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Alessia compressed her lips, looking towards the window. “I know he was close to bankruptcy.”
“And far too proud to admit it,” Max said darkly. “He had been talking to the worst kind of personal lending agent. A loan shark. Not the kind with an office and a computer – more the type with a ledger book and a baseball bat. Would you have preferred I allowed him to say ‘no’ to me and left him to borrow millions of dollars from an organisation such as that?”
Alessia’s jaw dropped. “No, I don’t believe you.”
“Does your personality assessment also accuse me of being someone who lies?”
She fluttered her lashes closed, her eyes focussing on her lap. “You did lie to me,” she whispered.
“When? How?”
She opened her mouth to answer that and then shook her head, because in truth, he hadn’t. He’d never said he loved her, he’d never claimed their wedding would be anything more than what it was. He’d left gaps and she’d rushed to fill them in – creating an image of romance and bliss when it had all been so far from that.
“You knew what I thought.”
“Yes. Not completely, but yes.” He dipped his head forward. “It suited me,” he said darkly. “I took advantage of your – shall we say…crush? – to force your hand – as well as your father’s. And while I understand that you were hurt by that, I was afraid for him – and how desperate he’d become.”
She swallowed past a suddenly dry mouth. “I didn’t realise it was so bad.”
“He’d made some terrible investments,” Max grimaced. “When I came on board as his partner I had to clear out a lot of rotten ‘assets’ and free up the profitable areas of the business to thrive.”
“That’s how you turned it all around so quickly?”
“That,” he agreed with a cool tone to his voice. “And a massive influx of capital.”
A shiver ran down her spine. She didn’t particularly want to contemplate the extent to which Massimo had helped her father. How had Carlo let things get so bad?
She sighed heavily, a need to defend her father prompting Alessia to say, “He was never the same after mum died.”
“I know.” Softer now, gentle.
“He loved her so much and she was so sick, for so long. Then she’d get better and we’d hope…even when there was no hope.” She closed her eyes for a moment, the memories almost too painful to contemplate. “Dad just didn’t cope. He was like a shell.”
“And he began to drink,” Max said quietly, leaning across the table. He wasn’t touching her but her whole body seemed to brush with awareness, as though his skin was pressed to hers.
Her eyes widened in surprise at his perceptiveness – she hadn’t known anyone else knew the truth about her father. There was no point in denying it. “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “But even so, if you’d told me all of this back then…”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t have known how you would react. You might have panicked. Or gone to your father and insisted he let me help him – and without our marriage, he would certainly have refused.”
She couldn’t help it. She met his eyes, a smile on her lips. “Control freak.”
He answered the smile, and flame seemed to leap from him to her. She looked away, dragging her eyes to the window and the pretty Roman street beyond. Christmas lights twinkled in the trees, and happy passers-by milled on the footpaths.
* * *
She was beautiful. He’d known this about her for a long time, but in that moment, her features relaxed, her face tilted away from his so he saw only her autocratic profile and shimmering blonde hair, he felt a rush of undeniable admiration for her classic features. She sipped her water, then placed the glass down carefully in front of her.
“It wasn’t completely your fault, you know,” she turned back to face him, pinning him with her clear, thoughtful gaze.
He had been staring at her, losing himself in the line of her face, and couldn’t immediately follow her thinking.
“I let myself get so caught up in i
t all – the whirlwind proposal, the wedding plans, the idea that I would be married and a part of your family,” she shook her head with a hint of self-condemnation. “How stupid of me not to reflect on it all a little better. Why would a man like you want to marry someone like me? I was – as you keep saying – little more than a child. At twenty I had no experience, I’d been sheltered by my father to a ridiculous degree, I was naïve and gauche –,”
“You were never gauche,” he interposed quietly. Alessia had always, even as a child, been elegant and sophisticated, her manner somehow intimidating without her having any intention of being so.
She rolled her eyes, leaning forward a little. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw a movement and flicked his gaze in that direction in time to catch a couple of men watching Alessia with obvious admiration. One leaned to the other, said something, the other one nodded. He ground his teeth and turned back to her. She was his wife, and besides which, the fact other men found her attractive should hardly surprise him. It didn’t surprise him, but the degree to which he resented it did.
