‘I thought perhaps you were having an affair with her,’ Jess advanced rather reluctantly, because it was so patently obvious from his pained expression that sexual shenanigans with his cousin’s wife had played no part in his pretence about his whereabouts.
‘No,’ he proclaimed in blunt dissent. ‘You thought wrong.’
‘Maybe not with Alice, but possibly with someone else?’ Jess persisted, unable to quite let go of her suspicions regarding his fidelity.
‘Dio mio, sex with anyone other than you has to be the last thing on my mind right now,’ Cesario responded with an impatience that dispelled her concerns in that field better than any heated denial would have done.
‘Well, I don’t know what goes on in your mind, do I?’ In reaction to the sudden release of her tension, because the spectre of Alice and that past affair had loomed like a very large threat in her mind, Jess threw up her hands in an unusually dramatic gesture and stalked over to the window. Ebony curls danced on her slim shoulders as she swivelled back to look at him, her profile taut and pale. ‘You told me you were in Milan and you were lying!’ she reminded him fiercely.
‘I have to confess that since we met I have kept a lot from you, piccola mia,’ Cesario declared.
‘Stop hinting and start telling!’ Jess flung in direct challenge, angry grey eyes bright as silver stars above her flushed cheekbones.
‘I really thought we could do this without anyone getting hurt,’ Cesario breathed in a raw undertone. ‘But with hindsight I can see now that I was depressed when I asked you to marry me. I was looking for a way out and a means of distraction—’
‘Just get to the point, Cesario!’ Jess cut in furiously, wondering what on earth he could have been depressed about, while bristling at the suggestion that marrying her had been a means of distraction. That made her sound insultingly like an entertainment act he had hired for his amusement.
‘Eight months ago, I had a series of medical tests and, with the diagnosis, life as I knew it came to a sudden end,’ Cesario revealed in a driven undertone, his strong facial bones taut beneath his bronzed skin. ‘I had been suffering from intermittent problems with my balance and vision and also severe headaches. A scan revealed that I had a brain tumour.’
Totally unprepared for the startling turn that the dialogue had taken, Jess simply stared at him and parroted weakly, ‘A brain tumour?’
‘Although the tumour is benign, I learned that surgery could leave me seriously disabled and that was a risk I was not prepared to take. I decided that I valued the quality of the life I had left more than the quantity, and I refused further treatment,’ Cesario revealed quietly.
Shock had drained the blood from Jess’s face and made her tummy flip a somersault. She was struggling to absorb what he had told her and it was so far removed from what she had expected that she was utterly stunned. ‘Your migraines…your fall last week…’
‘Caused by the tumour,’ he confirmed, his jaw line clenching at the reminder. ‘My condition has been worsening faster than I had expected and becoming unpredictable, which is why I came to London to undergo more tests this past week—’
‘You’re telling me that you knew you were dying when you asked me to marry you,’ Jess almost whispered as she finally put that scenario together for her own benefit and reeled from the ramifications of it. ‘When you asked me to have a baby with you, you must have known that you wouldn’t be here for that child while it was growing up. How could you deceive me like that?’
Beneath her hail of accusing words, Cesario had lost colour. ‘I only appreciated how selfish I was being last week when you told me that you had conceived.’
‘Selfish and irresponsible!’ Jess slammed back loudly at him, outraged and bitterly hurt that he could have kept her in ignorance of such a crucial if unpalatable fact from the outset of their relationship. ‘I knew you weren’t planning to stay married to me for ever, but I did believe that you would be available to act as father to our child…you allowed me to believe that!’
In addition, Jess was already working out that while Cesario had kept secrets from her she had been in a minority. Clearly Stefano and Alice had known that Cesario had a brain tumour. Now she understood the often anxious looks she had seen Stefano angling at his cousin. Now she knew exactly what Alice had been getting at when Jess had overheard the other woman arguing with Cesario. Alice, bless her heart, had been trying to persuade Cesario that day that he ought to tell his wife about his condition, Jess registered belatedly. Of course, she was fairly sure that Alice had no idea that Cesario’s was a marriage of convenience built on practicality rather than love and trust. And Cesario’s revelations had just blown Jess and all her misconceptions about him and their relationship right out of the water and left her floundering in alien territory.
‘Tell me everything,’ Jess urged grittily.
‘It was not a complete lie when I said I needed a child to inherit Collina Verde,’ Cesario continued grimly. ‘My grandfather did leave a complex will and to inherit I did have to name Stefano and his son as my heirs because I didn’t have a child of my own. But I used that inheritance claim as an excuse when all I really wanted was a child to leave my wealth to—without a child, everything I had worked for all my life suddenly seemed so shallow and pointless.’
And with a shrug of a broad shoulder on that grudging admission, Cesario half turned away from her. He spread expressive lean brown hands in a gesture of frustration that appealed for her understanding. ‘I thought I was seeing clearly, but my rationale was warped and short-sighted. I believed I was doing something good, something worthwhile…’
‘How could it possibly have been worthwhile?’ Jess couldn’t think straight. She had come to London to find out where she stood with the man she loved and he had thrown everything she thought she knew about him and their marriage on its head. Her heart thudding fast behind her breastbone, she studied him in growing disbelief as he unwound the tangle of falsehoods he had spread to lay the truth bare for her.
‘I saw a child as a worthwhile investment for the future I didn’t have,’ Cesario extended heavily. ‘But I was kidding myself—I was really only thinking about what I wanted, not about what truly mattered. And I wanted you from the first moment I saw you.’
But Jess was not prepared to listen to that line of argument. In concert with what he was telling her, she felt as though her own life were shattering and falling down around her in broken irreparable pieces. Nothing was as she had thought, nothing was as it had seemed. The fabulous honeymoon in Italy had been a mere passage out of time—a means of distraction—and essentially meaningless. Cesario had cruelly deceived her from the start. He wasn’t going to be there for her as a husband, or as a father for their child, or even as a former partner in another country, she registered sickly. He wasn’t going to be there for her at all.
‘Everything you told me was a lie,’ she began in condemnation.
‘And honesty is very important to you…I know,’ Cesario returned with a sardonic edge to his voice. ‘I’m not trying to minimise the effect of what I did to you. It was wrong.’
Jess settled embittered eyes on him. ‘But it’s too late for regret now. I’m married to you and pregnant!’
Cesario stared at her with deep, dark bronzed eyes and it was as if she was seeing him clearly for the first time. He was so handsome and so sexy, but he was also unfathomable, with depths that she had not even come close to plumbing, she acknowledged unhappily, feeling her ignorance bite to the very foot of her soul.
‘We can separate right now if you like. It’s not a problem,’ Cesario informed her qu
ietly. ‘I’m prepared for that.’