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‘I appreciate I was busy for the first two weeks, but a lot of that time was spent organising this.’
‘Really?’ She experienced a flicker of uncertainty.
‘Really. I needed to ensure a good team of staff were left at the resort so you and I could take this week off and get to know each other properly.’ Nico’s features had a seriousness to them that had been missing in recent days. ‘It seems to me that you are being unfair.’
‘How have you worked that out?’
‘You came to Butterfly Island with your mind made up. You promised to give me—us—another chance, but you didn’t mean it, did you?’
‘What’s the point?’ she said with a shrug, turning her focus back onto the open water. ‘You only want our marriage to continue for your own convenience and ego.’
‘My point exactly. You came here with preconceived ideas about what I want and what my motives are and have not given two thoughts to the fact I genuinely want our marriage to work. For both of us.’
His low yet gentle tones made her squirm inside, like a naughty schoolgirl caught stuffing crayons in her pockets.
‘How do you imagine that makes me feel?’ he continued. ‘Knowing you are only pretending? That in reality you are counting the days until you can be rid of me?’
This time she squirmed visibly. When he put it like that it did seem rather cold. She hadn’t meant it to be. It was self-preservation. Nothing else.
‘Give me this week, Rosa. Let us get to know each other properly—the way we should have done from the start.’
She wanted to. She didn’t know where it came from, but she felt her chest expand, as if it were full of fluttering butterflies trying desperately to break free.
She had got by perfectly well on her own. In all the years she had been with Stephen she had always felt detached from him and that was the way she liked it. With Nico she could feel her detachment slipping. And it terrified her.
‘But all this,’ she said, turning around and waving an arm towards the suite. ‘This doesn’t feel like the action of a man trying to get to know me better. This feels like the action of a man trying to get into my knickers.’
How could she trust that he wanted her knickers off? Her. Rosa. Not his wife. Not his asset. Her. A woman he desired.
‘Can it not be both?’ His green eyes held hers, burning her with their intensity. ‘I am not going to deny that I desire you. But I am prepared to wait until you are ready. You know you can trust me.’
‘We always said no sex,’ she said.
Cornered did not begin to describe how hemmed in she felt at that moment. She had trusted Nico enough to marry him, but that had not required any intimacy—nothing physical or emotional. Their marriage had given her the things she truly craved—stability and a feeling of belonging, of being a unit. Just sharing the same surname had been enough. At least it had been. For the first few months.
How could she trust that he wouldn’t reject her like everyone else she had loved in her life? She couldn’t. She didn’t know how.
‘That rule did neither of us any good, did it? The loneliness of an empty bed drove you into the arms of your ex. If our marriage is to continue, there is no doubt in my mind that sex needs to be a part of it. We need to have a proper marriage.’
* * *
Nico could see Rosa fighting a war with herself. Victory was within his grasp. He could smell it. He should have played to her sense of fairness from the start. After all, it was the thing he admired about her for above everything else.
That night in California, when the mad idea to marry had overtaken them and she had produced that piece of paper for them to write their contract, she could have made any number of demands on his fortune. But that was not Rosa’s style. The first thing she had written was that neither would have a claim on the other’s wealth. When he had queried this she had given that husky laugh and said, ‘I don’t want you thinking you can have a share of my flat. I earned it. You can keep all your billions. You earned them. I just want to keep my flat.’
She had been serious. For all the vodka they had consumed, he had known she was serious. Call him a fool—his lawyer, when they’d returned to England with the marriage certificate, certainly had—but he had trusted her.
Goddammit it, he had trusted her. Nico, the man who did not trust anyone, had trusted his wife. And she had slept with her ex.
The second point on the list had been no sex between them.
The third point had been to allow either of them to take lovers so long as they exercised discretion. He had never dreamed Rosa would be the one to take advantage of that point.
