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He didn’t like her tone. But he only gazed back at her. “I fail to see why it cannot be both.”
She stopped rubbing the lotion into her skin, and put the top back on the jar of the thick salve she was using. He couldn’t help but think that her movements were jerky.
“Surely the benefits of marrying a man of your wealth and consequence is that I need not concern myself with work.” And though there was no hint of temper on her face, he felt it in the air between them, anyway. “If I, for example, wish to do nothing at all but welcome our son into the world by loving him fiercely, wholeheartedly and with singular focus, that should be fine, shouldn’t it?”
“I wasn’t aware that you had to choose between the two,” he replied. “That is the true benefit of marrying me. You don’t have to choose a thing. You can have it all, whatever you like.”
“Not quitewhateverI like.” And her eyes were on him in a way that made him...distinctly uncomfortable. “You don’t believe in love. Why pretend you can offer me things you can’t, Cristiano?”
She launched herself from the bed, one hand going to support the small of her back as she moved, and then she swept out of the bedroom. Leaving him there.
To think about her obsession withlove.
And that was not the first inkling he’d had that all was not quite as rosy for his new wife as he’d imagined. But it was most direct.
Julienne never denied him. At night, their passion only seemed to grow, wilder and hotter, even as they moved into her final stage of pregnancy. And she always cried out his name in that same perfect song.
She indulged him when he wanted to get his hands on her bump, or put his mouth there so he could speak to his son.
But they were not far off from her due date when he realized that it wasn’t that there was a different light in her eyes when she looked at him these days. It was that there was an absence of light.
He didn’t know how he could have missed it.
And what made it worse was that he didn’t figure out what it was that was getting so deeply beneath his skin until Fleurette appeared, in her usual defiant state, a few days before Julienne was due.
“I can’t miss the birth of my nephew,” Fleurette announced when she saw him, andhergaze, Cristiano could not help but notice, was bright and hot and not particularly friendly. “I won’t.”
“Of course not,” he murmured.
And then he’d been called upon to handle a near disaster at one of their processing facilities. He’d spent all day handling the various politics between his plant manager and the local government in that country, and a full contingent of his attorneys.
When he arrived home, it was late. He was surprised to find lights still on, when Julienne had taken to a far earlier bedtime these days.
He nodded at his housekeeper as he entered, accepting the mail and messages she’d prepared for him.
And then he drifted further into the house, following a sound he’d very rarely heard here.
Had never heard here, or any place he’d ever lived in Milan, if he was honest.
Laughter.
He loosened his tie as he followed the surprising burst of it, past the study and the rooms he normally used to the small salon Julienne had claimed as her own in the back of the house. In the month that she had lived with him here, she had slowly substituted some of the furnishings, making it less a random collection of items a designer had chosen, and more hers.
Tonight, as he stood at the threshold, out in the dark hall beyond, the first thing he noticed was the light.
Endless, glorious light, and not only from the lamps she’d lit.
It was all over her face. Julienne sat in a comfortable armchair that she’d told him would be perfect for nursing his son. Before her, Fleurette was telling a story, sitting cross-legged on the floor gesticulating widely while also doing something with Julienne’s feet.
Painting her nails, he realized in the next moment. Or supposedly painting them, when she wasn’t waving her arms about.
And Julienne looked...alive.
Her eyes shone, sweet and bright, all toffee and no darkness. Her face was filled with laughter, and hope and that astonishing quicksilver song he only heard when he was deep inside her and she was calling out his name.
Cristiano felt his heart flip in his chest, as if heralding a cardiac event.
He felt frozen where he stood, staring at this woman. His wife. As if he’d never seen her before.
