and his mouth went hard. To her considerable surprise, he looked away first. ‘Is the house yours?’ he asked, almost as if it were a random question plucked from the air.
‘Mine and the bank’s.’
Her stock answer, but she should have expected the sudden stabbing quality of his stare. ‘If you needed money you could have asked me. Through your lawyer if necessary. I told him—’
‘I don’t want your money. I have a good job and I can afford the mortgage.’
‘Mortgage!’
He made it sound like a dirty word. Roxane smiled thinly. ‘It’s what we little people have when we need to buy a house.’
‘You have no need to buy a house. I can give you anything you need—hell, I did give you everything!’
‘Not everything,’ she said softly, sadly. Not the one thing she needed above all.
Furious, he said, ‘I loved you!’
She wouldn’t even think about what that past tense meant. ‘I know. I know you did. In your own way.’
He thrust a hand savagely over his hair, the frown turning to a scowl. ‘I gave you my heart and my soul, everything that was in me. I don’t know any other way.’
Of course he didn’t. Maurizio Riccioni never had done a thing in his life except in his own inimitable, confident, and usually hugely successful way. Why should he have ever imagined that his marriage, his wife, might not succumb to that combination of self-assured charm and incisive decision-making?
Almost compassionately she said, ‘It wasn’t all your fault. I was too young, and I should have said no when you asked me to marry you.’
‘You did,’ he reminded her.
Yes, she had, the first time he asked her, showing a shred of common sense. But her opposition hadn’t lasted long. She’d soon had her fears and scruples overturned one by one under the onslaught of Zito’s clever brain, unswerving will, and devastating kisses. He had even talked her parents round, despite their misgivings about their only daughter marrying at nineteen.
He’d reluctantly waited until she turned twenty, and on her birthday she’d stood beside him while they exchanged their solemn vows in the cathedral in Melbourne, with all the trimmings and before several hundred guests.
But marriage was more than a frothy white dress and a champagne reception. And theirs hadn’t stood the test.
‘I should have stuck to my refusal,’ she admitted.
‘Thank you.’ His voice held an acrid note. ‘Sometimes I wish I had beaten you.’
‘Zito!’
He managed to look both shame-faced and impatient. ‘You know I’d never hurt you, or any woman! But it would give me a reason for your desertion—something that made sense.’
He started prowling round the room again, stopping at the small desk that she’d found in one of the few remaining Ponsonby junk shops that didn’t have pretensions to being an antique store. When she’d sanded and polished it the grain of the timber had come up nicely.
Zito took a hand from his pocket and idly shifted aside a ‘personal invitation’ to subscribe to a book club at a ‘once-only’ price, revealing the envelope underneath.
‘Those are private!’ Not that she had anything in particular to hide. There was only more junk mail, bills and a letter from a cousin in England.
He looked at her unseeingly, his finger stilled on the sheet of paper, then lifted his hand, looking down again. Finally he turned fully. ‘Ms Roxane Fabian?’
Why did she feel guilty? Roxane shrugged.
‘You told me you were happy to take my name,’ he said, his voice thickening, ‘when we got married.’
‘I didn’t mind…it was no big deal.’
‘It was to me. A very big deal.’
Just as reverting to her maiden name had become important for her. She supposed it was symbolic. ‘An ownership thing?’ she accused, trying for mild amusement.
He controlled his temper, covering it with a hard laugh. ‘If you thought that, then you were too young.’
Or too stupid, his tone implied. ‘You didn’t think so…then.’
His reaction was barely noticeable, but Roxane was so attuned to his every tiny movement she saw the stiffening of his muscles, the infinitesimal recoil. She’d pierced the armour of his self-confidence, however minutely.
The elation she felt disconcerted her. She had never deliberately set out to wound Zito. Of course she’d known he would be upset and angry when she left him, but she’d had no thought of revenge or punishment, only a dire need for self-preservation.
In her long and probably incoherent farewell letter she had assured him that she didn’t hate him, and he shouldn’t blame himself for what he couldn’t help. She had tried not to hurt him any more than the simple fact of her departure inevitably would.
Maybe the hurt had gone deeper than she’d expected. He’d had more than twelve months to get over it, but his jabbing little remarks weren’t accidental.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect you’d understand.’
‘Was there another man?’ he asked abruptly. And looked around again, as if searching for evidence. ‘Have you left him too?’
Roxane’s temper snapped. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ He couldn’t conceive that she’d just wanted to be alone, that she could manage on her own? ‘Another man, after living with you for nearly three years?’
At her scorching tone he looked arrested, almost confused. She added, ‘And how dare you suggest I was unfaithful?’
Her anger seemed to give him pause. He shot a look at her from under his brows. ‘For months I tortured myself with the thought…’
It hadn’t even occurred to Roxane that he would think that. How could he have…? This was further proof that he’d never really known her, never bothered to comprehend her deepest needs. A small ache shifted from somewhere near her heart and lodged in her throat, stifling her voice. ‘You were wrong.’
A lifting of his shoulder, a tilt of his head, seemed to indicate it was not important. But of course it was. His pride would have suffered, and he had a surfeit of that. If the truth were known, pride was probably the real reason he had refrained from sending someone looking for her, rather than respect for her stated wishes.
‘You broke your other marriage vows,’ he said. ‘Why not that one?’
‘It’s different!’
‘How?’
The question was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, you were wrong,’ she reiterated.
He gave her
