numbly. No idea what she’d been through and she hadn’t even bothered telling him because it had been irrelevant. ‘So you’re saying that it was only a bad decision because of my reaction. If I’d been a tolerant Sicilian wife then prioritising your work over everything else would have been acceptable.’
‘That hotel has been our most successful. Had I not shown up that day we would have lost the bid.’
‘So what you’re actually saying is that the business was more important than me and you don’t actually regret it because it’s making you a nice profit.’
‘Once again you are twisting everything I say!’
‘Nothing is twisted. Everything is straight in my head.’
‘It is done, now. Finished. I don’t see the point in looking back.’
‘Well, it’s nice to know you’re not beating yourself up over it,’ Laurel said stiffly. ‘I’d hate to think your guilty conscience was keeping you awake at night.’
His eyes glinted. ‘I’m just saying that it is a useless waste of energy to dwell on the past. It can never be changed.’
‘True, but it can be used as a useful indicator of how to behave in the future. It’s called learning from mistakes. Something you’re not so good at, presumably because your ego blocks the view.’ Galvanised into action by his total lack of self-awareness, Laurel jumped out of bed and stumbled over to her suitcase, which lay abandoned on the floor.
Shocked and horrified by how close she’d come to allowing herself to be seduced right back to where they’d come from, she yanked at the zip, aware that he was watching her with incredulity.
‘What the hell are you doing now?’
‘Getting out of here. It’s what I was trying to do before you barged through that door and used sex as a weapon.’
‘I did not use sex as a weapon.’ His jaw hardened and his eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. ‘Unless you count using it to try and crack that tough outer shell of yours.’
‘I have that tough outer shell to protect myself from people like you.’
‘I loved you. I still love you.’ His voice thickened as he exposed his soul. ‘I made the ultimate commitment, but apparently that meant nothing to you. And still means nothing to you.’
‘You never loved me, Cristiano. You loved the challenge, the chase—’ She flung open the case. ‘Maybe you loved the fact I was the only woman who didn’t stare when you walked past, that I wasn’t impressed by the money and the status. I don’t know—but I do know it wasn’t love. The only thing you love is your work. That comes first for you. Nothing turns you on like winning a deal.’
His jaw was rigid. ‘I loved you. But you were afraid of that. Your problem is that you can’t let yourself need someone.’
‘And that drives you mad, doesn’t it? You can’t have a relationship with someone who doesn’t need you. You don’t want an equal, you want a dependent because it makes you feel big and macho.’ They were fighting and both of them knew that the reason the emotion was so agonisingly raw was because they cared so much. ‘You made me need you. You pushed and you pushed until you made holes in the armour I’ve spent all my life creating and then you walked off and left me exposed and I hate you for that.’ She tugged a T-shirt out of the case.
‘Then why didn’t you tell me instead of just walking out? That was cowardly.’
‘It was survival.’
‘I arrived home after that trip, ready to offer you support and you sat there in silence. You said virtually nothing except, “I’m leaving you.”‘
She’d had no words to communicate what she’d been feeling. She’d been swallowed up by emotions so huge and terrifying that she’d barely been able to function.
‘There was nothing to say.’ Laurel was pulling on her clothes. Not the silky bridesmaid dress that still lay abandoned where he’d dropped it so carelessly, but the skinny jeans she’d jammed into her suitcase moments before he’d crashed his way into the room. ‘This conversation is over. My flight leaves in an hour.’
‘Then they’re leaving with one less passenger.’ His rough, raw tone would have stopped a lesser woman in her tracks but Laurel jammed her feet into her shoes.
‘I’m going to be on that flight and if you dare try and stop me I’ll call the police.’ She ignored the fact that the Chief of Police regularly dined with the Ferraras. ‘The divorce is already going ahead. I saw Carlo this morning and signed everything you wanted me to sign.’
‘That’s irrelevant now.’
‘What do you mean, irrelevant?’ She zipped her jeans and freed the long sweep of her hair from the neck of her scarlet shirt. His eyes followed the movement and she tried not to remember how many times he’d buried his fingers in her hair as he’d kissed her.
‘Italian law expressly declares that a separation must be physical to be valid. A couple has to be formally separated for three years before a decree can be issued.’ His eyes slid from her hair to her mouth, his intimate and deliberate gaze reminding her of what they’d just done.
As the meaning behind his statement slowly sank in she felt a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Had she inadvertently sent the clock back to the beginning? No. Not that. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Even if we hadn’t just proved that we can’t be apart for that length of time, there is no way I’d be giving you a divorce now.’ His voice was like steel and she was suddenly aware of her heart hammering against her chest.
‘There’s no one you can’t influence. You could arrange it if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Yes, you do! You hate me for leaving you.’ Desperately she tried to stoke his anger but he was maddeningly cool.
‘And you hate me for going into one more meeting when I should have flown home to be with you. We both made mistakes. Being married is about fixing them and moving forwards. That’s what we’re doing.’
He was so smug, she thought desperately as she zipped the suitcase shut and grabbed the handle. So arrogantly sure that all he had to do was snap his fingers and whatever he wanted to happen would happen. So confident that he could wipe away the past.
‘You think we can move forward, but you have no idea what happened on that day.’ She was shaking with the stress of thinking about it. ‘You don’t know how I felt.’
His icy exterior splintered. ‘So tell me how you felt. Tell me now. Don’t hold anything back.’
The suitcase landed on the floor with a dull thump. ‘It started with a pain, low in my stomach.’ Her voice was remarkably steady given the fact that this was the conversation she’d thought she’d never have. ‘I thought to myself, This isn’t right. I called you, but your PA told me that you couldn’t be disturbed.’
His jaw tightened, like a fighter bracing himself for a punch. Clearly these weren’t the feelings he wanted to hear.
‘Laurel—’
‘I don’t hold that against you.’ She didn’t give him time to speak. It was her turn now and she intended to use it. ‘The first message didn’t get through but that was her fault, not yours. And my fault for not being more forceful about needing to speak to you. I called the doctor and he told me to take painkillers and go back to bed and rest for a while, so I did that and the pain grew worse. I knew no one else in Sicily. Your mother was staying with her sister in Rome, Santo was with you in the Caribbean. I was alone. And frightened.’ Her emphasis on that word triggered an indefinable change in him. ‘I called you again. This time I was forceful. I insisted on speaking to you and she put me through—’ Her heart rate