Page 55 of Loving the Enemy (The Montebellos 3)

“I know. Christo, Alessia, about this, yes, I have lied, but only this, and only for a time. It has always been my intention to tell you the truth.”

“The problem is, I find that almost impossible t

o believe.” She straightened her spine and he had that trickling sense of fear running through him once more – she was disappearing from him before his eyes, becoming someone he barely recognised, withdrawing and resisting effortlessly.

“You – my father – Sam. I am so sick of men. So sick of men thinking they know better than I do. You think I can’t make my own decisions and look after myself? You’re wrong.”

He ground his teeth together, denials flying through his mind. She was strong; he knew that. But every single one of his actions had made it seem as though he felt the opposite. So what did that mean?

She turned away from him, so he wanted to grab her wrist and spin her back to face him; he needed to see her face. “I’m going to a hotel,” she said quietly. “I need to think.”

“Stay here,” he growled. “I’ll go to a hotel if you must be alone.”

She shook her head. “This house is so full of memories now – not good ones. I need to get out of here.”

He could see everything unravelling. More than his marriage, everything he held dear in this world. He stared at her, desperately trying to grab hold of the threads of his life and pull them back together, but they stayed just out of his reach.

Massimo couldn’t let her leave.

“No.”

She blinked, her eyes hypnotic and beautiful, and swirling with obvious confusion.

“Did you just say ‘no’?”

He compressed his lips, cursing inwardly. “This doesn’t change anything.”

* * *

She felt as though the bottom was falling out of her world. “I beg your pardon, it changes everything.”

“Your engagement was over before London. Our reason for marrying has nothing to do with Sam, nothing to do with anyone except us.”

“How can you be so fanciful?” she reached behind her for the wall, needing a form of support. “You broke up my engagement. London would never have happened if you hadn’t done that. I would never have become pregnant, and we’d never have needed to get back in this situation.”

“You didn’t need to get back in this situation,” he said, with a softness that was all the more resounding for how it reached inside her heart. His eyes held hers, making it impossible to look away. “You didn’t need to marry me. You chose this – you wanted this.”

She opened her mouth to deny it, knowing how important it was to defend herself. He was right, though. She knew that, but she wouldn’t admit it. “You made it impossible for me to do anything but fall in with your plans. Yet again.”

His eyes narrowed cynically. She felt at a disadvantage even when she’d said something that should have scored points.

He crossed his arms over his chest, regarding her for several long, silent seconds. “I don’t know if you’re lying to yourself or just to me, but you are lying, Alessia.”

She snorted inelegantly.

“You agreed to marry me because you were still in love with me. You wanted our marriage to work this time, because you want – more than anything – to raise our child as part of a family. We both wanted that, with all our hearts.”

She expelled an uneven breath. Her eyes moved beyond him, focussing on a point on the wall. “Being part of a family isn’t all that matters,” she said, eventually. “And we’re not a family, anyway. Our daughter wouldn’t be fooled just because we had some rushed wedding ceremony.”

His eyes flashed, rejecting that statement.

“You can’t fake a family,” she said more clearly. “For a few hours, perhaps, in a public setting. Even for the year we were married, when we would go to Villa Fortune, I felt as though the whole world must be able to see how unhappy we were.”

He visibly bristled at that description.

“But not for a lifetime, and not with a child living in your house. I don’t want her to see this – us – and think it’s normal.” She tilted her chin defiantly. “My mother and father were so in love, and they wrapped me up in that love so I always felt safe and knew where I belonged. I haven’t really had that for a long time but I’m not going to settle for an illusion of that.”

“Nothing of importance has changed,” he continued, as though she hadn’t. And the words, spoken so calmly, were her undoing.

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