by Tara Pammi
He couldn’t be selfish. Her commitment to their marriage, to him, it was more than he’d ever expected to have in life. She was more than he’d ever expected to have. “There’s nothing to it but that you go. Si, it will be hard not to see each other for that long but I... I’m going nowhere. Our life together is going nowhere.
“Just don’t...fall in love with some guy on this expedition.” The words fell away before he could prevent them. He cringed at how pathetic and insecure he sounded. But there was no arresting that chain of thought. He pulled her left hand up, the diamond winking at him. “Remember that you belong to me, cara mia.”
Brown eyes glared at him through thick lashes. “It’s not funny, Dante. Do you really not trust me?”
He rubbed his thumb over her cheek, compulsively. “Of course I trust you. You’re just...” He blew out a big breath. Damn it, he’d always been strong and he needed to be strong for her in this. He couldn’t use her affection for him to sway her. She would come to hate him for it and he couldn’t bear that.
“Eighteen months is a long time!” He slammed his head back. That was the exact opposite of what he meant to say.
“Exactemente!” Instead of looking upset, she nodded her head fiercely. “I was hoping you’d say that. I don’t think I can go that long without seeing you. No, I know I can’t. These two-and three-week trips to Tokyo have been bad enough.” She nuzzled into his neck, and he felt the flick of her tongue at his throat. The bite of her teeth at his pulse. He hardened instantly against the soft curve of her bottom and she groaned. “I...was hoping you’d come with me.”
Dios mio, when she moved like that, all he could think of was to be inside her. Eighteen months was a long time, his brain repeated the thing on a loop. It took him a couple of minutes to process her last sentence. “What?”
She pulled back so that she could look into his eyes. “You know, like a long honeymoon. Except instead of luxury hotels as you’re used to, it will be tents or huts or whatever accommodation they give us. We wouldn’t have to be apart at all. I checked with my agent and his team and they said spouses are welcome. Of course they’ll expect you to pitch in, but I don’t see that as a problem. That way eighteen months will just be a breeze and then we can return—”
“Stop, Alisha! Just...stop talking.” He felt as if she’d knocked him down.
She turned those big eyes on him. Expectant. Wide. Full of hope and happiness.
But nothing could stop his answer. “I can’t just take eighteen months off. I run a billion-dollar company.”
“I know. I mean I’m sure you can stay in contact with your teams even in the remotest areas. The voting shares have been officially transferred so you don’t have to worry about a coup or any such thing. Izzy told me how Uncle Nitin tried to sabotage the Japanese deal and how that forced you to finally put him on a leash. So he’s not a worry anymore either.”
Dante stiffened. “What Nitin almost got away with proves that I need to be at the helm. I can’t just walk away.”
She leaped out of his arms, as if being near him was unbearable. Shaking her head, clutching her midriff. As if he was supposed to agree instantly to her madcap idea. “No one’s asking you to quit Matta Steel. I don’t think what you do is easy or small. I know that thousands of livelihoods depend on the company. If you’re willing to at least give this thought, I’m sure it’ll be a matter of snapping your fingers to have the technology to support it ready.”
Dante paced the floor, feeling as if there was some dark force coming at him but he couldn’t do anything to avoid it. As if he was losing her, but there was nothing he could do to hold on to her.
What she was suggesting was...unthinkable. The company was everything to him. “I can’t go away for eighteen months, Ali. I just can’t. What you’re suggesting is childish and... I understand you’re excited and got carried away but it’s not that simple.”
“Ask me not to go then. This is a great opportunity to build my career, to bring exposure to my work, yes. But at the end of the day, it is only one way. Ask me to give it up for you, for us, for our marriage and I’ll do it. I’ll happily stay, Dante. Please, just ask me. Demand it of me.”
“No! Don’t do that, not for me. I don’t deserve it. Damn it, Ali... I can’t give you anything in return for such a sacrifice.” The words piled out of his mouth, a strange tightening in his throat. It felt as if she was cutting his very breath off. Felling him at every turn. Like his heart was in her hand and she was fisting it tight.
“It’s not a sacrifice, Dante. That’s what you don’t seem to understand. I love you. I want to spend my life with you. I want to make our marriage a priority. I just... Don’t cut me down at every turn. Please, Dante.”
He didn’t want her sacrifice. It would choke him for the rest of their lives. “I can’t ask you to set your career aside for me. For us.”
* * *
Hurt made her stomach so tight that Ali felt as if she couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t even going to consider any option she presented. He refused to take a step toward her, and he forbade her from taking one toward him. She pulled at her hair, fear beating a tattoo in her veins. “So how does this work then? What if, after this trip, I go on another one? How will this marriage work then?”
“You’re asking me hypothetical questions to which I have no answers. Matta Steel is my lifeblood. I can’t shirk my responsibilities. I can’t risk something I have given decades to.”
“Won’t or can’t, Dante?” she said, anger coming to her rescue. “What’s the point of being a bloody billionaire if you can’t even be your own boss? What’s the point of this marriage if we are together when it’s convenient for your career and mine? When you won’t let me give myself to it completely and neither will you? You would have us live in this strange...limbo just because you fear love?”
A cold frost filled his eyes, turning his gray eyes unbearably distant. Even cruel. He was a stranger again. A man she hated. A man who had not an ounce of tenderness in him. A man who cared about nothing but the company. “Don’t make this small thing between us into a transaction, Alisha. Don’t twist this into some sort of big, romantic gesture that I’m supposed to do for you to prove what you mean to me.
“You don’t get to dictate how this marriage works. Now or in the future. I can’t just step away from the company I’ve given everything to, from the role for which I married you in the first place. I’m not my father. I never will be.”
She nodded, suddenly everything so clear to her naively wishful heart. “But I’m not asking you to make a big, romantic gesture. I’m not asking you to give up Matta Steel. I’m just...”
It wasn’t that he wasn’t even giving her idea a chance. It was the rigidity with which he did it. He’d always draw careful, clear lines between them. Always be a little out of her reach. Always decide what their relationship would be and would not be. Push him a little and he trampled her. Demand a little more than he wanted to give and he would crush her heart.
God, she’d been so stupid. She’d imagined them in some tent under the stars in some remote location, weaving an even stronger bond for life. She’d imagined having him all to herself. She’d built so many castles in the air.
The idea of walking away from their life together before it had even begun made her chest ache. “No. You won’t even give this thing between us a chance. God, Dante, you don’t even know how to take that I’m happy and what I’m willing to give. You’re so terrified that I’ll demand some price for not going. For simply loving you. What do I have to do to prove that I won’t? How long will I have to worry what I say or do will make you think I’m asking something you can’t give. That I’m asking too much of you. It will always be me reaching out. Always be me waiting for you to love me, maybe just a little.”
“I can’t... I won’t be manipulated in this relationship, Alisha.”
“Then ther
e’s nothing more to be said except goodbye.”
“Ali—”
“I’m going back to the mansion. Don’t come after me, please. Not tonight. I... I’ll leave soon and it will provide you with the perfect excuse to tell your precious media. And don’t worry, your reputation will be pristine, just like always. I won’t tell the world I fell in love with a man who truly doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”
Every instinct in her clamored to wait for him. To let him catch her, to let him hold her, to let him chase away the pain in her heart. But he was the one breaking it. He was the one throwing it away, the one who didn’t realize what her love truly meant. He would always measure it like a transaction, always think of it as a weakness.
She had put her world, her heart, at his feet. And he had simply kicked it away.
So she held her head high and went back to the elevator.
She’d lived alone before, she’d somehow made it through, and she would do it this time too. Even if it felt like the pieces of her were too many ever to mend again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SHE WAS GONE.
She’d been gone for over a month.
First, she left the flat, bunking down one floor below him, in the studio he had had built for her. Because he’d been worried about what trouble she would get herself into, and he wanted to keep an eye on her. Because he’d thought Alisha was a liability he was taking on. And he would need to do damage control.
The first couple of days in the flat without her had been his first glimpse of hell. Memories of her seemed to have been absorbed into the very walls, the very fabric of his home.
He’d lived alone for countless years and yet the silence now had a different, haunting quality. So Dante had taken to sleeping at his suite at work.
Then she’d walked up to the flat one evening when he’d returned for a change of clothes.
Clad in that off-the-shoulder loose sweater and some kind of leggings, she’d looked so excruciatingly lovely that it had been a kick to his gut. “You cut your hair,” he’d said, unable or unwilling to keep a possessive tone out of his voice.
She hadn’t even called him on it. Fingering the wispy ends that framed her delicate face and highlighted those sharp cheekbones, she’d simply said, “It will be easier this way. I won’t have time to wash and blow-dry.”
And then she’d told him that she was packing up all her work, leaving it with her agent, and that she was leaving the studio too.
That all that open space he’d had custom-built for her, premium real estate in London, was free again, to do whatever he wanted with. He’d been so angry with her.
He had still not understood how she could make a mountain of a molehill, how she was using a small difference of opinion as an excuse to turn her back on her vows, to walk out of their life together.
It wasn’t as if he had asked her to turn down that opportunity. It wasn’t as if he had told her that he would not wait for her.
No, he hadn’t begged, it wasn’t in his makeup to do so. But, even in the fury that had gone through him, he’d said he was okay with the kind of life she had described for their future. That even if she chose to go on expedition after expedition, to build her career, to do what she loved, to follow her passion, that it was okay with him. That he would always be in London, that he would always have a place for her in his life.
She looked as if he had swung an arm at her. As if he was speaking in a different language. As if he was the one who didn’t know the meaning of compromise.
It wasn’t what he wanted out of their life together, it wasn’t the picture he had of their marriage. He didn’t want her to go off for long months at a time, leaving him behind. But, still, he had taken that step.
She’d looked like another word from him would blow her away, like a fluttering leaf, but she hadn’t cried. Funnily enough, he would have felt better if she had cried. Instead, the emptiness in her eyes, the sheer absence of that light that was her spirit, had terrified him.
And then she moved into her papa’s home. He knew she’d been there for three weeks before flying to New York to meet the philanthropist’s team. He knew that in just a few days, she would leave for wherever it was that they were going.
Izzy had the information about their destination. He’d ordered her to get as much information as possible from Alisha, but had forbidden her to tell him where she was going. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know in which part of the world his wife was.
But even after a month of her being gone, he was surprised at how empty everything felt each evening when he came home. He wasn’t some romantic fool, some naive idiot in love to expect some kind of miracle to happen. He didn’t expect her to be there waiting for him, in tank top and shorts, waiting to tease him, torment him, to love him.
Dios mio, how she had loved him. How she had touched him and kissed him and taken him inside her.
But every night he missed her. He missed her in his bed. He missed her in the kitchen. He missed her in his heart.
So he’d done what he’d always done to protect himself when life dealt him a setback. He’d reminded himself he had what he had always wanted. He was the CEO of Matta Steel.
He had thrown himself into the Japanese merger, worked like a demon for eighteen, twenty hours a day, hitting the bed only when sheer exhaustion claimed his limbs. When he was so brain-dead that thoughts of Ali couldn’t torment him. He’d waited to feel that knife edge of desire to wane. Waited for the day when he would wake up and not reach for her. Waited for him to stop expecting her to walk in. Waited to stop holding his breath for her to kiss him, claim him. Like only she did.
Today, this morning, was not that morning.
Tonight, it seemed, was not that night. Grabbing the keys to her studio, he took the elevator to the floor below. He had a feeling he had left sanity behind a few days ago. That he was on the very edge that he’d been determined all his life to avoid. That despite his every safeguard, despite him breaking her heart, Alisha had brought him to his knees.
He pushed open the door to the studio and turned on the industrial lights. Bare walls and empty floors greeted him.
There was no trace of her in the studio, just as she’d left no trace in the flat. A strange fever gripping him, he walked around until he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. And that was when he saw it, one lone print, framed, blown up, sitting against the far wall, covered by brown paper and tied together with string.
He was so desperate for a glimpse of her work, for a glimpse of her, that he realized he was tearing through the paper with no respect for her work. Breathing hard, he forced himself to slow down. Slowly, he removed the brown paper, picked up the frame and brought it to where he could see it properly.
What he uncovered stole the remaining breath from his lungs.
It was him.
His picture. The one she must have taken before he realized that she was taking pictures of him.
Before he’d been even completely awake. When he’d still been in that moment between sleep and wakefulness, when all his defenses were down, when his heart was as free and light as it had been when he’d been a small boy, loved by his parents.
It had been in that moment when he’d automatically reached out for her, searching for her. She’d zoomed in on his face at the second before he’d found that she wasn’t there next to him. And somehow, she’d captured everything he felt for her but hadn’t even known.
Such love, pure and complete, such anticipation, such expectation, such utter trust, that somehow when he reached for her, and when he found her, his life would be complete. That he would be complete.
What had she felt when she had developed the print? Why hadn’t she come to him with it, why hadn’t she shown him what he’d felt and demanded that he acknowledge it? Why hadn’t she—?
It will always b
e me reaching out. Always be me waiting for you to love me, maybe just a little.
Dios mio, she had begged him to give them a chance. She’d asked him for one capsule of time in his entire life and she had promised to give him all of hers. All the moments, all of herself. And he had said no. He’d pushed her away. He’d called her childish, dramatic, he’d told her she was twisting things.
God, he didn’t deserve her.
It wasn’t his father’s fault or his mother’s fault, it was his own. He had had love like he had never known before and he had pushed her away. Cristo, he’d actually put the company before his wife.
She was right, he was a coward. He had known in his heart that she was everything to him. That if she persisted, she could demand his very soul and he would put it at her feet.
I will not be my father.
God, he’d even given voice to his biggest fear.
From the beginning, she had floored him with her generous heart. She’d captured him with her surrender and Dante found he had nowhere to go, no recourse but to tell the woman that stole his heart that he loved her.
That all the riches in the world didn’t mean anything without her. That for her, he would give up a hundred companies, he would give up everything.
She was everything to him.
* * *
New York in December was like a page from a fairy tale.
White blankets of snow covered every building, every street, wherever Ali looked.
Christmas lights sparkled everywhere—on buildings, skyscrapers, trees, awnings of tall apartment buildings, reflected brightly on the white snow-covered ground.
But she’d never believed in fairy tales, not even as a child. Maybe that was what came of living with a single parent, of being the product of a failed marriage.
Even when the city was at its most beautiful, its most brilliant, Ali still saw the broken-down buildings, the cheap housing and poverty, a sharp contrast to the glittering beauty and opulence. She loved walking through the different boroughs, and she’d been going through the rolls on her camera like it was candy. It was such an interesting landscape. So much life to see. To capture.