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The sound of footsteps warned her that Dante was about to open the door, and when he did she saw a fleeting look of surprise on his face and—yes—annoyance, too. And something else—some dark emotion underpinning all that unwelcoming sternness. Suddenly she wondered what she was doing here—and whether she should chase after that cab and get back inside.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘Am I...’ she forced herself to say it ‘...disturbing you?’
He wanted to say yes, that she had been disturbing him from the first moment he’d met her, when she’d turned those
incredible amber eyes on him and he had been lost. But he was through with chasing after Justina and rainbows which didn’t exist.
Instead, he fixed her with a questioning look. ‘What do you want?’
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Can I come in?’
Wordlessly, he held open the door. She walked past him, and although he was close enough for her to reach out and touch, his body language was so forbidding that he might as well have been on a different planet.
‘I’m upstairs,’ he said.
For a moment she thought he meant that he was in bed, but as she followed him upstairs she realised it was one of those tall town houses where the sitting room was situated on the first floor.
The scene which greeted her was curiously cosy. A half-drunk glass of red wine stood next to an open newspaper and the sound of Puccini was filling the room. He had hung several huge oil-paintings on the walls and bought furniture so stylish that it must be Italian. It looked like home, she thought wistfully. The kind of home she’d always known he would be able to create.
She wanted to go and sink into that squashy-looking sofa and have Dante join her there, pour her some wine—but the dark expression on his face told her that wasn’t going to happen.
‘What are you doing here?’ he questioned.
She could have blurted out a hundred conventional responses to that bald query. She could have told him she wanted to check that Nico was okay. That she wanted to see his house and the way he lived. All of those things were true, but none of them was the real reason why she was here, and somehow she knew she had to find the courage to tell him what that was.
‘I’m here because I miss you.’
‘You mean you miss the sex,’ he said cruelly.
‘No. I miss you. You.’
‘I find that very difficult to believe.’
‘But it’s true! It’s true, Dante,’ she finished quietly.
‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘Flattering as it is that you should feel that way, I’m afraid that I can’t do the kind of relationship you want, Justina. I told you that. I’m not interested in being your “friend with benefits”. I asked you to marry me and you threw it back in my face.’
‘Because I was being naïve—I was wishing for the stars!’ she burst out. ‘You never told me that you loved me, and I thought that marriage without love wouldn’t stand a chance.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘But I’m prepared to concede that I was wrong. Because we’re doing this for Nico. I realise that. And if it boils down to marrying you or losing you then I’ll marry you tomorrow.’
There was a long pause while his eyes captured hers, as if they were searching for a fundamental truth, and suddenly he knew that there was no turning back. No playing safe or covering his back any more. If he wanted her—really wanted her—then he had to have the courage to tell her what he hadn’t dared admit until now. Not even to himself. That some things never changed and the most important things never should.
‘Not just for Nico,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought it was, but it’s not. My lawyer told me that marriage was the only thing to guarantee my role in his life. But when I stopped to think about it afterwards, I knew there was no way that I would tie my destiny to a woman if I didn’t love her. No way I could tolerate a whole lifetime with a woman I didn’t care about. I have only ever loved one woman, Justina—and that woman is you. I thought that love had died, but it hadn’t. It came springing back to life when you had my baby.’
She realised that the music had stopped and that her rapid breathing was the only sound she could hear. She stared at him, wanting desperately to believe him but still not quite daring to. ‘Then why...why didn’t you tell me that when you asked me to marry you?’
‘Would you have believed me?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Didn’t you believe we’d spoken of love so often in the past that we had devalued the words by our actions? I wanted the chance to show you that I loved you rather than tell you. But even that won’t work if you aren’t prepared to forgive me. And I’m not sure you can.’
She felt the ice-cold clench of fear as she heard an awful finality creep into his voice. ‘Please don’t say any more.’
‘I’m going to say it, because you need to hear it.’
‘Dante—’
‘I know your mother made bad choices. I know you grew up believing that men could never be relied on. And I know I made a mistake—a big mistake.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘But if you can’t learn to forgive—not just me, but your mother—then the rest of your life is going to be shadowed by the past. Can’t you see that? Can’t you just let it all go, Jus, and allow yourself to be free?’
And that was when the tears started. Tears she seemed to have been keeping at bay for most of her life. Tears she’d never been allowed to cry as a little girl in case Mummy’s boyfriends would think she was troublesome. She’d learnt early that she needed to be strong. To present a cool façade to the outside world and make like she didn’t care. She remembered that long night in a hotel suite when she’d been eight—the first time her mother hadn’t returned home. She’d lain trembling with terror in bed. And by the morning something had changed. She had survived—she could survive—and she could do it on her own. What other choice had there been but to take that forward into her adult life? To forge the independence which had been her one and only anchor and to cling to it?
