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‘Because my feelings don’t matter to you.”
‘This is not true.” He tightened his jaw like a man trying to hold in his temper.
‘lt is true. I want to be alone and you won’t let me. Wh-what d-do you c-call that?” She’d started crying harder again.
He jerked around and marched out of the bathroom through a door she now saw was hanging in a broken door-frame. So that was how he’d gotten in. Brute force. At least he had left. She could wallow in her pain in peace now.
It was too much of an effort to get up and go into the bedroom so she sat on the toilet seat and let the tears fall.
That was how he found her when he returned a few minutes later. He swept her into his arms and carried her through to the bedroom. He laid her on the bed as if she were some kind of fragile porcelain doll. Then he tucked the covers around her but he made no move to join her.
And that was what she wanted. It was.
She needed to be away from him to think.
He sat beside her and she shied away from him. She couldn’t help it, but he scowled.
‘I won’t hurt you, damn it.”
‘you already have.” She said it in such a defeated tone, she shocked herself.
His complexion went from olive darkness to paste white in a breath. ‘lt was not my intention.”
‘That doesn’t make it better.” She wasn’t even sure if she was talking about now or a year ago, but it didn’t really matter. The pain was now. The grief was now.
She went to turn away from him but he lifted her into a sitting position and pressed a wine glass to her Iips .
She refused to drink. ‘What is it?”
‘Just wine. You need something to settle you.”
‘Alcohol is bad for the baby.”
‘your tears and upset are worse for the baby than a few sips of wine.”
She knew he was right and guilt assailed her.
Her self-indulgence could very well
be putting their baby at risk. She sipped the wine and reined in her emotions.
She’d stopped crying. Salvatore had handed her a tissue to mop up and now they b0th sat in silence. Her under the covers him on top, the distance between them as good as a mile.
‘I want to sleep alone.”
He nodded. ‘lf that is your wish.” And he left.
And she wondered if it really had been. Her emotions were careening all over the place and she hated this seesaw they seemed to be on.
She turned on her side away from the mental image of Salvatore sitting beside her on the bed and tried to sleep. In sleep, the pain would go away.
Salvatore went downstairs to the library. He pulled out a bottle of aged Scotch from the cabinet below one of the mahogany bookcases and poured himself a glass. He sipped but tasted nothing. He wanted more than anything to go back up to that bedroom and convince Elisa that she was wrong about his feelings for her wrong about his motives.
He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He’d left in the first place because she looked so fragile, so ready to go over the edge of her emotional control once again. Like Elisa he had now accepted she was pregnant even without the confirmation of a test. He could not force a confrontation that would put the baby at risk. Not again. He would not allow his stupidity to end in the death of his child again.
He slumped into the armchair closest to where Elisa had set up her temporary office feeling as if the very heart had been ripped from his chest.
The pain he had known upon discovering Sofia’s betrayal was like a pinprick compared to the slashing knife wound to his soul inflicted by Elisa’s rejection.
