Читать книгу The Costanzo Baby Secret - Catherine Spencer - Страница 8

PERUZZI would not be pleased. “Answer truthfully, but only as much as she asks for,” the good doctor had counseled. “Above all, don’t try to rush matters.”

In theory it had all sounded simple enough. In fact, applying the advice was as dicey as picking a path through a minefield. And kissing her, Dario realized, frustrated on more levels than he cared to number, ranked high on the list of rushing things, at least from his perspective. He was hard and aching and half-blind with hunger for a woman who wouldn’t have known him from Adam if she’d happened to pass him on the street. All of which most definitely left him in no shape to field another round of her astute questions.

Playing for time, he said, “What makes you think we weren’t happy?”

“You told me so, remember?”

Unfortunately he did, and wished he’d had the good sense to think before he spoke or, failing that, to keep his mouth shut altogether. A chunk of recent history might have gone missing from her memory, but the rest of Maeve’s brain was firing on all cylinders.

Despite not being able to see her clearly, the intensity of her gaze burned in the gloom. “Were we on the brink of divorce, Dario?” she persisted.

Were they? Only she knew the answer to that one. “No,” he said, sticking strictly to the facts. After all, no papers had been filed, no lawyers called in to divide the marital assets or mediate custodial rights.

“Then what was the problem?”

Racking his brains for a misleadingly truthful reply, he said, “All marriages go through rough patches once in a while.”

“But we’ve been married such a short time,” she mourned. “We should have been still on our honeymoon.”

Dannazione! Next, she’d be asking where they spent their honeymoon, and getting into the circumstances surrounding their wedding would certainly not meet with Peruzzi’s approval. “Don’t assume, because we might have hit a few bumps along the way, that our marriage was a failure,” he temporized. “For every disappointment there were a hundred joys, and for me, having you home again rates as one of the latter.”

“If you care that much, why did you never visit me in the hospital?”

Dio dare lui forza! Raising his eyes heavenward, he appealed for help. “I did visit you, Maeve. I sat by your bed day and night for weeks after the accident, praying that you’d live.”

“But then you stopped coming. Why?”

Because we have a son who was also hospitalized, and he needed me, too. “For a start, I’d had you transferred to a clinic outside Rome, one renowned for its success in treating brain injuries. But you didn’t know I was there, and since I was able to do nothing for you, I focused on what I could do.”

“Turned to work to distract you, you mean?”

“Yes,” he lied, because he knew the truth would be more than she was ready to hear.

“What about when I woke up from the coma?”

“I would have come to you immediately, but your doctors advised against it. You still had a long way to go before being discharged, and they didn’t want anything to interfere with your recovery.”

“Since when does seeing her husband impede a woman’s recovery?”

“When she doesn’t remember him?” he suggested drily.

“Oh.” She bit her lip. “Yes, I suppose so.”

As much by good luck as good judgment, he’d steered the conversation into safer channels. Before she derailed it with another question he couldn’t or shouldn’t answer, he said, “Difficult though it might be, you have to slow down, Maeve. When last we spoke, Peruzzi warned me against letting you overdo it. If he were here now, I guarantee he’d be appalled that, after the kind of day you’ve put in, you’re not yet in bed.”

“But there’s still so much I don’t know!”

Ushering her inside the house, he said firmly, “And a hundred tomorrows in which to learn it. At this point, what you need above all else is to get some rest. The last thing either of us wants is for you to suffer a relapse.”

He’d found the magic word. “Heavens, no!” she exclaimed with a shudder. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t face.”

“Then I’ll say good-night.” Keeping a safe distance between them, he bent and brushed his mouth across her cheek. But even so chaste a benediction tempted him beyond bearing. The fabric of her dress whispered over her skin in invitation, reminding him of the smooth, creamy flesh it concealed. And the color, a purple as deep as midnight in the tropics, turned her beautiful eyes an iridescent amethyst.

Clinging to him suddenly, she said on a trembling breath, “I am going to remember us eventually, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“You have my word.” He disentangled himself and shooed her away. “Off you go now. Sleep well, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

With a last doe-eyed look, she went. Expelling a breath of relief, he strode to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a stiff measure of grappa. The brandy seared his throat, but did nothing to ease the turmoil consuming him.

He hadn’t climbed to the top of the corporate ladder through indecision, but through sound judgment and an uncanny ability to read other men. He could sense weakness, detect lack of integrity before an opponent so much as opened his mouth. Yet she left him riddled with self-doubt.

Had she surrendered to his kiss because the desire that had run riot in him had taken her hostage, too, or because she saw pandering to his sexual appetite as a way to buy forgiveness for past transgressions? When she’d talked of abiding by her promises and he’d hinted at her duplicity, had her dismay been sincere or a disingenuous cover-up?

He had no answers. Not for her or himself.

That night she dreamed of home. Except it wasn’t home any longer. Someone else had moved into her apartment and she stood at her parents’ graveside, with all her worldly possessions stacked around her in various crates and traveling trunks. “I’m going away and never coming back,” she told her mother and father, “but you’ll always be with me in my heart.”

The leaves on the trees chattered in a gust of wind. “You can’t go. You belong here.”

“I must,” she protested, indicating a shadowy figure in the distance. “He needs me. I hear him…”

“No.” The branches swooped low, binding themselves around her. The leaves piled on top of her, smothering her, holding her captive.

She awoke, tangled in fine cotton sheets, her body bathed in sweat, the blood thundering in her ears. Sunlight flooded the room.

Desperately she tried to hold on to the dream, certain she’d been on the brink of a memory breakthrough. Closing her eyes, she fought to recall the image of that elusive background shape, but the clouds that had inhabited her mind for so long now, closed in again, blotting out the picture. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow…