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“You moved halfway around the world. You turned me into a stranger. This is your doing, Payton!”
She had to stay calm, had to keep control. “I’m trying to make amends—”
“How?” he interrupted fiercely. “By destroying my relationship with Marilena?”
“Nothing’s destroyed, Marco. Nothing’s changed. Don’t blow this out of proportion. It was just a kiss—”
“Just a kiss? How can you say that? I’m engaged. I’m about to marry Marilena in two months and you say, you have the gall to say, it’s just a kiss?”
He’d paled, blood draining, intensifying the hard slash of cheekbone and broad jaw.
“Maybe a kiss is nothing to you,” he continued bitterly, “but I am loyal. I am faithful. I do not do things like this. I do not make love to one woman when promised to another and yet twice now I’ve done the unthinkable and both times it was with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What is it about you, Payton?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either, but this…this—” He broke off, lips twisting, filled with loathing and self-disgust. “This is wrong. I am ashamed.”
He was. She didn’t doubt him, or his sincerity for a moment. “I’ll go to my room. I’ll give you some space.”
“That’s not what I asked you to do.” He was standing over her, shoulders dwarfing her. “I said get your suitcases and go.”
“Marco, please—”
“No! I am done talking. I am sick inside, I am sick that we are back to where we were three years ago. I don’t know what you do to me, I don’t understand the effect you have on me but this time I know exactly what to do. Get rid of you.” Tiny beads of sweat formed on his brow. Tendons popped on his neck. “Fast.”
They were standing so close she could feel his warmth, feel rather than see the rise and fall of his chest. He was insisting she, demanding she leave, but she could not.
She would not.
Yet.
He cursed beneath his breath. “If you will not leave, than I shall.” He stepped around her as if she were foul. Tainted. “Marilena and I will stay at my country house at the lake until you’re gone.”
Payton struggled to find her voice as he reached the tall, painted salon doors with the whirl of pale turquoise against faded gold.
Stop him. Stop him. You can’t let him leave. “You don’t have to go.”
He stopped, his wide back filling the doorway, but he didn’t turn around nor glance behind.
She drew a shaky breath. “I will go. I’ll pack my things immediately.” She forced herself to speak, to keep the words coming even though she felt horribly disorganized, her emotions colliding with her reason. “But I shall not be taking the girls back with me.”
Ah. She had his attention now. He hadn’t turned around, but his head lowered and she caught sight of his profile.
“What nonsense is this?” His low voice throbbed with fury.
“It’s not nonsense. It’s true. I can’t take them home. I won’t have them watch me go through chemo.”
He said nothing. He hadn’t moved. She pushed herself on. “I know what the treatment looks like, Marco. I know how it ravages the body. I don’t want the girls exposed to that.”
He stood frozen in place. “Chemo?”
His voice came out rough. Payton touched her tongue to her upper lip and took a deep breath. Damn but this was hard. One minute she was kissing, feeling, wanting and the next she was an ice maiden again, frozen on the inside.
“I…” She looked up at him, wondered how she’d get the words out. She hadn’t spoken them aloud yet. Hadn’t told anyone. “I have cancer.”
He turned toward her. She didn’t just say what he thought she said, did she?
He did a slow double-take as he faced her and yet Payton didn’t look hysterical. She looked calm. Astonishingly calm. She couldn’t have said what he thought she’d said. It was crazy, but for a split-second he actually thought she’d said she had cancer.
“Mommy!” The cry sounded outside the study, at the top of the stairs.
Payton quickly opened the door and headed for the stairs.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” Gia was standing on the stairs in her nightgown. “I have to go bad but I’m scared.”
It took Payton awhile to get Gia settled back into bed and by the time she’d closed the door to the girls’ bedroom, Marco was no longer in his study.
She found him outside, leaning against a column in the courtyard. He didn’t turn around but he must have heard her. “This is true?” he asked, staring up at the sky.
“Yes.”
“You’ve gone for a second opinion?”
“Yes. I’m waiting on the results, but the first diagnosis came from the specialist who treated my mother.” She stepped past him to stand in the middle of the courtyard in a small pool of moonlight. “I’m lucky they picked it up when they did. The earlier it’s detected the better my chances.”
“You haven’t told the girls.”
“No.” Payton felt a welling of fear. “I love them, Marco. They’re everything to me.”
His expression didn’t change. “So you did have an ulterior motive in coming to see me. It’s not just that the girls are older and easier to travel with. And it’s not about the girls missing me. It’s about you.”
She didn’t say anything and he swore softly, bitterly and shook his head.
“Maledizione,” he cursed beneath his breath. “I should have known better. You’d never come to me on your own. You only came because you were desperate.”
CHAPTER SIX
PAYTON swallowed the hurt protest. He was right. She wouldn’t have come to see him if she weren’t desperate.
Her mother’s death had left her without options. With her gone, she had no other living family member left, no one who could help her with the children while she underwent treatment.
So she came here, back to Marco’s home and in a painful, bittersweet paradox—it was exactly the right thing to do. Fate and circumstance forced her to do what her pride wouldn’t allow her. Fate and circumstance required humility and she had no other choice but to throw herself at Marco’s feet.
Beg for help, if not mercy.
“You smile,” he said tersely.
“A little.” A headache was forming and she pulled the elastic from her hair, letting the long curls fall loose. “But only because you’re right. You know how I hate to be wrong, especially if it means you’re right.”
His hard chiseled face gave away nothing. “Pride.”
“Pride’s always been a problem for me. Maybe growing up poor caused that. Maybe it’s because everyone knew my dad had left my mom—” She broke off, swallowed the sour taste in her mouth.
She was in kindergarten when her fath
er finally left for good. Her parents had been fighting for months and the fighting escalated until everything seemed to be flying in perpetual motion across the living room—books, purses, shoes, car keys, telephones. Then one day the shouting stopped. Nothing was thrown anymore. No one ever slammed a door again. Dad had gone. And everyone knew.
Absolutely everyone.
Payton slowly sank down on a garden seat. “Everyone knew you married me because I’d gotten pregnant.” She consciously forced herself to relax, to take a deep breath. Inhale, exhale, inhale—nothing bad was going to happen. “I hated it. I hated that people—” she felt his gaze and she looked up at him “—pitied you.”
“Pitied me?”
She nodded, her neck stiff, her body sore. She felt as if she’d been through the spin cycle on a washing machine. “You were Marco d’Angelo. You could have married anyone, and you’d intended to marry a princess. Instead you got stuck with me.”
“So you went home.”
She felt her cheeks burn. “Home to hide.”
Marco looked at her for a long moment before moving away, walking to the far end of the courtyard toward the house. “Pride,” he repeated slowly, softly, as if experimenting with the word. His scrutiny was hard. There was nothing gentle in his expression.
“If there’s any irony,” she said to fill the strained silence. “It’s that I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve no pride left. Nothing holding me back anymore. I am desperate. I need you. I need your help.”
He stared at her but didn’t speak. Yet he didn’t need words to communicate. She felt his anger, and his frustration. It was happening all over again. They were back to the awful sense of being trapped…cornered. It was what forced them to marry in the first place and now they were confronted by a reality bigger than either of them once again.
“Please, Marco, please help me make this transition work for them,” she continued softly, urgently, her hands knotted as if in prayer. “Help me feel like I’ve done something right in my life.”
“Of course you’ve done something right in life,” he answered sharply, unable to bear all the words, so much sound, when he felt so utterly confused by it all.
