Page 56 of Unveiled As The Italian's Bride
The silence that met this bald statement was deafening. His face had become a closed book and he moved his hand and sat back in stunned silence, giving her ample time to feel queasy.
‘If I could be on the sex-with-no-strings-attached page, if I could think about what we have ending and turning into something else until the expiry date comes up, then Icouldcarry on. Because I do need and want the money and will never accept any of it if we part company...’
‘If...’
Going for broke, Kate breathed in deeply and said huskily in a rush, ‘We get along so well, and I don’t just mean in bed. As two people, we laugh and chat, and sometimes it feels as though we’reone.Do you feel any of that? Do you feel that we might make a go of this?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We could...really see what happens, Dante. I know you’ve been burnt in the past and I... I’ve never thought that you were the kind of guy I could ever go for, but we could both be brave...see where this takes us for real.’
She saw his answer in the way he sprang to his feet and the speed with which he put distance between them until he was staring at her, narrow-eyed, from across the width of the room.
‘That is not an option,’ he said with unyielding ferocity. ‘It never was and it never will be. You knew the rules of this...arrangement.’
‘So I did,’ Kate said sadly, rising to her feet, thankfully more steadily than she’d feared.
And also...relieved.
‘Of course, I won’t take anything that came with this deal,’ she said, tilting her chin. When he brusquely told her not to be ridiculous, and to expect him to pay her exactly what he’d promised whether or not the contract had been fulfilled, she replied as hard as glass, ‘I won’t be accepting a penny from you. If you make the mistake of sending money to me, expect it to be returned to you immediately.’
She walked towards the door and paused, then she glanced over her shoulder at the drop-dead gorgeous guy who hadn’t budged from where he had fled on the opposite side of the sitting room. ‘It’s been fun. I’ll pack as soon as I head up, and perhaps you could get your driver to return me to Milan. I’ll be gone by the time you get there. And say goodbye to Angelina. She’s very precious and, just for the record, you’d be a complete idiot to ever think about sending her to boarding school.’
Final piece said, she let herself out, and within forty-five minutes she was on her way to pick up the pieces of a life she’d spent the past two years building.
She left a pool of cold behind her.
Dante hadn’t budged as she’d shut the door behind her. He’d remained as still as a marble statue, his body wired and rigid, knowing that she was upstairs getting ready to go.
And of course there was no option! On cue, he had called his driver and ensured that his car would be ready and waiting to return her to Milan.
She was right—she would be gone by the time he got back there. Indeed, he knew that he could stay on for longer in Venice with his uncle, giving her ample time to clear off before he returned.
Love? No. Hadn’t he made it perfectly clear that that wasn’t on his agenda? Hadn’t he told her more than once that theirs was a working relationship and nothing more, even if sex had been introduced into the equation, an addition that neither could have foreseen when their plans had been made?
He wanted his life run on clear-cut lines. His marriage had been a failure and had shown him the nature of his limitations which, deep down, he had already known. Emotions and the messiness that accompanied them were not for him.
Hadn’t he told her that, more than once?
If she had chosen not to listen, then so be it, but now that the pact between them had been broken, and an impossible gauntlet thrown down, he had no choice but to let her go. Disentangling the whole business would be annoying and inconvenient but not beyond the wit of man.
Angelina would be bitterly disappointed, but she would recover, because children did that—they recovered.
All those thoughts raced through Dante’s head as he eventually got moving and sat on one of the chairs, nursing a glass of whisky and scowling at a turn of events he hadn’t anticipated.
Was this his fault? Had he led her on? Taken his eye off the ball and given her hope for something more where there was none?
He’d said all the right things...
But had hedoneall the right things?
He stared down into the amber liquid, swirling it in his glass, trying to think, but it was suddenly like wading through treacle.
His thoughts wanted to go somewhere but he could no longer direct them, and they drifted in his head, disconnected and just out of reach of interpretation.
Time would sort this edginess out, he decided. And he would send the money to her. What she chose to do with it would be up to her but, having met her parents and bonded with them, it was the very least he could do.
It was several hours later before he fell asleep, half a bottle of whisky to the good.
