loss and wretched that her curiosity over a photograph fallen on the floor had compelled him to relate what must be the most soul-wrenching period of his life.
And she’d had no idea. She didn’t think anyone in America had.
He’d carried this loss for all these years...
The tears finally choked her and spilled out in a flood.
Marcello felt the heave of Victoria’s sobs and, fighting back the burn in his eyes, wrapped his arms around her. Holding her tight, he kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her shampoo.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wept into his chest, her fingers digging and clinging into his side. ‘So sorry. He was so beautiful and perfect and... God, Marcello, I’m so sorry.’
‘It is okay,’ he whispered. It had been many years since he’d told anyone about his son. Anyone who mattered had been there at the time and had grieved with them.
Victoria mattered. Mattered far more than she should. Than he should allow.
That she should feel it so deeply...
He closed his eyes again to his own tears and breathed in more of her soothing scent.
She disentangled herself from his hold and stared at him with tears still falling over her blotchy face. ‘You shouldn’t be having to comfort me .’
He brushed a tear away with his thumb. ‘The death of any child is never easy to hear about.’ He wiped another tear with a sad smile and pressed a kiss to her forehead before reaching over for the box of tissues on the bedside table. He thrust them under her nose. With a grateful smile, she grabbed a handful and blew her nose while Marcello climbed off the bed and headed to the bureau he kept a bottle of his preferred eighteen-year-old single malt in. Taking the bottle and two crystal glasses, he re-joined her on the bed and poured them both a glass.
Visibly calmer, she took a small sip of hers then fixed her red-rimmed eyes back on him. ‘I’m sorry you felt boxed in and compelled to tell me.’
‘I’m not.’
Her eyebrows drew together.
‘You should know that about me.’ They were far beyond keeping things from each other. Their time together as lovers was coming to an end but Victoria was the most important person in his life. The last few days had taught him that much. He could envisage a future where they were both old and wrinkled and she would walk to his car with the aid of a stick and climb in next to him, and the pair of them would wheezily laugh together over the latest of life’s absurdities.
She deserved to know the truth about why that future could only be as friends.
She took another drink of her whisky and, her eyes on his, held a long breath before slowly letting it out. ‘Is Tommaso the reason you came to America?’
He inclined his head and drained his glass. Filling it back up, he explained, ‘When Livia fell pregnant we had been having problems. The pregnancy pulled us back together and papered over the cracks in our marriage, but Tommaso’s death broke us, as people and as a couple. We tried... God knows, we tried, but we could not find a way through. Not together. The old problems came back and magnified—I worked too hard, she preferred being with her sister and her mother to me. We argued over everything. Silly things. If I said something was blue she would say it was green, if she said it was pink I would insist it was black.’
He took a long sip and swirled the whisky in his mouth before swallowing it.
What he was about to say was the hardest thing to admit to. ‘I wanted out. I wanted to escape it all. We had both built a whole life in our minds of us and Tommaso, and it was taken from us, and the reminders were everywhere. Every street I walked, I had pictured walking it with him, holding his hand.
‘I wanted a fresh start, not to forget him because that would be a betrayal of his life, but to breathe again. I was suffocating. Manhattan was the perfect place to relocate to. I had always enjoyed my time there and the cut and thrust of doing business there, and it was big enough and busy enough for me to immerse myself into a brand-new life. Livia did not want to come with me and I didn’t try hard to convince her. We both knew we were over.’
‘That’s just so incredibly sad,’ she said softly.
‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But it was the only way I could live with it. We managed to part as friends and if I am proud of anything, it is that. Livia is a wonderful woman but we were never right for each other. She has a family now with a husband who is right for her, and she is happy, and I built the new life I wanted for myself and have found a different kind of happiness.’ He raised his glass with a wry smile. ‘Even if it is happiness of a shallower kind.’
She raised a wry smile of her own. ‘You came to Manhattan and conquered all before you.’
‘I would trade every dollar to have my son back.’ Trade his very soul.
Tears filling her eyes again, she nodded to convey that she understood.
Taking the glass from her hand, he placed it with his glass and the bottle on the bedside table then ran his fingers through her glorious hair. Strangely, the weight that had formed to see Victoria with the photo of his precious boy had lifted.
‘Do not cry any more, bella ,’ he urged. ‘The past cannot be changed. I have had to learn to live without him and I take each day as it comes because life is too fragile and uncertain to do anything else. Live for the moment and let the moment be this.’
Victoria parted her lips to Marcello’s gently probing mouth and wound her arms around his neck, deepening the kiss, deepening the connection.
Even as she responded to his lovemaking she had to fight more tears.
Any hopes of even a tentative future with him had been dashed before they’d had the chance to fully form.
Marcello’s demons went far beyond a marriage turned sour.
Grief had broken his heart beyond repair.
Somehow she would have to find a way through her own, different, grief because the physical pain of hearing his story had brought the truth home to her.
She’d fallen completely and irrevocably in love with him.
The first thing Victoria did when she woke the next morning was look out of the bedroom window. There had been another flurry of snow overnight but nothing to write home about. Nothing that promised another shutdown of Manhattan.
This time tomorrow, they would be in their office on the sixtieth floor of the skyscraper the Guardiola Group occupied, preparing for the scheduled board meeting.
Their short but beautifully hedonistic and sweet affair would be over.
She couldn’t even begin to think about how she was going to cope.
Slipping her arms into Marcello’s robe, she set off to find him.
She didn’t have far to go. Her early bird was in his home office answering emails, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts.
His face turned to hers and lit into the dazzling smile he always greeted her with. She’d never noticed how heartbreaking it was before.
Pulling her onto his lap, he kissed her deeply, hands already breaking through the sash of the robe to roam over her body.
‘ Dio , I thought you would never wake up,’ he murmured, burying his face between her breasts and manipulating her so she straddled him. His hardness pressed right at the centre point of her own arousal, feeding a hunger that had sprung from nothing but his first touch. If he didn’t have the barrier of his boxers, he’d be inside her already.
‘Did you bring a condom?’ he asked with a groan, sucking deeply on her nipple and thrusting upwards.
Holding his head to keep him exactly where he was, rocking against him, she managed to gasp a, ‘No...’ at the exact moment movement from the main living area below caught her attention.
In utter horror, Victoria watched a member of the cleaning crew drag a vacuum cleaner across the room, but it took seconds before what her eyes were seeing connected with her body, and she scrambled off his lap, frantically tying the robe back together to cover her nakedness.
Marcello followed Victoria’s flame-faced stare, laughed a curse and muttered, ‘I need to buy a new apartment.’
Oblivious to what she’d disturbed on the overhang above her, the cleaner plugged the vacuum in just as Christina joined her from the kitchen door. She, too, was oblivious to them. That didn’t stop Victoria shrinking even further back.
‘They wouldn’t have seen us,’ he assured her.
‘Yes, they would. Your balustrade is glass.’
‘Tempered glass,’ he corrected.
‘Well, that makes all the difference.’
Amused at her unnecessary embarrassment, he reached for her hand. She dodged out of his reach.
‘I don’t want Christina to see me like this,’ she hissed.
‘Like what?’
She patted the robe. ‘Like this .’
‘Victoria, you spoke to her just last night.’ The two women had had a long discussion about their respective illnesses.
‘I was wearing my own clothes then—’
‘Clothes she laundered for you,’ he pointed out.
‘Because she knows I’ve been ill!’
‘She knows we are currently lovers.’
If he’d thought she was embarrassed before, that was nothing to the colour her face turned now.
‘She’s not blind, bella .’ Or deaf, something he failed to add in case Victoria took it on herself to dive out of the window and into the snowdrift still piled high against the side of the building to cool her flaming face off in.
‘That doesn’t mean I want her to see me wearing your robe!’ she spluttered, before turning on her bare heel and fleeing back to the bedroom.
Following her, Marcello closed the door firmly behind him. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now no one can see or disturb us.’
‘How do you live like this?’ she asked, shaking her head with bewilderment.
‘It has never been a problem before.’ And it never would be again. The few women he’d allowed to stay the whole night before Victoria had been dispatched back to their own homes first thing in the morning. He could not even imagine allowing them to do that much in the future.
Coldness filled his chest to imagine allowing another woman into his bedroom at all.
It was the intensity of what he and Victoria were sharing, he assured himself as he shook off the unsettling feeling. The closeness. Opening up to her about his son and his marriage.
He stepped to her and ran his finger in the dip where the robe joined together from her neck to her cleavage. Then he pulled it apart, exposing her to him. ‘Where were we?’
Victoria sat at the desk Marcello had long ago designated as hers in his home office and, for the first time in—how long? A week...? Time had flown—turned on the desktop he’d also long ago designated as hers, and opened her emails. Over four hundred new messages.
The cleaning staff had all gone. Christina and Patrick were in their own quarters. The only person who was going to disturb her was Marcello and he’d fallen asleep. She was taking no chances though, and had put her jeans and vest top on. A quick glance in the mirror had made her put her bra on too.
Back to the real office tomorrow. Back to the real world.
The real world had already found its way back to her though, and she stared at her mammoth inbox without seeing.
She’d been too caught up in the bliss of everything she was experiencing to realise Christina had figured out that they’d become lovers, and it made her cheeks burn with humiliation to imagine what the older woman must think of her. Made them burn harder to imagine what it would be like dealing with her in the future.
She knew Marcello wasn’t any more ready than she was to say goodbye as lovers yet, but the unspoken deadline of their return to the office marking the end of them would not change.
The grief that had brought Marcello to Manhattan had cut too deep for him to ever dare open his heart in the same way again. He’d let her in as much as he could and tomorrow he would let her go. For him, life would return to how he needed it to be.
She’d let him so far into her heart that he’d nestled inside it with no means of release.
She closed her eyes to the swelling tears and took a long breath.
How long until he re-joined his usual dating pool? She no longer believed he would ask her to keep evenings free for him or do any of the old stuff he used to do when he had a lover on the scene—she might tease him for being a monster but he wasn’t. Marcello was often thoughtless but he was never cruel—but the tabloids took a keen interest in his sex life. His shallow lovers saw to that, many using their affair as a springboard to craved fame. Victoria would once again find herself reading about his sexploits and fielding calls from disgruntled women cast aside without a thought, and know that they’d shared the bed she’d found such joy in.
All the things she’d known lay in her future and known would hurt her...
And now she knew she could not endure any of it. Because she hadn’t known just how deeply in love with him she would fall.
Putting a hand to her pounding heart, she took another deep breath and blinked away the tears until she could see more clearly.
She knew what she needed to do.
Another deep breath and then she composed an email to the head of HR. She would send it in the morning, after she’d told Marcello that it would be impossible for her to go back to how things used to be.
Marcello straightened his black bow tie, flicked a speck of dust off the lapel of his black dinner jacket, then patted cologne into his shaven cheeks and neck. He was ready.
In the bedroom, Victoria stood before the full-length mirror putting on the diamond teardrop earrings he’d had delivered as a surprise for her only an hour before. If he hadn’t wasted an hour of the day sleeping, he’d have snuck out and chosen them from the real-life versions and not the online versions.
He still struggled to believe he’d fallen asleep in the afternoon. His mother still regaled family and friends with stories of how, even as a toddler, Marcello had refused to nap. Since moving to Manhattan, his body’s need for sleep had diminished to such an extent that he rarely slept more than five hours a night. He could only assume the copious amount of sex he’d been enjoying with Victoria was the cause of his unintended snooze. He’d woken from it, rolled over to cuddle into her and coax her into more lovemaking, only to find the bed empty. She’d returned to the room inconveniently clothed before he could seek her out. Her face had coloured when she’d explained that she’d been sorting out work stuff.
‘Never mind that,’ he’d said thickly, throwing off the duvet. ‘Come back to bed.’
And so she had, and this time she’d been the one to doze off afterwards. When she’d woken, she’d been the one to instigate more lovemaking.
Just as he struggled to believe he’d had an afternoon snooze, he struggled to understand why his mind kept substituting the word sex for lovemaking. And why his mind flatly refused to imagine a time without Victoria in his bed.
Tomorrow they would part as lovers and return to the rhythms of their old working lives. There would be a period of adjustment but he was confident they would get through it. He was sure that throwing himself back into his pool of shallow vipers would take off the edge of his craving for his executive assistant. He would just have to be discreet, and throw himself back into the pool away from his apartment until Victoria’s imprint had faded to nothing.
Back to the bland, vaguely satisfactory couplings that demanded nothing of him but his body.
Damn it, if he could keep this affair with Victoria going until it was naturally spent then he would, but this was as much as he could allow, and he had to think, too, of what it would be like for her if they did continue things a little longer. Offices could be febrile places filled with gossip and innuendo. He would not have her humiliated. He needed her as his assistant. Needed her in his life.
His hopes for them to be old and wrinkled and wheezing together would never die. Maybe he should add the grandchildren she would surely have to the mix. Imagine them pushing the pair of them around in wheelchairs.
But where would her future husband be? he wondered, his mood dipping. To have grandchildren, she would need children first, and it was inconceivable that Victoria would choose to have children without a man by her side. A husband. A man she would pledge her life to.
His guts filled with acid.
He could provide a crèche and childcare staff in the office so she could bring her imaginary future children to work, but what if she met the father on one of her visits home and decided to move back to Ireland for real, and not just as a threat to Marcello to pull him back a peg?
She caught his stare in the mirror’s reflection.
After the longest time passed, she smiled. ‘You look beautiful.’
Pulling himself together, he straightened and strode over to her.
They still had this one last night together.
‘Beautiful?’ he said, feigning outrage. ‘I think the word you are looking for is handsome.’
She turned around and gently tugged at his bow tie. Eyes on his, she said with simple sincerity, ‘No. The word is beautiful.’
Her words touched something in him that made him close his eyes before taking a step back so he could drink the whole of her in. The red velvet dress fitted as if it had been tailored especially for her. Long sleeved, it dipped in a V to her breasts, giving the most tantalising glimpse of her generous cleavage, then hugged her curvy waist before cascading like drapes to her feet. Only the heels of the black knee-high boots she was wearing, a sop to the wintry weather, stopped the hem trailing on the ground. Her red hair, the perfect complementary shade to the colour of the dress, had been parted in the centre but then gathered together to fall over her right shoulder. It gleamed like the finest gold. ‘No. You’re the beautiful one.’
Rosy colour flushed her cheeks. ‘It’s the expensive makeup you bought me.’
Expensive makeup subtly but strikingly applied. ‘It only enhances what God has blessed you with. You are a beautiful woman, Victoria Cusack.’
The flush deepened. ‘I keep telling you, you should see my sisters. They really are beautiful. No enhancement needed,’ she quipped.
He captured her chin and rubbed his thumb over the faint cleft in it. ‘Stop comparing yourself to your sisters. You are perfect exactly as you are.’
The hazel eyes softened. ‘You mean that, don’t you?’
He brushed a kiss over her lips and breathed her in. ‘Yes. And it is time you started believing it.’