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She shook her head at the beauty of the sight before her. Water spreading out like a spool of molten silver, reflecting the blue of the cloudless sky and the stunning emerald greens of the trees bordering the banks of the lake.
Her fingers rubbed against each other, soothing the nipping bite of the cold against her skin, brushing gently the band of silver, diamond and jet that she had worn now for almost a month. Nothing had been as she’d imagined. Nothing she’d expected or dreamed of that moment he had slipped the ring over her finger had come to pass.
After their wedding ceremony, David and Malcolm and whisked them away to one of
Bern’s most renowned restaurants for an exquisite wedding breakfast, nothing of which she remembered tasting. If the jovial couple had noticed anything peculiar in the silence between the newly minted husband and wife, neither acknowledged it. Their happy, gentle, mocking banter had washed over her before the limousine had arrived to take her and Matthieu to his home, here on the edge of Lake Lucerne.
She remembered sitting beside Matthieu in the dark cocoon of the luxurious interior of the sleek machine that ferried them towards their wedding night, tension palpable and thrumming from where he held himself almost impossibly still and she practically vibrated with it. In clipped words he had told her about his home, the team of staff employed to service, clean and cook for them, the extensive gym and leisure equipment, including an infinity pool that overlooked Switzerland’s famous lake. The walks that had been cleared throughout the estate, the woodlands and down to the shorefront.
‘Anything is yours,’ he’d said.
Apart from you, she’d noted silently.
As the limousine had eaten up the miles of smooth tarmac, winding closer and closer towards their destination, she had wondered why on earth he was talking. Reams of descriptions about the house, the architect, the way life would be, and all she could think was, Yes, but what about now? What about tonight? Because in truth she had been almost overcome by a maddening sense of him. Everything about the previous weeks had been about practicalities, packing up her home and life, getting to the register office, the exchanging of rings and signing of marriage certificates... But the moment it had happened, the moment that they had been declared husband and wife—she blushed now at the memory of it—all she had thought of was spending the night with her husband.
She had wanted to share his bed, to feel even just for a little the same kind of ‘rightness’ she had experienced the night they had conceived their child. To feel the heady sense of desire, the way that their bodies had somehow communicated beyond words or civilities but more with raw, intense and all-consuming passion. An equal passion—the one thing that they had most definitely shared.
It hadn’t gone away, she’d marvelled as they’d drawn closer and closer to Matthieu’s estate. She had seen her husband in the sweep of the passing road lights, illuminating the darkness that surrounded their journey. The soft dark swirls of his beard doing little to gentle the stark outline of his jaw. The thick dark brows almost startling atop eyes of pure molten honey that gleamed almost with traces of emerald. The width and breadth of him made her feel deliciously small, delicate but also strong—strong in her desire for him, the need to make that physical contact, any kind of contact with the man she had just married.
And when they had finally drawn to a halt at the top of a sweeping driveway beyond a set of stunning iron electronically controlled gates, she had thought, This is it. She had turned to him, just in front of the large wooden door to a building she had been unable to take in because of the sheer magnificence of her husband, her hand poised to raise to his jaw, her palms itching to feel the heat of him, the soft whorl of his beard against her skin, just as he’d pushed open the door, explained where her room was and stalked off to his ‘office’.
He had left her standing in the foyer of an unknown home, alone, in her wedding dress, untouched and unwanted.
She had retreated to the room he had given some offhand directions to before the first tear had fallen. She had kicked off her shoes, before the second and third, she had collapsed onto the bed and pressed her face into the pillow before the sounds of her sobs could be heard. Because it was then that she’d realised what she had done. She had looked for love for her entire life and now she had consigned herself to a man who would never love her.
As she turned her back on the beautiful lake and made her way back to the estate, Maria realised she had neither of the futures she’d envisioned for herself just before the wedding. She was not his perfect wife, nor the discarded wife. Instead, he had put her in this strange kind of half-life, and she feared that it was slowly choking her.
* * *
No matter what he did, Matthieu couldn’t shake the stranglehold that had wrapped around his chest. Couldn’t escape the realisation, sheer and shocking, that he had done something very wrong. It had started that first night they had come here. Before that even, in the limousine bringing them home. Home. He’d not really ever thought of this place as a home before. It was his sanctuary, yes, the place he hid away from the outside world. But a home?
In the limousine, he’d felt it. The sensual undercurrent ebbing and flowing between them. As it had done that first night in Iondorra, her expressive features, her body, it had called to him. Teased and tempted him. The thick band of arousal fierce and shocking, as everything in him roared to reach out and take what he wanted, to take her.
But he had meant the promise he’d made to himself, to Maria silently, the day of their wedding. He meant to protect her. Which meant that he needed to ensure that they started their marriage as it would continue. He would give her her every material need or desire. But he could not give her himself. Because if he lifted the tight leash he had on his control, if he did what he so desperately wanted, to sink into her soft warm heat, to give into the exquisite pleasure that she brought him, he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back. And he couldn’t shake the thought that doing so would unleash the thoughts and memories he felt biting at the edges of his consciousness.
So he had held himself back from her that night and all the nights since. And if that meant he had to suffer this constant state of frustration, then so be it.
His legs pounded away on the treadmill of the sprawling gym housed on the floor beneath the living quarters and kitchen, and two floors beneath the bedrooms and infinity pool that stretched out towards the lake.
Sweat dripped down the sides of his head and he swiped at it with his arm. If he could exhaust himself, perhaps then he would find relief from this...thing. This feeling in him that felt like a ragged beast, tearing and snarling away in his chest.
Exercise had become something vital for him over the years. It had started with the rehabilitation after hours, days, weeks of surgeries in the years following the fire. He barely remembered those first few months. A pain so intense it had made him delirious with agony, which at times he’d actually been thankful for. Because it focused his mind on something other than the fact he had lost his entire family. Something other than the last look his father gave him, having hurled him from the living-room window before turning back for his mother.
His feet and legs compensated for the shiver that ran through his body, the heat and sweat turning icy cold beneath the memory of the screams from that night. Their screams, his screams, he couldn’t tell. But neither his mother, his father, nor his uncles and aunt had escaped the inferno that had consumed the old estate.
Faulty electrics, a real Christmas tree, and a two-hundred-year-old estate. That was what the insurance investigation had decreed. An accident. An accident that had robbed him of everything.
He increased the treadmill’s speed in an attempt to force his focus to shift back to nothing more than the movement of his feet and body. He never dwelled on thoughts of his family. He had become adept at avoiding them but as he picked up the pace, to run almost flat out, he couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps he was running from his past.
Because unaccountably since Maria had moved into his home, he’d felt it rising up around him. Memories of family meals, the echoes of childhood laughter at his parents’ gentle mocking, or the warm love they offered, they all hovered around Maria like a promise of what could be, but what he would not allow himself.
So Matthieu had begun to avoid her, plunging himself into work, into new acquisitions. He’d even left her here while he’d travelled to one of the mines in Russia, hoping that the distance between them would cause things to settle back into what his life had been like before. But the moment he’d returned, he’d seen signs of her throughout the estate. Books left on side tables, a throw on the sofa that hadn’t been there before. Having lived alone for more than ten years, he’d found it disconcerting. It had felt like an intrusion and, although he shouldn’t, he found himself begrudging her for it. For presenting reminders, evidence of what she had done without him.
And soon it wouldn’t just be evidence of his wife...it would be their child. Would he spend his future trying to avoid them both? No, he growled internally. Once again shocked by the possessiveness of his feelings towards his child.
A noise startled him and he nearly lost his footing. His hands flew to the bar in front of him to steady himself, as he mentally checked the ankle he’d nearly turned over, cursing loudly.
‘Sorry! I didn’t...’
