Page 50 of Forgotten Mistress, Secret Love-Child
With a shush of silk the dress fell to wedge at her elbows. She darted a look at Alessandro, but, contrary to expectations, he wasn’t scrutinising the bare flesh he’d exposed. Instead he watched her face. That look sent her stomach plunging on a rollercoaster ride.
‘Let me.’ As simply as that, when his hands slipped down her sleeves and tugged, she allowed him to pull the dress away. It dropped in rumpled folds around her feet and he helped her step out. Only now did she realise he’d removed her shoes. She stood before him in bra, suspender belt and stockings. Totally vulnerable.
Yet the glow in his eyes warmed her to the core and stopped her from covering herself.
She felt something swell inside. She felt almost powerful. Felt desired. Even, for a crazy moment, cherished.
‘Did you mean that?’ Carys found herself asking before she could think twice. ‘About there not being anyone since the accident?’
It was so unlikely, especially given his cold fury when he’d accused her of betraying him. But the Alessandro she’d known had never lied. If he said it was so…
He leaned close, holding her with his gaze, and with his hands, large and warm, grasping her upper arms.
For a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer. She read a play of unfathomable expressions in his shadowed eyes and felt his fingers stiffen against her bare skin.
Finally he nodded. ‘Si. There was no one.’ He didn’t look happy about the admission, as if it impinged somehow on his masculinity. But Carys was so elated she barely registered it. A fizzing, as if of a hundred champagne bottles, flooded her bloodstream, making her dizzy. All this time…had he been subconsciously waiting for her?
She tried to blank the preposterous notion from her head, but it lodged there, insidiously tempting.
It meant nothing. He’d been recuperating from injury, or busy with business. Yet a stubborn part of her clung to the idea his celibacy had been because he hadn’t had her.
‘Carlotta told me you hadn’t been lovers,’ she blurted out. ‘She said you hadn’t planned to marry her.’
He shrugged, still holding her, yet his face took on a more rigid cast. ‘I told you I would not behave in such a way. Carlotta is a childhood friend, nothing more.’
Even now, without remembering the details himself, he was so sure of himself, so positive about his actions!
Carys wished she had half his self-belief. She’d striven a lifetime to overcome the ingrained idea she was second best, fostered by being the ‘slow’ member of an academically highachieving family. And by being all but ignored by her busy parents. Even now it was so easy to let doubt take hold.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t trust you, Alessandro.’ Tentatively she raised her hand and pressed it over his where he held her. The feel of her hand on his seemed so right.
It wasn’t her fault alone their relationship had unravelled at the seams. But she realised now her readiness to believe the worst, fed by her own sense of inadequacy, as much as Livia’s lies, had been a major part of it.
Her throat clogged in mixed hope and fear as she waited for his response. Tension buzzed her rigid body.
‘Now you know the truth,’ he said dismissively. ‘The past doesn’t matter.’
But it does, she wanted to cry as pent up feelings lashed her. If they’d been able to trust, to believe in each other, they might still be together. Truly together, not yoked in a marriage of convenience.
Bitterness welled on her tongue as regrets swamped her.
‘I believe you didn’t betray me, Alessandro. Is it so hard for you to believe I didn’t betray you?’
Alessandro stared down into her earnest, flushed face and felt again the stab of unfamiliar emotion in his gut. This woman twisted him inside out. With her words as well as her delectable body.
Automatically he shied from the emotions she sought to awaken. They were too confronting, too foreign to a man who built his life on logic and self-sufficiency. Too dangerous.
‘I believe, piccolina, that the past is the past. There is nothing to be gained in revisiting it. Instead we have our future with our son to create. Our future together.’
She blinked and he could have sworn he saw tears well in eyes that had turned from hopeful blue to dull slate-grey in a moment. Heat corkscrewed through his chest at the knowledge he was responsible. But he refused to lie, even to placate the woman he intended to live with for life.
His trust only went so far. Taking any woman’s word without proof was as foreign to him as breathing underwater.
She could not seriously ask him to accept, on the word of a woman he couldn’t remember, that he’d been wrong to accuse her of infidelity. He must have had excellent reasons for the accusations.
