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He was furious with himself most of all for starting to trust her again even though he knew she was a liar and a manipulator. It wasn’t like him to lose his temper, but when he had seen that newspaper headline, he had felt betrayed, and then he had wonderedwhyhe felt betrayed when Brooke was only doing what she had always done in seeking to shape her public image and stoke press interest. He should’ve been better prepared, should’ve expected such behaviour from her. It was his own fault that he felt as though she had deceived him. When, after all, had he begun to forget what kind of a woman she was?
‘I should’ve guessed that you’d have your own more direct butslyway of dealing with the media!’ Lorenzo fired down at her.
Brooke was frozen to the spot in disbelief by his behaviour because Lorenzo had never once raised his voice to her before. But at this moment, he was ferociously angry with her and it showed in every honed, hard lineament of his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘Go on...look at the article and tell me you’re not responsible for this outrage!’ he challenged with contempt.
Trembling, Brooke lifted the tabloid newspaper, shaken to see the photo of her in the blue dress she had worn at the clinic now adorning the front page. She recalled the friendly nurse who had asked if she could take a picture on her phone. Brooke had said yes, had believed that it was the dress that the woman was interested in. She hadn’t known enough about safeguarding herself from such exploitation to say, no, sorry, she conceded in dismay. So, itwasabsolutely her fault, just as Lorenzo believed, that that picture was in a newspaper.
‘Obviously it was more than your vanity could bear to have the press speculating that you could be scarred or in a wheelchair!’ Lorenzo bit out in raw condemnation. ‘You tell me you don’t want media attention and then you do...this? You give an interview to them?Madre di Dio, why the hell am I acting surprised?’
‘An interview?’ she whispered, turning the page with shaking fingers, intimidated more than she liked to admit by his sheer dark fury. There was more volatile emotion than she had ever thought he possessed emanating from him and lacing the atmosphere with brutal tension. Unfortunately, it wasn’t how she would’ve wanted to discover that he was much more emotional in nature than he was prepared to show.
‘Sì, an interview. While I’m busy hiring extra security toprotectyou, you’re still feeding the fire to gain the attention you crave from your admirers!’
Brooke took a mental step back from the toweringly tall, dark man raging over her and concentrated on the article. She was quick to recognise that stray comments she had made and medical info that should’ve been kept confidential had been cobbled together and leaked in the form of an interview that had been faked. ‘I didn’t give anyone an interview, Lorenzo. I did let one of the nurses take a photo of me and I’m sorry she gave it to the press, but I didn’t exactly know who I was supposed to be then or that I shouldn’t allow that,’ she confided uncomfortably. ‘Read it properly and you’ll see I’m telling the truth. It’s afakeinterview. I wouldn’t want people to know that I’m suffering from amnesia because that’s embarrassing—’
‘Unfortunately for you,’ Lorenzo countered glacially, ‘I already know that I can’t trust a word you say because you’re a gifted liar. You lie about the most ridiculous things and then shrug indifferently when the truth comes out. I’ve never been able to trust you!’
While Brooke had contrived to remain calm and in control while Lorenzo vented his wrath over a naïve mistake she had made, those words fell on her like hand grenades that exploded on contact with her shrinking body. In shock, she drew up her knees and hugged them. All her natural colour had gone into retreat while her tummy stirred sickly. She had told her husband lies and he had found her out in them?Shewas a liar? It dawned on her then that for the veryfirsttime Lorenzo was giving her what he deemed to believe was the absolute truth about herself, yet only raw anger had drawn that honesty from him. For just a few minutes he had forgotten to treat her like someone too delicate to handle reality.
All of a sudden, she was being forced to face the fact that, regardless of how hard she had tried to explain away her husband’s cool attitude towards her, their relationshipdidhave problems. Indeed, Lorenzo saw her as a liar he couldn’t trust. Shaken and appalled by that revelation, she rocked back and forth where she sat, struggling to deal with that new sobering knowledge.
Lorenzo stared down at her and then he blinked and the explosive rage that had powered him, most ironically a rage that had never once seized him with Brooke before, vanished as though it had never been. Stricken by what he had dumped on her in a temper, he came down on the side of the bed and hauled in a deep shuddering breath, cursing his lack of control and the damage he had inflicted. She looked so small, so lost, so unlike the woman he remembered, the woman he needed toburyand forget about becausethatversion of Brooke might never return, he finally acknowledged.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper,’ Lorenzo conceded heavily and reached for her hand. ‘When I saw that paper, a fuse just blew somewhere inside meand—’
‘We’re both living in a very stressful situation,’ Brooke pointed out in a wobbly undertone. ‘It’s sure to be affecting you as well.’
Lorenzo didn’t feel that he was in a stressful situation because naturally he was in possession of facts she had yet to learn. But he did feel guilty, horrendously guilty for shouting at her, condemning her and causing her distress. When her hand pulled away from his, rejecting that hold, he was disconcerted by that withdrawal.
‘You don’t need to pretend any longer, Lorenzo,’ Brooke sighed in explanation. ‘You’ve let the cat out of the bag. We don’t have a good marriage, which actually explainsa lot.’
Unprepared for that far-reaching conclusion being reached at such speed, Lorenzo hesitated only a moment before reaching across the bed and bundling her small resisting figure into his arms and settling her down across his long muscular thighs with an intimacy he had never dared to embrace before. ‘No, it only explains that I have a terrible temper, which I usually manage to keep in check,’ he breathed as he heard her swallow back the sobs making her tremble within his grasp. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘But you said I was always telling lies and that you couldn’t trust me!’ Brooke sobbed outright.
Lorenzo was usually very fast at thinking on the back foot, as it were, but a quicksilver tongue somehow evaded him when he had Brooke struggling to hold back sobs in his arms.Hehad done that;healone had distressed her to that extent. Yet she had borne every unsettling, scary development bravely from the outset of her recuperation. Even so, he had, and for the second time, reduced her to tears. He felt like a complete heel. When had he become so tough, bitter and selfish that he only went through the motions of giving her a roof over her head while at the same time utterly ignoring her presence in every other way? Of course, she had noticed that he wasn’t behaving like a husband, of course she had become anxious about it.
‘Did I lie about money?’ Brooke whispered chokily. ‘I mean, I can see by that wardrobe that I was kind of a bit...spendthrift.’
Lorenzo seized on that option with intense relief. He was rich enough to support a thousand spendthrift wives but rows over extravagance and lies concerning that extravagance were far less damaging to her self-image than the truth would be. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, relieved to feel some of the jerking rigidity in her small frame drain away. ‘Nothing I couldn’t deal with, but you kept on doing it.’
‘Well, I won’t any more,’ Brooke whispered shakily, the worst of her crushing anxiety draining away. ‘I promise you, absolutely promise that I won’t tell you any lies or spend too much money. There’s no limit on those credit cards you gave me, is there?’
Lorenzo breathed in deep and slow. ‘I don’t think we need to worry about that now. You’ve only spent a couple of hundred pounds since you arrived,’ he reminded her ruefully. ‘Believe me, you can be a lot more spendthrift than that. I don’t want you worrying about that either.’
‘Maybe getting married to someone with money like you have sort of went to my head and I got carried away,’ Brooke suggested thoughtfully.
Lorenzo registered the one salient fact that he should have shared with her sooner. ‘No, you weren’t penniless when I married you—your father left you a decent trust fund. He was an affluent wine importer and you were an only child.’
Brooke focused huge violet eyes on him as she flung her head back. ‘I have money of my own?’ she exclaimed incredulously.
‘Yes, although we agreed when we married that I would take care of all the bills.’
But Brooke was still gripped by amazement that she had her own money. ‘That really surprises me because I don’t feel like I’ve ever had money. I suppose that sounds weird to you when I obviously have, but everything like the staff here and the limousines and the grandeur makes me feel...overwhelmed,’ she finally confided. ‘I assumed it was because I hadn’t had time yet to become accustomed to your lifestyle.’
‘Your parents weren’t rich, only comfortably off,’ Lorenzo suggested, the feel of her body heat, the brush of her breasts against his shirtfront and her proximity combining to increase the hard arousal thrumming at his groin and remind him of just how long it had been since he had had sex. As gently as he could, he scooped her up, rose upright and laid her back down on the bed. ‘You should rest. I upset you.’
Brooke sat up again. ‘I’m fine now. The nurse that took that photo was called Lizzie and if you read the supposed interview, you can see it’s just put-together stuff aside of the amnesia.’
