Mina looked at him in astonishment. She remembered him saying that Susie deserved the very best that he could give her and that his parents had done that for him. It had not occurred to her that the best might have been less than perfect.
Cesare expelled his breath in a hiss and swung back to her, his strong features taut and clenched. ‘Believe it or not, I don’t want the same for us,’ he told her with harsh emphasis. ‘I don’t want a charade for Susie’s sake. You can’t fool a child. She would sense the lack of warmth between us, feel the resentment, hear the silences…’
Mina bent her head. He had shaken her and she was suddenly gripped by raw tension as she wondered where the dialogue he had initiated was leading. It sounded very much to her as though he was about to admit that their marriage had been a bad idea, entered into in haste but not to be repented at leisure.
‘You think we made a mistake,’ she forced herself to say out loud.
‘No…’ The silence stretched as taut as a rubber band. ‘I think I am the one who has made mistakes,’ he contradicted grittily.
Her head flew up, startled amethyst eyes skimming to his fiercely set jawline. He still wasn’t looking at her. But abruptly that changed. He spun fluidly round, darkas-night eyes settling on her with perceptible force, a tiny pulse tugging at the edge of his unsmiling mouth, revealing the depth of his strain. ‘It may be no consolation …but I’m not like this with anyone but you. I thought I’d put it all behind me but recognising you in that charity newsletter was like getting a shot of insanity in my veins. Four years ago you left me high and dry and feeling as foolish as an infatuated teenager. I was very bitter. Maybe this time I was trying to rewrite our history…’
‘Yes,’ Mina conceded, reeling from his blunt and raggedly voiced confession. Whatever her own private thoughts on the subject might have been, the depth of remembered bitterness in Cesare’s delivery told her that he was recalling feelings that went far beyond the sting of a dented ego. He might not have loved her but he had been hurt and humiliated, she acknowledged, pained by that awareness, and if he would not believe her there was nothing she could do to take away those bitter memories. They would always stand between them.
‘But that night at the benefit everything went haywire,’ he intoned with a humourless laugh. ‘Instantaneously I wanted you again. I looked at you and you looked back at me and I knew you felt the same way, even though I was an unwelcome and dangerous echo from the past.’
‘I——’ For a split-second she was on the brink of arguing the point out of pride and then she too remembered how she had felt. Her skin burned. That intense hunger had been mutual. Even when they were fighting like cat and dog that hunger remained.
‘If you had admitted what you had done I would have behaved differently,’ Cesare stressed, and as her lips parted he shifted an expressive brown hand in a silencing motion. ‘I don’t want to get into that again.’
‘But——’
‘Leave it in the past where it should have stayed,’ he interposed in grim interruption. ‘Who am I to talk about stainless-steel ideals? I’ve had money all my life. I’ve always been able to do whatever I wanted to do and I suppose I must take that for granted. I can understand that you were tempted——’
‘But I——’
‘Dio… aren’t there more important things?’ Cesare shot at her with sudden raw frustration. ‘Can’t you see that this endless rehashing of the past is tearing us apart?’
Mina lost her angry colour, her stomach cramping up. ‘I wasn’t aware there was an us to be torn apart,’ she said tightly.
The silence went on and on and on.
Cesare gazed back at her, very pale and taut, brooding dark eyes intently pinned to her. ‘Finding out about Susie devastated me…’
‘I should have told you,’ Mina breathed in a guilty undertone. ‘I should have told you when she was born.’
‘I would have liked to have been there from the beginning,’ he admitted very quietly. ‘But now I’ve come to terms with the shock I’m simply grateful that she exists. I should have apologised before now for the accusations I made that afternoon. First impressions weren’t on anyone’s side and I wanted to hit back at you for keeping her a secret. You felt like the enemy that day.’
Mina nodded.
‘First Clayton squaring up to me like a Viking version of a Rottweiler,’ he recalled, ‘then your sister behaving as if I were some maniac on the loose…and then out of nowhere…Susie! I was shattered but also blazingly angry with you. It was easier to ignore you and concentrate on Susie than risk dragging out those feelings before the wedding…’
She recognised what an effort it was for him to admit how angry and bitter he had felt—ironically much the same as she herself had felt until she’d blown a gasket yesterday and said a lot of things she didn’t mean in a frantic last-ditch effort to save face. Yet what she had flung in anger had shaken Cesare enough to make him begin talking to her.
But then he was thinking about Susie, wasn’t he? Clearly remembering his own less than idyllic childhood with unhappily married parents, he had been forced to see that he was doing everything possible to create the same situation.
‘We didn’t have any privacy at the manor.’ But even as Mina said that she realised that both of them had avoided being alone together. Pride had made her equally guilty of a desire to avoid a direct confrontation and she had wanted Cesare to have time to simmer down. However, she’d really known deep down that, left to his own devices, he was more likely to boil than cool off.
‘Dio mio, that is not a problem here at the castello, but then let’s face it, we’re not the average newly-weds.’ Cesare vented a sardonic laugh that cut through her like a knife. ‘We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. I have the villa we can use on the coast.’
Concessions, Mina thought, comprehension spiralling through her. Without ceremony, Cesare had laid aside his desire to punish her. It had finally dawned on him that he couldn’t hurt her without hurting Susie as well. No wonder he looked so desperately on edge, and sounded so stilted: he was compromising those ‘stainless-steel ideals’, bending them for his daughter’s benefit. Welcome to the marriage of convenience you thought you could settle for a few weeks ago, Mina reflected in an agony of pain.
‘Mina…?’
‘Whatever you like,’ she said flatly, with the unspoken clarity of someone who didn’t give a damn where they went.
‘It’s…nice.’ Mina stared down fixedly at the twisted rope wedding-ring, her colour high. She imagined it turning into a real rope which she could pull tight round Cesare’s throat. The image was so innately enervating that she snapped shut the jewel box again. Cartier’s, she noted without surprise. Not a fake this time…but still an empty symbol, she told herself painfully.
‘Try it on,’ Cesare suggested.