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Her heart stammered with a rush of sympathy for him. She felt his pain, and she knew that he was hurting himself, perhaps as a form of self-flagellation, a punishment for what he perceived as his fault.
“Nothing you did would have caused this. The baby – that’s not because you hurt her feelings. It’s not because you guys fought.”
“It didn’t help,” he said quietly. “The stress. The uncertainty. I promised her the world and then ripped it away from her again. Don’t you see that? I was a bastard to her. I broke her heart.”
“I can see that,” Bronte whispered. “Not the bit about you being a bastard, but about you breaking her heart. But I don’t think that has anything to do with what happened to Mattia.”
He was silent.
“You must have spoken to doctors at the time. Surely they explained.”
“No one could explain it. Everything was fine, and then it wasn’t.”
“Sometimes, these things happen,” she said softly, hating that there was nothing more she could offer him. “And it’s awful, completely unfair and tragic, but you can’t keep beating yourself up, blaming yourself, bearing the responsibility for that loss.”
He made a gruff noise that she took as rejection. She supposed he could do whatever he wanted or needed to do; who was she to try to change the way he lived his life?
“And somewhere, Katie is out there, hurting, or possibly dead, because I couldn’t even hold the loving fiancé thing together for a few months, until the baby was born.” When he looked at her, she felt the cold anger in his eyes and knew it was all directed at himself. “Do you understand why I tried to warn you away from me?”
Her heart hammered.
She shook her head.
“And why I didn’t want to talk about it?”
Grief flooded her, but a grief for him, and the baby he’d lost, the woman he’d cared for, and all the pain that had been. A grief that made her want to reassure him, somehow, that she didn’t see him the way he did himself.
She pushed the sheet back, lifting up so she could straddle him, surprised it didn’t feel strange to do something so intimate. It felt perfect and right, and exactly what she needed to do in that moment.
Her pyjamas were a soft barrier between them, but that didn’t matter. This was about basic human comfort, a need to connect with him, to be close.
“You’re a good person, Luca.”
His eyes shuttered; she felt him pulling away from her.
She pressed her palms to his bare chest in a gesture of entreaty, silently begging him to listen. “Everything you’ve just said shows me that you’re a good guy.”
“Then you’re not listening.”
She shook her head. “Of course I am. So you slept with a girl you liked. And she got pregnant. You didn’t fob her off or offer her money and a place to live, just because that would have been more convenient. You moved her in with you so you could look after her and be a part of her life, so you could give your baby the best chance to know both parents. She fell in love with you and you tried to give her everything she wanted. You proposed because you cared about her, you loved your baby, and you wanted to make her happy. That’s not a horrible thing to do.”
“I didn’t love her.”
“You cared about her, and you don’t know you wouldn’t have come to love her.”
His eyes showed his thoughts on that.
She bit down on her lower lip. “I can’t see any good comes from you beating yourself up about this.”
His smile was dismissive.
She sighed, bringing her face closer to his, her lips brushing his. “You’re a good person.”
His eyes flicked to hers, but he didn’t say anything to reject her statement.
“You’re kind, and good.” She moved her palm to his heart, pressing it there. “And you’re hurting.” She kissed his lips lightly.
“It was a long time ago. Years.”
