“Anything left?”
I shake my head. I lost count of how many times he made me scream. Too many, but he’s still not satisfied. Even as he touches me with tenderness, I can hear the edge in his voice. His frustration. His anger. The betrayal still lingering between us like a bomb that might detonate at any moment.
“You left me,” I croak, embarrassed when I start to cry for real.
I’m overstimulated and raw, and not just physically, but emotionally.
“Everyone out,” Angelo says.
At his order, the room clears, and the door shuts behind them, leaving me alone with my husband. That privacy offers me the safety I need as a sob breaks free.
Angelo mutters a low curse, working quickly to undo my restraints.
I can’t even lift my head, and all my limbs are numb when he picks me up. He carries me to another chair and sits down with me in his lap, cradling my head against his chest as he massages the feeling back into my body.
“I didn’t leave you,” he rasps. “I was with you both nights,cara. You just didn’t see me.”
His words should comfort me, but they don’t. Something has broken in me, and I can’t seem to shut off my emotions anymore.
“What could be so bad that you won’t tell me?” he presses.
The confession is on my lips. But fear whispers through me.
I’d rather have his anger than nothing at all.
I draw in a staggered breath and meet his gaze. “Can we go home now?”
A long, tense moment of silence passes before he nods. Then he rises, wraps me in a blanket, and takes me home.
36
ANGELO
“Relax,bella. We’ll stay here a while.”
Abella leans back against me, the warm water in the tub enveloping us. She can barely keep her eyes open as I wash her. Her head lolls back on my chest, her body depleted from exhaustion.
I mind-fucked her and wrung everything out of her—except for the one thing I needed. Her secrets still loom over us like a dark cloud, and she refuses to give them up. I wanted to break her tonight for everything she’s kept from me, but not like this.
The first time I saw her break down, I thought she was processing the things she’d learned about her father. The next morning, she shut off her emotions like a switch, and it bothered me. But tonight, I saw a glimpse into something else. This isn’t the kind of pain that fades with time. There’s a pit of despair inside her, buried so deep nobody else can see it.
I don’t know the source of that wound, and it frustrates me to no end.
As long as she refuses to tell me the truth, my resentment for her will continue to war with my obsession. From one momentto the next, I don’t know whether I want to punish her or take care of her.
Tonight, the softer side won.
I rinse the soap from her body and drain the tub. She’s limp with exhaustion, so I dry her off as best I can and carry her to bed naked. We settle beneath the covers, her head resting against my chest, her palm flat against my beating heart. She burrows as close as she can get, and I wrap my arm around her, extending an olive branch—for now.
“Go to sleep,” I tell her. “I’ll be right here.”
“Anything new to report?”I adjust my tie as Nicky glances at me in the rearview mirror.
He gives me a look that indicates he’s picked up on the tension in my marriage over the last few weeks. It would be hard not to, when I keep asking him these inane questions.
“Nothing new,” he says. “Unless you want to hear about her occasional lunch deliveries.”
After our temporary ceasefire, Abella and I have fallen into what might seem like a normal routine. In the mornings, we make the commute to the city. At night, we eat dinner together and sleep in the same bed when I come in late. I haven’t touched her since, which is a problem for my dick—and an even bigger issue because she informed me her period arrived.
