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She looked as if she was wondering what had gone wrong.
She looked as guilty as hell.
‘I was going to!’
‘Like hell!’
‘I was!’ And then she was up from the couch, clutching at his arm. ‘Luca, you have to believe me, I was going to tell you. I know I hadn’t before, but I decided this morning that you should know.’
‘This morning! How convenient! What a shame someone else got there first.’ He brushed her hand away. ‘I don’t want anyone like you touching me. Not after what you’ve done.’
She blinked up at him, all big golden fake eyes. ‘But you wouldn’t have wanted to know, surely? You wouldn’t have wanted to know I was pregnant, not after the way we’d parted.’
He looked down at her with all the hate in the world on his face. ‘I might at least have wanted a say in how our baby met its end. Don’t you think I was entitled to at least that much?’
Tina stopped and stared, sideswiped by the ugliness of his words. She’d been defending one charge—that she had never told him about their child, a charge she’d known would be difficult enough. But suddenly the argument, like the ground beneath her, had shifted again and Luca was accusing her of...what?
‘What are you saying? What exactly are you accusing me of?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! Because you know what you did. You murdered my child!’
The clocks stopped, while the magnitude—the sheer injustice—of his allegation rolled over her like waves upon a beach, dumping her head first into the sand, only to come up barely alive, barely breathing.
‘No,’ she muttered, from that vague, shell-shocked place she was. ‘No, that’s not how it was.’
‘You as much as admitted it!’
‘No! Our baby died.’
‘Because you made it happen!’
‘No! I did nothing! I know I didn’t tell you about our baby, but I did nothing—’
‘I don’t believe you, Valentina. I wish I did, but you damned yourself when you pretended you were going to tell me today. You never made any effort to tell me. You were never going to tell me.’
‘Luca, listen to me, you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘Have I? I curse myself for taking a woman like you back into my bed, knowing now what you did that first time. Knowing what you might be capable of again.’
‘I had a miscarriage! Our baby died and it was nothing to do with me. Why won’t you listen to me?’
‘A miscarriage? Is that what they call it where you come from?’
‘Luca, don’t be like this. Please don’t be like this. I could never do such a thing!’
But dark eyes bore coldly down upon her, judge, jury and executioner in two deep fathomless holes. ‘Then why did you?’
And she knew there was only one card left to play.
‘I love you,’ she said, hoping to reach some part of him, hoping to appeal to whatever scrap of his heart might hear her pleas. Might believe her.
She didn’t know how he would respond. Disbelief. Horror. Indifference. She braced herself for the worst.
But the worst was nothing she could have imagined. He laughed. He threw back his head and laughed, and the sound rang out through the palazzo, filling the high-ceilinged room, reverberating off the walls. A mad sound. A sound that scared her.
‘Perfect,’ he said, when the fit had passed. ‘That’s just perfect.’
‘Luca? I don’t understand. Why is that so funny?’
‘Because you were supposed to fall in love with me. Don’t you see? That was all part of the plan.’
Ice ran down her spine, turning her rigid. ‘Plan? What plan?’
‘You still can’t work it out? Why do you think I asked you here?’
‘To pay off my mother’s debt. On my back. In your bed.’ The words came out all twisted and tight, but that was how she felt, like a mop squeezed and wrung out and left out to dry in a twisted, tangled mess.
‘But it wasn’t only her debt,’ he said in a half snarl. ‘It was your debt too. Because nobody walks out on me. Not the way you did. Not ever.’
‘All of this because I slapped you and walked out?’ She was incredulous. ‘You went to all this trouble to settle the score?’
‘Believe me, it was no trouble given Lily’s predilection for spending.’
‘So why,’ she asked, her hands fisting, her throat thick, but damn him to hell and back, she refused to give in to the urge to cry, not before she knew all of the awful truth, ‘why did you want me to fall in love with you? Why was that part of your so-called plan?’
