Thank you. And thank you for putting me next to her.’ She adjusted her hold on Lily and looked back at him. The rising sunlight was slowly dispersing the dusky grey, her features becoming clearer by the passing minute. ‘I admit, when you said I was to have the blue room, I thought it was deliberate because you knew how much I hated it. It took a while for me to remember it adjoined another room.’
‘She is sleeping in my old cot,’ he said. ‘My mother got the staff to take it out of hibernation.’
‘I did wonder.’
He should leave; return to his room. Instead he found his eyes transfixed on the feeding baby. His feeding baby. Their feeding baby. A child he and Grace had created together.
A part of him longed to reach over and touch her, to stroke his baby’s face, to hold her to his chest and feel her warmth on his skin, to smell that sweet, innocent scent.
They looked so perfect together. Even Grace could not create a more beautiful picture.
A spike cut through his heart, piercing him, a pain a thousand times stronger than the ache in his shoulder. It took all his strength not to sway with its force.
And there was another ache too, a much baser ache that should not exist for her, not any more.
His sex drive had always been high but Grace was the only woman who had been able to turn him to lava with nothing more than a seductive smile or the flash of a shoulder. To his body, there was no more desirable a woman. Even the curve of her ankle was erotic.
There were times when he would swear she was a sorceress. How else could he explain the hold she had over him, the unquenchable yet ultimately poisonous desire that lived in his blood? Why else had he not grabbed his freedom when he’d had the chance, as any other red-blooded Sicilian man would have done?
But he’d had no time for such pursuits. What with running the estate and his other, newer, business interests, there had been no time for any kind of affair. On top of all that, the main focus of his energies had been spent on tracing Grace. Sex had never crossed his mind.
To discover his libido had reawoken because of her and that he could still respond when she wore nothing but a tatty old dressing gown sickened him. That his fingers ached to lean over and trace the delicate line of her neck, that his lips tingled to press against her...
He dragged his gaze upwards and found her staring at him, the same pained yearning mirroring back at him, her angular cheeks heightened with colour. Then her eyelids snapped a blink and she turned her face away.
Clenching his hands into fists, Luca looked to the door and willed his thundering heart to slow.
The sooner he found himself a lover, the sooner he could be released from the sexual hold she still held on him.
The sooner he stopped thinking about making love to his wife, the better.
‘Write a list of everything you need for you and Lily, and I’ll get someone to get it for you tomorrow.’
Closing the door softly behind him, he went back to his room and fired up his laptop.
There was no way he would be able to get any sleep now.
Work would be his salve, as it had been since Grace disappeared. Work would help focus his attention on the matters that truly deserved it, not the deceptive, heartless bitch he had been foolish enough to marry.
* * *
As Grace tiptoed back into her bedroom from the adjoining nursery there was a rap on the door.
She hurried over and yanked it open, her fingers already flying to her lips.
‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve only just got her down for a nap.’
‘Here’s your passport,’ Luca said without any preamble, extending it to her, making no move to step over the threshold.
Snatching it from his hand, she flipped through it. ‘I did wonder if you would give it back to me.’
‘Why would I want to keep it?’ he said, his top lip curving. ‘You are free to leave whenever you like.’
‘And Lily’s passport?’
‘I will be keeping that.’
She expected nothing less. ‘I suppose it’s pointless asking where, exactly, you will be keeping it?’
‘You presume correctly. Now give me your phone.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t take it from me yesterday.’ Turning her back to him, she grabbed it off her bedside table where it was charging.
‘Today will suffice.’
She passed it to him. ‘I take it you’re going to put a tracker in it.’
‘You’re getting good at this—you assume correctly. If you need to make a call before I get it back to you, use the landline.’
How she hated the coldness of his tone. And how she hated that she hated it.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said with a brittle smile. As he had still not stepped over the threshold she took great delight in shutting the door, quietly, in his face.
The smile dropped. She leaned back against the closed door and crossed her hands over her racing heart.
* * *
Her phone was returned that afternoon by one of the maids. She took it from her gingerly and threw it onto the bed. It felt tainted. The first chance she got, she would buy herself a new pay-as-you-go one.
Purchasing another phone turned out to be trickier than anticipated.
When she felt ready to take Lily on a Sicilian shopping trip two days later, a Mercedes was brought out for her. Three heavies were sitting in it.
The number of her personal ‘guards’ had been increased.
Pushing Lily around Palermo, her gorillas surrounding her, she knew she was onto a lost cause.
Their presence only served to remind her of what she had hated most about her marriage. Before she had opened her eyes to her husband’s true nature, the biggest blot on the marital landscape had been the lack of privacy. Sure, on the estate she could come and go as she pleased, but she had always been aware of hidden cameras, supposedly there for all the Mastrangelos’ protection, watching her every move on the grounds. Outside the estate, she was under constant armed guard. She couldn’t even pop off to buy a paintbrush without one of Luca’s gorillas accompanying her.
She had hated it.
She still hated it, loathed the thought of her daughter growing up in an environment where freedom meant nothing.
Freedom was precious. It was unrealistic and dangerous to expect Lily to have the same levels of freedom she had enjoyed, but, unless she found an escape route, her daughter would never experience what it meant to be a proper, regular child. She would never be able to explore and get into mischief without her parents knowing her every move. She would always be in her father’s eyeline
