‘It’s personal.’ His eyes lifted to hers. The blade was back, only this time she perfectly understood why she felt it. He was delineating boundaries—just as they’d agreed they would—but this time it felt like rejection. As though he were dismissing her.
‘Okay.’ She tried to infuse a casual breeziness into the two syllables. ‘Is there anything about that situation I should be aware of?’
He took a sip of water, his expression neutral, but there was a tick in the lower part of his jaw. ‘My grandmother doesn’t know the details of what happened, so she’s unlikely to ask you. If it comes up, we should just stick to the line that you’ve helped me get over it.’
Her heart twisted sharply, unexpectedly, unwantedly. Because that one little lie revealed so, so much about Dante. Namely, that he wasn’t over his ex-wife. That he thought he might need help to get over her. Charlotte tried not to think about it, not to unpack it, but the simple, throwaway sentence had lodged right in her sternum. He must have cared for his ex-wife a lot. She didn’t know what had happened between them but, suddenly, Charlotte was aware of one thing for absolute certain. She’d never compare to Jamie. Not in Dante’s eyes. Just like her mother had never been enough for her father and she, Charlotte, had never been enough for either of her parents to properly love her.
Dante was someone else who would always look at her and wish she was someone else.
She blinked down at her curry, but Charlotte was no longer hungry. Nonetheless, she speared a piece of broccoli and swooshed it around in the sauce. ‘What else do I need to know?’
If this were a genuine relationship, and if he was planning on spending any more nights sleeping at Charlotte’s, he would have already ordered a new mattress for her barely-double bed. How she got any sleep on that lumpy thing was beyond him.
Dante sure as hell hadn’t been able to sleep. And not just because the size of the bed meant that every tiny movement either one of them made brought them back into contact and his body didn’t seem to realise that they’d already slept together—twice—that night.
No, his body was firing with a whole heap of needs, apparently. And Charlotte wasright there, in a soft, tiny camisole and boxer shorts. Her pale skin so smooth and silky. How he’d ached to just reach for her and start kissing those pillowy lips until she kissed him back and wrapped her arms around him... God, he wanted her.
So, he’d given up on sleep, given up on the bed, and taken the few steps into the living room to make himself a strong coffee—something he’d learned early on in this whole thing that he and Charlotte both shared a love of. He took the mug back into the living room, eyes landing first on the table at which they’d shared dinner and, after talking of Jamie, a whole heap of black and white biographical information.
What did you want to do when you were a kid? What did you study at university? What’s your favourite restaurant?
He now knew that Charlotte liked Indian food but preferred pizza, that she loved to travel and had a huge bucket list of destinations, that she had turned down each of the headhunting calls she’d received in order to remain in the charity sector, that she loved designer clothes but only shopped at thrift shops and that she believed she had developed some kind of foot mutation that allowed her to live almost permanently in high heels and not feel their pinch.
Their conversation after Jamie had been like an extension of any of their others. Surface level and polite. Both instinctively avoiding anything that might dig too close to feelings. Anything that might inspire more questions than they wanted to answer.
He hadn’t asked her about her mother, because he’d just known it was a no-go area for her. And besides knowing the other woman’s name, and that she and Charlotte saw each other pretty regularly, he didn’t need to know more.
Not for this to work.
He dragged a hand over his stubbled jaw, briefly contemplating exactly what ‘this’ was.
It had never occurred to him to get married just to appease his grandmother and assuage her concerns. But in recent months, with her health taking such an obvious decline and her worries for him clearly at the uppermost of her thoughts, no matter how often he sought to reassure her, Dante didn’t, for even a moment, doubt that this was a good course of action.
He would never have concocted it, nor would he have suggested it, but Charlotte’s needs so perfectly dovetailed with his own—and her insistence on all the barriers that he wanted kept in place meant they could rest assured that this was all perfectly business-like.
Except for when they touched, he thought with a hint of self-mockery.
He took a sip of coffee, grimacing as the bitterness hit the back of his palette.
The problem was that Dante San Marino, amongst other things, ran a huge hedge fund. He analysed risk for a living and he was damned good at it. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t take risks. Some of his biggest wins had been off the back of deciding to stare uncertainty in the face. But he’d always been prepared to gamble with money—because he had a lot of it.
But with his personal life it was different.
He’d gambled once, personally, and lost everything. More than he’d even known he’d had to give. He’d lived with a myriad of soul-destroying emotions for way more years than he should have, because he’d wanted to give Jamie absolutely everything in life.
Their marriage had almost destroyed him. Maybe it had. But work had brought him back. Work had been his touchstone, always. The arena in which he felt completely in control. Where he could click his fingers and make whatever he wanted happen.
Charlotte was too much of an unknown. He had to make sure he kept his walls in place, to keep her at arm’s length, because there was no way he’d ever risk going through anything like he’d felt with Jamie.
It was just as well Charlotte felt exactly the same as he did.
Nonetheless, aware that she was sleeping in a room down the hall—though God knew how in that monstrosity of a bed—he grabbed a pen from beside the fruit bowl and scrawled a quick note on the back of an envelope:
I’ll send a car to bring you to the airport tomorrow. D.
Just as he was about to leave, he remembered the ring. He hesitated a moment before pulling it from his pocket and placing it beside the envelope. He’d originally planned to give it to her over dinner, but why? What would the point of that have been? There was no need for romantic gestures with them. It was better to keep it unceremonious and simple, just like this whole relationship.
He pulled the door shut quietly behind him, not bothering to wonder why he was so keen to avoid waking her up.
