Elodie stared at him, the man she’d fallen head over heels in love with, and she knew she was fighting a losing battle, but that she had to fight it anyway.
“Can you honestly tell me there’s no chance you’ll ever care for me like I do you?”
His expression showed surprise.
“Tell me,” she demanded. “Tell me you don’t care for me now.”
“Care for you?” He swore angrily, dragging a hand through his hair as though waking from a dream or a nightmare. “Maybe, Elodie, if things between us were different. You’re right – that night in London was about so much more than sex. There was something between us, a strange connection. Yes, I felt it too. Yes, in another time, another place, if I hadn’t had everything going on with Alison and Gianfelice…but life is always a question of timing and ours was bad from the start. Doomed. And it still is. You make me feel as no other woman ever has. If it weren’t for Jack, if it weren’t for the fact you kept my son from me, I think I would already be head over heels in love with you. If things were different.” He was quiet as his words sunk in. “But they’re not. This is the situation we find ourselves in.”
She sobbed, a wrenching, primal sound that had Fiero whipping his head in immediate response, as though a similar instinct flooded him, making him want to protect her, save her, to speak to her in a way that would fix all of this.
He didn’t.
“I know myself too well.” He said the words with cold determination even as his face was slashed with colour. “I can’t move past this, and I can’t lie to you. I won’t have another relationship with a woman who wants more from me than I’m able to give.” His chest moved with the force of his breathing. “Love should be about making someone happy, about living your life for the purpose of bettering theirs and I could never be that for you. Not after everything that’s passed between us.”
She sobbed again. “Maybe I could be that enough for both of us.”
“For how long? A year? Two? Before you grew tired of loving me without being loved back? I know you Elodie, as well as I know myself, and I know that would destroy you.” He swore again. “I don’t want that. I don’t want you to be miserable. I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have. And I have hurt you. I’m not blameless in any of this – I get that. I see my faults, I see your faults, I see too many faults for us to move past.” He stalked to the other side of the kitchen and stared at the wall, his back shifting as he drew in large, tortured breaths.
“You have to leave, to go back to London.”
She couldn’t leave Jack! Surely they weren’t back here again. She made a drowning noise and he whipped around, his eyes travelling the length of her body. There was pity on his face, and regret.
“I can’t. I will put up with anything rather than leaving Jack.”
“I know.” He swept his eyes shut but not before she caught the sympathy in their depths. “You will take him with you. Go home, and live just as you were before.”
“What?” Her ears were ringing. Shock and desperate panic flooded her. Did he want to be rid of her so badly he’d choose to ostracise his son? That made no sense.
“It’s what we should have done from the beginning. What I should have done. I have headquarters in London,” he spoke slowly, calmly. “I can start to base myself there more, so I can see him regularly. Weekends, and as he gets older, we will build up to fully shared custody. It will be easier for you if we don’t see much of each other, so I will work out a schedule with Emilia initially. Bene?”
“No,” she wanted to scream, but all she could do was shake her head from side to side so her dark hair whipped her cheeks. “It is not bene. I’m in love with you, Fiero. Wild, free-falling, tumbling off the edge of a cliff love, and I’m asking you to look into your heart and see that maybe what you feel for me isn’t what you think. And instead, you’re calmly making plans to excise me from your life?”
“For your own sake,” he insisted, his determination and implacability galling.
“Don’t tell me what’s good for me,” she fired at him angrily. “Don’t you dare!”
“Well, what do you suggest then?” He prompted, the words cold, calm, and so infuriating for that, because she didn’t really think he was feeling coldness towards her. She knew him better than that and she understood that the ability to control your emotions outwardly didn’t equate to a lack of them inwardly. She’d seen his heart. She’d seen it grieve for the loss of his son, for what his wife had suffered, she’d seen it hurt for what he’d lost with Jack, and for the death of his grandfather. He felt things deeply, even if he felt nothing for her.
I can make you only one promise: it is, and always will be, just sex.
He’d been so sure of that, so determined on that score, and not once had he waivered. Not once had he retracted those words or hinted that maybe, just maybe, there was more between them.
“I don’t know.” Even to her own ears, her voice was feeble. Tremulous.
She swallowed past the lump in her throat, balling her hands into fists at her side in the hope it would bring a fighting spirit back to her.
“You and Jack will go back to London.” The words weren’t cold now. They were simple, accepting. “As you should have all along. It was my mistake to steamroller you into this. My mistake to force you to give up your life and become a part of mine. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t want his apology! It was hard enough to accept what he was saying when he was being cold and detached but being kind? It hurt so much worse.
“I have a townhouse there, in Kensington. You can have it.”
Her eyes jerked to his. “I don’t want a damned townhouse. I have a home in London.”
“A flat in Earls Court?”
She bristled at the tone in his voice. “Yes, what’s wrong with that?”
And perhaps because he sensed the hurt in her words, he backed off, nodding slowly. “Fine. I’ll have my jet fuelled up. We can leave today.”
“We?” She shook her head in an instant rejection of that.
“I will accompany you both, make sure you’re settled.”
“No.” She lifted a hand towards him in the universal gesture of ‘halt’. “I don’t want you to do that. If we’re going to live separate lives from now on, Fiero – we should begin as we mean to go on.”
It was so final, so mature, so determined, but inside, her heart was crumbling like a cookie, and she knew there was no way to put it back together.
* * *
He stared out at the vineyards with a gash on his face that hadn’t eased in the six days since Elodie and Jack had left Rome.
“Can’t live with her, can’t live without her,” Max called from the pool, lifting his hand so water landed at Fiero’s feet. He turned to regard his brother with the same sense of irritation that was now his stock in trade.
“What?” The word was barked.
“Come on, Fiero, you’ve barely spoken since you got here, you’re obviously miserable. Why the hell did you let them leave?”
“Are you kidding me?” He stood up, prowling towards the edge of the pool. “What choice did I have?”
“You should have married her,” Nico called from the bar, carrying four beers in between his fingers, a grin on his expression that Fiero had an irrational urge to punch loose. He turned away. Nico was the person he was closest too out of the five of them. If he could feel violently enraged towards Nico, then there was something badly wrong.
“Married her?” Raf, reading the newspaper from a sun lounger, flicked the top down to regard Fiero with a look of amusement.
“She thought she was doing the right thing,” he heard himself defend, taking a beer from Nico and drinking half of it in one mouthful. He focussed on the sun in the distance, dipping as it was towards the horizon, and tried not to think about Elodie and what she was doing. He tried not to think about Jack and the fact he felt like a part of him had been cut loose.
“So you’re going to mov
e to London?” Nico stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, his presence a silent support.
“It’s an easy commute. I’ll go between here and there.” He drained his beer, placing the bottle at his feet, crossing his arms over his chest. “I won’t be an absent figure in Jack’s life.”
“It doesn’t sound like she wants you to be.”
He frowned. “No. She wanted the opposite.” I want you to love me. His stomach twisted painfully.
“And you couldn’t give that to her?”
Fiero lifted his gaze to Nico, his expression rigid. “No.”
“Then letting them go was the right thing to do,” Nico spoke more quietly now, cutting the others out of the conversation.
“Was it?” So why the hell did it feel like he was being pushed deep underwater?
“You’re having regrets?”
Fiero frowned, turning to face his cousin. “It’s done.”
“It can be undone, if that’s what you want.”
“No,” he shook his head, but what he wanted wasn’t easy to determine in that moment. “When she first came to Italy, I thought I hated her. I thought I wanted to make her pay for keeping me out of Jack’s life.”
“But you don’t.”
“No.” He expelled an angry breath. “It turns out, I actually do care about Elodie, and the idea of hurting her…”
“Why are you so sure you would?”
“Because I already have.” Fiero fixed Nico with a level stare. “I did the only thing I could Nico, for both of us. I did what I should have done all along.”
Thirteen
A month after Elodie had left Rome, and Fiero’s opinion hadn’t changed: he’d done what was right for both of them, he’d done what had been required of him, just as he’d told Nico he would. Having seen the way he’d destroyed Alison with his inability to love her back, he knew that he’d never make that mistake again.
And surely he could never love Elodie. He desired her. He cared for her. He wanted her to be happy and well, but she’d crossed a line in the sand and he couldn’t forget that.
So this was the only solution: permanent estrangement. In time it would get easier, surely.
He’d used Emilia as a go-between from his London townhouse to her flat, ferrying Jack between the two of them on the pretext of his work and schedule, which meant he got to see his son without needing to see Elodie.
It was supposed to be the path of least resistance, the easiest option, but he had quickly discovered it wasn’t necessary to see someone in order to feel them. She was everywhere. She was the sweet smell in Jack’s clothes when Fiero picked him up to cuddle, she was in the little boy’s voice and smile, in his curious nature and kindness, she was in the handwritten instructions for him that he found in Jack’s suitcase – or which Emilia stuck on the fridge if she found them first. They were business like and to the point, but he somehow knew that she’d laboured over them, choosing her words with care. And they showed such care for their son, such love, that he knew how much it must hurt her to send him away for a night or two at a time. Jack is afraid of the dark right now. He needs a hallway light on while he goes to sleep. Be patient with him – it’s a phase. Or, He’s eating strawberries by the punnet! Don’t give him more than two punnets a day though or he gets a belly ache.
He could feel her hurt in each one, her anxieties. Fiero was doing that to her – hurting her even when he’d sworn that was the last thing he wanted.
He was trying to be accommodating. In the days, while he was at the office, Emilia took Jack back to Elodie’s, where things were as normal as they had been before the accident, but it was still a broken schedule and there was the constant reminder that Jack was no longer solely hers.
And he should never have been! Fiero knew that, but as more time passed, he found it harder to summon his original outrage, he found it hard to hold onto his anger with her, he found it harder to care about what she’d done, even when he knew he had to.
He adored Jack with all his heart and Elodie was a part of him, so maybe she was right? Maybe on some level, he even loved her?
Whatever, the way he was handling things was for the best. Hands off, maintaining a cool, professional distance. It was the only way for them both to move forward with their lives, and God knew he desperately wanted that.
So why all of a sudden did he have an insane urge to see her? To prove that he could? To show himself how far he’d come? It had, after all, been a month. Surely by now whatever feelings had formed the jagged edge of their relationship at the end would be gone by now?
* * *
“You’re the best, thank you.” She pressed a kiss to Axel’s cheek, stepping towards the door. “Emilia will be here any minute. The bag’s all packed. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t –,”
“Go, go, I know,” Ax grinned, pressing the button on one of the trains so it started to wiz around the tracks. “Don’t forget to bring me a coffee.”
“I won’t,” she wrenched the door in, her eyes sweeping over Jack. She’d already buried him in cuddles and kisses that morning, storing up all his sweetness for while he was away, knowing what the night would be like, the emptiness in her soul a form of toxin.
“Bye sweetheart.” The words were hoarse. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to cry, and she hadn’t done that in front of Jack even once. She wasn’t about to start.
“Ciao, mama.” He loved his growing Italian vocabulary but it brought tears to Elodie’s throat so she pulled the door shut swiftly, almost jamming her finger in the latch, then took the stairs two at a time as she ran down to the front door and stepped onto the street. It was busy, as always, the aroma of the area filling her nostrils – the Indian restaurant on the corner with its fragrant spices, the pub downstairs with beer hops and fryer grease, and just a little way up the street, the small park that in summer smelled like cut grass and horses.
She was running late, and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to make a good impression. If she could get this consulting job then she’d have something to keep her mind occupied with, something to focus on while Jack was out of her apartment. It was a way of turning lemons into lemonade, something her mother had always encouraged her to do. The only possible upside to having Fiero and Emilia in her life was that she now had regular time without Jack – and as much as it was a little like her heart had been ripped out of its socket and left in the middle of the street, it was also an opportunity to get back to the kind of work she’d discovered she had a passion for, and was good at. Marketing wasn’t what she’d trained for but the skill seemed to come innately to her, the campaigns she’d been coordinating before Fiero had come into her life were proof of her aptitude in this area.
She pushed Jack, Fiero, everything from her mind except the preparation she’d done for this meeting, because she had to. She had to find a way to make her life go on, she couldn’t let this grief consume her.
But it was consuming her at the moment.
It was in the sleepless nights she spent staring at her ceiling, the phantom of Fiero so real in her mind that she could feel his touch on her flesh, running the length of her body, his kiss on her lips, his weight pressing her down into the mattress. It was in his smile and laugh, both of which haunted her when she did finally fall asleep, so that she woke with a start, and it was just like she’d described to him, each and every time – that confusion upon waking, like maybe she’d dreamed everything and she was actually back in Rome with Fiero only a room away…
* * *
He could do this. He’d see her, smile, enquire after her generally, take Jack and walk away. He could do this. Whatever compulsion he’d had to touch her, a month had passed. He was stronger than that, stronger than physical needs and their chemical connection.
He jabbed his finger into the button and waited.
A man’s voice answered. “Come on up, Emilia.”
Fiero frowned, but when the door buzzed him in, he pushed it, taking the stairs with a nauseati
ng feeling in his stomach, as though he was peeling back the layers of time and moving through them.
Everything was the same as it had been then, on that night he’d come to her house knowing it would only be one night for him.
He remembered it more vividly than he could believe, now he was back. The way she’d fumbled her keys and he’d kissed her as she’d finally inserted them in the lock, the way the light had flickered overhead a few times, the bulb dying.
Stifling a groan, he thumped once on the door but it was already being pulled inwards. A man stood on the other side, so Fiero did a double take, checking the number on the front of the door despite the fact he knew this was where she lived.
“Oh.” The man was handsome in a Hollywood film star kind of way, all blond hair, blue eyes, white teeth and a golden tan. “You must be Fiero.” The words were said with obvious cool. “Where’s Emilia?”
Fiero ground his teeth together. “And you are?”
The other man regarded him intently. “Axel. A friend of Ellie’s.”
Ellie’s. The moniker was like a punch in his gut, the friendship and familiarity conveyed in those two syllables more than he could bear.
Shit.
He closed his eyes for a second, reminding himself this was supposed to be about proving to himself how little he cared for Elodie. Ellie. God. “Where’s Jack?”
“He’s here.” Axel opened the door wider but it was with obvious reluctance.
“Daddy!” Jack’s voice was clear and loud. The little boy ran through the flat like a hurricane, pitching himself at Fiero’s legs so he momentarily forgot to feel anything but joy and delight, pleasure in his son’s presence, love for him that was all-encompassing.
How well the little boy had taken to the idea of Fiero being his father. It had been a seamless transition – from Fiero to daddy in the space of a week or so.
“His bag?” Fiero heard the tight rejection in his voice and didn’t care. The blond jerked his head towards the sofa. Fiero moved deeper into the room and wished he hadn’t when proof of the other man’s occupancy were everywhere. A discarded jacket over the back of a chair, his shoes in the corner, a book that looked distinctly un-Elodie open on the coffee table, two empty cups of coffee on the counter and God help him, two glasses of wine in the sink.
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