by Sarah Morgan
‘That is not true. At no point did I accuse you of neuroses.’ He sprang to his own defence but Laurel wasn’t in the mood to listen.
‘You were always labouring the fact that I found it hard to tell you how I was feeling. “Trust me,” you said in that same seductive voice you always use when you’re determined to get your own way. So I did. On that day, I put all my trust in you. I told you I thought something was badly wrong and that I didn’t trust the doctor. I told you I was scared. That’s the first and only time I’ve admitted that to anyone. For the first time in our relationship I put my trust in you and your response to that enormous risk on my part was to dismiss my concerns as less valid than the doctor’s and return to your meeting. With your phone switched off.’
She saw the exact moment he recognised the impact of that decision.
His breathing turned shallow. His bronzed handsome face lost some of its colour. ‘It was a particularly bad moment—’
‘It was a particularly bad moment for me, too.’ This time she wasn’t letting him off the hook. ‘When you said, “I have to go now, but I’ll call you later. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” how did you think I’d feel?’
‘I was trying to reassure you.’
‘No, you were trying to reassure yourself. You needed to convince yourself I’d be fine in order to justify staying there and not immediately flying home. You made the judgement that I was overreacting. You didn’t once think about the fact I had never asked you for anything before. You didn’t think of me at all, so don’t talk to me about love. Even if I hadn’t lost the baby, the fact that I’d asked for your help when I’d never, ever called you at work before should have been enough.’ The words poured out of her along with her feelings and there was nothing she could do to stop it now because her control had been swept away by the violent force of her emotions. ‘You say that I killed our marriage by walking out but it was your empty, useless verbal pat on the head that did that. It was the first time in my life I’d asked another human being for help. And you dismissed me. And because I was panicking, because I couldn’t actually believe that you’d done that, I phoned you one more time, only to discover that you’d turned your phone off.’
He stood immobile, as if every shot she’d fired had gone straight into his brain. ‘You didn’t tell me that you felt that way.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now. And do you know the worst thing?’ It had been hard to open up but now that she had, the hard part was stopping. ‘Because I had allowed myself to trust you, depend on you, for one horrible minute I actually thought that I couldn’t handle the situation without your help. I actually had to remind myself that before you came along and insisted on being the macho protector, I did perfectly well by myself. Once I’d reminded myself of that fact, I calmed down and took myself to hospital.’ She emphasized the word ‘myself’ but it was the word ‘hospital’ that drew his attention and had his brows meeting in a deep frown.
‘You went to the hospital? Why was that necessary?’
‘Because neither my doctor nor my husband believed anything was wrong. Fortunately I knew differently.’ She watched the tension spread across those wide, powerful shoulders.
Standing there naked, he should have looked vulnerable but Cristiano didn’t know how to look vulnerable. Even in this most sensitive of situations, he was the one in command.
‘I had no idea you went to hospital. You should have told me.’
‘When? When was I supposed to tell you? I tried telling you but you had switched your phone off to avoid the inconvenience of talking to your neurotic wife. By the time you finally fitted me into your demanding schedule, I’d coped with it by myself. There was no point in telling you.’
‘Now you’re being childish.’
The accusation robbed her of breath. ‘I asked for your help, you didn’t give it. I told you I was scared, you didn’t come. Did you really think I was going to carry on begging for attention? I did what I’ve always done. I sorted it. That isn’t childish, Cristiano. It’s adult behaviour.’
‘Adults don’t walk away from a difficult situation.’ A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘Even given the difficult circumstances, there was no excuse for sulking.’
‘Sulking?’ Her voice shook and she could barely say the words that needed to be said. To steady herself, she took a slow, deep breath. ‘God, you have no idea. I don’t know why I’m even wasting my breath having this conversation. You say I don’t talk but the biggest problem is that you don’t listen. I say, “I’m in trouble” and you hear, She’s neurotic; she’ll be fine. If that’s love, then I don’t want it or need it.’ Dragging her phone from her bag, Laurel punched in a number and ordered a taxi in shaky Italian, shocked by the powerful and utterly alien urge to leap on him and do him physical harm.
Watching her through eyes glittering with frustration, Cristiano dragged in a driven breath. ‘You will not leave this room until we’ve finished talking.’
‘Watch me.’
‘Basta! Enough!’ His face as pale as Sicilian marble, his muscular frame taut, he blocked her path. ‘I realise that a miscarriage is a shattering experience for a woman. I, too, was very upset at the loss of the pregnancy, but it’s important to keep this in perspective. These things happen. My mother lost two babies and then went on to have three healthy pregnancies. Our problem is not the miscarriage, it is our marriage. If we can sort that out then we will have more children.’
Laurel stood still, frozen by the chill of her own emotions, wondering how someone so emotionally expressive could be so monumentally insensitive towards the feelings of others. ‘We won’t be having more children, Cristiano.’
‘I made you pregnant the first time we had unprotected sex. After tonight you could already be pregnant. You probably are.’ His unquestioning confidence in his own virility increased her tension tenfold.
‘I’m not pregnant.’ Her lips were stiff and the blood pounded through her skull. ‘That isn’t possible.’
‘A miscarriage doesn’t—’
‘I didn’t have a miscarriage.’
His brows met in a frown. ‘But—’
‘I had an ectopic pregnancy.’ Just saying it brought back the memories and she had to pause and hitch in her breath, which surprised her because she’d thought that by now the experience should have been nothing more than a bad memory. She pressed the flat of her hand to her abdomen, to that part of her that had malfunctioned with such devastating consequences. She thought of their child. ‘If I hadn’t followed my instinct and gone to hospital when I did, there is a strong chance I would have died when the tube ruptured. As it was, they operated within fifteen minutes of my arrival and they saved my life. I owe them that. They were brilliant.’
The silence was shattering.
She’d never witnessed Cristiano at a loss. She’d never witnessed him unsure and out of his depth.
But she was witnessing it now.
The blistering self-belief was nowhere in evidence and he actually shifted his position as if he needed to rebalance himself, the foundations of his rock-solid confidence severely shaken by her unexpected admission.
Deciding that it was only fair to give him the right of response, Laurel waited.
And waited.
No sound emerged from his lips. His face was the colour of pale marble and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides. He looked utterly shattered by her dramatic revelation.
‘You should have told me.’ His hoarse exhortation shattered the silence. ‘It was wrong of you not to.’
Any sympathy she might have felt dissolved in that unguarded, judgemental comment. Even now, it seemed, the fault was hers.
‘If you’d been here, I wouldn’t have had to tell you,’ she snapped, her hand closing round the handle of her suitcase. ‘The doctor would have told you. And he also would have told you that I can’t have more children. They removed one tube and the other is such a mess there is no way it’s up to the job, so you’ll have to
find someone else on whom to publicly demonstrate your astonishing virility.’ Eyes stinging, throat dry, she hauled the suitcase towards the door, knowing that the taxi would already be waiting. If there was one thing you could depend on in a Ferrara hotel, it was efficiency and attentiveness to the needs of the guests. It was just a shame that same attentiveness hadn’t spilled over into their marriage. ‘Don’t follow me, Cristiano. I don’t have anything left to say to you.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE door slammed.
Cristiano flinched, the sound reverberating through his skull.
He stared at the empty space that moments before had held Laurel and her suitcase. A furious, fire-breathing Laurel. Even when he heard the revving sound of an engine vanishing into the distance he still didn’t move. He was incapable of moving. His brain and body felt disconnected, frozen at the point she’d made her shocking confession.
Ectopic pregnancy?
She’d almost died?
As the stark, shocking truth sank into his brain he stumbled through to the bathroom and was violently ill.
His brain produced a kaleidoscope of vile images. Laurel clutching her phone, confessing that she had a bad feeling. Him, switching his phone off while he went into one more meeting. And the worst image of all—a bunch of gowned surgeons battling to save the life of the woman he loved.
A life he hadn’t even known was at risk.
A love she didn’t believe in.
Trying to clear his head, Cristiano lurched into the shower and turned the jets on full force and the temperature to cold.
Minutes later he was shivering, but his brain still wasn’t functioning.
He kept thinking of her alone in a hospital room, her fears dismissed by those closest to her.
Her accusation that he was the one who had pushed her to confide in him and trust him rang loud in his brain. He remembered that single phone call with uncomfortable clarity, including the part where he’d placed all his trust in the doctor’s opinion and dismissed her anxieties.
Phone call. He had to make a phone call.
Cristiano turned off the shower, knotted a towel around his hips and sleepwalked back into the bedroom, trying to remember where he’d put his phone. He stared blankly at his suit, strewn carelessly on the floor in the hot burn of passion.
She’d almost died.
Picking up his trousers, he fumbled blindly in the pockets. No phone. Surely he’d had it with him last night?
Why hadn’t the hospital called him when she was admitted?
Distracted by that question, he picked up his jacket and his phone slid out of the pocket and fell onto the tiled floor with an ominous crack.
Broken, he thought. Like everything else around him. And all through his own carelessness.
Trying not to compare that livid line now dividing the screen with the state of his marriage, Cristiano punched in the number of the hospital, relieved to find that the phone still worked.
His reputation meant that he was instantly put through to the relevant person.
Unsettled to find that the hand holding the phone was shaking, he sank onto the sofa.
When the consultant at the hospital refused to divulge any information on Laurel’s case without her permission, Cristiano tried asserting his authority but in truth he had none and the man wouldn’t betray patient confidentiality.
Feeling uncomfortably as if he was losing his grip, Cristiano pulled on his clothes from the night before and dropped his shattered phone into the pocket of his trousers.
Nothing the doctor told him would have changed the way he was feeling anyway.
The details about what had happened at the hospital were irrelevant now. Wasn’t he the one who always said that you had to keep moving forward? And here he was, rooted to the spot, beating himself up about the past while she was currently boarding a plane, intent on getting as far away from him as possible.
He had to stop her.
Still in the process of buttoning his shirt, Cristiano grabbed his car keys and sprinted from the villa, leaving the door wide open. He sprang into his sports car and accelerated away, exploiting his skill and knowledge to push the car to the limits of its capability. Dust rose behind him, smothering his stunned security team in a choking white cloud.
Part of him was aware that he was behaving like a madman but he didn’t even care.
She did this to him, he thought, finally finding focus as he shifted gears. She drove him to behave in ways he had never behaved before. Take marriage—he braked sharply and swerved to avoid an oncoming car—he’d been perfectly happy with his single status until he’d met Laurel.
Santo had employed her to train him for the New York City Marathon and had suggested she advise on the hotel development.
Right from the first moment he’d seen her, Cristiano had been lost.
She’d walked into his office, that chocolate-brown ponytail swinging, and calmly pointed out all the flaws in the plans for the new state-of-the-art fitness centre.
Other people tiptoed around him, intimidated by the power he wielded. Most of them were too protective of their own futures to challenge him.
Laurel had shown no such reservations. She had absolute faith in her own expertise, a confidence that came from a lifetime of making decisions alone. He’d learned quickly that the only person she trusted in life was herself.
In his head he heard her voice on that day she’d come to his office to give him her recommendations.
‘You hired me,’ she’d reminded him in a cool voice as she’d scored lines through the list of equipment and added more. ‘I presume you want my professional opinion. Your entire model is flawed. No one wants to come to a hotel of this quality and sweat on a treadmill. You need personal trainers. One to one. Everything tailored to the individual. You need free weights, exercise balls, offer Pilates—’ Her list had been carefully thought out. It had been her idea to turn what had originally been a standard gym into an exclusive fitness club, including physiotherapy and links to the spa with massage and beauty treatments. ‘You’ll attract athletes, but also normal people because you’re developing tailored programmes. In an ideal world everyone should have a personal programme and you’re trying to create an ideal world.’
When he’d pointed out the cost of her plans, she’d laughed. ‘Do you want to be the best or not?’
Despite grumblings from his brother, he’d followed her proposal to the last detail, admiring her bold vision and her innate sense of what was possible.
It had been an overwhelming success.
The Ferrara Spa Resort was now one of Europe’s foremost hotels. They did indeed attract top athletes who were able to maintain fitness within the luxurious resort, but they also drew a less physically fit clientele eager to make use of the expertise on offer. Laurel had personally selected the staff, trained them and supervised those opening weeks to ensure that everything was the very best it could be. She worked like a Trojan.
Cristiano had offered her a small fortune to stay on and run it but she’d turned him down flat.