smile on her face until the housekeeper had disappeared into the house. Her body vibrated with a tension that hadn’t left her since they’d climbed aboard the De Campo jet and flown the five hours south to the island—a flight the entire duration of which Riccardo had worked. She pulled in a breath to steady herself, but the shallow pulls of air she managed to take in didn’t help much.
She turned back to the sea and laced her hands together. “Stay in the moment. Allow yourself to feel and move through the pain...” Her therapist’s words were a grounding force when all she wanted to do was run. It had been her coping mechanism since she was a teenager and her parents had been having their no-holds-barred fights to run when she was in pain. To refuse to feel it.
Making herself stand here was like being asked to walk over red-hot coals.
“You haven’t had any wine.”
Riccardo’s low, smooth observation contrasted sharply with the imminent hysteria she felt building within her. This had always been the pattern with them. Him handling everything with reason—with well-thought-out premeditation. Lilly shooting from the hip—driven by emotion.
She turned around, a sharp condemnation on her lips. But he was so breathtakingly handsome in jeans and a navy polo shirt, his square-jawed, dark good looks only intensified by the casual attire, that the words fled her head.
He was beautiful beyond the meaning of the word. Charisma oozed out of him like oxygen for the female race. And she knew then that this had been a big, huge mistake.
Just as it had been to think she could claim ownership over a man every woman wanted.
She turned back to look at the ocean. “You can pour me some now.”
The knot in her stomach grew to an almost incapacitating level as she heard him walk across the patio and pour the wine. The sound of bubbling liquid hitting glass was deafeningly loud on the night air.
He came to stand beside her, the smoky, spicy scent of him wrapping itself around her.
“What’s wrong?”
She swiveled to face him. “You’ve been talking on that phone non-stop since we left. I thought we had a no work rule.”
His mouth tightened. “It’s off now. I just had a few last things to go through with Gabe. By the way,” he added, raising a brow, “he asked Alex out for dinner and she turned him down flat. Said she was going back to Mason Hill for the weekend.” His gaze narrowed on her face. “You two never go home. Is everything okay with your family?”
She blanched. “Everything’s fine. Can we just get this over with?”
He kept that watchful dark gaze on her. Then handed her the glass of wine.
She wrapped her fingers around the stem. The glass shook in her hand.
“Lil—” His eyes moved from her shaking fingers to her face.
“I’m fine,” she murmured. “You—you start.”
He exhaled harshly, the nostrils of his perfectly straight Roman nose flaring.
“What happened the night of the fashion show? Why were you so afraid to do it?”
She blinked. She had not expected that to be his first question. “You know I’ve never been comfortable in that type of setting. I told you that when we first started dating.”
“But you got over it. You thrived on it.”
“I hated every minute of it. I trained myself to do it so I wouldn’t let you down.”
Confusion flickered in his eyes. “Why? Why would a woman like you have confidence issues? You had the position, the wealth, the looks to back you. Why would you feel inferior?”
She gave a twisted smile. “I come from a town of two thousand, five hundred people, Riccardo. I will always feel small-town, no matter how you dress me up or how many places you take me or how many etiquette rules you teach me.” She shook her head. “You swept me up into this glamorous life I had no coping skills for, tossed me into the deep end and expected me to swim.”
He frowned. “But you never said anything. To me—you were just fine.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “I was doing what I had to do. That was my job. My role as Lilly De Campo.”
He exhaled heavily. “No one would ever have known you felt that way.”
Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “I became extraordinarily good at faking it. And why not? I faked my way through our entire marriage.”
His gaze sharpened on her face, a dangerous glint firing in its dark depths. “I think you’d better explain that.”
“I never wanted that life, Riccardo. I told you that when you knocked me off my feet in that bar in SoHo. But you wouldn’t listen...you kept pushing until I said yes.”
“We were in love with each other,” he growled.
“We were infatuated with each other,” she corrected. “There was still time to recognize how wrong it was for me. How self-destructive all the attention and criticism was.”
“How so?”
She set her wine down on the railing and pushed her hair behind her ears. “I’ve never been secure in the way I look. It’s always been a tough one for me. But as your wife I couldn’t put on five pounds without the tabloids noticing and pouncing on me.”
“I told you. Stop reading them.”
“That’s overly simplistic. They were everywhere. I couldn’t avoid them all.”
His brows drew together. “But where does it come from, then, this insecurity about your looks? Beyond what the tabloids say?”
She turned away from his penetrating barrage of questions. But her therapist’s words haunted her, refused to let her back away. “Above all be honest, Lilly. Be honest with yourself and those around you.”
She took a deep breath. “I was very unhappy as a teenager. My parents’ marriage was a mess for a long time. The farm wasn’t doing well and the stress of having no money was getting to them. The kids—we had no life. We spent all our time helping out on the farm. We barely had time for schoolwork, let alone social lives.”
“I knew you weren’t happy at home and that’s why you left,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t know it was that bad.”
She nodded. “My parents’ fights would dissolve into screaming matches. Plates would fly and my mother would threaten to leave. My dad had an affair with the farmer’s wife down the road.” She hugged her arms around herself and looked up at him. “It was a disaster. A huge mess.”
There was a pregnant silence. His face paled. Yes, she thought viciously. That’s why what you did hurt so much.
She kept going, afraid that if she stopped she’d never tell him the truth. “David seemed immune to it all. Lisbeth was too young to know what was happening. Alex dealt with it by getting into trouble—running with the wrong crowd. I internalized it. I thought if I could control everything about my life beyond them, beyond what was happening at home, I’d be okay.”
Her mouth felt wooden, her lips thick, and the desire to stop talking was so strong it was hard to make herself form the words. “My big thing was food. I hated the way I looked so I controlled everything I put in my mouth.” She swallowed hard. “To the point where I was hardly eating.”
His eyes darkened with an emotion she couldn’t read. “But you can’t ever have been fat. Why in the world would you hate yourself so much?”
“I was a ‘chunky, healthy, solid-boned farmgirl,’ as my mother would say,” she said with a derisive smile. “And I hated it. No one wanted to date me. No one wanted to be with me.”
“I find that hard to believe.”