Page 42 of Public Wife, Private Mistress

She reached for her wine. 'We should have known that could never last.'

Dark eyes connected with hers. 'Why couldn't it last?'

'Because it wasn't real. When we first met we didn't share anything except our bodies.' Her cheeks heated slightly at the memory. 'We spent our entire time in bed.'

'Not always in bed, cara mia’ he teased softly, his eyes sweeping her flushed cheeks with visible amuse­ment. 'Sometimes it was the floor. Sometimes the sofa. Sometimes the beach. Several times we—'

'All right, all right.' she interrupted him hastily, re­jecting the images he was conjuring in her mind. 'You know what I mean. At the beginning, our relationship was all about sex. We didn't spend time getting to know each other. When we went back to Rome, suddenly we reverted to who we really were. We were strangers, Rico. And we never got to know each other. You were always away.'

He frowned. 'I reduced my foreign travel drastically.

I slept in my own home more during our marriage than in the ten years before.'

'That's sex, Rico,' she said flatly. 'You always made it home for sex, but rarely for dinner and conversation. Do you realize that there were days when we didn't talk at all?'

He inhaled sharply. 'I was working long days—I had a business to run.'

'Did you?' She toyed with her wine. 'Or were you afraid of intimacy?'

There was a long pulsing silence. 'We were intimate.'

'Sex again,' she muttered, taking a gulp of wine to give her courage. 'You never shared anything with me except your body and your bank account.'

'I gave you everything.'

'You gave me gifts. Money again. With you, every­thing comes down to money.'

'If it does then it's because I've seen what a lack of money can do to a family.' His voice was suddenly harsh and she looked at him. slightly startled by his tone.

'Money isn't everything, Rico.'

'Try telling that to a woman who has just lost her husband and her only means of feeding her two chil­dren,' he said hoarsely. 'Try telling that to a family on the brink of starvation, about to lose the roof from over their heads.'

It was so unlike Rico to be so verbally expressive that for a moment she fell silent, shocked by his sudden uncharacteristic display of passion.

Instinctively she knew he had to be talking about his mother. She was almost afraid to speak in case he backed off, retreated emotionally as he had always done in the past whenever she'd tried to tackle the subject of his childhood and his father's death. 'You sup­ported her.'

He shot her an impatient look. 'I was fifteen. Not exactly in a position to provide the level of support she needed.' He reached for his wine and drank deeply be­fore replacing the glass on the table. 'This is not some­thing I talk about and after tonight I do not want the subject brought up again, but before you dismiss the importance of money so easily you should know some­thing of what it is like to be without it.'

He looked cold, distant, and she sat totally still, afraid to speak in case she said the wrong thing.

'Every day my mother went without food so that I could eat but my sister was barely weeks old and be­cause my mother wasn't eating herself she couldn't feed the baby. Her milk dried up.' He rubbed long, strong fingers over the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes briefly as if the image he conjured was almost too ugly to confront. 'Every night my sister cried because she was so hungry and every night my mother cried along with her. I started refusing the food on my plate so that my mother could eat it with a clear conscience.'

Sta

sia swallowed. 'Rico—-'

'Do you know?' His hand dropped to the table with a thump and his eyes were suddenly fierce. 'Do you know what it's like to be hungry? I mean really, really hungry?'

She shook her head, unable to answer, and he gave a humourless laugh.

'Well, I do, cara mia. And so does my mother.' He stared at the food on his plate, clearly remembering what it had been like to be denied even the most basic of human requirements. 'And in the end it was hunger that drove my desire to succeed.'

His expression was so bleak that she wanted to reach out and touch him, offer comfort in some way, but she sensed instinctively that to offer sympathy at this point would be an insult to his Sicilian pride.

'I went to my neighbour, Gio's father.' His tone was flat. 'I asked him for work. Any work. I just needed enough money to feed the family. He hardly had enough for his own family but he gave me what he could and in return I worked for him, although there was little enough to do. But he understood what it means to be Sicilian and to be a man of honour. He knew that I needed to do something for the money. And he knew that one day I would repay him.'

Stasia swallowed down the lump in her throat. The image of Rico as a young boy, fiercely determined to provide for his mother and baby sister, choked her. 'And Gio is still with you.'

Source: www.allfreenovel.com