‘I’m afraid I’m not with you,’ she said lightly.
‘No?’ He turned onto his back and yawned. ‘You mean that wasn’t your way of thanking me for buying you a home of your own? For finally getting the independence you must have craved for all these years?’
Darcy froze as the meaning of his words sank in and suddenly all that vulnerability which was never far from the surface began to rise in a dark unwanted tide. Groping down over the side of the bed, she managed to retrieve her overcoat and slung it over herself to cover her nakedness.
‘Let’s just get this straight.’ Her voice was trembling. ‘You think I had sex with you because you made me an overgenerous offer I hadn’t actually asked for?’
‘I don’t know, Darcy.’ His tone had changed. It rang out, iron-hard—like the sound of a hammer hitting against a nail. And when he turned his head to look at her, his eyes were icy. Like the black ice you sometimes saw when you were out on the roads in winter. Or didn’t see until it was too late. ‘I just don’t get it with you. Sometimes I think I know you and other times I think I don’t know you at all.’
‘But aren’t all relationships like that?’ she questioned, swallowing down her fear. ‘Didn’t some songwriter say that if our thoughts could be seen, they’d probably put our heads in a guillotine?’
His eyes were narrowed as they studied her. ‘And if I promised to grant you leniency, would you give me access to your thoughts right now?’
Darcy didn’t react. She could tell him the rest of her story—and maybe if it had been any other man than Renzo she would have done so. But he had already insulted her by thinking she’d had sex with him just because he’d bought her this house. To him, it all boiled down to a transaction and he didn’t really trust himself to believe anything different. He thought of everything in terms of barter between the sexes because he didn’t really like women, did he? He’d told her that a long time ago. He might want her but he didn’t trust her and even though she could try to gain that trust by confessing her biggest secret, surely it was too big a gamble?
‘I’m just wondering why you seem determined to wreck what chance we have of happiness,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘We have a lovely new home and a baby on the way. We’re both healthy and we fancy each other like crazy. We’ve just had amazing sex—can’t we just enjoy that?’
Black eyes seared into her for a long moment until eventually he nodded, his hand snaking around her waist and pulling her closer so that she could feel the powerful beat of his heart.
‘Okay,’ he said as he stroked her hair. ‘Let’s do that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just all very new to me and I don’t do trust very easily.’
Silently, she nodded, willing the guilt and the tears to go away. All she wanted was to live a decent life with her husband and child. She wanted what she’d never had—was that really too much to ask? She relaxed a little as his hand moved from her hair to her back, his fingertips skating a light path down her spine. Couldn’t she be the best kind of wife to him, to demonstrate her commitment through her actions rather than her words?
He leaned over her, black fire blazing as he bent his face close. ‘Are you tired?’
She shook her head. ‘Not a bit. Why?’
His thumb grazed the surface of her bottom lip and she could feel his body hardening against her as he gave a rueful smile. ‘Because I want you again,’ he said.
CHAPTER TEN
DARCY’S FIRST INKLING that something was wrong came on a Monday morning. At first she thought it was nothing—like looking up at the sky and thinking you’d imagined that first heavy drop of rain which heralded the storm.
Renzo was in London unveiling his design for the Tokyo art gallery at a press conference—having left the house at the crack of dawn. He’d asked if she’d wanted to accompany him but she’d opted to stay, and was in the garden pegging out washing when the call came from one of his assistants, asking if she was planning to be at home at lunchtime.
Darcy frowned. It struck her as a rather strange question. Even if she wasn’t home, Renzo knew she wouldn’t have strayed much further than the local village—or, at a pinch, the nearby seaside town of Brighton. All that stuff they said about pregnant women wanting to nest was completely true and she’d built a domestic idyll here while awaiting the birth of their baby. And hadn’t that nesting instinct made her feel as though life was good—or as good as it could be? Even if sometimes she felt guilt clench at her heart unexpectedly, knowing that her husband remained ignorant of her biggest, darkest secret. But why rock the boat by telling him? Why spoil something which was good by making him pity her and perhaps despise her?
Placing the palm of her hand over the tight drum of her belly, she considered his assistant’s question. ‘Yes, I’m going to be here at lunchtime. Why?’
‘Signor Sabatini just asked me to make sure.’
Darcy frowned. ‘Is something wrong? Is Renzo around—can I speak to him, please?’
The assistant’s voice was smooth but firm. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. He’s in a meeting. He said to tell you he’ll be with you soon after noon.’
Darcy replaced the receiver, trying to lose the sudden feeling of apprehension which had crept over her, telling herself it was only because that fractured phone call felt a little like history repeating itself which had made her nervous. At least it hadn’t been the same assistant who had stonewalled her attempts to get through to Renzo to tell him she was pregnant. That assistant had suddenly been offered a higher position in a rival company, something which Darcy suspected Renzo had masterminded himself. He’d seemed to want to put the past behind them as much as she did. So stop imagining trouble where there isn’t any.
But it didn’t matter how much she tried to stay positive, she couldn’t seem to shake off the growing sense of dread which had taken root inside her. She went inside and put away the remaining clothes pegs—something her billionaire husband often teased her about. He told her that hanging out washing was suburban; she told him she didn’t care. She knew he wanted to employ a cleaner and a housekeeper, and to keep a driver on tap instead of driving herself—in the fairly ordinary family car she’d chosen, which wasn’t Renzo’s usual style at all. The private midwife who lived locally and could be called upon at any time had been her only concession to being married to a billionaire.
But she wanted to keep it real, because reality was her only anchor. Despite Renzo’s enormous power and wealth, she wanted theirs to be as normal a family as it was possible to be. And despite what she’d said when he’d railroaded her into the marriage, she badly wanted it to work. Not just because of their baby or because of their unhappy childhoods. She looked out the window, where her silk shirt was blowing wildly in the breeze. She wanted it to work because she had realised she loved him.
She swallowed.
She loved him.
It had dawned on her one morning when she’d woken to find him still sleeping beside her. In sleep he looked far less forbidding but no less beautiful. His shadowed features were softened; the sensual lips relaxed. Two dark arcs of eyelashes feathered onto his olive skin and his hair was ruffled from where she’d run her hungry fingers through it sometime during the night. She remembered the powerful feeling which had welled up inside her as the full force of her feelings had hit her and she wondered how she could have failed to recognise it before.
Of course she loved him. She’d been swept away by him from the moment she’d looked across a crowded nightclub and seen a man who had only had eyes for her. A once-in-a-lifetime man who’d made her feel a once-in-a-lifetime passion, despite the fact that he could be arrogant, tricky and, at times, downright difficult. And if fate—or rather pregnancy—had given her the opportunity to capitalise on those feelings and for passion to evolve into love, then she had to make the most of it. He might not feel the same way about her but she told herself that didn’t matter because she had more than enough love to go round. She pla
nned to make herself indispensable—not just as the mother of his child, but as his partner. To concentrate on friendship, respect and passion and reassure herself that maybe it could be enough. And if sometimes she found herself yearning for something more—well, maybe she needed to learn to appreciate what she had and stop chasing fantasy.
She spent the next hour crushing basil leaves and mashing garlic, trying to perfect a pesto sauce as good as the one they’d eaten in Rome on the last evening of their honeymoon. Then she picked a handful of daffodils and put them in a vase and had just sat down with a cup of tea to admire their yellow frilliness, when she heard the front door slam.
‘I’m in here!’ she called. She looked up to see Renzo framed in the doorway, her smile and words of welcome dying on her lips when she saw the darkness on his face. She put the cup down with a suddenly shaking hand. ‘Is something wrong?’
He didn’t answer and that only increased her fear. His hands were white-knuckled and a pulse was beating fast at his temple, just below a wayward strand of jet-black hair. She could sense an almost palpable tension about him—as if he was only just clinging on to his temper by a shred.
‘Renzo! What’s wrong?’
He fixed her with a gaze which was cold and hard. ‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘Renzo, you’re scaring me now. What is it? I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I.’ He gave a harsh and bitter laugh. ‘But suddenly I do.’
From his pocket he took out an envelope and slapped it onto the table. It was creased—as if somebody had crushed it in the palm of their hand and then changed their mind and flattened it out again. On the cheap paper Renzo’s name had been printed—and whoever had written it had spelt his surname wrong, she noted automatically.
His lip curved. ‘It’s a letter from your friend.’
‘Which friend?’
‘Shouldn’t take you long to work that one out, Darcy. I mean, it isn’t like you have a lot of friends, is it?’ His mouth twisted. ‘I never really understood why before. But suddenly I do.’
She knew then. She’d seen the look often enough in the past not to be able to recognise it. She could feel the stab of pain to her heart and the sickening certainty that her flirtation with a normal life was over.
‘What does it say?’
‘What do you think it says?’
‘I’d like to hear it.’ Was she hoping for some sort of reprieve? For someone to be writing to tell him that she’d once told a policewoman a lie—or that she’d missed school for a whole three months while her mother kept her at home? She licked her lips and looked at him. ‘Please.’
With another contemptuous twist of his lips he pulled out the lined paper and began to read from it, though something told her he already knew the words by heart.
‘“Did you know that Pammie Denton was a whore? Biggest hooker in all of Manchester. Ask your wife about her mam.”’
He put the note down. ‘It’s pointless asking if you recognise the writing, since it’s printed in crude capitals, but I imagine Drake Bradley must be the perpetrator and that this is the beginning of some clumsy attempt at blackmail. Don’t you agree?’ he added coolly.
Her normal reaction would have been to shut right down and say she didn’t want to talk about it because that had been the only way she’d been able to cope with the shame in the past, but this was different. Renzo was her husband. He was the father of her unborn baby. She couldn’t just brush all the dirty facts under the carpet and hope they would go away.
And maybe it was time to stop running from the truth. To have the courage to be the person she was today, rather than the person forged from the sins of yesterday. Her heart pounded and her mouth grew suddenly dry. To have the courage to tell him what maybe she should have told him a long time ago.
‘I’d like to explain,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath.
He gave her another unfathomable look as he opened up the refrigerator and took out a beer and Darcy blinked at him in consternation because cool and controlled Renzo Sabatini never drank during the day.
‘Feel free,’ he said, flipping the lid and pouring it into a glass. But he left the drink untouched, putting it down on the table and leaning against the window sill as he fixed her with that same cold and flinty stare. ‘Explain away.’
In a way it would have been easier if he’d been angry. If he’d been hurling accusations at her she could have met those accusations head-on. She could have countered his rage with, not exactly reason—but surely some kind of heartfelt appeal, asking him to put himself in her situation. But this wasn’t easy. Not when he was looking at her like that. It was like trying to hold a conversation with a piece of stone.
‘My mother was a prostitute.’
‘I think we’ve already established that fact and I think I know how prostitution works,’ he said. ‘So what exactly was it you wanted to explain, Darcy?’
It was worse than she’d thought because there was anger, only it was quiet and it was brooding and it was somehow terrifying. Because this was a man she scarcely recognised. It was as if his body had become encased in a thick layer of frost. As if liquid ice were running through his veins instead of blood.
She looked at him, wanting to convey a sense of what it had been like, trying to cling on to the certainty that there was something between her and Renzo—something which was worth fighting for. There had to be. He might take his parental responsibilities very seriously but deep down she knew he wouldn’t have married her or contemplated staying with her unless they had something in common. ‘She was an addict. Well, you know that bit. Only... Well, drugs are expensive—’
‘And a woman can always sell her body?’ he interposed acidly.
She nodded, knowing this time there was no going back. That she needed to tell him the truth. The cruel, unedited version she’d never even been able to admit to herself before, let alone somebody else.
‘She can,’ she said. ‘Until her looks start to go—and that tends to happen sooner rather than later where addicts are concerned. My mother had once been beautiful but her looks deserted her pretty quickly. Her...her hair fell out and then...’
She flushed with shame as she remembered the kids at school taunting her and she remembered that she’d once thought she would never tell him this bit, but she knew she had to. Because why was she trying to protect her mother’s memory, when she had uncaringly gone out and wrecked as many lives as it took to get that hypodermic syringe plunging into her arm?
‘Then her teeth,’ she whispered, staring down at the fingers which were knotted together in her lap. ‘And that was the beginning of the end, because she kept losing her dentures whenever she got stoned. She was still able to get clients—only the standard of client went rapidly downhill, as I’m sure you can imagine, and so did the amount of money she was able to charge.’
And that had been when it had got really scary. When she hadn’t wanted to go home from school at night—even though she was so stressed that learning had become impossible. She’d never know what she’d find when she got there—what kind of lowlife would be leering at her mother, but, worse, leering at her. That had been where her mistrust of men had started and if that kindly social worker hadn’t stepped in, she didn’t know what would have happened. To most people, going back to the children’s home would have seemed like the end of the road—but to her it had felt like salvation.
‘It sounds a nightmare,’ he said flatly.
Sensing a sea change in his mood, Darcy looked up but the hope in her heart withered immediately when she saw that his stony expression was unchanged. ‘It was. I just want you to understand—’
‘No,’ he said suddenly, cutting across her words. ‘I’m not interested in understanding, Darcy. Not any more. I want you to know that something was destroyed when I received this letter.’
‘I realise it was shocking—’
He shook his head. ‘No. You’re missing the point. I’m not talking about sho
cking. Human behaviour has always been shocking. I’m talking about trust.’
‘T-trust?’
‘Yes. I can see the bewilderment on your face. Is that word such an alien concept to you?’ His mouth twisted. ‘I guess it must be. Because I asked you, didn’t I, Darcy? I asked you not once, but twice, whether you were keeping anything else from me. I thought we were supposed to be embracing a new openness—an honest environment in which to bring up our child, not one which was tainted by lies.’
She licked her lips. ‘But surely you can understand why I didn’t tell you?’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘I can’t. I knew about your mother’s addiction. Did you expect me to judge you when I found out how she paid for that addiction?’
‘Yes,’ she said helplessly. ‘Of course I did. Because I’ve been judged by every person who ever knew about it. Being the daughter of Manchester’s biggest hooker tends to saddle you with a certain reputation. People used to sneer at me. I could hear them laughing behind my back. And even though my social worker said it was because I was attractive and people would try to bring me down by exploiting my vulnerability, that didn’t stop the hurt. It’s why I left and came to London. It’s why I never was intimate with a man before I met you.’
‘Why you never accepted the gifts I tried to give you,’ he said slowly.
‘Yes!’ she answered, desperately searching for a chink in the dark armour which made him look so impenetrable. Searching for the light of understanding in his eyes which might give her hope.
But there was none.
‘You do realise, Darcy,’ he questioned, ‘that I can’t live with secrets?’
Secrets of a Billionaire's Mistress (Mills & Boon Modern) (One Night With Consequences, Book 29) Page 13