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‘“This” is simple, Flora.’
‘It is?’
‘We will be lovers. Companions. Maybe even friends. And we will raise a baby together. But understand this...’
He shuffled closer to her. She could smell herself on his skin. Their shared arousal. The desire still simmering between them to be closer. To entwine their hands and touch each other. But he didn’t touch her, so she wouldn’t touch him either. She wouldn’t hide in his kisses and she wouldn’t let him hide in hers.
‘Love will never find you inthathouse.’
He pointed out of the window to the house the car was now pulling up to. The house that would be her new home. He should be carrying her over the threshold to start her new life as Signora Russo.
‘Because it never found you?’ she asked quietly. ‘I’m not your redemption for whatever guilt you feel about the past. I’m your wife, and I’m asking you to let me love you, to love me in return. Because that little boy deserved more than the kindness of strangers. He deserved to be loved and so do you.’
She placed her hand to his chest and everything in her told her to climb back onto his lap and hold him. Hold him until he understood that the love she gave him with her body came from her heart. Her soul.
‘Love me, Raffaele,’ she said. ‘Trust yourself to love me. Now.’
She was asking him just as she had in the storm, but now she needed all his love. Not only his body. But his heart.
‘I can’t.’
She held the breath in her lungs. Let it burn. Let it stem the tears threatening to spill all over her cheeks.
She wasn’t a very good teacher, it would seem.
One more lesson.Her heart roared.The hardest.
And if it didn’t work this love affair would be over and she’d raise her baby by herself. Surrounded with love that was unconditional. But she would give him one more chance to choose love. To choose family. To love her.
And he would choose her, wouldn’t he?
She blew out the air between her lips and put the last lesson she had to teach into motion.
Pulling her hand from his body, she turned her eyes straight ahead. She said, ‘Get out of the car, Raffaele.’
‘What?’ he growled.
She did not turn. She would not look at him.
‘Why?’
‘You said love won’t find me in that house, so I’m not going in.’
‘It’s our wedding day, Flora.’
‘And you have vowed never to love me. I won’t raise my baby in a house without love.’
‘Flora—’
‘Get out.’
The silence rippled with tension, charged with everything she held back. This time on purpose—not because she was being illogical or chaotic. Because even if she said all those words, expressed all the thoughts in her head, she knew he wouldn’t hear them.
She needed to show him.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked.
Forcing herself not to react, not to turn and ask him if it was really that easy to get out of the car and let her drive away, she kept her eyes forward and replied as neutrally as her raging heart would allow.
