She plastered the biggest, fakest smile she could muster to her face. ‘I’ll do my best to buy a dress that is the epitome of elegance.’
‘Rather than rely on your definition of elegance, I will accompany you.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ll clear my schedule for the next few hours. We can leave now.’
* * *
The dress on the mannequin had thin straps and a tight buttercup-yellow bodice that narrowed in a V at the waist. Its skirt fell to the knees at the front, the back flaring down to the ankles like a peacock tail, a riot of reds, yellows and oranges. It was so beautifully designed and cut, so fantastically offbeat that Grace couldn’t help but stare wistfully at it.
Luca appeared by her side with a fawning shop assistant. ‘I have selected the dresses I wish you to try,’ he said in the offhand manner he had adopted since they’d arrived at the exclusive shopping arcade.
Leaving Lily with him, she followed another assistant into the plush changing room.
He’d selected four dresses. Like the others she had already paraded herself in, they were all in varying shades of beige. If there was one colour she loathed, it was beige. She remembered on one of their previous, happier shopping trips she had regaled him for a good twenty minutes about why beige was so nondescript it didn’t deserve to be called a colour. Even in her darkest days she would never have contemplated wearing it.
In their marriage’s first incarnation, he had made her feel like a princess whenever they went shopping together, never caring if her preferences were a little offbeat, his only wish for her to feel confident and happy in whatever she chose. This time he dismissed each of her humiliating parades in front of him with a dismissive sweep of his eyes, his attention taken with the fawning shop assistant, who at one point he permitted to hold Lily.
The spike of jealousy that pierced into her chest was so acute she had to fight the urge to rip her child from the assistant’s arms.
‘Lily will need a bottle soon,’ she finally snapped when displaying the fourth dress for him. ‘Will this one do?’
He fixed cold eyes on her. ‘I think it is highly suitable.’
‘Great.’ She bestowed him with a saccharine smile and sashayed back into the changing room. Of all the dresses she had tried on, this one was the greatest antithesis to style. It resembled something her grandmother would wear to a wedding.
She had no choice but to suck it up. She would rather die than be parted from her daughter.
Once the dress was packaged and Luca had paid, he led them to a bustling café for a late lunch.
‘Can’t we go straight home?’ Grace asked, in no mood to spend any more time with him. In three days they would be going on an overnight trip to Florence for the blasted party. She was going to be stuck with him for at least twenty-four hours.
‘You’re the one who said Lily needed another feed.’
Naturally, Lily chose that moment to start grizzling.
Without exchanging another word between them, they ordered. While they waited for their meals, a waiter was dispatched to heat Lily’s bottle.
‘Why do you not breastfeed?’ Luca asked, finally breaking the silence between them.
Rocking Lily on her shoulder, she stared at him. ‘Why?’
‘It surprises me. I assumed you would want to.’
His accurate assumption turned her stomach. In the early days of their marriage they had agreed that having a baby would be something to embark on in the future. Grace had only been twenty-three. There had been plenty of time. Selfishly, they had wanted to enjoy each other first. Even so, she had become rather slapdash about taking her contraceptive pill.
‘Life happens.’
His eyes hardened. ‘Considering I have already missed so much of her life, it is only fair that you fill in the blanks.’
She met his gaze. ‘You think?’
He leaned forward. ‘I want to know everything about our child. Everything. In due course you will tell me, but for now you can start with why you did not breastfeed.’
Grace was interrupted from glaring at him when the waiter returned with Lily’s bottle.
‘Well?’ Luca said, impatient, once the waiter had left them.
‘I couldn’t breastfeed,’ she said flatly, shifting Lily’s position and putting the teat in her mouth. ‘The midwives wanted to help but they were too busy. Nothing we tried worked. I was exhausted, Lily was hungry...’ She shrugged. ‘In the end they had to discharge me because they needed the bed, so Lily and I went home and onto formula milk.’
‘Just think,’ he said, his voice musing but his eyes like a frozen winter night. ‘If you’d had your husband there to take the burden off you, the outcome might have been different.’
‘You’d love to think that, wouldn’t you?’ She shook her head with a grimace. ‘The big hero riding to the rescue of his wife’s underperforming breasts. Tell me,’ she continued, ignoring the throbbing pulse in his temple, which always meant danger, ‘how exactly would you have helped? Unless biology has advanced to allow you to lactate, I don’t see what possible help you could have given me.’
‘I would have been there for both of you. I would have taken care of Lily so you could sleep and recover. Who was there for you, Grace? When you gave birth to our child, who was there for you? Who was there to help you recover?’
Cheeks burning, she gazed down at her guzzling baby.
He leaned forward again. ‘You can justify it all you want but you made the first three months of Lily’s life an unnecessary struggle for you both.’
She turned her head and stared pointedly at their bodyguards who were sitting at the table next to them. ‘Our freedom from you and from them made the struggles necessary. And for all your talk about “being there” for us, don’t think it’s escaped my attention that you haven’t held her yet. Not once. While I’ve spent the morning acting as a prancing clothes horse, you’ve spent your time flirting with the shop assistants.’
‘You sound jealous.’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘There is nothing more unattractive than a jealous wife.’
‘And there’s nothing more unattractive than a married man flirting with another woman in front of his wife and baby.’
‘I was not flirting—’
‘And you can’t expect me to believe Sicilian women don’t get jealous,’ she continued, deliberately talking over him. ‘How would your mother have reacted if your father had flirted with younger women?’
‘She would have pulled his testicles off with her fingernails.’ He smiled coldly. ‘But my father adored her, so he never needed or wanted a mistress.’
The waiter arrived with their steaming plates of pasta, suppressing her urge to punch Luca in the face.
