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person couldn’t watch her mother choose time after time to believe her cheating husband’s lies rather than face the truth and not be affected in some way. Had she been so determined not to allow herself to become a victim whom people pitied that she had made a terrible mistake? For as long as she could remember she’d despised her mother for believing the lies her father told. Am I so damned sure, she asked herself, that I won’t do exactly what Mum did?
She couldn’t let herself find out.
Not that the question was anything but academic now; she had made her decision and there was no going back even if she had wanted to.
‘Sometimes, Erin,’ she heard him say as she passed a not quite steady hand across her eyes, ‘an innocent kiss is just that, innocent. Your reaction was totally irrational; you must realise that.’
Erin shook her head in stubborn rejection. ‘I don’t consider it irrational to expect fidelity.’
‘Fou were the woman I married.’ The woman who is carrying my child. He dragged his eyes upwards from her stillflat stomach where they kept drifting.
His original intention had been to confront Erin immediately. His plan had been simple: reveal the phone, play back the message and watch her face when she realised that he knew her secret.
Now he found himself wondering how long she would be prepared to prolong this lie of omission. How long she would be able to look him in the eye and conceal the truth.
‘You were the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with …’
The throaty catch in his deep voice brought Erin’s downcast eyes sweeping upwards. It wasn’t the molten anger she encountered as their eyes connected that drew the involuntary gasp of shock from her throat, but the unexpected glitter of pain and loss she saw in the smoky, expressive depths of his thickly lashed eyes.
‘That,’ he added, bracing one hand against the back of a leather armchair, ‘should have been enough for you.’
A full thirty seconds’ nerve-shredding silence elapsed before Erin could drag her eyes from his mesmeric dark gaze. ‘You mean I should take whatever crumbs you throw in my direction and not ask too many awkward questions.’
‘I mean that my word should have been enough for you.’
‘I should have been enough for you,’ she countered, dismayed because his simple statement increased her growing sense of irrational guilt.
But was it irrational? What if it was merited? A chill swept over her at the unbidden thought and without wanting to she remembered how none of the many who had witnessed the embrace on the night of the ball had looked at her with anything that approached discomfort when Francesco had ruefully disentangled himself from the tipsy blonde.
I’m not the one who had cause to feel guilty, she reminded herself deliberately. The image of the curvaceous blonde plastered all over him brought the taste of bile to Erin’s mouth.
They had been married almost a month and had still been enjoying their extended honeymoon. The charity ball in Venice, a glittering society affair, had been the first—and as it turned out the last—public event they had attended together.
It was his intention, Francesco had explained, to use the occasion to show off his beautiful new wife to the world.
It had clearly not occurred to him that the idea of being paraded in public scared her stiff.
When he had commented with some concern on her quietness the day leading up to the ball, Erin had finally confessed that she was nervous.
‘What if I let you down by using the wrong fork or saying the wrong thing? What if your friends don’t like me?’
Francesco seemed astonished by her anxieties, but she had already worked out that concern for what people thought of him did not register with the man she had married.
He laughed at her fears. ‘Of course they’ll like you. Just be yourself.’
‘I will,’ she promised, wishing that herself was more interesting.
So dressed in unaccustomed designer finery, her confidence buoyed by the sensual glow in Francesco’s eyes as she had paraded before him in the slim black silk sheath dress that swished deliciously against her bare legs as she moved, Erin walked in beside her handsome husband. Her head held high, her stomach tied in nervous knots.
The scene inside the spectacular room took her breath away. She was dazzled as much by the people as the chandeliers glittering overhead.
The first people Francesco introduced her to were a colleague of his, and his wife.
The sophisticated-looking brunette was so charming to her that Erin actually began to relax and think that this might not be so bad after all. This made her even less prepared for the sudden change in the older woman’s manner when the men briefly excused themselves to speak to a mutual acquaintance.
Her charming smile stayed fixed, but there was a hostility in the other woman’s eyes that bordered on malice as she looked Erin up and down in a way that brought Erin’s insecurities rushing back.
‘Married? Well, you’ve succeeded where many before you have failed, so I suppose there must be something more to you than meets the eye. I can’t say I envy you … Francesco is the sort of man who makes a perfect lover, and I’m not the only woman in the room tonight who is in a position to vouch for that. But as a husband?’ She arched an artfully shaped brow. ‘He would, I think, be difficult to manage.’
