‘Sì...and the moment Prince Matteo proposed, I was history. He had everything she had ever wanted. Social position, a title and immense wealth. The only flaw in his perfection was that she was twenty-five and he was seventy-five.’
‘Good grief! That’s a huge age gap!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘Did she tell you she’d fallen in love with him?’
‘No. Possibly that would have been easier to accept, if not believe. No, she told me that he was just too good a catch to turn down and that if she contrived to give him a son and heir, she’d be rich and blessed for the rest of her life,’ Cesare breathed with derision. ‘I realised I’d never really known her. It crushed my faith in women.’
‘Of course it did,’ Lizzie agreed, the nails of one hand biting into her palm while odd disconnected emotions flailed her, particularly when she found herself thinking aggressive thoughts about the woman who had broken Cesare’s heart. She had read him so wrong when they first met. He had been prepared to leap into the commitment and responsibility of marriage at a very young age. Clearly, he had genuinely loved Serafina and yet she had betrayed him in the worst possible way when she chose a life of rich privilege over love.
‘Andrew?’ Cesare pressed in turn.
‘He was my best friend growing up. We had so much in common we should’ve been a perfect match and we stayed great friends although he never actually asked me out until I was in my twenties. I was already in love with him...at least I thought it was love,’ she said ruefully. ‘Everybody assumed we would be great together and when he asked me to marry him, Dad was ecstatic. I said yes but I wanted us to just date for a while.’ Her face paling, she studied her tightly clasped hands. ‘It was in private that Andrew and I didn’t work out.’
‘Obviously you didn’t sleep with him,’ Cesare murmured softly, watching the fragile bones of her face tighten, the vulnerable curve of her mouth tense, feeling his own chest tighten in response.
‘No, I just didn’t want to sleep with him,’ she admitted in an awkward rush. ‘I froze every time he got close and he said I was frigid but I didn’t find him attractive that way. I thought I had a real problem with being touched. That’s why I wouldn’t date anyone after him and why I never blamed him for turning to Esther.’
‘You don’t have any kind of a problem,’ Cesare asserted with quiet confidence. ‘You were inexperienced; maybe he was as well—’
‘No,’ Lizzie broke in, running back through her memories while remembered feelings of inadequacy and regret engulfed her.
Yet even before she had fallen asleep in the bath she had realised that her enjoyment of Cesare’s attentions had shed a comforting light on the past, which had always troubled her. Her only real problem with Andrew had been that he had always felt like the brother she had never had. She could see things as they had been now, not as she might have wished them to be: sadly, there had been zero sexual attraction on her side. She had sincerely cared for Andrew but he had always felt more like a good friend than a potential lover. When she compared how she had reacted from the first moment with Cesare, she could clearly see the difference and finally understand that what had happened with Andrew was not her fault.
‘I liked and appreciated him but I never wanted him that way,’ Lizzie admitted with regret. ‘I still feel guilty about it because I was too inexperienced to realise that he was just the wrong man for me...and my rejections hurt him.’
‘He seems happy enough now.’ Cesare toyed with another piece of chicken.
Encouraged to think that further treats were in the pipeline, Archie got up on his haunches and begged.
‘Oh, my goodness, look what he’s doing!’ Lizzie exclaimed, sitting forward with wide eyes to watch her pet. ‘He can beg...I didn’t even know he could do that.’
Cesare rewarded Archie with the chicken because he had made his mistress smile and laugh.
‘Of course, I’ve never fed him like that. If he’d come to me for food when I was eating my father would have called that bad behaviour and he would have blamed Archie. I kept Archie outside most of the time.’
‘I suspect Archie would’ve been clever enough to keep a low profile around your dad,’ Cesare surmised.
‘Did you ever have a pet?’
‘I would have liked one when I was a kid,’ Cesare confided. ‘But I was constantly moving between my grandmother’s home and Goffredo’s apartment and a pet wasn’t viable.’
‘Did you organise all this food?’ she asked, smothering a yawn.
‘The staff are in bed. I don’t expect service here late at night,’ he told her quietly. ‘I emptied the refrigerator.’
‘And let Archie up to lure me out of the bathroom,’ Lizzie guessed, settling their discarded plates on the low table and clambering in the far side of the bed to say apologetically, ‘I’m tired.’
‘Brides aren’t supposed to get tired, particularly not when they’ve been lazing in the bath for hours,’ Cesare informed her, amusement dancing in his dark golden eyes.
He could still steal her breath away at one glance, she acknowledged wearily as she closed her eyes. It was, as he had termed it, ‘just sex’ and she had to learn to see that side of their relationship in the same casual light. She wondered if that would be a challenge because she was already drifting dangerously close to liking him.
‘Archie can sleep under the bed,’ Cesare decreed. ‘He’s not sharing it with us.’
‘We can’t do anything, you know,’ she muttered in a sudden embarrassed surge, her cheeks colouring. ‘I’m...I’m sore...’
‘It’s not a problem.’
Relieved, she smiled and closed her eyes. As he stripped by the side of the bed Cesare studied her relaxed features and thought, Mission accomplished, honeymoon back on track. It was the same way he handled problems at work, mentally ticking off items on a to-do list while always seeking the most successful conclusion. But as he slid into bed beside Lizzie he reached for her and it wasn’t a pre-programmed task. He reasoned that she was a very restless sleeper and if he left her free to move around she would annoy him.
Strangely enough, he acknowledged, in spite of the bathroom shenanigans, she hadn’t annoyed him once. But then she wasn’t the greedy, grasping type of woman he had deemed her to be. Why had he been so biased? After all, he had a stepmother, a grandmother and three sisters, none of whom were rich or avaricious. Had he deliberately sought out lovers who only cared about his wealth? And if he was guilty of that, had it been because he genuinely only needed carefree sex with a woman? Or because he preferred to avoid the possibility of anything more serious de