I know she is, I know. Yet I can’t accept her leaving me. ‘You’re not trapped here,gattina,’ I remind her and myself. ‘You can leave. With the appropriate security, naturally. You’re not a prisoner.’
She turns fully to face me now, her arms still wrapped around herself. I can see goose bumps rising on her skin, so I slip my jacket off and move over to her, putting it around her shoulders.
She doesn’t resist, looking up at me. ‘I’m just an object to you, aren’t I? Just a thing. A wife at your side, a sex toy in your bed and an incubator for your children.’
She’s so direct, so blunt, but she’s wrong.
‘No,’ I say, suddenly fierce. ‘That’s not how I think of you.’ Her jaw is tight, her body stiff with anger, but I reach for her, pulling her against me. She’s so warm and despite my tiredness, my cock is hard and getting harder. I grip her hips firmly, feeling the softness and heat of her skin beneath her thin nightgown. The fabric is slightly transparent and I can see the pink of her nipples through it, and I feel suddenly feral at the thought of all my guards being able to see them too.
‘What you want matters,’ I say to her, meaning every word. ‘I can work it so that our life will be as normal as possible, I promise. You’ll never be a prisoner here. If you like, I can find you an apartment anywhere in the world that can be yours and yours alone. And you can visit it anytime you want.’
Her body is still stiff with resistance, her features set, so I lift my hands from her hips and cup her face between my palms. Emotions move through her green eyes, fury, pain, sadness. They are precious, these emotions of hers, and I want to ease her. Soothe her in any way I can, which is unlike me.
‘I can make it easy for you,’ I murmur, bending to her mouth and pressing a soft kiss there. ‘I can make it so you’ll be freer than you’ve ever felt in your life.’ Another kiss. ‘There are no bars on this cage,gattina.’ Another kiss to her jaw. ‘There is no cage at all.’
Chapter Nineteen
Caterina
HIS HANDS CUPPINGmy face are warm and his mouth making its way down the side of my neck is hot. The kisses he presses against my skin burn and my body is starving for him.
After he walked away from our breakfast yesterday morning, I heard the helicopter come and go, and realised he had left the villa. I checked with Maria and indeed, he’d apparently gone to Naples for the day on business. And no, she didn’t know when he was coming back.
My disappointment that he’d gone seemed out of all proportion, so I tried to tell myself that I was glad. He’d left in a huff after I hadn’t liked his rings, and he’d taken them with him, and if he gave them to his stupid mistress, who cared? Certainly I didn’t.
But as the day progressed and I couldn’t seem to settle, wandering around the villa restlessly with a pressure in my chest that was starting to turn into pain, I was forced to admit to myself that actuallyIcared.
I cared that I’d upset him. I cared that his father had been such a terrible person, that he’d lost his mother, that he was clearly still grieving her. I cared that he’d been turned into a killer because of an accident of birth, and I was starting to suspect that it wasn’t in his nature.
I went in search of Maria in the end, and had a conversation with her about Vincenzo as a boy, since she’d been their housekeeper since he’d been a child. He’d been a kind little boy, she’d told me. He’d rescued a kitten once, and loved his mother. He’d had a puppy for a while until his father took it away to train it into a ‘proper’ dog, and it came back and killed one of the cats he’d rescued. He’d been inconsolable.
The only time his mother had been happy, Maria told me, was when she was with him, and he was the only one who could make her laugh.
It hurt to hear those stories. It hurt to hear what his father had taken from him and his mother, and it made me so angry too. It was lucky that Stefano Argenti was already dead, because if I’d had a weapon, I’d certainly have taken it, found him and shot him myself.
After that I’d put on a swimming costume and gone down to the pool, swimming laps and then floating on my back the way I remembered from long ago. I kept waiting for his voice to follow me, to see him coming down the steps from the villa, but there were only his guards, keeping watch.
I was disappointed. I was so bitterly disappointed and I didn’t know why.
Eventually, after realising he wasn’t coming back here anytime soon, I let Maria cook me dinner and I watched TV until late, trying to distract myself. Then I’d gone to bed. I didn’t use his bedroom, but the one I’d been given.
My dreams were full of darkness and I was running down a shadowed hallway, trying to escape from something or someone. And then the dream changed so that I was the one doing the chasing. I’d woken just before dawn, feeling unrested and groggy, so I’d gone down the stone path to visit the beach, needing some fresh air to clear my head. It was such a beautiful beach that I’d stayed to watch the sunrise, trying to ignore the guards that stood on the stone path, looking down at my every move.
And just when I was thinking about going back up to the villa, out of the corner of my eye I could see a man walking towards me. Tall and powerful, moving with that familiar lithe grace.
My heart had jumped in my chest and when he came to stand beside me, I’d been filled with the inexplicable urge to turn and throw myself into his arms. But I’d forced the urge away. I didn’t want him to think anything had changed from when he’d walked away the day before.
Then he’d told me about his mother and how they’d used to go walking on this beach, and in my head I could see him, a little boy running beside her as they found treasures in the sand. Then watching in delight as she drew him maps and told him of all the places they would visit.
A little boy’s dream. But only a dream, because his mother had been held prisoner here and all because of his father.
My chest had tightened and it’s still tight now as he presses another kiss at the base of my throat. His body is so hard and hot, a delicious contrast to the cold wind blowing around me. I can smell the smoke and cedar of his scent surrounding me, in the jacket he placed around my shoulders and on his skin, and all I want is to melt into his arms. All I want is to believe the promises he’s murmuring, because right now the thought of leaving him is not one I want to contemplate.
But then I smell another scent, a feminine one, and a surprisingly sharp knife of jealousy slides between my ribs. ‘So,’ I whisper as he presses another kiss to my throat. ‘You really meant it when you said you were going to give the emeralds to your mistress.’
He goes still for a moment and lifts his head. ‘Is that jealousy I hear,gattina?’ He’s amused, but I am most definitely not, though I wish I could be.
‘I know I said you weren’t to sleep with anyone else on our wedding night, but even two days later it’s—’
