All the color drained out of his face. “It didn’t happen. You’re the only woman I want, Lilly. Chelsea never came close to meaning anything like that to me.”
“Then tell me the truth,” she raged, pointing a finger at him. “This is my life, Riccardo. Not a tabloid page. When I left you I was in the fetal position for three days. Three days. And if Alex hadn’t come along to dig me out I might still be there. So do not tell me any more lies. I can’t take it.”
He stared at her with the glazed look of a man who didn’t know where to go. What to do. She watched him take a deep breath and steady himself and felt her heart sink into the depths of hell.
“You need to give me a chance to explain...”
She bit back the bile that rose in her throat. “Believe me—you have my full attention.”
He raked a hand through his hair and set his jaw. “Chelsea and I were once close—you know that. But once I met you that all ended and you were the only woman in my life. The only one, Lilly.” He frowned when she gave no reaction. “When things got so bad between us I was completely at a loss as to what to do. It was impossible to believe a marriage could go from one-fifty to zero in a matter of months—but somehow ours did, and I couldn’t figure out why or what to do about it. You refused to be with me, my pride was stinging, and I think we were both questioning our marriage.”
She forgot to breathe. Forgot she had to.
“I was hurt at what had become of us. Angry at what you were doing to me.” His mouth flattened into a grim line and his eyes half closed, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “So I called Chelsea and invited her to dinner.”
Lilly felt as if a train was headed for her, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything to avoid it.
“I wanted to prove I didn’t need you—I didn’t love you,” he continued hoarsely. “And maybe I wanted to hurt you too. Make you hurt as much as I was hurting.”
Lilly pressed her hands to her ears, but he stalked forward and dragged them away.
“I drove her home, I went up to her apartment with every intention of taking her to bed. And then I kissed her and everything felt wrong.”
Lilly felt the ground sway beneath her and, cursing, Riccardo scooped her up in his arms. He carried her over to the bench and sat down with her cradled against him. A tortured expression filled his eyes as he stared down at her. “You haunted me. No matter how much you pushed me away you were the only one I wanted.”
She sat there in his arms like a strange, disembodied presence that could hear what he was saying but couldn’t actually register it. When she managed to speak, her voice was low and thready. “You kissed her but you didn’t sleep with her?”
He nodded. “I came home to you and never saw her again.”
Something reached inside her and tore her heart out. “What kind of a kiss was it?”
He cursed low under his breath. “You can’t torture yourself like that.”
“Yes, I can!” she shrieked, stumbling off his lap and facing him on shaking legs. “You betrayed me, Riccardo. I saw those photographs. You didn’t just kiss her. You had sex with her!”
He frowned. “There were no photographs taken of us. We were in Chelsea’s apartment.”
“There were eight. Eight photos of you in various states of undress. Dammit, stop lying.”
He stood up and took her by the shoulders. “You will watch your tongue and tell me what you’re talking about.”
“Lacey Craig,” she threw at him, knowing this might well put the final nail in their marriage, but past caring. “After we got back from Barbados I called her up and asked what proof she had to support her story. She showed me photos of you and Chelsea. Intimate photos of you. And she let me buy them to spare me the humiliation of having them splashed across every gossip magazine in the country.”
He blinked at her, a look of complete incomprehension on his face. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You called a gossip columnist, demanded information about my infidelity and paid her for fake photos?”
“They weren’t fake,” she cried. “Everybody in New York knew you were having an affair! Too bad I was the last to know.”
His fingers tightened around her shoulders. “They are fake photos because I did not sleep with Chelsea Tate—ever—after our relationship began.”
His rage and the icy, menacing look on his face vibrated through her like a sledgehammer. Riccardo had never lied to her. Not once in their marriage. Until Chelsea. Truth was like a badge of honor to him—it was the De Campo creed, the way he conducted his life. Better to be brutal and get it over with.
What if she was wrong?
“Lilly?”
She yanked herself out of his grasp and turned away. Her brain moved wildly through the possibilities. Photos could be doctored. They were doctored all the time. Maybe those hadn’t been shots of him and Chelsea. It had been hard to see their faces after that initial shot of them kissing...
A cold, buzzing feeling descended over her. Would Lacey Craig have dared to sell her fakes? Wouldn’t she have been worried Lilly would take them straight to Riccardo, who would have pronounced them as such and sued the hell out of her?
Or maybe Lacey hadn’t known they were fake...
Oh, God.
Riccardo took a step toward her, his face hard and determined. “How much did you pay for those photos?”
She shook her head.
“How much?”
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
“A hundred thousand?” His brow furrowed. “They wouldn’t give you a full-page ad for a hundred grand...”
Lilly felt her world fall apart.
His gaze sharpened on her face as understanding dawned in his eyes. “That was the money you said you sent your parents?”
“Yes.”
He sucked in a breath, his fists clenching at his sides. “You trusted me so little you would do that without talking to me?”
“You kissed her, Riccardo! You went home with her, intending to sleep with her. Where in that is there anything that says I should have trusted you?”
His jaw clamped shut. He was silent for several long moments, each one driving the stake that was impaling her heart deeper and deeper.
Finally he raised his gaze to hers and asked quietly, “Was there ever any point in our marriage you were happy?”
She fought the fire burning the back of her eyes. “That first year after we married was the most amazing year of my life. I loved you, Riccardo. I worshipped the ground you walked on. You were my knight in shining armor who’d swooped into my life and made it whole again. But somewhere along the way I lost my glitter when it came to you. You didn’t want me the same way you did before. And it was torturous for me to be with you like that.” She looked down at the sparkling ring on her finger. “So I left.”
“You left because you thought I didn’t love you anymore?”
“I left because we were destroying each other. You became obsessed with that job—obsessed with having your birthright. And you left me alone to deal with the fallout of being Lilly De Campo. Something I couldn’t do on my own.”
He was silent, a granite mask stretching across his face. She hugged her arms around herself and listened as a chorus of tree frogs filled the air with their haunting, rhythmical song.
“You never once thought I might be struggling too? That I might need my wife?” He said the words quietly, deliberately, his face devoid of emotion.
“How would I have known? You’re like Mount Vesuvius. You keep everything inside until you explode. And when you do there’s nothing for me to respond to but the anger.”
His dark gaze rested on her. “I could say the same about you.”
“Yes, you could.” She nodded. “I have a ton of baggage, I know. But at least I acknowledge mine.”
His mouth pulled tight as her arrow hit home. He swung away and walked to the edge of the terrace, rested his elbows on the railing as he looked out at the sea. “I always thought if you wanted something bad enough you made it happen. That we could resolve our differences because we loved each other that much.”
The lump in her throat grew so large it felt as if she was aching all over. “Sometimes,” she choked, “love isn’t enough.”
He turned around, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the setting sun. The dull look on his face made the rest of her shrivel away.
“A marriage needs trust to survive. And between the two of us I think we’ve proved we have none.”
And there it was, she thought miserably. Their marriage summed up in one glaring truth.
“It was never going to work.”
Her words sat flat and lifeless on the night air between them. Riccardo’s head snapped back, a flare of angry color slashing across his cheekbones. His steps as he closed the distance between them were jerky, full of a barely leashed rage that made her suck in a breath. When he stopped in front of her, his furious glare leveled on her face, her heart seemed to stop.