learned being Mrs. Lorenzo Ricci had meant wining and dining his business contacts multiple times a week, their social schedule so exhausting for a pregnant Angie she’d barely been able to keep up. She’d begun to feel as if she was drowning, but Lorenzo hadn’t seemed to care, was too busy to notice.
It had all come to a head when they’d lost their baby. Her increasingly distant husband withdrew completely, rendering him a virtual stranger. He’d descended into the blackness, whatever hell had been consuming him, and they’d never recovered. But, apparently, she thought bitterly, it was her obsession with Lucia that had crippled their marriage—not his.
The water cooling, a chill descending over her, she got out of the bath and got ready for bed. Slipping the silk nightie over her head, her eyes were half-closed by the time she stood in front of the beautiful, chrome, four-poster bed.
Too many memories crowding her head, a burn in her chest so painful it was hard to breathe, she fought back the hot, fat tears that burned her eyes. I can’t do it. She could no more get into that bed as if the last two years hadn’t happened than she could convince herself that coming back to Lorenzo hadn’t been a big, huge mistake.
She padded down the hall to the guest room. Done in soothing pale blues and yellow, it evoked none of the master bedroom’s painful echoes. Pulling back the silk coverlet, she slid between the sheets. Peace descended over her. She was out like a light in minutes.
* * *
She woke to a feeling of weightlessness. Disoriented, half-asleep, she blinked against the velvet black of night. Registered the strong arms that cradled her against a wall of muscle. Heat. The subtle, spicy, familiar scent seduced her into burrowing closer. Lorenzo.
Lost in the half-awake state that preceded full consciousness, bereft of time and place, the dark, delicious aroma of her husband seeping into her senses, she flattened her palm against the hard planes of his chest. Reveled in his strength. Registered the rigid set of his body against hers.
Her eyes flew open, consciousness slamming into her swift and hard. The taut line of Lorenzo’s jaw jolted her the rest of the way to full alertness. Cold, dark eyes that glittered like diamonds in the dim light.
“Wh-what are you doing?” she stuttered as he carried her down the hallway and into the master bedroom.
He dumped her on the bed. “You can have all the time you need but you will sleep in here. We are moving forward, not backward.”
She pressed a hand into the mattress and pushed herself upright. “I—” She slicked her tongue over her lips. “I couldn’t get into this bed. There were too many memories, too many things I—”
“What?” he responded harshly. “Too many things you want to forget? Too much backstory you’d like to erase instead of facing it?”
She blinked, her eyes becoming accustomed to the light. Anger pulsed in his face—a living, breathing entity that made her heart tick faster. “Why are you so angry?”
“You weren’t in bed,” he said tersely. “I didn’t know where you were.”
He’d thought she’d left. Again. The realization wrote itself across her brain in a dazed discovery that had her studying those hot, furious eyes. She’d known instinctively that walking out on Lorenzo hadn’t been the right thing to do, but she hadn’t been equipped with the emotional maturity at twenty-three to handle the destruction they had wrought. Instead she had left Lorenzo alone to face the fallout of their marriage while she’d spent a month in the Caribbean with her grandmother. She’d never quite forgiven herself for it.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, reminding herself he had things to be angry about, too. “For leaving like that. I didn’t handle it the right way. I did what I thought was necessary at the time. I needed to find myself—to discover who I was. But it wasn’t right. I know that.”
He reached for the top button of his shirt, eyes on hers. “And did you succeed? Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes.” She laced her fingers together, eyes dropping to the sapphire that blazed on her finger. “I found me.”
“And who is she?”
“The true me,” she said quietly. “The one who spends her evenings with a sketch pad beside the bed, who gets to get up every morning and make those ideas into reality, tells a story someone might find beautiful. That’s what I love, Lorenzo. That’s when I am at peace.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then finished unbuttoning his shirt. She told herself to look away as he stripped it off, but her sleepy, hazy brain, her senses, still filled with the scent of him, the parts of her that still craved him like a drug demanded she watch. Absorb every lean, cut line he exposed, angling down to the V that disappeared into his belt line.
Heat lifting to her face, she lay back against the pillows. It didn’t matter how many times she’d seen Lorenzo naked, it still had the ability to fluster her beyond reason.
Seeking to distract herself, she voiced the one question her still unguarded brain needed to know as she lay staring at the ceiling. “Those women you talked about...did you sleep with them?”
* * *
Lorenzo balled up his T-shirt and tossed it in the hamper, struggling to get his anger under control. A part of him, the bitter, wounded part that hadn’t been able to enjoy the one woman he had taken to bed during their time apart, while she had apparently found her fiancé more than satisfactory, wanted to see her flinch, hurt. But something stopped him. He thought it might be the knowledge that if he followed through on that desire, it would haunt them forever.
Setting his knee down on the bed, he joined his wife. “I don’t think we should go there,” he said softly. “I said, forward, Angie, not back.”
Her face crumpled. “I want to know.”
A knot formed in his chest. He drew in a breath. Dannazione—he was not the injured party here.
“One,” he said evenly, “and no, I won’t tell you who she is.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t need to know.”
She closed her eyes.
Heat seared his belly. Blood fizzling in his veins, he threw a thigh over his wife’s silk-clad body and caged her in, forearms braced on either side of her head. “Angelina,” he murmured, watching as her eyes fluttered open, “you asked. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget about our friend Byron.”
Her lashes shaded her cheeks. “I didn’t sleep with Byron. We were waiting.”
He rocked back on his heels. “Waiting for what?”
“Until we got married.”
Incredulity that any man would marry a woman without knowing whether they were sexually compatible warred with the infuriating knowledge that she had lied to him.
“And yet you deliberately let me think you’d bedded him,” he murmured. “‘I have no complaints,’ was how I think you put it.”
Her
