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He was quiet for a long time, and then he turned to face her, and she felt something in his gaze, a strength and a hardness that sent a shiver down her spine, despite the fact neither seemed aimed at her. “No.”
It made little sense- the single word answer was at odds with his tension. “No?”
He shook his head. “My father had a different view of marriage to me.”
And now Bella’s pulse speeded up for a different reason, as memories of the snatches of conversation with her father fired inside of her. “Did he?” The words came out shallow. Breathy.
Vitalo said nothing.
“Do you mean he had an affair?”
“An affair?” Vitalo lifted a brow, and his darkness was all around him now. He was like a caged animal. “That sounds so civilized, so reasonable. No, Bella. He did not have ‘an affair’. He had a string of lovers, prostitutes, women he paid for sex at any opportunity.”
Bella had thought her own mother’s infidelity bad enough, having seen the way it had tormented Andrew at the end, but this was so different. “Did your mother know?”
“Yes.” He swallowed, his eyes showing his torment. “Not at first. But by the time I was a teenager, she was well aware of his predilections.”
“Did she… did they divorce?”
“My mother killed herself,” he said, the words clinical and cold, despite the pain he must have felt inside of himself. “She’d found him in bed with one of his lovers the day before. She got very upset – screamed at him. I was in the room next door and I’ll never forget the sound she made – like a primal, wounded animal.” He shook his head, as if to pull himself together. “My father laughed.” The words were quiet, rich with his disbelief and disgust. “He told her she was
behaving like the child she was. She took a bunch of sleeping pills that night.”
“Oh, Vitalo,” Bella’s heart squeezed for him. “I’m so sorry. Is it possible it was an accident? That she was too upset to sleep and accidentally took a double dose?”
“She had the whole bottle,” he said, shaking his head. “She knew what she was doing.”
Bella’s heart broke – first for her husband and also for his mother. “Your father must have felt awful!”
“Must he have?” Vitalo prompted, looking at Bella now with that watchfulness he employed to great effect.
“I imagine so.”
Vitalo sighed. “Yes. He felt guilty, I am sure of it, but it didn’t stop his habits. He brought a date to her funeral.”
“He didn’t!”
“Oh, not so obviously, but I knew.” His jaw tightened and he turned away from her, moving to the table and bracing his fingertips on its edge.
“It must have been so hard for you.”
“I moved abroad,” he said with a shrug, and when he turned back to face her, it was with an expression far more like his usual. “Studied, made a life for myself distinct from his. He died a few years after her.”
“And you weren’t close, at the end?” She asked softly, moving to him. She wanted to touch him – it was the most natural thing in the world to physically comfort someone in distress, but something held her back.
“That’s an understatement.”
“Did he ever have any other children?”
Vitalo’s eyes sparked to hers. “I can already see, Mrs Katrakis, that you have an unsettling habit of knowing exactly what to ask that I do not wish to discuss.”
She frowned, sympathy making her lift her hand up and curve around his cheek. “You don’t have to answer me. That’s enough for now.”
His eyes shifted to hers and her pulse throbbed through her body. She wanted him to demur, to say he was fine to answer – she wanted to know everything about him, stuff the cake theory – but he smiled, capturing her hand on his cheek, curving his fingers over it.
“Thank you for the reprieve,” he winked. “There are far better ways to spend our wedding night, I think.”
Her stomach swirled with the force of a kaleidoscope of butterflies. “I have no idea what you’re referring to,” she drawled softly.
