Page 72 of No Saint

At this point, I was willing to get on my knees.

She looks at me then, her blue clashing with my hazel and I see loneliness, pain,longing,but she masks that quick enough making me believe I might have misread it. “I’m tired. Can I be excused?”

“Non dire cazzate!”I growl.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Amelia.” I grab her wrist when she rises, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to fix it, but I want you.Cazzo,Amelia, I want you. And I can’t forget that night.”

She closes her eyes, “Please, Gabriel, this is for the best.”

“Is it?”

“It is.” She says with determination, “This way you get what you want.”

“What I want?”

“An heir.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t think that really matters anymore.”

She pulls her arm from my grip gently, “I don’t hate you, Gabriel. I know I said it, but I don’t. I’m not sure I could anymore but what happened, it won’t happen again.”

“I hurt you.”

She nods, “I’ll admit that.”

“They were just words, Amelia.”

She smiles softly, a real smile but not one that spoke of happiness, “Words are sharper than knives.”

She shuts down. Emotionally. Physically.

It’s like something within her has been hardwired into removing herself from a situation to stop herself from being hurt.

And I didn’t blame her.

I hurt her. I hurt my wife.

I fucked up.

I didn’t lie in my words, but they were said in the wrong way. The woman needed attention, not because she was an attention seeker but because, for some reason, she had been denied it. Her past was a secret even I couldn’t dig up.

We all need attention.

We strive for it.

And she had been starved.

I pause outside her bedroom door and knock twice, a gentle tap of my still healing knuckles.

It doesn’t take her long to open it and step out, wearing a sweet little summer dress and a cardigan over the top, covering her arms and back. The dress was blue, covered in a floral print and sat just above the knee. With her long, dark hair down and a light covering of make-up, she didn’t look like the tired woman I had at my table the night before.

We walk down silently and out to my waiting car. There would be no men with us, no brothers or bodyguards. The city needed to see us together anyway, but I needed her alone.

I open her door and she slides into the passenger seat, turning her face away from me and to the window.

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