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Her throat thickened with the threat of tears—tears she refused to let fall. ‘And you’ll take Prim’Aqua to devastate Carlo? You’ll take it and you’ll use me to hurt him. Yes?’
He didn’t answer and, quite demented by her grief, she stood and shoved at his chest, her hair whipping her cheeks as she pushed him. And he stayed where he was, impenetrable and strong, and then finally he tilted his head, just a tiny movement.
‘Yes.’
Silence fell, condemnatory and grief-laced.
‘And you can’t even see how wrong that is, can you?’
* * *
Antonio gripped her wrists, holding her hands still against his chest. Her words were like blades in his side. ‘I want Prim’Aqua,’ he said, as though it were simple. He didn’t need to be looking at his wife to know she was close to tears. He heard it in her voice, when she spoke next.
‘More than you want me?’
‘I want you both,’ he said finally. ‘I want you, I want this baby. And, yes, I want Prim’Aqua. That was our agreement.’
‘I know that.’ Her voice sounded husky, scored by sadness. ‘But we were different people six months ago. I thought we were going to try to make this marriage real—’
‘In what way is it not?’ he interrupted, wishing he hadn’t turned to look at her when he was confronted with such obvious despair on her features.
‘There’s no love here,’ she said simply. ‘Not from you.’
Her words filtered through his brain and something like an alarm bell sounded. ‘Are you saying you’ve fallen in love with me?’ he asked, incredulous, surprised, and not sure what else.
‘Yes.’ It was a simple answer, one that made his heart jump and panic all at once. ‘I love you,’ she said, and there was a part of him that rejoiced at that, and a larger part that wanted her to take the words back because they were undeserved and unasked for. Because they complicated a situation that should have been straightforward—an agreement between two parties, just like he was used to. ‘But I can’t do this.’
‘Do what?’
‘You can’t actually think this marriage will work, with you hating my brother like this? With you intent on destroying him, determined to hold onto your revenge and your anger and your hatred. Not if there’s a chance you’re going to poison my child against him.’
The bottom was falling out of Antonio’s world. Her words might as well have been spoken in Swahili for all the sense they made. There were very few facts in life he knew for certain, and one of those was that the diSalvo and Herrera families were enemies, to the death. He had no compassion for Carlo, no room for forgiveness for Giacomo. They deserved whatever fate he could conspire to give them.
And Amelia? What of her pain and hurt?
He faced the prospect of Amelia walking away from him and he wanted to assume super-human form, to build a wall as high as the sun to keep her in his home. To trap her? Dios, had he not already done that with this marriage?
Apparently not, if she was threatening to leave him. ‘Your reasons for being married to me haven’t changed,’ he pointed out, falling back on his skills as a negotiator to silence the panicked drumming of his heart. ‘We want the same things for our child—’
‘No, we don’t.’ She fixed him with a level stare, icy determination in her own eyes now. ‘I want my kids to have what I never did. I don’t want them to live with uncertainty and insecurity, doubt, and a lack of love. And I’m sure as heck not prepared to bring my child into a war zone.’
Her words cut him to the core. ‘You and I aren’t a war zone! Look at how well things work between us!’
She sucked in a shallow breath. ‘Because we haven’t been tested! We work because we’ve existed as an island, totally separate from the reality of our situation. But we can’t raise our child in a void! I won’t deny them their heritage, and the love they can know from my family. You have no one left—no parents, no siblings, nothing you can offer them by way of an extended family. Carlo and Giacomo are it.’
‘Better to have no family than those two bastardos—’
Her eyes fluttered shut, her lashes two dark fans against her pale cheeks. ‘I can’t accept that.’
‘You have already accepted it,’ he pointed out softly. ‘You married me and you knew how I felt, and what I wanted. Carlo was bound to find out about us at some point, so now he knows. This is not the end of the world.’
She made a scoffing noise. ‘He’s devastated. He thinks you’re using me to avenge your father. He thinks our marriage is just the next step in your revenge plan.’ Her skin paled visibly. ‘And the worst thing is, he’s right.’
‘Madre de Dios, you cannot actually believe this is all about revenge.’
‘Not all of it, no,’ she conceded softly. ‘But it’s a part of our marriage, and it shouldn’t be.’
He ignored the compulsion to point out that their marriage had been born out of a desire for revenge—the words were lodged inside him, yet he couldn’t speak them.
