Angie nodded. Heart in her mouth, she headed toward her glassy-eyed mother. Her mother glared at her. “Oh, look!” she declared in that far too loud tone. “My daughters are here to cut me off before I say something I shouldn’t. I haven’t, have I, Courtney? We’re just having a nice conversation.”
Courtney Price had a half fascinated, half horrified look on her face. Brilliant column fodder. Angie reached for her mother’s arm. “Actually I have someone I’d like you to meet.”
Her mother yanked back her arm. The force of the movement sent the champagne flying from her glass, splattering the dress of the woman beside her. Paralyzed, Angie stared at the silk dress, then lifted her gaze to the woman’s bemused face. She was the wife of one of Lorenzo’s business acquaintances.
Oh, hell.
Gasps rang out around her. The shocked sounds spurred her into action. Grabbing her mother by the arm, she propelled her through the crowd, people gawking at them as they went. Angry and humiliated, her mother kept up a verbal barrage the whole way.
“It was your fault that happened, hauling me out of there like that.”
Angie kept her mouth shut. Nodding her thanks at the butler who opened the patio door for them, she marched her mother inside and up the stairs toward her parents’ suite, keeping her mother’s weaving steps on course. Where the hell was her father? Somehow this just never seemed to be his job.
Guiding her mother inside her suite, she flicked on the light. Her mother stared at her belligerently, hands on her hips. “All I wanted was to have some fun,” she said, her speech slurred. “All I wanted was to be happy tonight, Angelina. But you won’t even give me that.”
A lump formed in her throat. “You’re an alcoholic, Mother. You can’t drink. Ever.”
“I am fine.” Her mother put her arms out as she lost her balance and weaved to the side. “I would have been fine. I only had a couple of drinks.”
A lie. Angie had heard so many of them, about the drinking, about the pills, about every secret her mother had wanted to hide—it had become her normal state of being.
Her mother headed toward the bar in the lounge. Threw open the door of the fridge. “There’s nothing in there,” Angie said quietly, stomach churning. “You need to go back for treatment, Mother. You know that.”
Her mother swung around. Fear pierced her hazel eyes. “I told Abigail I won’t go back there. Ever. Never again.”
“You need help. Professional help.”
“I won’t go.”
“Yes, you will.” Rage vibrated through her. “You will not destroy all of us in your quest to annihilate yourself. Abigail needs a life. I need a life. You need help.”
“You,” her mother said, fixing her with a vicious look. “You who don’t care. You who turned your back on me and walked away.”
“Because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Because you were taking me apart piece by piece, Mother.”
Her mother’s gaze darkened. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “I don’t feel well.”
Angie moved fast, sliding an arm around her and helping her to the bathroom. When her mother had upended the contents of her stomach multiple times, Angie cleaned her up and put her to bed.
“I’m sorry.” Her mother started to cry, her transformation from angry to sad happening with its usual rapid-fire swiftness. “I’m so sorry.”
Heat burned the back of Angelina’s eyes, the pieces of her heart she’d finally healed shattering all over again. “I know.” She clasped her mother’s hand in hers, hot tears escaping her stinging eyes and sliding down her face. “I am, too.”
For everything. For all of it.
Turning off the light, she let herself out of the room. Tears blinding her vision, knees shaking, she slid down the other side of the door until she sat on the floor, hands pressed to her face.
She couldn’t do this again.
CHAPTER FIVE
“ANGELINA?” LORENZO PULLED to a halt when he saw his wife sitting in the hallway, legs drawn up, head in her hands. Her quiet sobs tore loose a piece of his heart.
He squatted down beside her. “What’s wrong?”
No response. He tipped her face up to his. “Angelina,” he said more urgently, “what happened?”
Her beautiful blue eyes were red-stained, unfocused. Heart jamming in his throat, he cupped her jaw. “Dio, Angie. Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
She shook her head as if to clear it. Lifted a hand to push her hair out of her face. “I—” Another tear streaked down her cheek.
He cursed. Slid his arms beneath her knees and back and scooped her off the floor. Carrying her down the hallway to their suite, he shouldered the door open and set her on the sofa in the sitting room. Her beautiful red dress was wet, stained with something. Champagne, he assumed, from the story he’d heard.
He sat down beside her. “What the hell happened out there?”
She frowned. Rubbed a palm over her brow. “I’m so sorry about Magdalena’s dress. Did Abigail smooth it over?”
“Magdalena’s dress will survive. What the hell happened with your mother, Angie?”
Her gaze slid away from his. “She had a bit too much to drink.”
His brow rose. “She was drunk. Blotto. She could hardly stand up. I’d say it was more than a bit too much.”
She bit her lip. “So she was drunk. It happens. I apologize for the scene she caused.”
“I don’t care about the scene.” A flash of heat consumed him. “I just found my wife crumpled in a ball in the hallway crying her eyes out... Dio mio, Angelina, what is going on?”
Her chin dipped. “It’s nothing. I’m just...emotional. It’s been a tough night.”
He pulled in a breath. Counted to five. “You can either tell me why you’ve been such a disaster tonight, what is going on with your family, or I will go outside and ask Abigail. In the spirit of making our relationship work, I’d prefer, however, if the truth came from my wife.”
She stared at him for a long time. He held her gaze, ready to follow through on his threat.
“My mother is a functioning alcoholic,” she said finally. “She’s been that way since I was fifteen. We’ve managed to keep it from being public knowledge, have taken her to rehab twice, each time thinking it would be the last. This recent dry spell lasted two years. She started to slide backward when the money troubles began.”
A red tide swept through him. “You were carrying this around with you our entire marriage and you didn’t tell me?”
“My mother swore us to secrecy. It was the only way she’d agree to go for treatment. It was decided it would remain locked within the walls of the Carmichael family vault. If we didn’t speak of it, didn’t acknowledge it, it ceased to exist.”
He frowned. “Who decided this?”
“My father.”
“I’m assuming your sister’s husband doesn’t know, then, either?”
A flush swept her cheeks.
“Dannazione, Angelina.” His hands clenched into fists by his sides. “Why didn’t you feel you could trust me with this?”
She waved a hand at him. “You have the perfect family, Lorenzo. I was worried you would look down on us. You have such a disdain for a lack of discipline.”
Heat seared his skin. “I would have helped you, not looked down on you. That’s what a husband and wife do for each other.”
“And we had that aspect of our relationship perfected, didn’t we?” Her eyes flashed. “I never felt good enough for you, Lorenzo. Appreciated by you. Ever. Not after those first few months when you started tuning me out. Treating me like an afterthought. At least when you wanted me, I felt I had some value. When you lost interest in even that, it decimated me. Why would I tell you about my mother? Air my family’s dirty laundry? All that would have done was make
you regret your decision to marry me even more.”
“I did not regret my decision to marry you. Ever.” He stared at her, stunned. “Is that what you think?”
No response.
Confusion warred with fury, the red tide in him winning. “You are so off base, Angelina. So off base. I might have been distant, we agree that I was, but do you really think I would have thought any less of you because of this? That I wouldn’t have supported you?”
Her mouth pursed. “I don’t know.”
His breath hissed from his lungs. His marriage was suddenly illuminated in a way it had never been before. What the cost of his emotional withdrawal had been on his wife. What he should have seen. He didn’t like what he saw.
He took hold of her hand and pulled her to her feet. Turning her around, he reached for the zipper of her dress. She jerked away from him, eyes wide. “What are you doing?”
“Putting you to bed.”
“I can’t go to bed. The party’s still going.”
He moved his gaze over her face. “You’re a mess. You can’t go back down there. Things are winding down, anyway. I’ll go finish up.”
He turned her around and slid down the zipper. She pulled away, arms crossed over her chest. “I can do the rest.”
He headed for the door. “Did Abby talk to Courtney Price?” she called after him. “She can’t print this in her column tomorrow.”
He turned around. “She pulled her aside. I saw them talking.”
Her face relaxed. “Abby will fix it. She always does.”
Abby will fix it. She always does. The words rang in his head as Lorenzo went back to the party. Is that what Angelina and her sister had spent the past decade doing? Fixing their mother’s lapses before they made it to the tabloids? Preserving a family secret that was tearing his wife apart, a secret he hadn’t known about because he’d been too caught up in himself, in his own stuff, to see the warning signals?
The tension that had always lain between his wife and her parents, the distance she’d put between herself and them this past couple of years, his wife’s refusal to ever have more than one or two drinks no matter what was put in front of her—it all made sense now.
Anger at his own blindness fueling him, he found Alistair Carmichael and ensured he went and checked on his wife. What kind of a man was he to leave it to his daughters to pick up the pieces? To ignore what was clearly a cry for help from his wife?
Perhaps, he thought, the same kind of man he had been during his marriage. A man who had simply not been there.
* * *
Angie willed herself to sleep after Lorenzo left, curling up into a ball under the cool satin sheets and squeezing her eyes shut. But the scene with her mother kept replaying itself over and over again in her head.
You who don’t care. You who turned your back and walked away.
A knot tied itself in her stomach. She had walked away. Because going through what had happened tonight again and again, never reaching that place inside of her mother that was in so much pain she couldn’t heal, had taken a piece of her soul.
She burrowed into the pillow, an ache consuming her insides. Lorenzo’s anger, his fury, twisted the knot tighter. Perhaps she should have told him. Perhaps she was as guilty of holding things inside as he was. Except it was difficult to communicate with a brick wall and that’s what he’d been near the end.
She hugged the pillow tighter. Tried to force herself to sleep, because it hurt too much to be in the here and now. But she couldn’t settle. She was still awake when Lorenzo came in just after one, stripped off his clothes, showered and came to bed.
He smelled so good, so achingly real and familiar, she had to fight the urge to beg him to hold her. Closing her eyes, she curled her fingers into the sheets. Lorenzo sighed, reached for her and turned her toward him. Feeling utterly exposed with her tearstained face and puffy eyes, she closed her eyes.
He ran a finger down her cheek, making her lashes flutter open. “Angie,” he murmured, “mia cara. Things between us have to change. You have to learn to trust me. I have to get better at reading you...at knowing when you need me, because clearly I am terrible at that.”
She searched the angular shadows of his face in the moonlight. “You’re serious about this.”
“You think I would have done what I’ve done if I wasn’t? I want you back because you are meant to be with me, Angie, not because I have some cruel desire to make you suffer. I married you because you are beautiful and intelligent, because you were what I wanted in a wife, not simply because you were pregnant. Because for the first time since Lucia died, I felt alive. You made me feel alive.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest. If she had sensed that this was the case, felt that intense connection that had bonded them together, he had never once verbalized it. When he had begun to shut her out, she’d convinced herself she’d imagined it, that she was delusional and hopelessly naive where he was concerned. But this, this, she didn’t know how to process.
His fingers traced the edge of her jaw, commanding her attention. “If we had disagreements about how our relationship worked, it didn’t mean I found you lacking—it meant we had issues to resolve. To say we didn’t do a very good job of that is an understatement.”
She bit her lip, the salt tang of blood filling her mouth. She’d been convinced he’d wanted her because she’d been a politically viable Carmichael, as a wife who could open doors for him in alternate social circles. For what he’d thought he’d been signing on for. If it really had been more than that, if he had wanted her for her, what did that mean?
Had she walked out on a marriage that had been reparable if she’d just stuck? It was an overwhelming, earth-shattering prospect to consider. She sucked in a deep breath and lifted her gaze to his. “Every time you withdrew I felt it as a rejection. It hurt, Lorenzo, badly.”
“I know. I realize that now.”
A long moment passed. His fingers slid to her cheek, thumb tracing over the tracks of her tears. The ache inside her grew until it was almost all-encompassing. The need for everything they’d had. Everything they’d never had. For this to be different this time as he was promising it would be. But she didn’t know if she could trust him, wasn’t sure she could go through another of his Jekyll-and-Hyde routines. Didn’t know if she could trust her own instincts anymore.
Fear invaded her, coiled its way around her insides. She pushed a hand into the mattress to move before she did something she would regret. Something she wasn’t ready for. Before she did beg him to hold her. Lorenzo hooked an arm around her waist and tucked her into the warmth of his body before she could, her back nestled against his chest. “Go to sleep,” he murmured, brushing his lips over her shoulder in a fleeting caress. “Tomorrow we’ll deal with what happens next.”
Except she couldn’t relax. Couldn’t slow down her brain. Not with him so close, clad only in the sexy hipster briefs he’d added to his routine in deference to their adjustment period. Not when tomorrow would mean deciding what to do with her mother. Convincing her to go back to the treatment facility in California she swore she wouldn’t return to.
Silent tears slid down her face. She reached up to brush them away, shocked there were any left. Lorenzo muttered an oath. “Don’t,” he murmured, shifting so she lay back against the pillows. “We’re going to solve this—I promise.”
She should have protested when he set his mouth to her jaw. As he kissed and licked away her tears, working his way up one cheek, then down the other. But the erotic, soul-searing comfort he offered eased the ache inside of her. Lit her up in a way only Lorenzo could.
A low sound escaped her throat. Her eyes locked with his in a hot, heated moment that held time suspended. Murmuring her name, he closed his mouth over hers, taking her lips in a slow, sweet kiss that drove everything from her head but him. How mu
ch she missed this. How much she missed everything about it.
He captured her jaw in his fingers, held her as he dipped deeper into her mouth, his tongue sliding against hers. The taste of him exploded through her, dark and dangerous as she tangled her legs with his, a tight fist of need forming in her stomach. She twisted closer, seeking, needing the oblivion he could give her because this, this had always been right.
She rocked against him. His obvious arousal, covered only by the thin cotton briefs, sank into her softness, the delicate material of her panties no obstacle. She gasped as he moved against her with possessive intent, the friction turning her insides molten.
“Lorenzo...”
He threaded a hand through her hair, held her still as he lifted his mouth from hers. “Angie,” he murmured softly. “No.”
No? Her eyes flew open.
“You will hate me tomorrow, cara. I guarantee it. You’re emotional. I won’t take advantage of that.”
Her brain right-sided itself with a swiftness that made her dizzy. She pushed a hand against his chest, humiliation and confusion flaming through her. Lorenzo levered himself off of her. She scrambled to the other side of the bed, pressing her hands against her cheeks. “You started it.”
“I wanted to comfort you,” he said softly. “It got out of hand.”
She turned her back on him and curled up in a ball.
“Angie.” He laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Leave me alone.” She took a deep breath as her fractured breathing slowed. She had no idea what she was doing. Thinking. Nothing made sense anymore. Everything she’d thought was true was now a massive gray area she had no idea what to do with.
Pain throbbed at the back of her eyes, her heart a rock in her throat. Lorenzo was just as much of an addiction for her as the alcohol her mother consumed. Just as dangerous. She would do well to remember that before she started making life-changing, potentially disastrous decisions to sleep with him again. Her husband was right in that.
She closed her eyes. This time sleep came swift and hard with the need to escape.
A Debt Paid in the Marriage Bed (Mills & Boon Modern) Page 7