Page 204 of Modern Romance Collection May 2024 Books 1-4

He was a man capable of admitting to his mistakes. Elena had instilled in him the virtues of accountability and when he was wrong he could acknowledge it. And he’d been wrong in his marriage to Rae, neglecting her emotionally.

Every complaint she’d sent his way had been deserved. She’d had no reason to believe that he would support her aspirations because he’d never shown any interest in that part of her life. Never had he enquired about her dreams or ambitions for the future. He’d known she’d loved her job in London, but not once had he encouraged her to find a similar role in Venice.

Why hadn’t he? Because he hadn’t thought to. Hadn’t cared to.

He mentally cursed himself again, the newfound awareness ravaging him in the same way it had on the plane. Over and over again he’d mulishly argued that there’d been nothing wrong in their marriage and that Rae had had no good reason to walk out on him, but the opposite was true. He had let her down in so many ways.

And he hadn’t even realised that it was happening.

Hearing the patter of footsteps behind him, Domenico turned to look over his shoulder, his body tightening as his eyes landed on Rae walking around the edge of the pool. Her feet were bare, her hair was hanging down in loose waves and she wore the same white trousers and blue blouse that she’d travelled in. Heat raced through his veins as his eyes followed her. There was no point ordering himself to look away. He knew he wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

There was no way to escape his feelings for her. No matter what had happened in the past, he wanted her with a heat that could not be quelled or contained.

‘Can we talk?’ she asked, coming to a stop, and as he read the solemn set of her expression, his mood darkened momentarily.

‘Haven’t we dredged up enough of the past for one day, Rae?’

‘It will only take a few seconds,’ she responded, shooting him a look that signalled she would not be deterred and he knew that, fired by her new grit and determination, she would not be.

‘Bene.’He placed his hands on the side of the pool and levered himself out, completely naked. He reached for his towel, wrapping it around his waist before turning back to Rae. But as he did so he caught her widening stare, full of wonder and hunger.

She wiped her expression clear and started to speak. ‘I want to apologise to you. Since our conversation, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about everything that happened between us and I realised it was wrong of me to run away. It was cowardly and unfair. I should have talked to you, told you what I was feeling and thinking. However hard it seemed to be, I should have tried, at the very least. And I’m truly sorry that I didn’t, and that it’s taken me this long to apologise.’

‘Thank you for saying that,’ he said, his voice quiet as he absorbed the depth of emotion in her expression. But she was not the only one who had been engaged in some serious self-reflection and although he could sense there was more she had to say, he couldn’t allow her to go a second longer feeling that she bore sole responsibility for the demise of their relationship, so he pressed on. ‘But what you said about me on the plane...you weren’t wrong. I did like having you by my side all the time and I wouldn’t have wanted that to change.’ He lifted his shoulders, trying to loosen his thoughts. ‘I wasn’t trying to restrict your life, Rae, or you. I didn’t even think of it in those terms. I was only thinking that I didn’t want to lose that sense of complete belonging that I had with you. Because I’d never had that feeling before. I’d never felt like I belonged anywhere or to anyone.’ His mouth was dry with the effort of speaking those words, those feelings dragged from the closed-off heart of him.

But Rae had every right to know why he had behaved as he had, where his ignorance and incompetence had stemmed from. Hewantedher to understand. He wanted to understand it too and by the way she was hanging on his every word, whatever she had been on the verge of saying forgotten, he knew she was just as eager for that explanation.

‘Did you feel that way because of the situation with your biological parents? Because you weren’t raised by them?’ she asked tentatively, as if she were tiptoeing across a minefield, expecting an explosion at any second.

Was that really what he’d done to her? Made her think she couldn’t ask him anything? Fresh recrimination speared him, sharp and deep.

His nod was quick, an admission he didn’t want to make and yet knew he had to. He had to start making amends, undoing these patterns that he hadn’t known existed but that had proved so destructive. Moving to one of the nearby loungers, he sat down, gesturing for Rae to do the same.

‘I was only a few days old when my mother abandoned me. She left me on the doorstep of Palazzo Ricci for someone inside to find.’ He heard Rae’s shocked intake of breath, but carried on. If he looked at her, if he paused, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to continue. The only way for him to get through this was to keep going. ‘She hadn’t given me a name. She hadn’t registered my birth. On my birth certificate it just saysgenitori ignoti—parents unknown. I’ve never been able to find out who my father is and my mother, whose identity I obviously did know, didn’t want any connection with me.’ His heart burned uncomfortably with that admission. ‘I had no sense of belonging to anything, or anyone, not the way most children do. I had Elena and all the love she gave, and for that I was lucky, but she wasn’t my mother and I always knew that. I was always aware that I didn’t belong to her in that traditional sense and other children were very good at making me even more aware of that.’

And the steps that could have been taken to instil him with that security and sense of belonging had never been actioned. He didn’t hold that against Elena. She had given him so much, but that additional piece of paper would have offered him a lot too. Instead, he’d grown up always feeling unsure—denied and rejected by one family and always fearful that it could happen again because there was nothing official, nothing legal, binding him to Elena. The first time he’d felt completely secure in a relationship, he realised with a jolt, was when he’d met Rae.

She’d been so open and giving of herself, so wholehearted in her acceptance of him. He’d liked how everything she felt was written across her face, how her arms opened to him whenever he walked in the room, the eagerness of her kisses. He’d felt so certain of her love for him.

Maybe that had been the driving force behind his whirlwind proposal, why he’d felt that loosening of feeling around her, why he’d been so impatient to marry her. Because all along he’d been clinging to that rarefied feeling, having finally found what he’d spent his whole life hungering for. Love and acceptance and belonging. And he’d wanted it legal and binding before it could be taken away.

Rae was quiet, absorbing the overwhelming weight of all that he had shared as the darkness swelled around them, cocooning them in its mystical embrace. When she did open her mouth to speak, he was expecting sympathy and platitudes but she just smiled sadly across at him.

‘If only we could have found our way to talking like this four months ago,’ she said wistfully.

‘Would it have made a difference?’ Domenico asked, unsure why he was asking the question or if he really wanted to hear the answer.

Her lips twisted as she thought about it. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Knowing that we had the ability to talk things through would have helped me to feel a lot surer about our relationship. That we could have the big conversations. And I like talking to you, hearing the sound of your voice.’

‘You didn’t like the way we spent the time not talking?’

Her burst of laughter was quick and genuine. ‘I had no problem with that. The physical side of our marriage was never in question. That was always incredible.’ Her eyes glowed with the memory and her accompanying smile was almost shy. ‘It’s probably why I let myself be distracted by it so many times, because it was so good. Because it was in those moments, lying in your arms, that I felt closest to you. But it shouldn’t have been a substitute. It wasn’t. It’s not.’

He heaved out a sigh, feeling the reproach. ‘I’m not a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, Rae. I never pretended to be.’

‘I know you didn’t. But I thought that after we were married you would lower those walls a little, show me some more of yourself. That you would talk to me about...anything. Everything. The way my parents did.’ She hugged her arms around herself, smiling nostalgically as she thought of them the way she always did, with that mix of happiness and hurt. ‘I used to listen to them after we’d gone to bed. In the summer I’d leave my windows open and they’d be outside and I’d drift off to sleep to the sound of their voices. My mum talking about whatever naughty thing Maggie had done that day, my dad telling her about work. I stupidly assumed all marriages would be like that, and that ours would be too,’ she confessed and Domenico felt a twist in his chest that he’d ruined such a simple dream. ‘I didn’t understand the amount of work that went into getting to that place. And when you wouldn’t talk to me, I saw it as a rejection of me. That you didn’t want to talk about things with me, you didn’t trust me. Sometimes I even wondered why you’d married me, if you’d started to regret it. That’s why it hurt so much.’

‘Rae, no,’ he assured her hurriedly before the words had even finished leaving her lips. ‘That couldn’t be further from the truth. I trusted you more than I ever trusted anyone. Before you, I had never considered letting anyone so deeply into my life. I just...’

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