Page 158

He swiped to read the message, and then felt his stomach fall to his toes as the kettle boiled and clicked off. Still all Christos could do was stare at the damning words on the screen.

This changed everything.

Chapter Nineteen

Rose stretched languorously, enjoying the ache of muscles she hadn’t used before, and certainly not the way she’d used them last night. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and the surface of the lagoon was touched with gold, a few boats bobbing in the water. The whole world felt like that—touched by beauty, by magic, and made new.

Last night had changed everything. It had cemented in Rose a certainty of who she was and what she was doing, that marrying Christos was both right and good…and would be the best thing that had ever happened to her. In an instant, all her doubts had been blown away, like dandelion clocks in a summer breeze.

She heard the door creak open, and she sat up in bed, still naked, and amazingly, not embarrassed by it. Christos stood in the doorway, wearing a dressing gown and holding a cup of coffee. Rose beamed at him, unable to keep a blush from sweeping over her body as she remembered what they’d done to each other last night, only to realize belatedly that Christos wasn’t even looking at her.

“Decaf,” he told her with a smile that seemed strange somehow, like no more than a stretching of his lips. Silently he crossed the room to hand it to her.

“Thanks.” Rose cradled the cup between her hands as she glanced uneasily at her soon-to-be husband. She’d thought she must be imagining that strange sense of strain, maybe just a morning-after awkwardness that would disappear in the bright light of day, but as the seconds stretched on, Christos still seemed tense, his gaze hooded, his jaw tight. And, she noticed, he still wasn’t looking at her.

Something definitely felt wrong.

“Is everything all right?” she asked quietly. She wanted to be past the wondering, the awful uncertainty, but when Christos simply nodded, the movement decidedly terse, she knew no matter what had happened between them last night, she still wasn’t brave enough to ask anything more.

It was dispiriting how quickly her sunny confidence had completely evaporated, she reflected as she took a sip of coffee, her stomach churning. Now she only felt uneasy…and afraid.

“I’m just going to catch up on work,” Christos murmured, and left the room without waiting for her reply.

Rose leaned her head back against the pillow, trying not to feel hurt by his seeming rejection. Trying not to overreact, either. So he was a little distracted. It didn’t have to mean anything. She couldn’t start a marriage, a life with him, wondering at every curt word or sudden silence. She had to be more secure than that, and yet right now, when just last night she had offered her most vulnerable, complete self to this man, and he seemed tense and uncommunicative afterward…well, it was hard not to wonder. Hard not to recall exactly how that kind of complete rejection felt.

It was why for all these years she’d kept herself from ever having to experience it again. For a second, she could perfectly recall the sight of her suitcase on the front step, her aunt’s stony face. “We’ve done our duty.” Even though she should have realized it far sooner, it had taken her aunt saying it out loud to make Rose realize that was all she’d ever been.

She didn’t want to be a duty to Christos. It was why she’d been so reluctant to marry him, and yet now that she had definitively decided she would, the doubts were hurtling in. Clearly they were for Christos, too, judging by his stony silence.

“Don’t be a drama queen,” Rose muttered as she put her coffee aside and scrambled out of bed. She was going to shower, dress, and calm the heck down. There was absolutely no point getting in a tizzy over a single semi-cross word.

By the time she’d showered and dressed, Rose was feeling calmer. She’d talked herself down from the ledge of terrified insecurity and decided she would find Christos, kiss him and tease him about being too serious. It would all be fine. Of course it would.

But when she headed out into the suite, she realized almost immediately that Christos was gone. She felt his absence like a palpable thing, a definitive loss. She peeked into his bedroom, a jolt of shock running through her when she realized not only was he absent, but so were his bags. He’d left.

Rose walked back out to the living room, telling herself not to panic. They were meant to stay in Venice till tomorrow, had a private box for the opera at one of the city’s grand palazzos tonight, but maybe there had been a work emergency. Maybe Esmerelda knew what was going on, or maybe he’d left her a message.

She scrabbled for her phone, her heart lurching when she saw the missed call and voicemail message. But it wasn’t from Christos. It was from Manhattan Cryobank. With a sense of dread swirling in her stomach and rising up inside her like a mist, Rose swiped to listen to the message.

At first, the words didn’t compute. “Apology…error…vanishingly rare…so sorry…she could come into the office to discuss, of course, but she should be aware that she’d signed a waiver absolving Manhattan Cryobank of any responsibility in this kind of situation. Again, apologies…if she would like to call back, they could discuss the situation further…”

Rose had to listen it to twice before she finally understood what the disembodied voice on the other end of the line was telling her.

Luca Amanti was not her baby’s biological father.

* * *

For two hours, she didn’t move. She sat in a chair in the living room of the suite and simply stared into space. For a good part of that time, she couldn’t even think, at least not beyond the seemingly incontrovertible fact that she was not giving birth to the Amanti heir. In fact, she didn’t know whose baby she was having, which seemed awful and absurd in equal measure.

Then thoughts, realizations, cold and hard, started slamming into her consciousness. If she wasn’t giving birth to the Amanti heir, then she had absolutely no connection to any of the Amantis, or the life she’d been building here. More importantly, Christos Amanti had no reason, no reason at all, to marry her. In fact, if some other nameless, hapless woman was now having his brother’s baby, he had every reason to go chase her down. Which rendered her not only unnecessary, but seriously inconvenient.

She’d been in this situation before. Not quite in the same way, and certainly not as badly, because already Rose knew this was painfully, infinitely worse than when she’d been kicked out of her aunt and uncle’s house. Once again she was going to be told she wasn’t needed or wanted. Instead of her suitcase on the front step, Christos had taken his, no doubt leaving her to find her own way—where? Back to New York? Did this not even warrant a conversation?

Because, she realized, he must have known she’d had a message from the sperm bank. He most likely would have had one too, thanks to his earlier influence. So here they were, both reeling from this devastating knowledge, and he hadn’t even bothered to talk to her about it.

It did not, Rose acknowledged heavily, bode well.

She closed her eyes, wanting to block it all out, a tidal wave of grief coming to crash over her.