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“What do you need?” He murmured, the words wrapping around her.
“I need you to understand how much I don’t want that.” She swallowed hard. “Our marriage was…every day was…I hated it. I came to hate you. Our divorce was devastating for me.” She looked away from him, so she didn’t register the tightening of his features, the bleakness in his eyes. “The idea of picking up the threads of that life, living in the house in which I was so miserable, waking up beside you, it fills me with an actual sense of panic.”
Max’s face was pale beneath his tan. “I knew you were unhappy, but never to this extent.” He muttered the words, brushing her cheeks with his hands, holding her face still. “How can I make you understand how different this will be?”
“You can’t.” Her smile was brittle. “Our divorce broke me and when I put myself back together, I found that I was completely different. I don’t trust anyone easily, and I will never trust you. Perhaps that’s a blessing in all of this.”
His expression was brooding as he surveyed Villa Fortune. This stunning ancient villa in the Tuscan countryside had belonged to his grandparents, and had been his grandfather’s pride and joy. Now, yaya lived here, and all of the grandchildren came weekly to eat dinner on the terrace beneath the vines, to talk and surround her with love and noise.
But Max was unusually quiet, his expression sombre, his humour poor. It had been a week since he’d seen Alessia and a week had been too long, given him far too much time in his own head.
He vacillated between a self-directed fury at what he’d let their marriage become, and a sense of despair at how long she was taking to decide what she wanted, so that the ruthless tycoon he had earned a reputation for being wanted to pressure her into the marriage using whatever means he could. There were plenty of levers he could pull – her father’s wishes, her father’s health, her father’s finances. Any of these would be sufficient to pressure Alessia into acquiescence, but he wouldn’t do that. Not unless it became absolutely necessary.
Because blackmailing her into marriage was unethical and wrong, and it would have been the final nail in the coffin for a good marriage – and he had wanted their marriage to work. Not in a ‘love and happily ever after’ kind of way – that had never been a part of his wish list and he couldn’t see that changing any time soon – but a happy, respectful partnership that would surround their daughter with safety and security, so she would know she had two parents who adored her so much they chose to make a life together, just for her.
Why couldn’t Alessia see what he could offer her?
Because you hurt her. Badly.
Ironic that he’d spent the years since their divorce smarting over her infidelity, believing the worst of her, when all along he’d been the one who’d carved up their marriage – and her confidence – in the process.
“How’s it going?”
He lifted his gaze towards his cousin Nico, a tight smile on his face.
“Fine.”
“You’re not having coffee?”
“Non.” He lifted his beer bottle a little higher, then returned his gaze to the view. The sky was clear, the stars shimmering against its inky black colour and his gaze instinctively pulled towards the coastline where, if he travelled far enough, he’d arrive in Ondechiara.
“You’re okay?”
He compressed his lips, his cousin’s attention kindly-meant but completely unwelcome. “Why do you ask?”
“You’ve been quiet.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “How’s married life?” He was glad for the change of subject, particularly when Nico picked up the threads and ran with it, enthusing about his wife Maddie, how perfect she was for him, how much he loved every little detail about her. It was enough to make even Max smile, but his heart remained heavy.
He’d always presumed his desire to stay single came down to their parents – two brothers and their wives who’d chosen to take a payment and hand parental control over to yaya and Gianfelice, rather than being a part of their children’s lives. Was it any wonder the myth of happy families was one to which Max didn’t ascribe?
And yet Fiero had fallen hard for Elodie and now Nico for Maddie, and neither of those men had ever seemed at all likely to settle down and fall in ‘love’.
So perhaps his aversion to marriage wasn’t a strike against his parents so much as simply a question of biology. Maybe Alessia wasn’t the only one who struggled with trust? After all, falling in ‘love’ and promising to love someone for the rest of your life seemed like an incredible gamble.
A sensible marriage of convenience was far safer, much wiser. Max dealt in probabilities and risk analyses and where a marriage based on something as whimsical as love was fraught with the possibility of disaster, a marriage based on clear-cut rules just made sense.
Trust or not, he could get this across the line. He just had to return to his basic business principles. There would be a way to gently win Alessia over, he just had to find it.
“You’ve thought of almost everything.” She blinked at him, her eyes huge in her face, her lips parted on a sigh, every inch of her covered in the over-sized flannelette pyjamas she wore. Hardly designed to tempt and seduce and yet he found he could think of little else than her body beneath them.
He focussed instead on the glass of water she’d poured him when he’d arrived, watching the light bubbles fizz against the glass’s sides.
“I appreciate your hesitation to trust me,” he growled the words. “I think it is something we have in common, in fact.”
Her eyes startled to his.
“I find the idea of a traditional marriage to be – strange. So much emotion and uncertainty,” he shook his head. “Ours will be a true partnership.”
