Chapter Eleven #2
‘Everything they said went way over my head. You were all talking about things I’d never heard of!’
‘But that’s hardly surprising—I haven’t seen them for ages and I’ve known them for years—’
‘While you’ve only known me for five minutes?’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said frustratedly.
‘No?’ Suddenly, an odd feeling of weakness washed over her—as if she’d been battling and battling against some immovable force and had finally run out of strength.
She shook her head. ‘Look, maybe this is all a waste of time and we should just stop pretending to each other,’ she said wearily.
‘Maybe I should just give you your freedom—at least that way you can get together with Gabriella and have some chance of happiness.’
Giancarlo stilled. ‘So that I can what? What did you just say?’
Cassandra shrugged. ‘She’s going to split from your brother—you told me that and so did she.
She also told me that all of your friends were wondering why the hell you married me—and tonight proved her right.
She still wants you—she made that perfectly clear.
And I know you still want her, Giancarlo. ’
There was a heartbeat of silence. ‘And just how do you know that?’ he questioned dangerously.
But Cassie was too distraught to heed the icy warning in his voice and much too emotional to be able to bite back the words she had been bottling up for days now.
‘Because you didn’t lay a finger on me after the wedding, did you?
Not until the day we saw her. Then you couldn’t get enough of me—it was like you were wild for me that night.
’ The bitterness welled up, like an all-consuming cloud.
‘Did you close your eyes and imagine it was her, Giancarlo?’ she whispered.
‘Her you were making love to—not me? Is that why you said all those things to me in Italian—things I couldn’t even understand? ’
There was a fraught and disbelieving silence. ‘You think that?’ His face had drained of all colour. ‘You really think I am capable of such behaviour as that?’
Her mind was spinning so much that she wasn’t sure what she was thinking any more and the thready beat of her heart was making her feel dizzy. ‘It’s the kind of assumption any woman might make under the circumstances.’
His stony words matched the sudden hard gleam of his eyes. ‘Not if she had any respect for her husband,’ he snapped. ‘Or any respect for herself!’
At this, something inside her snapped back.
‘How can I respect myself when I get nothing back from you? You never tell me what’s on your mind.
You never open up to me. I don’t really matter to you, do I, Giancarlo—not as person?
I never have, not really. I’m just a commodity—first a mistress and now a prospective mother.
You don’t want me—only what I can give you! ’
He felt a slow kind of anger begin to burn inside him.
How dared she confront him with this messy emotional display and outrageous allegations?
‘Do you imagine that this kind of hysteria is going to win you any brownie points?’ he flared.
‘Don’t you think that sitting down and having an adult conversation about what is troubling you might be preferable to throwing out a series of accusations when you’re overwrought? ’
She stared at him—and never had he looked more forbidding. Not even that windswept day in Cornwall when his rage had been dark and he had discovered she was pregnant.
But that had been when she’d decided to go it alone—when her pride had been intact, not slowly being dismantled by her unrealistic yearning that one day he would learn to love her.
Because he would never do that. She should have stuck to her guns and kept her integrity and been that single mother who could hold her head high.
Who wouldn’t keep pushing and pushing for a little love and affection and coming up against an emotional brick wall, time after time.
But maybe she could still do it. Maybe it wasn’t too late to claw back a little independence.
‘You…you…You cold-hearted machine of a man—you’ll never understand!
You wouldn’t be able to interpret the facts if they jumped out and punched you!
Well, I’m through with trying to pussy-foot my way round your brooding silences and attempts to stonewall my conversation.
Having to bite back questions all the time because Mr Moody doesn’t want to answer them! ’
Cramming her fingers in her mouth to stifle her sobs, Cassie rushed straight past him, running upstairs to the spare room where she locked the door and stumbled into the bathroom to let the tears begin to slide from her eyes.
She cried until there were no tears left—until her body and eyes felt dry and sore and aching. Her head felt tight and so did her stomach as she crept from the bathroom and lay on the bed and wondered what on earth she was going to do next.
Should she tell Giancarlo that, despite their bitter and angry words, maybe it was best that it was all out in the open?
That they couldn’t carry on ignoring the fact that the marriage wasn’t working—and that a baby certainly wasn’t going to make it any better.
If he knocked on her door and demanded to be let in, she would open it and they would calmly talk it all out until they had worked out some kind of way forward which would be satisfactory to both of them.
But he didn’t knock—and in a way that shouldn’t have surprised her, for Giancarlo was not the kind of man to meekly turn the handle of a locked door and ask to be let inside.
She would just have to wait until the morning, when they could discuss things in the cold light of day.
And she would have to face the future with a heart which felt as if it were breaking in two.
Kicking off her shoes and still wearing her dress and stockings, she crawled beneath the coverlet and lay there, shivering and drifting in and out of sleep.
She didn’t know how long had passed when her eyes snapped open in alarm, her senses alerted by some dark instinct—knowing that something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
She just didn’t have a clue what it could be.
She felt a sharp spear of pain low down in her abdomen—accompanied by the frightened jerk of her body.
For a moment she just lay there—too scared to move—until tremblingly, she slid her fingers down between her thighs and their tips came warm and sticky.
And she didn’t need to snap on the bedside lamp to see that they were covered in blood.
An intense shudder of shock and fear ran through her—the kind of fear she had never known before. She opened her mouth to call out—but no words came. Sucking in a deep breath, she tried again—calling out the only word she could think of in the mists of this pain and fear.
‘Giancarlo!’ she screamed. ‘Giancarlo!’