Stepping inside, she took a deep breath and cast her stare around, momentarily struck by the jumble of late-blooming flowers and cascades of foliage running wild. The sweetness she breathed in was soothing enough for her to take more deep breaths as she gazed at what had once been a hidden paradise filled with stone arches, water fountains and snaking pathways.
All that was left were the ruins. Nature had taken control of the man-made order and given beautiful chaos, like something from a fairy tale.
A short walk inside, she found a stone bench. After wiping it with her cardigan’s sleeve, she sat down and closed her eyes.
Maybe it was better to be here amongst the ruins of a fallen paradise than in the chapel. It felt more fitting. She understood nature better than she did the teachings of the church. She’d tried very hard to bring nature into her flat, and she suddenly remembered Domenico presenting her with a box of the cherry tomatoes she’d grown after he’d gone to collect her clothes.
He couldn’t have known the care and attention she’d given the little seedlings she’d germinated to turn into healthy, productive plants. He could have ignored them. Instead, he’d taken the time to pick them for her, and because she’d been too ill to eat them, he’d had his chef preserve them for when she was better.
His face swam before her.
Tears fell down her face.
What a fool she’d been to let him get so close when she knew he still had the power to hurt her, and what a bigger fool to have believed she had the power to control her reactions to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered tearfully to her baby, rubbing her belly. ‘I did try. I think your daddy did too, but…’
She couldn’t bring herself to tell her baby that its daddy didn’t want to love its mummy.
And that was the worst of it. That she’d finally felt his love. He’d felt her love too, and rejected her for it…
A stray thought suddenly made her blink and straighten, but by the time she’d brushed away the tears with her grubby fingers, it had vanished.
But her heart was pounding, her pulse racing.
What had she been thinking before the stray thought had come into her head? About Domenico rejecting her love, that was it, and the stray thought leapt back at her.
With hot blood zooming between her ears, Marnie thought harder than she’d ever done before, trying to remember every word he’d said and every expression in his eyes before the tears had fallen too hard for her to see them.
He’d offered her custody of their baby. That’s what the stray thought had been. The man who wouldn’t entertain the thought of being a part-time father had put their child’s entire future in her hands, and he’dmeantit.
He’d meant it because he loved her.
The very act of letting her go—and letting their baby go—was an act of love. The greatest act of love he could have given her.
She looked again at the beautiful chaos surrounding her and stumbled to her feet.
Wasn’t this what their baby represented? Domenico had tried to impose man-made order on their marriage, but it had needed the beautiful chaos of emotions—real emotions—to create their baby. That bitter fury that had driven them both the night they’d conceived their childhadcome from emotion. It had come from the desperate unhappiness they’d both been feeling at the loss of the other.
She hurried to the door, a smile breaking out over her face.
He did love her. He did! And he wasn’t the one hiding from it, not this time. This time it was all Marnie, frightened, lonely Marnie, because over the last few months she’d fallen in love with him for real, not as a fantasy figure in a fairy tale but as a flesh and blood man, and all she knew of real love was rejection. When he’d said he was giving her freedom, she’d heard that he didn’t want her anymore, because that’s what she’d expected to hear, because that’s what she knew. Rejection.
Domenico hadn’t been rejecting her love; he’d been showing her his.
Helovedher!
Almost fizzing with revelation, she put her hand on the doorknob and twisted it…only for it to come off in her hand.
Where the hell was she?
Domenico and his staff had searched every inch of the villa and its grounds. They’d checked the security cameras that covered the whole perimeter of his estate. Nothing. It was like Marnie had vanished into thin air.
She’d been gone for six hours, and the only thing he knew for certain was that she hadn’t left the estate.
So where the hell was she?
Smacking his palm to his forehead, he commanded himself to think. She had to be somewhere. People didn’t just vanish. People like Marnie especially didn’t just vanish. Not his calm, thoughtful wife.
