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As if on cue, she nestled closer to me.
‘This party’s rather dull, isn’t it? How about we go upstairs?’
She gave me a knowingly seductive look that normally would have had me smiling just as knowingly back, but for some reason it made my stomach clench and my body recoil. I didn’t want this woman. I wanted another one—with topaz eyes and a ridiculous red dress.
‘Matteo...?’
On any other evening I would have taken up this woman’s offer—and gladly. I’d arranged my marriage to satisfy my grandfather’s vindictive demand and also to grant me the minimum of inconvenience—and for the last three years I had been inconvenienced very little indeed. Yet now I thought of the paltry pleasures available to me and realised how little they appealed.
It was a strange thought, but I realised it was not a new one. Those pleasures had been palling for some time, and it had simply taken one shocking encounter with my wayward wife to make me realise it.
‘I’m busy tonight,’ I told the woman—Veronique, I’d remembered—and watched, unmoved, as her mouth dropped open in surprise and then her eyes narrowed.
‘It’s not that frumpy tramp, is it?’ she asked.
A sudden red-hot rage blazed through me. ‘You will not talk about her like that,’ I snapped.
Veronique’s expression managed to turn both smug and desolate. ‘It is her, then?’
I turned away without replying. Yes, it was her—frustratingly so—but I was not about to explain anything to the woman I’d just dismissed and forgotten. I strode through the ballroom, intent on assuaging this sudden, unsettling restlessness that surged through me.
I had any number of ways to do so, I told myself as
I surveyed the ballroom, with its bevy of beautiful women, nearly any of whom would be happy to accompany me just about anywhere. A few caught my eye and smiled hopefully, but I looked away from them all, uninterested.
And that was the heart of the problem, I realised. I was restless in a way I hadn’t been before, and the pleasures that I had always enjoyed now seemed pointless and empty. It was as if I’d plumbed my soul and found unexpected depths. I wanted more than a one-night stand or a meaningless affair—more than yet another round of parties and social occasions to fill my evenings.
This had been building for a while, but now the ache was impossible to ignore. I was thirty-six years old and I felt jaded by life’s pleasures, too weary to want them any longer. But did I really want a wife? A real one?
‘You’re looking rather lonely, Matteo.’
I turned to see Lara, a woman I knew only as an acquaintance, sidling up to me. I smiled thinly at her and she cocked her head.
‘Perhaps you want company?’
She was beautiful, with long, tumbling black hair and vivid blue eyes, her mouth pursed in a provocative pout, her generous figure encased in ice-blue silk. An international lawyer, I remembered, based in London.
Already I could imagine how the evening would unfold—a bit of flirting, a few nuanced innuendoes, the building of expectation and then upstairs to bed. It had been a pleasurable dance for so long, but now it just felt like so many tired steps.
She’d leave sometime in the night—or I would; I never slept a whole night with a woman. Perhaps we’d see each other again...perhaps not. Rinse and repeat. And yet right now it felt like the last thing I wanted. It felt like a burden rather than a pleasure, and one I had absolutely no interest in.
Did this happen to everyone at one time or another? Or had Daisy done something to me with her fiery determination, her sudden hurt—and that kiss?
Oh, that kiss.
‘Matteo?’ Lara’s speculative gaze rested on my face, uncertain and a bit impatient.
Even as I contemplated taking her up on her offer, if only just to banish this strange new sickness that seemed to have taken me over, I shook my head. ‘I have work to do,’ I said, and turned on my heel.
I strode out of the ballroom, uncaring of the whispers that followed in my wake. No doubt most people had seen Daisy confront me a short while ago, and now they saw me leaving in a hurry. The rumours would spark and fly—something I had always been keen to avoid—but now...
Now I really didn’t care.
I headed to the hotel bar and ordered a whisky, neat, throwing it back with grim intention. I was on the brink of making a big decision and I needed to be sure. Did I want Daisy that much? Was I willing to bind her to me for ever? And what about the needed heir? A child? Was I ready to take on that responsibility?
Briefly I pictured myself locked away, being told I was worthless, tormented simply because of my parentage. Anger still burned at the rank injustice and cruelty of it—the injustice and cruelty I’d been subjected to again and again, not just by my grandfather but by his savage minion, Eleni.
My lips twisted at the name.
