Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: March 2018 Books 1 - 4 - Кэтти Уильямс, Cathy Williams - Страница 17

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘WHAT CAN I bring you for le petit dejeuner, madame?’

Her eyelids feeling as heavy as lead, Nicole sat down at the table which had been laid up for breakfast on the terrace, momentarily dazzled by the crystal and silver which gleamed in the early morning sunshine. The air was warm with the combined scent of jasmine and strong coffee and Veronique was gazing at her expectantly.

‘We have bread and croissants, madame,’ the housekeeper continued. ‘Though Signor Barberi has reminded chef that it is the English way to eat a cooked breakfast—should you wish for bacon and eggs.’

Nicole smiled, even though smiling was the last thing she felt like doing. Pulling a face full of remorse would surely be more appropriate in the circumstances. After a restless night haunted by disturbing dreams she had woken up amid sex-scented sheets, revelling in the delicious glow of her body until the heart-sinking moment when she’d remembered exactly what had made it feel that way. Or rather, who.

An image of her unzipping Rocco’s jeans and caressing him intimately rushed into her head and her cheeks burned as, hastily, she put on a pair of sunglasses and pulled her coffee towards her, wishing that last night wouldn’t keep flooding back in a conflicting rush of hungry and humiliating memories. Her cheeks burned as she recalled the way she had welcomed her husband into her body with an urgency which had taken her by surprise—startled her in the discovery that her desire for him was stronger than ever. And that had puzzled her. Because at the tail end of their marriage, hadn’t she resigned herself to the fact that she no longer wanted Rocco anywhere near her?

And he hadn’t wanted her either, had he? They had pushed each other away in every sense of the word. She watched the breeze tugging at the pink petals of the roses at the centrepiece of the table and tucked her hair behind her ears. Last night shouldn’t have happened but there was nothing she could do about it now. She couldn’t wind back the clock and wish she’d suggested Rocco take a hike when he’d wandered into her bedroom—uninvited—and told her to undress.

But her sexual gymnastics had left her with a ravenous appetite and hungrily Nicole eyed the dish of iced peaches before looking up at the housekeeper. ‘I’d love some poached eggs,’ she said. ‘With wholemeal toast, if that’s possible.’

‘D’accord, madame.’

After Veronique had gone, Nicole ate some fruit and watched the expensive yachts bobbing in the exclusive harbour until the housekeeper returned with the rest of her breakfast. She was busy dipping a rectangle of toast into the runny yolk of an egg and oblivious to the presence of anything else when a shadow fell over the table and she looked up to see Rocco standing there, obviously fresh from the shower. His black hair was curling in shiny tendrils around his neck and his jaw looked newly shaved. Unjacketed, his ice-blue shirt contrasted with the much darker hue of his eyes and those exquisitely cut trousers emphasised his long legs. Her breakfast forgotten, Nicole stared up at him and all that blatant masculinity so early in the morning began to do worrying things to her pulse-rate.

‘Rocco!’ she accused. ‘Do you always make a habit of creeping up on people like that?’

‘I move quietly, tesoro. It is in my nature. It’s only because you’re so damned jumpy that you react like that,’ he drawled, drawing out a chair opposite her and lowering himself onto it.

Nicole put her toast back on the plate because eating had suddenly lost its allure. Those thighs, she thought with unwilling hunger, unable to forget their tensile power as he’d driven into her last night. She grabbed her napkin and blotted it over her lips. ‘Maybe it’s just you who has that effect on me.’

He leaned across the table to pour himself a cup of coffee. ‘Should I be flattered?’

She met his gaze. ‘What do you think?’

He shrugged. ‘I never know what to think where you’re concerned, Nicole. Take last night, for example. One minute you’re hot for me and the next as cold as ice. You are something of an...enigma.’

She gave a short laugh. ‘That’s rich, coming from you. The man who never talks about his feelings.’

‘Because that is not my way,’ he said, lifting the cup to his lips and sipping from it. ‘You know that. It has never been the way of Barberi men.’

Nicole pushed her plate away. That much was true. She thought about his grandfather, the man who had helped bring up Rocco and his siblings after their parents had been killed in the dramatic speedboat accident which had been splashed across the front pages of the world’s press. She remembered the day she had arrived at the family complex just outside Palermo, fresh from her honeymoon and slightly daunted at meeting the patriarch of Sicily’s most powerful clan for only the second time since her wedding. Very quickly she’d discovered that the revered elder was as uptight as Rocco about expressing his feelings. She’d thought his lack of warmth was because Turi was an old-fashioned man who would have preferred his golden-boy heir to have married a Sicilian woman with an equally elevated status.

Yet despite the barriers she’d encountered, Nicole had been determined to overcome them and make a good impression. She’d wanted to fit in, no matter what it took, because she’d wanted to make a proper family home for her new husband and their baby. She had spent most of her American honeymoon—when she wasn’t being sick—trying to learn as much Italian as possible in order to impress her new family and especially Rocco’s grandfather. But everything had seemed so new and strange and different when she’d arrived in Sicily. She had felt like a lonely outsider in the huge and sprawling house with nothing much to do all day and nobody to talk to. Rocco had buried himself in work and Turi had spoken only in dialect so that they had barely been able to communicate with each other. Like grandfather, like grandson, she remembered thinking. Maybe her mistake had been to expect anything different. To think that the orphaned nobody who had mopped floors could ever have been considered suitable.

And it was weird. Rocco spoke of her inability to discuss her feelings as if it were a character flaw, while for him it was simply something he accepted as a natural trait of Barberi men. Meanwhile, he showed no inclination to change. He was still concealing his feelings—if he had any—behind the weapons of blame and possession. He was a hugely successful man with a massive global influence, who examined business opportunities in the most minute of detail. He was prepared to bring her out here in order to facilitate a deal, yet he was able to ignore the deep, dark hole at the centre of their marriage and make as if it had never happened.

He was acting as if they had never created a baby together. As if that brief little life had never existed.

Her heart contracted with pain and suddenly Nicole knew that she couldn’t carry on not knowing. Maybe that was why this whole relationship felt so...unfinished. She recognised now that she must shoulder some of the blame, because she had run away rather than face up to their issues. But she was here now, wasn’t she? Maybe it needed to be resolved once and for all before either of them could have true peace. Was it that which gave her the courage to come right out and say it? The sense that she would never get the answers she sought unless she pushed for them, no matter how painful that might be?

She removed her dark glasses and looked at him. ‘Okay,’ she said, sitting back in the chair. ‘We’ve both accused the other of never discussing our true feelings—’

‘I don’t remember putting it exactly like that,’ he said.

‘You called me an enigma,’ she pointed out. ‘So why don’t we agree to ask each other a question and then answer it truthfully? No excuses—and no getting out of it.’

‘You’re proposing some kind of party game?’

‘Don’t deliberately misunderstand me, Rocco. That’s not what it’s about.’

His flattened lips indicated a lack of enthusiasm which bordered on contempt. ‘No? And the purpose of this interrogation is...what?’

It was a bad sign he even had to ask but Nicole wasn’t going to back down now. She leaned across the table towards him. ‘Couldn’t you just do it, Rocco? Just this once. Just to humour me?’

‘Very well.’ He gave an impatient sigh. ‘As long as you are prepared to ask first.’

How typical of him to say that! Nicole took a deep breath and started to speak and the words came rushing out before she had a chance to question the wisdom of saying them. ‘You only married me because I was pregnant, didn’t you?’

There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

She felt her heart twist as if someone were turning a corkscrew in her chest. She’d known that all along—so why did it hurt so much? Did hearing him say it mean she could no longer pretend that her brief marriage had been anything more than a sham?

She was tempted to abandon the conversation but forced herself to continue. After all, they’d come this far—which was further than they’d ever come before. Why stop now? ‘Now you,’ she said, praying for him to address the subject they’d both shied away from for so long. She’d given him a lead by talking about her pregnancy—all he had to do was take it from there and confront the dark space which linked them both. ‘Your turn.’

He took a sip of coffee before turning the full brilliance of his sapphire gaze on her. ‘That’s easy.’ His voice dipped into a seductive caress. ‘Did you enjoy last night?’

Nicole blinked and stared at him in dismay, unable to believe he’d come out with something so...so...superficial. Was that the only thing which mattered to him? Sex? She swallowed. Maybe it was. Sex had been the thing which had brought them together and remained the only thing which united them.

‘You mean, was I satisfied?’ she demanded, her temper suddenly flaring. ‘Yes, of course I was. You’re very good at satisfying a woman, Rocco—but you don’t need me to tell you that.’

It had been a mockery of a question and she suspected he’d asked it simply to even the score. To make him an equal player in this ‘game’—or maybe warn her against ever trying to do something like this in future. But his attitude infuriated her. Couldn’t he have done the bigger thing and asked her about something which mattered? No, of course he couldn’t—because Rocco Barberi didn’t do feelings. He acted like a machine and expected everyone else to do the same. And suddenly she knew she couldn’t let this opportunity go. She was going to say it, no matter how much it angered him, or how much it brought back the pain. Because she needed to say it.

‘You never talk about our child, Rocco.’

She saw a shadow briefly cloud his face but if she’d been expecting heartache, or anger, or pain, or longing, or any of the dark stream of emotions which had dragged her down into the depths of despair so many times, then she was about to be disappointed. Because Rocco was putting his cup down on the saucer as calmly as if she’d just asked him how often it rained in Monaco, his rugged features as impassive as she’d ever seen them, his blue eyes their habitual shade of cold.

‘What is there to talk about?’ he questioned tonelessly. ‘It happened and there’s nothing we can do to change it. We both wish it hadn’t, but there you go.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t think there’s anything more I can add to that and neither do I intend to.’

She wanted to shake him. To rail at him. To accuse him of being unfeeling and heartless—but how could she do that when he’d never pretended to be otherwise? Everything she’d ever wanted from Rocco Barberi, he was incapable of giving her. She had been determined to somehow win his love if only she tried hard enough. But love wasn’t a competition you could win, she realised—and even if it was, surely having a winner would imply there had to be a loser.

And she didn’t want to be that loser.

She didn’t want to be anchored by the past. She wanted to be free of heartache and regret. Of him.

Briefly she thought about getting up from the table and telling Rocco she was going back to England and if he wanted to make her wait for her divorce, then she would just have to suck it up. But she had run away once before and where had that got her? It had left her with an underlying feeling of failure, no matter how many modest achievements she’d managed to chalk up along the way. Wasn’t facing up to the truth like this—in a way they had never done in their marriage—a therapy of some kind, even if it hurt like hell?

But Rocco didn’t hurt, did he? Rocco didn’t give anything away. Not then and certainly not now.

Pushing back her chair, she rose to her feet and flung her napkin over her uneaten toast. ‘Oh, what’s the point of trying to talk to you?’ she said. ‘So why don’t I make it easy for you, Rocco? Let’s just spend the day apart and I’ll join you for your cocktail party later. That way neither of us will have to endure a second more of each other’s company than we need to. I’ll be there for you in public and that’s what matters. That was the deal, wasn’t it?’

Rocco’s eyes narrowed. He was aware that he had hurt her and wondered if that had been deliberate. Part of him had suspected that his blunt answers to her unwanted questions would have her running for the hills again—and wouldn’t that have been simpler? Things were certainly less complicated when Nicole wasn’t around, because she was turning into a constant stream of surprises. For a start, she wasn’t intimidated by him. Not any more. She had the courage to ask him stuff and had been surprisingly calm when he’d given her the brutal truth.

At times during that uncomfortable conversation, she had clearly been trying to hold back her own feelings. There had been anger on her face and bitterness, too. And pain, of course—plenty of that. But no tears. He found himself wondering if it was a struggle for her to maintain that politely enquiring expression and from somewhere he felt the unfamiliar stab of his conscience. Had he been unnecessarily harsh with her?

‘Yes, that was the deal,’ he agreed slowly. ‘But maybe we could amend it.’

‘Really?’ Their eyes locked. ‘And just what did you have in mind, Rocco?’

It was unlike Rocco to search for the unspoken but he did so now. He saw the expression of resignation which had flattened her green eyes—as if sex was all he was capable of offering her. And even though up until a few minutes ago he might have echoed those very sentiments, now his ego rebelled against such an assumption. He would not tolerate being regarded as a stud, but it was more than that. Their conversation had left him feeling disquieted. He could see how vulnerable it had left his estranged wife, no matter how hard she tried to disguise it. And vulnerability was always a danger where women were concerned. It made them capable of misinterpreting an act of physical intimacy and loading it with imaginary significance. If they had sex right now, wouldn’t it be asking for trouble?

He let his gaze drift over the simple white sundress which flattered her curvy body. She looked as sweet as on that first evening he’d met her, when she’d stood in front of him in her cleaner’s uniform, looking guilty for having splashed him with soapy water. The fabric of his trousers had been warm and wet against his ankle but all he could remember was the emerald blaze of her eyes—and Rocco was unprepared for the sudden jolt of nostalgia he experienced.

His jaw clenched.

No. Sex would be a bad idea. He needed to get them as far away from the vicinity of a bedroom as possible and, for once, the idea of leaving her to sun herself by the pool while he buried himself in work was leaving him cold. ‘Why don’t I take you walking?’ he said.

‘Walking?’ she echoed.

‘I meant around the Rock.’

‘The Rock?’

‘That’s what everyone calls Monaco. Because it’s built on a rock,’ he added.

‘I’d kind of worked that one out for myself, Rocco.’

He gave a reluctant laugh as his gaze travelled to her feet—currently encased in a pair of high, strappy wedges which defined her shapely ankles and briefly made him regret his impetuous decision. ‘Do you have anything more suitable you could wear?’

‘Like trainers?’

‘Trainers would be fine,’ he said evenly. ‘Why don’t you go and put them on?’

Glad to escape the disturbing scrutiny of his gaze, Nicole sped upstairs, her heart pounding as she pushed open her bedroom door. She’d straightened the rumpled bedding before going down to breakfast but someone had obviously been in and changed the linen because now the bed looked so pristine that last night might never have happened. But it had. She could feel her cheeks heating as she located her sneakers, trying to forget their explosive passion and to remember instead what he’d just told her.

He had only married her because of the baby.

She remembered the doctor telling her that early miscarriage was very common. That she should go home to her husband and get pregnant again as soon as possible. But how could that be possible when Rocco had resolutely stayed away from her after she’d lost the baby? When he’d seemed almost relieved to have a legitimate reason not to resume marital relations. Was that how he’d felt only been afraid to admit it? Had some part of him recognised that the terrible thing which had happened was probably best in the long run, if it freed him from a marriage he had never intended?

But she had never asked him, had she? Had never sat him down or confronted him and not just because she was feeling out of her depth as the billionaire’s new bride. She hadn’t talked about stuff because, in a way, she hadn’t known how. Those years in foster homes hadn’t exactly been warm and although Peggy Watson had loved her like a mother, she had come from a fierce generation of practical Irishwomen who got on with things, rather than discussing how they made them feel.

Wasn’t she as much to blame as Rocco for the lack of communication between them at the time—which had speeded up the end of their forced marriage?

Tying her shoelaces, she grabbed a canvas tote bag and went back to the terrace to find him waiting, blue eyes gleaming as he quickly appraised her change of footwear.

‘Much better,’ he murmured.

Nicole’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Strange coming from the man who once insisted I parade about his office in a pair of sky-high stilettos. What happened, Rocco? Did your tastes undergo a dramatic change?’

His face was impassive. ‘You are no longer my mistress, Nicole—that’s what happened.’

But she’d felt like his mistress last night. He had treated her with that same raw hunger he’d displayed at the beginning of their relationship, before they were married. And that was something else which had always puzzled her, something else she had felt unable to ask him in the past. But now she had nothing left to lose and she looked unflinchingly into his bright eyes. ‘Those things you used to get me to dress up in. The packages you used to buy from that shop in Soho—’

‘You’re going to tell me now that you didn’t like them?’ he questioned roughly.

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m not going to say that. I wore them because you did like them. But the more outrageous the outfits, the more...disapproving you seemed to be, even though they clearly turned you on. It was as if you were trying to turn me into someone you could ultimately despise. Is that what you were doing, Rocco?’

Rocco felt his mouth dry. She was far more perceptive than he’d given her credit for, or maybe he’d just never stopped to notice it before. He’d been horrified to discover that the beautiful cleaner had been a virgin, because he hadn’t wanted an innocent, he had wanted a mistress. Turning her onto the more colourful sexual practices enjoyed by his previous lovers had been an attempt to place her firmly into the latter category. Because the alternative was admitting he was captivated by having straightforward vanilla sex with his eager young lover. And that admission had made him uneasy because what then would she want from him—and could he ever be that man?

His mouth tightened. And then she’d fallen pregnant and once again he had been cast into the role which had haunted him all his life.

Responsible adult.

Ask Rocco.

See how Rocco does it.

Well, not any more.

He was free now and that was the way he liked it.

‘Maybe I was trying to get you to despise me,’ he admitted eventually.

Confusion fired in the leafy depths of her eyes. ‘But why would you do that?’

He saw the colour which had risen to her cheeks and somehow he knew he couldn’t duck out of this. ‘Because I knew I was the type of man who could hurt you,’ he said, in as candid an admission as he’d ever made. ‘And I didn’t want to do that. Not when I discovered just how sweet and innocent you really were.’

‘Could you...elaborate, please?’

Rocco scowled, wondering why she was being so persistent when this was only going to hurt her. ‘I thought that if I tried to objectify you, it would drive a wedge between us.’

‘And it did,’ she said dully.

‘It did,’ he agreed.

Her teeth were biting into the cushioned pinkness of her bottom lip but she said nothing more. She didn’t have to. Her face gave it all away. That he’d ended up hurting her anyway. Because that was what he did. She’d tried to get close and he’d pushed her away. He didn’t know any other way. He didn’t want it any other way.

His gaze swept over her. ‘So, have you changed your mind about sightseeing?’

She hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. ‘Actually, I’m looking forward to it.’

He looked at her curiously. ‘Despite the things I’ve just said?’

‘Maybe because of the things you’ve just said,’ she agreed then gave a shaky laugh. ‘I’ve found this discussion very...useful.’

‘I thought you didn’t like that word.’

‘That depends on the context.’ She shrugged and wound a curl around her finger. ‘Understanding what makes someone tick is always useful, Rocco. It helps me make some kind of sense out of what happened.’

And then she smiled and inexplicably Rocco felt his heart pound and for a moment he found himself wishing he’d kept his mouth shut and that they could just have spent the day in bed. ‘Let’s go,’ he said abruptly.