A Debt Paid in the Marriage Bed (Mills & Boon Modern)

by Jennifer Hayward

  “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. My father worships the ground my mother walks on and rightly so. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to watch your father disrespect your mother like that when she has stood by his side the entire time.”

  Her dark lashes swept over her cheeks. “You see what everyone else sees. The glittering, perfect world of the Carmichaels. You don’t see the dysfunction on the inside.”

  “So tell me about it,” he countered. “Help me understand.”

  “They are private family issues. I would be betraying confidences if I did.”

  “You are my wife. You can confide in me.”

  Her mouth formed a stubborn, straight line. An oath left his lips. “This is one of those areas we need to fix, Angelina. How can we make this marriage work if there are big pieces of you I don’t know?”

  “Like those big pieces of you I don’t know?” Her eyes flashed, a storm rising in their gray-blue depths. “You can’t press a button and summon emotional intimacy. Trust. It doesn’t work like that. It takes time and effort. If you want that from me, you have to lead by example.”

  Heat seared his belly. He knew she was right. Knew he’d been operating on automatic pilot in the years after Lucia’s death, cauterizing his emotions, refusing to feel. But it wasn’t the easiest thing to admit.

  “Bene,” he conceded harshly, opening his arms wide. “Consider me an open book, then. No subject is off-limits. Anything is fair game. But we are going to learn how to communicate—in ways that do not involve the bedroom.”

  The stare she leveled at him rattled every nerve ending. Made him ache to resort to tried-and-true methods. But he wasn’t going there. He was making good on the promise he’d just given her.

  “I think,” he said evenly, deciding a change of subject was in order, “we should host a party in the Hamptons over the long weekend. Marc Bavaro, the CEO of the Belmont chain, has a place there. I’d like to try and soften him up a bit. Get a few outstanding issues resolved. It would also provide an ideal opportunity to formally announce our reconciliation given the gossip that’s running rampant.”

  She muttered something under her breath. His brow lifted. “Scusa?”

  “I said to put your stamp on me. That’s why you want to have this party.”

  “I already did that,” he murmured, eyes on hers. “Why would I need to make a public display of ownership when we both know the truth?”

  A flush stained her cheeks. “Go to hell, Lorenzo.”

  “I’ve already been there, cara. At least this time there will be a great deal of pleasure along with the pain.”

  Her eyes locked with his. A long, loaded moment passed as they took a step into uncharted territory. Lashes lowered, his wife studied him, as if deciding whether to continue the charge.

  Her chin dropped. “Everyone’s calendars will be full on the Labor Day weekend.”

  “They’ll be doing the rounds. What’s one more stop? Speculation about us alone will pack them in.”

  She gave him a pointed look as if to say that was exactly the issue. “I have to finish the pieces for Alexander so he can match them up with the show. If something doesn’t work, I’ll need to come up with an alternative.”

  “It’s one weekend. There’s nothing pressing between now and then. Work around it.” He pointed his whiskey glass at her. “This is where we learn to compromise, Angie. You give, I give—that’s how it works.”

  Her mouth flattened. “Fine.”

  “Good. Gillian will plan it, you will contribute your guest list and the staff in the Hamptons will execute. All you need to do is show up.”

  Her expression remained frozen. He sought the patience he was not known for. “I expect you to invite your family. Whatever’s going on between you and your parents, you need to fix it. This will be a good opportunity to do so.”

  “No.” The word flew out of her mouth—swift and vehement. He lifted a brow. “I went to see them last week,” she explained. “They aren’t in the Hamptons much anymore in the summer. There’s no point in inviting them.”

  “I’m sure they’ll make the effort to come. It will look strange if they’re not there given I do business with your father.” He took a sip of his whiskey. “Speaking of parents, mine will be visiting the week after the party. They’ll stay at their apartment, but we’ll host them here for dinner. Decide on a date with Gillian that works for you.”

  Her face fell further, if that was possible. “What did you tell them? About us?”

  “That we’ve decided to make this marriage work. That we made a decision in haste at a time when we were both in pain and now we are rectifying it.”

  “So you chose to leave out the part where you’re bullying me into becoming your wife again?”

  “I prefer to think of it as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Motivation for us to make this marriage work.” He leveled his gaze on her combative face. “We made a deal, a commitment to each other, Angelina. I meant it when I said your heart and soul have to be in it, but I’m not so unfeeling that I don’t understand you need time to adjust. After that settling-in period, however, I expect an attitude adjustment, because this is not how it’s going to be.”

  * * *

  An attitude adjustment? Angie was still fuming after she and Lorenzo had shared a tense, mostly silent dinner on the terrace, where she ate little and talked less. It had been so generous of him to concede she needed time and space after what he’d done to her. Clearly she should be falling into line, looking forward to spending more time with his PA than she did her husband.

  Her mouth twisted. I meant it when I said your heart and soul have to be in it. He didn’t even have a heart...or a soul for that matter. What would he know about it?

  Lorenzo was ensconced in his home office to finish some work, so she elected to have a hot bath and go to bed. Constanza had unpacked all her things in the light, airy master bedroom, with its gorgeous vistas of the park, the housekeeper’s usual ruthless efficiency putting everything back as if she’d never left.

  It was eerie to pull a nightgown from a puddle of silk in a drawer and untangle her hair with the pearl-backed brush that sat on the dresser in the exact same place it used to be. On edge, her nerves in disarray, she headed for a rose-scented bath in the Italian-tiled en suite, immersing herself up to her ears in hot, cathartic bubbles.

  All sarcasm aside, she was relieved with her husband’s acknowledgment they needed time—that he didn’t expect her to jump into bed with him as seamlessly as her brush had landed back on the dresser. But clearly, she thought, stomach knotting, given that her things were where they were, he expected her to share that bed with him. The thought made her search desperately for something else to focus on, like why he had rose-scented bath bubbles in here.

  Either Constanza had been thoughtful, as she was wont to be, or they had belonged to one of his lovers. Because surely, the tabloids couldn’t be right? Surely her highly sexual husband, who’d thought he was divorced, had had other women?

  You haunt me, Angelina, every time I’m with another woman... Her heart sank, a numb feeling settling over her. He’d pretty much admitted he had. Lorenzo wouldn’t have spent two years pining after her as she had him. Going dateless until Byron wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  The thought of her husband with other women lanced her insides. She sank farther into the bubbles and closed her eyes. They had been so happy in the beginning. That’s what hurt the most. What might have been.

  After Lorenzo had accepted the consequences of what a broken condom had produced, he’d submitted willingly to her mother’s ostentatious society wedding—what he’d considered a politically advantageous match, she suspected. She’d been too crazy about him to care.

  They’d spent the first months of their marriage in a pheromone-induced haze, tuning
out the world. In Lorenzo’s arms, her worries about why he’d married her had faded to black. He’d hungered after her with an intensity that had made her feel as if she’d been the most important thing on the planet to him, their addictive obsession with each other inescapable, unassailable. The wounded pieces of her, the parts that had been convinced she was unlovable after a childhood devoid of emotion, had begun to heal. For the first time in her life, she’d felt whole, as if she was worthy of love.

  And how could she not? Having her husband focus on her, choose to engage, had been like having the most powerful force in the universe directed at her. Suddenly all the pieces of her life had been falling into place and happiness had seemed attainable after years of wondering if it even existed.

  Until reality had interceded—one of Lorenzo’s big, flashy deals had come along, he’d immersed himself in it and their cozy cocoon had become her husband’s insanely busy life.

  She’d 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 eyes filled with an icy blue heat. “You blackmailed me back into this marriage
, Lorenzo. If you think I’m going to apologize, think again.”

  What he thought was that he had no idea what to think. Knowing his wife remained his and only his satisfied him on a level he couldn’t even begin to articulate. That she might be as haunted by him as he was by her...

  He traced his gaze over her lush, vulnerable mouth. Across the enticing stretch of bare skin the askew neckline of her nightie revealed, down over the smooth flesh of her thighs where the silk had ridden up...the dusky shadow between her legs. Unbearable temptation. Hard as rock, he ached for her.

  “Get off me.” His wife drew his attention back up to her flushed face.

  His lip curled. “What’s the matter, mia cara? You afraid I’m going to penetrate those defenses you cling so desperately to? That make you feel so safe?”

  A defiant look back. “Just like yours do?”

  “Ah, but I am promising to open up.” A lazy smile twisted his lips. “I’m a caterpillar poised for transformation. You get to come out of your cocoon, too, and try your wings.”

  “Very funny.” She pushed at his chest. “Off.”

  He dropped his mouth to her ear. “An open book, Angelina. That’s what you and I are going to be. The brutal truth and nothing but. We might just survive this little experiment if we can offer each other that.”

  He levered himself off his sexy, furious wife and headed for the bathroom. It occurred to him, then, as he stepped under a hot shower, his emotions a tangled mess, that he might have underestimated the power his wife still held over him. That both of them might end up getting burned before this was over.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ANGIE SPENT THE WEEK leading up to the Hamptons party attempting to avoid any further confrontations between her and Lorenzo. That combustible scene in their bedroom had convinced her engaging with her husband was not a good strategy. Avoidance was. And with Lorenzo immersed in his big deal, it hadn’t proven difficult. It was almost like old times.