Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
D READ LAY HEAVY in Victoria from the moment consciousness pulled her from sleep.
This was it. The day she destroyed her own happiness and threw away everything she’d worked for.
Stifling a whimper, she rolled over, seeking out Marcello. His side of the bed was empty.
Cuddling into his pillow, she squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in the remnants of his scent. She wanted desperately to make love to him one last time, before she detonated the bomb. Experience the blissful closeness one last time.
His robe was slung on the back of the armchair, and she wrapped herself in it before searching for him. His office and the living space below were both empty.
She tried to draw air into her tight lungs.
The dread spread into her limbs. She had to drag her legs back to the bedroom.
With still no sign of Marcello, she took a quick shower and tried her hardest not to think of standing under this very shower only hours ago with him, when they’d returned from the restaurant. Brushed her teeth trying not to remember how, only hours ago, Marcello had stood at the adjoining sink brushing his own teeth.
Christina had laundered her clothes for her again, and when Victoria tugged her grey cashmere sweater over her head and then straightened it over her stomach, there was a beat when she thought she glimpsed the pounding of her heart pushing through her chest.
The door opened.
Marcello strode into the bedroom carrying two cups of coffee. He was already dressed for the office in a white shirt, navy trousers and a matching waistcoat.
‘Good morning, Victoria,’ he said in greeting, as if he were already back in the work office and had beaten her in by ten minutes. He put her coffee on the table by the armchair, and stood with his own close to the door. Already creating a distance between them. Already showing that this was the point they returned to how things should have stayed.
Her heart twisted to see his tie. Its knot was too big. Marcello was always precise with his knots.
‘You are ready?’ he asked.
Somehow she managed to form a nod.
He gave a sharper nod of his own. ‘ Bene. The car will be here in fifteen minutes.’ He flashed his heartbreaking smile. ‘Bagels will be delivered momentarily.’
Bagels? In that moment, she couldn’t even conjure the image of one. The world was swimming around her and it was taking every ounce of her strength to keep hold of the emotions battering her into a bruise.
She thought she might be sick.
Gripping the cup tightly, she lifted it to her lips.
There was no comfort in the warm, familiar bittersweetness.
His tone became even lighter. ‘How did I do?’
He was unshaved, she realised with another twist of her heart. Unshaved for the office. It was a sight that made her want to cry. ‘You made it?’
Another dazzling smile. It didn’t meet his eyes. ‘My first attempt at making coffee in a decade. Marks out of ten?’
‘A definite nine,’ she croaked through her splintering heart.
‘It appears I am as naturally talented at making coffee as everything else,’ he said with a deadpan modesty that would normally make her laugh but now made her eyes fill with tears. ‘Other than cooking, that is. But do not think this means I will be taking on coffee-making duties in the office—this is strictly a one-time event.’
He continued talking as he reached for the door handle, his accent becoming more pronounced with every word. ‘We will stop at your apartment on our way to the office so you can change before the board meeting. I have already—’
‘Marcello, stop,’ she interrupted softly, unable to bear the faux normality a second longer.
His hand tightened around the door handle but his light expression didn’t change.
She shook her head whilst frantically blinking the tears away, and tried her hardest to control her wobbling chin. ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do this.’
Marcello’s grip on the door handle was so tight he could feel the bones of his knuckles press against his skin.
He could no longer ignore Victoria’s pallor. She was paler than she’d been since her illness. More than pale.
The weight he’d woken to in his guts spread and clamped his heart in a vice.
Her eyes shining with tears, she shook her head again.
He cleared his throat. ‘What can’t you do?’
But he knew. His weighted guts had known it the moment their eyes had locked together when he’d come back into the bedroom with their coffee. The misery contained in her stare.
Her grip on her cup was as tight as his hold on the door handle. ‘I can’t go back to the office and pretend that nothing happened between us.’
‘It will be difficult,’ he admitted evenly, in what he knew was the understatement of the century. They’d both known it would be difficult to return to how things had been. ‘But we are both professionals, and—’
‘I can’t go back to how we were. Not now.’
His heart was thumping so hard it was a struggle to hear his own voice over it. ‘Would you like to take a few days’ paid leave? That might be the best thing for both of us—a short reset and then we...’
But she was shaking her head.
A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘A few days is not going to reset my feelings. I’m sorry.’
‘Okay, paid leave for the week, until our trip to Rome on...’
But she was still shaking her head. More tears spilled down her distressed face. ‘It can never work, Marcello. Not for me. Not now.’
‘Don’t be so defeatist,’ he chided through the scratching in his throat and the hot pulse raging in his head as his planned route to a dotage with Victoria in his life and her grandchildren pushing them around on wheelchairs began evaporating before his eyes.
‘Marcello, please .’ Victoria put the coffee cup on the table and wiped the tears away, wishing with all her splintering heart that she could turn back time a week and a day, to the morning her phone had woken her at five a.m. Wished she could put herself back in her bed and ignore his call.
But she’d never been able to ignore him. The pull of hearing his voice or seeing a written message from him had always been too powerful to resist. Marcello had become her whole world long before she’d even realised it.
And now she had to walk away from it.
A pulse was throbbing on his unshaven jaw. ‘Victoria, we will make it work as we said we would. Whatever you need to readjust, I will provide it, and then—’
‘But there is no way, don’t you see?’ she implored. ‘I can’t spend twelve hours a day every day by your side feeling the way I do. I just can’t. It would kill me.’
His head reared as if she’d slapped it.
‘What...?’ His voice trailed off, and he stared at her as if looking at her for the very first time.
As much as she wanted to turn her stare away, she forced herself to hold the lock of their eyes. Forced him to read what was in hers.
Shocked understanding flared.
He shook his head slowly, as if in disbelief.
She simply held his gaze until, without uttering a word, he staggered over to the bed and sank onto it, cradling his head in his hands.
‘Now do you understand?’ she whispered.
The silence was so total that when he dragged his hands down his cheeks she could hear the scratching of his fingers against the stubble.
He tilted his head back slowly. Blew out an equally slow breath.
Feeling sicker than she’d ever done in her life, Victoria sank onto her knees before him and captured his stubbly cheeks in her hands. She could feel the barely suppressed tension breathing out from his pores.
‘You don’t have to leave,’ he said raggedly, turning his mouth into her palm. ‘We can find a way to make it work.’
‘The only way it can work for me is if you love me—’
His eyes squeezed shut as he let out a long groan. ‘No, Victoria, don’t say it.’
‘But I do love you,’ she told him quietly. ‘I think a part of me has always loved you.’
The strong throat she loved nothing more than burying her face into and breathing in the scent from moved, but nothing came out. It made her broken heart splinter a little more to know she would never breathe in his scent again.
‘Do you think I wanted this to happen?’ she choked into the silence. ‘I spent eighteen months pretending to myself that you weren’t the sexiest man alive and that my feelings for you were strictly platonic, but the way you took care of me during my illness...’ She closed her eyes to hold back another wave of tears and tried with all her might to stop her voice from breaking. ‘How could I not have fallen in love with you after that? And loving you has changed everything for me. A family of my own has always been a distant thing and now I find myself longing for it, and I’m longing for it with you . I want to spend the rest of my life with you and have your children and raise a family...’
Pain flaring in his eyes, he snatched hold of her wrists and pressed his forehead to hers. ‘Bella, if I could give it to anyone it would be you. But I can’t.’
She’d known it, but to hear it from his own mouth hurt more than she could ever have believed.
The nugget of hope her heart had held onto even when her brain had been telling it not to be so foolish shattered, and she finally crumbled.
Marcello could never allow himself to love her.
‘I know you can’t, and that’s why I have to go,’ she sobbed.
He shook his head despairingly. ‘You don’t have to go. We can—’
‘I do . I don’t want to leave you, Marcello, you must know that. Working for you has been the most infuriating but fulfilling time of my entire life and if I could stay by your side as your right-hand woman for ever then I would, but I can’t . I can’t be around you with these foolish dreams. I can’t work by your side waiting for the day you start dating again and have my heart broken all over again.’
He palmed her cheeks and caught her tears in his thumbs, then pressed his forehead to hers again. ‘I never wanted to break your heart, bella .’
‘You’re not breaking it, Marcello—I’m breaking it all by myself. You gave me every warning and I tried to listen but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I know you care for me and I know this is hurting you too, and I’m so sorry, and I’m sorry but I can’t go to Rome with you.’
The scratching in Marcello’s throat had spread to his chest. She could have been ripping at them with her nails.
The disaster he’d sensed coming when he’d recognised the attraction in her stare had detonated around him, and for the second time in his life, the solid foundations of his world were cracking around him.
‘You want to leave me now?’ he asked, still hardly believing. Not wanting to believe. Still half waiting for Victoria to break into a smile and tell him this was all one big joke.
‘I don’t want to leave you at all but I have to. Please try to understand. I will work until the end of the week to get everything in order but I can’t do Rome. I just don’t think I could bear to watch you act normally when I know the memories will be ripping you to pieces and the comfort I’ll want to give you... It’s just too much. Please understand. Please.’
The thick weight in his guts was pulling him under, a darkness in his bloodstream steadily creeping through his pores and deepening with every passing second. His nightmare a reality.
The best person in his life. He was losing her.
He was losing Victoria. And it was all his own fault. He’d sensed the danger. Not just sensed it. Known it.
He could make threats. Legal threats. Financial threats. Deploy all the weapons in his arsenal to make her stay and keep her by his side for ever.
‘I understand,’ he whispered hoarsely.
And that, for him, was the worst part. He did understand. He’d fled Rome and made Manhattan his home to escape his own pain, and because he understood it, he had no choice but to let her go.
He could never give her what she needed. What she deserved.
He should have walked away when he still had the chance.
‘I will not make you work any of your notice period. We can say goodbye to each other now.’
Her face contorted. ‘Thank you.’
The bleakness in his stare felt like a knife in Victoria’s heart, and she tightened her hold on his cheeks and pressed her lips wet with tears to his.
His hands burrowed into her hair and his lips parted as they shared a kiss of such tender passion the anguished scream from her heart that this would be their last had her clinging tightly to him and scraping her fingers through his hair, imprinting his taste and scent into her memories to see her through a lifetime.
Letting him go was a physical wrench but it had to be done. Every minute longer that she stayed only prolonged the agony.
In silence, she gathered the last of her possessions and walked to the door.
He made no effort to follow her. Neither of them needed to say it was better that way.
‘I’ll email Audrey when I get back to the apartment,’ she said quietly. She didn’t add that her resignation was already written. Only that now-smashed nugget of hope had stopped her pressing send before.
What a foolish, foolish thing to hope for.
He closed his eyes and nodded.
She swallowed. ‘Thank you for taking such good care of me and for everything you’ve taught me.’ She had to catch a breath to continue. ‘Thank you for being the best person in the world... I will carry you in my heart for ever.’ The tears almost blinding her, she wiped them away so she could look at Marcello’s beautiful face one last time and give the thanks that meant the most. ‘And thank you for remembering my name.’
The smile he conjured was only a ghost of the heartbreaking smile she loved so much but it shattered her heart into a thousand pieces.
Hoarsely, he said, ‘As if I could ever have forgotten it.’