Chapter Eleven
Charlotte was out of breath and out of fucks to give. She really was.
She’d been fuming mad after their dinner with Allegra, but it hadn’t even been Dante’s fault.
Sure, he’d sat through the meal like an inert lump, for much of the time speaking only when spoken to and hardly evincing a loved-up fiancé vibe.
But it was how much Charlotte noticed—how much she cared—that had really gotten under her skin.
She had genuinely enjoyed getting to know his grandmother—a woman with whom she had a great number of overlapping interests, in fact.
But all night, half of her brain had been focused on Dante.
Wondering about him, worrying about him, stressing that this whole fake engagement had been too much to ask of the man.
A man who clearly had a saviour complex, who’d seen a woman in distress, in need of ‘rescuing’, even though that was the very last thing she’d ever knowingly convey.
Even though it was the last thing she wanted to feel or need.
Had she guilted him into this? She’d known just which buttons to press—his worry for his grandmother—and she’d used that to her advantage.
His first instinct had been to run a mile. Had it been the correct one?
But then, what about this?
Beside her, Dante lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, his cheeks flushed, his chest moving with each breath he took and expelled. This was something neither had wanted to step away from, just yet. They hadn’t been ready.
Another thing that terrified her.
Dante turned at that moment and caught her looking at him. He didn’t smile. His face remained as it had before. Stony. Cold.
In contrast to the white hot way he’d just made love to her. Hard, fast, desperate, passionate, as though she was the beginning and end of his universe. As though he craved her with an almost life-sustaining passion.
Only, no, she was wrong. He wasn’t completely cold.
She knew that now. She’d probably known it for a long time, but seeing him with his grandmother, and here in Tuscany, it was impossible to pretend any longer.
He might have acted like an emotional automaton but, beneath the surface, he did have a heart.
And she suspected he knew how to use it.
He would never use it with her, but it was there, beating and warm.
So he wasn’t cold, so much as confused or distracted. Like something was weighing on his mind. As it was on hers. But the problem was, Charlotte didn’t want to talk about it, because her gut instinct was that talking about it would make everything so much worse.
And yet...that damned part of her, that was constantly at war with common sense, was banging into her brain, pushing against what she knew she should say and do and what she wanted to ask.
She bit into her lip, as if to physically stop herself from asking him anything.
But Dante was moving, shifting onto his elbow, so he was facing her and looking at her with an expression that was half grim, half accepting.
‘I need to tell you about my wife.’
Something tightened in the very centre of Charlotte’s chest, as if a vice had been applied to her organs. She shook her head, but no other denial came out.
‘Partly, because you deserve to know. Partly because it will make this easier. And partly, because I just...want to tell you.’
Her lips parted at that last sentence. It seemed to Charlotte that Dante had been waging the exact same war she had—a battle between good intentions and wants.
She pressed a finger to his lips. ‘I don’t need to know.’
‘Why are you fighting this?’ he pushed. ‘Do you think that knowing this about me will fundamentally change what we are?’ His eyes scanned hers.
How did he know that? How could he understand the tightrope she was carefully walking, even when she’d exercised such diligence in concealing anything that might give her away?
‘I’m not afraid,’ she lied.
‘Listen to me, Charlotte. I want to tell you for that exact reason—so you can understand why I am the way that I am. Why I will never really get married again—not in the real sense of the word. Why this,’ he gestured from his chest to hers. ‘Is all we can ever be.’
‘You say that like I’m asking for more.’
‘I say it like a man who can read the situation, cara.’
Her spine prickled with goosebumps.
‘We’re good together,’ he said, simply. ‘In another world, if we were different people, with different pasts, we could make something truly good come out of this. But we’ve both lived lives that have made us want to run from love.’
She drew in a deep breath. ‘Dante, stop. You’re grossly misunderstanding what I want.’
His lips twisted. ‘I know you do not love me, don’t worry. But we both see the danger here. It is the only reason I can think of that we are both so desperate to keep reinforcing our rules. Why we keep insisting it’s just about sex.’
‘It is—,’
‘Yes,’ he interrupted. ‘And I am about to explain why, for my part at least.’
She glanced down at the crisp white sheet between them, dropping her hand from his lips and giving up on arguing with him.
In other words, letting the curious part of herself win the battle, finally.
But that didn’t matter. Charlotte would win the war.
She would protect herself with every last fibre of her being.
And in doing so, she’d protect Dante, because they both wanted the exact same thing—security. A guarantee that this relationship would leave them unscathed.
‘For the first year or two of my marriage, Jamie and I were very happy together. We were young and in love, and we had everything we could possibly want in life. We travelled, we connected, we spent as much time together as we possibly could—which was, actually, not that much because I worked a lot then. As I do now,’ he conceded.
Charlotte’s stomach felt mushy. She didn’t want to hear this, even though she was hanging on his every word, with some kind of masochistic fascination.
‘I’ve often wondered if that was part of it.’
‘Part of what?’ she prompted, when he didn’t continue.
His eyes latched to hers, but in a manner that made her feel he wasn’t really seeing her any more. He was back in the past, looking at Jamie, looking at himself, in that oddly distorting way memories had.
‘Why she was so desperate for more?’
‘More? Are you saying she cheated?’
He shook his head. ‘Jamie would never do that.’
Something barbed her side. Hurt. Betrayal. Jealousy. Sharp enough to seem like an electric shock. He defended her automatically. Spoke of his ex-wife with reverence.
Charlotte blinked away, hating her visceral response to that. Hating that he could evoke anything like that in her.
‘Then what?’ Her voice emerged a little gravelled.
‘She wanted a baby,’ he said, the words heavy and scathing.
‘Oh.’ Charlotte frowned. ‘I see.’ She didn’t. While she’d known for a long time that she’d never get married, or have children, she also knew that many people out there felt the exact opposite. A lot of people grew up with that biological urge to procreate hard-wired into their brains.
‘I doubt it,’ Dante muttered, looking at her now with something in the depths of his eyes that made her head hurt.
Or was that her heart? Because for a moment, he looked truly vulnerable.
Sore. And she yearned to reach out and draw him into a hug.
To tell him that it was okay. That no matter what he was feeling, it would all be fine eventually.
She stayed right where she was though, one hand forming a fist at her side, beneath the sheet, where he wouldn’t see it. She dug her fingernails into her palms so hard she knew they’d form little crescent moon indents.
‘She wanted a family,’ he said. ‘And I loved her enough to give her anything. I didn’t have strong feelings, one way or another, back then. I was focused on my career and then on Jamie. It was enough for me.’
‘But it wasn’t for her.’
He shook his head. ‘She’d always wanted a big home, filled with people, bursting at the seams of love. And I wanted to give that to her. I would have done anything, Charlotte. Anything.’
She nodded, slowly, because she was pretty confident that Dante didn’t have children. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d have failed to mention, after their various conversations surrounding the matter of permanence.
‘We tried.’
Her heart panged at the oblique reference to his sex life with the other woman. She tried to blot it out and focus purely on the admission he was making, and on how hard it was for him to get this out. On the fact that she suspected this was not something he’d told many people, if anyone.
‘We tried for a long time, taking comfort from all the websites that said you shouldn’t be worried until after twelve months, that it didn’t necessarily mean anything was wrong. And then, we began the testing and then the IVF.’
Sympathy swirled inside Charlotte. ‘What happened?’
‘Charlotte had a condition that made it difficult to conceive naturally. IVF was successful, on multiple occasions, but each time, she miscarried.’
‘Oh, no,’ Charlotte whispered, tears sparkling on her lashes, despite her intention to keep everything about Dante at arm’s length. ‘I’m so sorry, that’s awful.’
‘Yes, it was. Awful. Disheartening. Our marriage turned into an endless round of trying to conceive, failing, succeeding then losing the baby, just a constant pressure. Jamie was obsessed and the more she wanted, the more I felt a weight that I almost couldn’t bear.
’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘I felt like a failure,’ he muttered.
‘The one thing my wife wanted and I could not give it to her. All the money in all the world, all the best doctors, and we could not succeed.’
‘What about surrogacy?’ she whispered.
‘We tried it. Our surrogate lost the baby.’
‘Oh, Dante,’ a tear slid down her cheek. ‘I don’t know what to say.’