He took a step closer, his expression furious. “That is not the same thing, and you know it.”
She shook her head. “What do you want, Luca? A call? For me to have phoned you up and said I was filing the papers? Honestly, I’d have thought you’d be relieved.”
“Relieved?” he repeated, incredulous. In any other setting, anyone else might have sensed his tone as a warning, but Ally had never feared Luca.
“It’s just a practicality you don’t have to worry about. Your hands are full with the company, right?”
A muscle throbbed low in his jaw, and his eyes sparked with hers in a way that made her whole body feel both weak and strong at the same time.
“Have I ever given you the impression that I was too busy for you?”
She looked away, the question like a knife, digging deep into her side. Guilt washed over her for how she’d painted him, because his question was just. He had always carved out time for her. For them.
She blinked quickly. “It’s just a formality.”
“Not to me.”
She looked back at him, a question in her eyes, but what she saw on his face made her whole body go weak. The dark, ruthless possession was haunting and warming, all at once. “You are my wife,” he ground out. “I do not want this divorce.”
The earth seemed to tip beneath her. She reached out for something to steady her, glad when her fingertips connected with a chair. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t want this.”
Her throat had some kind of paralysis; she couldn’t swallow, couldn’t speak.
“You are my wife.”
She closed her eyes, agony pulling at her. “Not for much longer.”
His hands were on her then, curving around her arms, pulling her closer. “Is this really what you want?”
The question was so cruel. She shook her head, features pinched. “Don’t ask me that.”
“I want to know.”
“What I want is…impossible.”
“What is it?”
But she shook her head again. Why should she say what she wanted when he would never give it to her? So she turned it back on him, instead. “What doyouwant? Why are you here?”
“I want you to come home. You are my wife, and you belong in Italy, with me.”
CHAPTER 16
HIS WORDS RAN through her like tangled cord. She tried to untangle them, to make them make sense, but no matter what, she failed.
“You want me to come to Italy with you,” she said, finally, flattening her lips.
His eyes glittered like onyx. “You belong there, and you know it.”
She did know it. That was part of the heavy grief she carried. She’d come back to America, ostensibly to her ‘home’, and nothing had felt right. The light had landed differently, the people, the accents, the food. Everything had felt like an approximation of life; she had felt out of step.
But a place was just that—a place. She didn’t want to go to Italy because of its beauty and how right it had felt. She wanted to be wherever Luca was, but only if he loved her like she loved him.
She swallowed convulsively. “What are you offering? A new deal?”
“Is that what you want?”
