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CHAPTER SEVEN
‘OKAY, I’VE SLEPT on it.’
Seb blinked blurry eyes in the half-light of early morning. If it even was morning. It felt like the middle of the night.
‘What time is it?’ he asked, pushing himself up onto one elbow.
It must have been his imagination—or maybe he was still dreaming—but he could have sworn that Maria actually stared at his bare chest for a moment, when the sheets fell down. But seconds later she was focused on his face again, her arms folded across her pyjama top, a determined look on her face.
He knew that look. It was the one she’d worn when she’d left him.
He hated that look.
‘It’s morning,’ Maria said, unconvincingly.
Seb glanced at his phone on the bedside table. Five thirty-five. ‘Barely.’
‘Frankie will be up in less than an hour, and I wanted to talk to you first.’
Seb smiled at the mention of his son. They’d returned from their sleigh ride the afternoon before to find Frankie bouncing with excitement and desperate to tell them all about the fun he’d had with Aunt Noemi and Uncle Max. Max had looked exhausted and Noemi a little triumphant, but the important thing was the babysitting had been a success—even if the date hadn’t given him quite the victory he’d been looking for.
Frankie had fallen asleep at the dinner table, and Maria had never returned from putting him to bed. Alone, as she’d insisted.
Seb had hoped that meant she was ‘sleeping on it’—her decision about their future, that was.
And it seemed he’d been right.
Shuffling up to lean against the headboard, he patted the bed. ‘Sit down, at least, if we’re going to talk. You’re making my neck ache looking up at you.’
Maria looked conflicted, but eventually perched on the end of his bed. It wasn’t quite how he wanted her there, but if it meant they were making progress towards her staying, he’d take it.
‘So. You’ve slept on it. And?’ Seb tried to sound relaxed about the whole thing, when in reality his heart was thumping against his ribs. This could be it. His whole future, in one conversation.
‘You said yesterday that you were more comfortable with the requirements of business than the business of being a family, yes?’ Maria’s crisp delivery made him wonder if she’d been rehearsing these lines all night. Probably, knowing Maria. They may have had very different upbringings in lots of ways, but one thing they had in common was that both sets of parents had instilled in them a chronic fear of messing up.
He hadn’t thought about that when she’d left. How hard it must have been for her to go back to her parents and admit that she couldn’t make the marriage work. Whether it was fair or not, the Rossis would have seen that as a failure.
How unhappy must she have truly been to choose that over a life with him?
Maria was still staring at him. He quickly ran her last statement through his mind again. ‘Yes. I guess so. Sorry, I’m still half-asleep here.’
She bit her lip, and suddenly Seb lost all attention again, unable to focus on anything except her luscious mouth and how much he wanted to kiss it.
Until Maria said, ‘In which case, I think we should make a business plan for our marriage,’ and he came jolting back to the here and now.
‘What?’ Surely he hadn’t heard that right.
‘A business plan. For our marriage.’ She said it more slowly this time, as if that would make it a more sensible suggestion.
‘Like...with profit-and-loss statements? Or expected sales and markets?’ He spent his working days—which was basically all of them—staring at those. Now he had to spend his family time doing it as well?
‘With objectives and goals for the marriage. And commitments,’ Maria added.
‘I thought we made those when we took our wedding vows,’ Seb pointed out. He refrained from mentioning the part where she’d run away and broken them, which he figured was pretty good of him under the circumstances.
They’d already made a deal. Their whole marriage was a business arrangement. So why did they need a new one?
‘Well, clearly just promising to love, honour and cherish wasn’t enough,’ Maria snapped. ‘So this time how about we do it your way?’
‘My way? This is your idea—how is it my way?’
Except...hadn’t he realised just yesterday that he hadn’t chased his family goal the way his parents had? That he needed to focus on what mattered by keeping it front and centre, like he would any work goal?
‘Because you’re the one who—’ She broke off and took a deep breath, and Seb was almost certain she was counting to ten under her breath. Yeah, that wasn’t a great sign. ‘Look, Seb, I’m trying to find a way to make this work. It would help if you just went along with me, rather than arguing.’
‘It would help if I had coffee,’ Seb muttered, scrubbing a hand over his head. He had to try. If nothing else, between now and Christmas Day he had to try literally anything that might help him save his marriage.
Even this. ‘Okay. I’m listening. I’m open to ideas. Tell me how this would work.’
* * *
It had seemed so obvious when she’d come up with the idea. Seb knew business, so she’d turn their relationship into something he understood. And by setting the parameters herself, it gave her control over things, the better to protect her heart this time. It was perfect.
That was the problem with middle-of-the-night epiphanies—they always seemed like a good idea at the time.
But then you had to explain them to your half-asleep estranged husband at stupid o’clock in the morning, and the whole thing fell apart.
No. This was a good idea. More to the point, it was her only idea. If she wanted to either turn this marriage into something she could live with or be able to leave again knowing she’d given it her best, they had to follow the plan.
Once she’d explained it in terms that Seb was capable of understanding before coffee.
She contemplated actually going and fetching him coffee before she continued, but it had taken her half the night to get up the confidence to do this in the first place. She couldn’t stop now.
He’d just have to struggle through un-caffeinated.
‘When our fathers insisted we get
married, what was their reasoning?’ she said, hoping to get his mind on the same track hers was. Maybe everything only seemed obvious to her because she’d already been living with the basics since she’d first had the idea the previous afternoon. She had to take Seb through the same thought process she’d followed.
‘It was...well, I guess it was a business deal.’ He sounded slightly embarrassed about it, which was sweet. But it was the truth, and she’d never been under any illusions otherwise. How could she have been?
Her father had been very clear about his hopes for her future, ever since she’d become a teenager. She’d just never taken it seriously until it was too late.
When, at fourteen, she’d brought a boy home from school—not even a boyfriend, just a boy who had been a friend—he’d almost hit the roof. Her mother had calmed him down, though, and then, the next day, she’d been summoned to her father’s study.
‘You need to understand that you are not free to make any sort of...alliances, specifically of a romantic nature,’ he’d said. ‘We need more from you than just some boy you pick up from school.’
Slowly, it had dawned on her that, as a daughter, she was useless to him—or to his business. Except in one way. The right marriage. That was all her father was interested in for her—marrying her off to the highest bidder.
She’d railed against it, of course, had wanted to rebel, even—ineffectual as it might have been. Until the day her father had shown up at her university to take her away and dash all her dreams.
Except then he’d told her he needed her to marry Sebastian Cattaneo and, suddenly, against the odds, she’d started to hope again.
Now here she was, all these years later, still clinging to that hope.
Maria swallowed the memories, and tried to get her mind back on track. Their marriage, the business deal.
‘Your father’s business was failing, but he didn’t just want a buyout from Cattaneo Jewels. He wanted a merger,’ Seb went on.
