“Thirteen minutes.”
He bit back a curse that would have raised Mattia’s hackles again. His brother was right. He couldn’t blame him for damage done when he’d been absent. Tommaso should have been there.
He wished Mattia had been right and that he’d been late through screwing Gabriella. That, to his mind, would have been far more acceptable than being caught up in emotions that had no place in his marriage.
What the hell had he been thinking, chucking his responsibilities to one side to go shopping for his treacherous wife and then hanging around to dry her hair and infuse his senses with a direct hit of her poison?
He’d left his brother to deal with all the shit of Alfredo’s defection because her pain and embarrassment had tugged on his heartstrings?
Mattia’s phone pinged. He opened the message. “We have the footage. We’ll see better on the laptop.”
Thirty seconds later, the brothers were leaning over a battered table studying the footage on the larger screen. They watched Alfredo pull into the forecourt and fill his small car with petrol. They watched him go into the shop. While he paid for his fuel, two other cars entered the forecourt. One bypassed the fuel and pulled into a parking space at the front of the store. Two minutes after Alfredo entered the shop, he exited without his jacket or trainers, looked in all directions, and jumped into the just-parked car.
Tommaso was already on the phone to his tech guys before the car had driven out of the CCTV’s range. It was answered in one ring.
“I have a car registration for you to trace,” he said tersely. “I want the ownership details, and I want the team to find its location.”
Within two minutes, the first part of his request had been relayed. The car Alfredo had vanished into was registered to one Durante Abate, a high-ranking associate of Gino Vicario.
It was late when Tommaso arrived home. Very late. Gabriella, who’d long gone to bed, woke as soon as his footsteps treaded into the bedroom.
She lifted her head. “Is everything okay?” she asked sleepily.
“Not really. How are you feeling now?”
“Better. Whynot really?”
His laughter was hollow. “As if you give a shit.” He sucked in a breath and then, in a softer tone, said, “Go back to sleep, Gabba.”
Stung, she lay her head back on the pillow and gazed up at the mirrored ceiling. Sometimes, in their early morning couplings when Tommaso always went on top and his eyes stayed closed, she watched the two of them together. Any erotic charge she took from it always evaporated at the unbidden thought that always entered her mind: how many other women had watched themselves with him?
“Can we change the mirrors in here?” she blurted out.
“What?”
“I hate them.” Hated seeing the ghosts of all his past lovers reflecting at her. Hated it more with each passing day.
He took a long time to answer, and when it came, it was a curt, “Sure.”
Her whispered, “Thank you,” was lost in the closing of the bathroom door.
She closed her eyes. Not to avoid the mirror or to go back to sleep – her heart was racing too hard to drift back off easily – but to hold back the tide of fresh tears.
So much for never crying for him again.
Why was everything so screwed up? If she could just hold onto her hate for him, she’d have a fighting chance of surviving this marriage, because she shouldn’t go to bed wishing she had a means of calling him so she could check that he was safe and well. The reason she had no means of calling him was because he’d taken her phone from her, and that was because she was his prisoner.
But she could still feel his lips on hers.
She’d never known a kiss could feel like that.
She must have replayed it a hundred times since. More. Replayed, too, the way he’d wrapped that giant towel around her and the tender way he’d dried her hair.
For those short but long minutes, all the hate and angst between them had simmered into something so tender that she wished she could bottle it and hold it close forever.
There had been no hate in his stare when he’d kissed her. And no hate in hers. Just an overwhelming ache of longing that had come straight from her heart and now sat like a fist in her chest.
When he finally joined her in bed, freshly showered, she could smell the faint trace of whisky beneath his toothpaste.
