“You are so certain about this woman you have married, this woman you have only just met?”
“Yes,” Rule said firmly. “I am.”
“You wanted to marry her, for herself? Not simply for the child. You feel she is … right for you?”
“Yes. I did. I do.”
“Yet you don’t feel confident enough of her trust in you to tell her the basic truth of the situation?”
Rule winced. His father had cut a little too close to the bone with that one. He said, “I made a choice. I’m willing to live with the consequences.”
His father was silent. Rule braced himself for criticism, for a very much deserved lecture on the price a man pays for tempting fate, for doing foolish, thoughtless, irresponsible things and telling himself he’s breaking free, that he’s trying to help others.
More than three years ago, Rule had let his hunger for something he didn’t even understand win out over his good sense. And now, when he’d finally found what he was looking for, he’d lied to secure the prize he sought. And he was continuing to lie….
But then his father only said, “Fair enough, then. I see your dilemma. And I sympathize. But still, it’s only right that you explain yourself to Liliana, face-to-face, as soon as possible. She should hear it from you first. She’s an innocent in all this.”
“I agree. I was planning to return on Tuesday, but I’ll try to get away Monday … I mean, today.”
“Do your best.?
?
Rule promised he would and they said goodbye.
He turned to go inside and saw Sydney, her hair tangled from sleep, her green eyes shadowed, full of questions. Wearing one of the white terrycloth robes provided by the resort, she stood watching him through the sliding glass door.
Chapter Eight
He’d been facing away from the suite, he reminded himself. And speaking in low tones. She couldn’t have heard the conversation through the thick glass of the door.
Tamping down his anxiety that she might have overheard something incriminating after all, he pulled the door open and murmured regretfully, “I woke you….”
“No. The absence of you. That’s what woke me.” She took his hand, pulled him into the suite and slid the door shut. After that, she stood gazing up at him, and he had that feeling he so often had with her, the feeling he’d just described to his father. The feeling of rightness, that he was with her, that he had finally dared to approach her, to claim her. Too bad the sense of rightness was liberally mixed with dread at the way-too-possible negative outcome of the dangerous game he played. “Is there something wrong?” She searched his face.
He still had her hand in his, so he pulled her back to their room. Once he had her inside, he shut and locked the door.
“Rule, what?”
He framed her sweet, proud face between his hands. He loved her wide mouth, her nose that was perhaps a little too large for her face. A nose that made her look interesting and commanding, a nose that demanded a man take her seriously. One lie, he had already told her. A huge lie of omission. All else must be the absolute truth. “You’re going to be angry with me….”
“You’re scaring me. Just tell me what’s going on. Please.”
He caught her hand again, took her to the bed, sat her down and then sat beside her. “That was my father, on the phone. He asked me to come back to Montedoro today. He thinks I should talk to Liliana, that I owe her an explanation, that I should be the one to tell her that any proposal she might have been expecting is not forthcoming, that I’m already married.”
She pulled her hand from his and drove right to the point. “And what do you think, Rule?”
“I think my father is right.”
She speared her fingers through her night-mussed hair, scraping it back off her forehead. He wanted to reach for her, but he didn’t dare. “Princess Lili is still waiting, I take it, for you to ask her to marry you?”
“That’s the general assumption. She’s a guest at the palace. It would be pretty unforgivable of me to let her find out in the tabloids that I’m already married.”
“Pretty unforgivable?”
“All right. Simply unforgivable. As I said before, she’s like a sister to me. While a man doesn’t want to marry his sister—he doesn’t want to see her hurt, either.”
“I understand that.”