Page 1 of Broken Trust

1

GIA

Tonight I'm bringing romance back into these walls.

Dante. My husband, who showed me there was hope for someone like me. I'm nothing special. Not next to the women in my village with their long legs and their collarbones like blades. Americans would file me under Plain Jane and move on. Dark hair that never does what I ask it to. A medium sort of height. Wide hips, a soft stomach, a chest that leaves nothing to the imagination.

And then there was Dante, who looked at me as if I were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

When he asked me on a date I didn't even pretend to think about it. Around here, men wanted the Rizzo name more than the girl attached to it. The top fashion house in Europe was born in this valley, grew out of it, and became one of the biggest labels on the planet, so my surname opened doors before I reached them. Dante never once looked at the door. He looked at me.

So tonight I'm going to remind us both of that.

I've been on my feet since morning. The good glasses are polished until they throw little rainbows on the ceiling. Rose petals run down the length of the table, though it took twenty minutes of fussing because they looked staged, and another ten of putting them back because everything looks staged when you're this nervous. Candles burn low and warm down the middle, throwing gold up the walls. Sade turns over on the speakers, the same voice he used to play me in the dark years ago, when we owned nothing worth naming and didn't care. Two glasses of the Barolo he loves sit breathing on the counter. And in the center of it there's me, in a champagne slip I bought this afternoon and buried at the bottom of my bag like a teenager, because if I'd stood in that shop one second longer, thinking, I'd have put it back and driven home in my old cardigan and hated myself the whole way.

The silk slides over the parts of me I've started avoiding in mirrors. Funny. I'd forgotten those insecurities for years. They stopped mattering somewhere between the engagement and the wedding, between building his career with him and trying for a baby. Then the baby never came, and they crept back in. Anyway, that's behind me. I push the thought out and make myself stay here, in this room, on him.

A quiet night alone with my husband should feel like breathing. It doesn't. I don't know if he wants me anymore, and some cold part of me suspects I stopped being wantable the day we learned I'm infertile. Tonight I'll find out. And I'm not sure I'll survive the answer if it's yes.

I laid the table the way I did the first time I ever cooked for him. We were sixteen, his pockets empty, my parents away for the weekend, so instead of a date he couldn't afford I told him I'd feed him. I've loved cooking for people since my Nonna put me on a stool at her counter at six years old. It gathers my heart into two hands and sets it on a plate where someone can see it, and that was the thing that undid him back then. You do everything wide open, he used to say. Nothing held back. For ten years I believed that was a safe way to love a person.

The garage door grinds awake beneath the floor and my heart shoots into my throat.

He's early. He's never early anymore.

Bare feet quick on the tile, I check it all one last time and hate the way my hands won't settle. The candles. The petals I have to step around now so I don't bruise them. The record is turning low. The wine breathing. Me, in silk I already want to hide under.

The door from the garage opens and he's still on the phone.

“Let me call you back.” A pause. “No. Tomorrow's fine.” He hangs up without waiting for an answer and slides the phone into his jacket. I file it away without meaning to, the way I file everything now, because a year ago he didn't end calls like that.

Then he steps into the light, and my foolish heart does the thing it's done since I was sixteen. It lifts.

He's in the dark polo and trousers he left in this morning, creased now in a way they weren't at breakfast, sleeves shoved up his forearms. Stubble he skipped shaving catches the light and makes him look tired and rough and unfairly beautiful. He ducks his head out of habit under the low beam by the door, though he clears it easily. His hair's gone a little long at the collar because he keeps canceling the barber. Those eyes are so dark brown they read as black until you're close, and I've been close enough, for long enough, to know every shade in them. Ten years of loving this man and the sight of him in a doorway still knocks the wind clean out of me.

His gaze goes to the table. “What's all this?”

Not you look beautiful. Nothing. My heart drops through the floor, and I fight to keep the fall off my face, because there it is already, the first small cold confirmation, and the night hasn't even started.

“Dinner.” Instead of retreating to the couch I move toward him, and I feel him take in the length of me as I come, and I hold my breath the whole way. “This is me missing my husband. Since when do I need a reason?”

He sets his keys down without once glancing away from me. Something shifts in his face, and I grab for it with both hands like a woman going over the side of a boat.

“You hid something in your bag this afternoon.” His voice drops low. “This was it.”

He noticed. He was watching me closely enough to notice. Relief floods up my neck, warm and shameful and far too big for what it is, and I hate what I've become, a woman counting a noticed shopping bag like a love letter. “Maybe,” I say.

He crosses the last of the floor and takes my face in his hands, palms cool and huge against my cheeks. The old current of him runs straight through me, and beneath the wanting sits the fear, both of them wired to the same switch now, so I can't feel one without the other lighting up.

“Whatever you're about to say about yourself,” he murmurs against my hairline, “leave it alone tonight.”

“I only want it to be perfect.” My voice frays on the last word, and I could weep at how easily I give myself away.

He kisses my forehead, then the bridge of my nose, his mouth curving against my skin. “I'm half dead, Gia. The production's late and running over every number we set.” He says it almost like an apology, and strangely it steadies me, because he hasn't told me anything real about his work in months.

I draw his mouth down to mine and go slow. For one terrible second there's nothing. He's stone, and I think, there it is, there's my answer. Then it breaks. A low rough sound climbs out of his chest, surprise going molten, and his hands slide off my face to the small of my back and spread wide there like he means to hold as much of me as he can. I could cry from that alone, from being wanted for the length of a single kiss.

The day slides off him all at once. Everything in him pulls tight to the two inches of air where we're pressed together, and it goes to my head faster than the wine could. And still I watch him. That's the thing I can't stop doing now. Even wanting him this badly, some cold clerk in the back of me stands over a ledger, checking.