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She blanched as if he’d shouted. “You put great stock insophistication, Ranieri. I hated to disappoint. And in any case, you didn’t ask me. I didn’t think it mattered.”
He knew that was not at all what she had thought. And he was beginning to understand exactly why he preferred not to get this close to anyone. Why he preferred to know less, not more, about the women in his life.
This was painful.
Yet he pushed on. “You did not choose to tell me, Annika. It is not the same thing. But it does not matter. I will tell you this. Sex can be powerful. When it’s done well, it can feel life altering. You know this now, yes? Yet these are all just feelings. Yours are likely to be more intense, as they are new.”
“Wait.” She shook her head as if there was too much noise in there for her to concentrate. Or as if he was the noise. “Are you, of all people, lecturing me onfeelings?”
Ranieri couldn’t say he liked the way she asked that. And he liked even less how it landed in him, but he shoved it aside. “I admired your father,” he told her, his voice clipped. “I was fond of him. I know that worry over you, and what might become of you, consumed him in those last days before his coma. It pleases me that I’ve been able to help you on his behalf.”
She let out a soft sound that he would not quite call a laugh. “How kind of you. You are known for your kindness, of course.” Annika shook her head. “Do you really believe that Bennett Schuyler’s dearest wish for his only daughter involved her being sent back home in the middle of her honeymoon?”
He was clenching his jaw and he forced himself to release it. “The fault is mine.” At least that part was true. Ranieri inclined his head. “I should have known that making such demands of a virgin might create problems. You don’t have the perspective necessary to handle my appetites in full. I should have gone with my first instinct.”
And it killed him that as he spoke, she changed. The light in her eyes dimmed. She still clutched her hands before her, but her body—so supple, so soft—had gone rigid.
“I should have gone with mine,” she said, and her voice was too cold. Too unlike her. He almost reached out, but he remembered himself in the last moment, and there was nothing to do with her brittle smile but endure it. “I was only sixteen. You came to our front door like a storm cloud and I said to myself,That man is the devil. I was right.”
“It seems that we were both right,” Ranieri gritted out. “All the more reason to stop pretending otherwise, do you not agree?”
And he would never know how long it was they stood there, staring at each other, neither one of them saying a word.
Neither one of them reaching out.
Ranieri told himself this was a good thing. Or if not good, it was the right thing. And that would have to do.
He thought they could have stood there for a lifetime or two, but then the headlights of the car he’d called for her swept through the darkness outside the window, and the spell was broken.
The staff came to get her bags. And she stood there a moment longer, still looking at him with that imploring expression as if she thought that could reach him. As if she was debating whether or not she should throw herself into his arms—
And Ranieri knew that if she did, he would catch her. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. But she didn’t.
Instead, Annika turned and walked away, and took all the light in the world behind her.
CHAPTER TEN
ITWASAlong and bitter fall.
Back in New York, Annika immersed herself in the life she’d left behind and called herself lucky that it was still there, waiting for her to wake up from the dream she’d been in and remember herself.
Even if she felt a deep well of embarrassment within her because she knew how little she’d wanted to do anything but lose herself in Italy—and in Ranieri—forever.
Well. She liked to call itembarrassment, but she knew it was something far deeper than that. It was the way her heart beat now, and the hurt in it. It was the way the world seemed changed all around her. Darker, dimmer. Even in this city that seemed too bright to her after the soft, sultry Italian dark.
When she first landed in New York, she’d almost asked that the car drop her off at her father’s old apartment, but bit back the request. Like it or not, she had married Ranieri.
That meant that if he wanted her to move out, he would have to say so and if he did, she would win.
And that was all she had left. Winning this thing.
Ranieri did not come back to New York for three long weeks. And when he did, he was a different man. Or rather, he was the man she’d always thought he was before all of this. Grim. Disapproving. Unimpressed with her in every possible way.
There were no cozy lunches. There were no intimate dinners.
There was no waking up to find him so deep inside her that she was shattering into bright, hot pieces before she’d fully come out of her dreams.
That she cried about these losses, alone in her room at night, was something she would deny if asked. But he never asked. That she had missed him—and still missed him—so horribly that it was like a flu, was something she thought she would rather die than admit.
