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I’d be no better than my mother, she thought. A gambler who lost everything. And worse.
She clenched her hands at her sides to hide the fact that they were trembling. ‘No, it—it isn’t that.’
Face expressionless, Zac looked down at the floor. ‘I see. What then?’
She swallowed. ‘It’s about the house.’
‘Santa Madonna.’ The words seemed ground out of him. ‘Sì, naturalmente. It would have to be the house. What else has it ever been? You need more money? Take it. You wish to pull it down and begin again? Do so. It is no longer my concern. Only yours. Or did I fail to make that clear?’
‘It’s nothing like that,’ she said. ‘I came to say that I want to sell it.’
‘To sell—Mannion?’ There was an odd note in his voice.
‘Yes,’ she returned baldly, adding, ‘I—I thought you would wish to know.’
‘Why? Do you want my advice? I am sure your former employers are better placed to assist you. Or do you need me to recommend a lawyer, perhaps?’ He shrugged. ‘Contact our legal department. Any of them will be glad to help.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they would.’ Glad to help rid you of your unwanted encumbrances. To set you free again.
She could feel misery knotting in her chest. Tears threatening that she could not—would not allow to fall.
She said huskily, ‘I can make my own arrangements, thank you. I’ve said all I came to say and please forgive me for interrupting you.’
As she turned to leave, Zac said abruptly, ‘Un momento. Wait.’
‘Are you worried I’ll sell at a loss?’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t.’
‘I wish to know why you are selling at all.’
‘Because I no longer wish to live here.’
‘After all these years when you thought of nothing else—wanted nothing else?’ he asked harshly. ‘I cannot accept that.’
‘I’ve always believed that if Jack Latimer hadn’t been killed, he’d have married my mother and, as his daughter, I’d have had a legal right to his estate. I now know that isn’t true. That even if he did have an affair with my mother, there could never have been a child because of the illness he suffered in adolescence. That my mother’s entire story was a tissue of lies.’ She shrugged. ‘And I can’t live with that.’
‘You do not have to,’ he said swiftly. ‘Mannion has come to you as my gift to my wife.’
‘Wife!’ She almost choked on the word. ‘And how much longer will I continue to be your wife? And when it’s over, how many years will I have to spend here without you—in Serafina’s empty shell?’
Her laugh was a sob. ‘Surviving in this heap of stones in the middle of nowhere, wandering from room to room, pretending that being alone is just a bad dream, and that somewhere I’ll find you waiting for me.’
She flung back her head. ‘Well, no, thanks. I can’t stay here. There are just too many memories and I won’t be able to bear them, so I’ll cut my losses right now, if it’s all the same to you.’
Her voice broke and she turned, fumbling for the door handle, and heard him say, in little more than a whisper, ‘Dana, my love, my wife, mi adorata—don’t leave me. Don’t go.’
The words she had said in her heart so many times.
She looked back and saw his face, as never before, pleading, vulnerable, haggard with yearning and something close to despair.
Caught between hope and uncertainty, she heard herself ask, ‘Do you want me?’
‘More than that,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I love you. I think I have loved you always—for the whole of my life, even before I met you. But, until this moment, I thought you only cared for this house. And that is why I went away because I too found I could not bear it.’
With a little cry, she went to him. Went into his arms, yielding her mouth to the storm of his kisses and her body to the fever of his shaking hands. Seeing him for the first time, starving, driven and completely out of control. Glorying in his urgency, as he lifted her on to the desk, sweeping the papers to the floor.
He pushed up her dress, tearing aside her briefs and dragging down his zip, entering her without any preliminaries except their mutual, frantic need of each other. Thrusting into her with passionate, agonised intensity as she clung to him, her body clenching round him, meeting his fire with her own until they were both consumed, gasping their joy into each other’s mouths as they rose together to the exquisite savagery of release.
