Page 21 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

“She’s with your mother,” Chisa whispered.

The floor went out from under the night.

“They’re watching television!” She was already talking, because she always talked when she was frightened. “There’s toast involved. I wasn’t supposed to be told about the toast, so if you could look surprised in the morning, that would probably—”

“Chisa.”

“—save her from—”

“Chisa.”

She stopped.

Marcello stood in the dark of his wife’s room and made himself count it out one more time.

The child was two floors down, asleep in his mother’s bed. There was nobody in this room but the two of them. There had not been nobody in a room with the two of them in eight years, four months and thirteen days.

He had counted. That was a thing he had never once admitted to himself until this moment.

Go, then. Say goodnight, go down to the study, drink something, let the sun come up.

“Go to bed, Marcello,” she whispered.

And it didn’t sound like go away.

He heard it. He heard exactly what it sounded like, then watched her hear it too, and something in his chest came loose from its moorings.

He shut the door.

He couldn’t cross the room. That was the thing nobody would ever believe of him, least of all her.

Marcello Bastianelli stood with his back against a door, hands flat on the wood behind him, breathing like a man who’d come up a hill at a run. Eight years of discipline was all that stood between this house and the thing he wanted, and the discipline was going.

“Say it,” he told her roughly.

“Say what?”

“Tell me to go.”

She could end it with three words. He had built the last eight years so she’d never have to say them—so a lawyer said them for her, so a clause on page four said them in language nobody had to hear out loud.

“I can’t,” his wife whispered.

Marcello crossed that room.

Afterwards he would not be able to say how he got there. He had her face in both hands, her mouth under his. She made a sound against him that went through him like a current through water, and eight years came off him in the dark like a coat.

She was shaking. He could feel it everywhere they touched, so he made himself slow down. Then slower still.

“Cara.” He had her against the pillows now. “Cara, look at me.”

“I can’t see you.” Her hands came up to find his face, exactly the way they had on a night with a storm at the window, ten years and one wrecked marriage ago. “You’re a blur. A very large, very expensive blur.”

He laughed, but it came out broken.

Then he took his time with her.

He had been a man of appetite all his life, but by then he understood that this was the only night of it he was ever going to be given. A man does not rush the only night he is ever going to be given.