He spoke furiously into the phone in a stream of fluent Italian.
He spoke Italian?
Whoever Marlena was, she had his full attention as the call continued, none of which she understood.
It could only have lasted a few minutes, but it felt like hours as she watched the emotions cross his face in the shadows of the booth, for once unguarded and unrestrained. Concern, panic, desperation, was that what his love really looked like?
Desdemona’s melodic soprano from the stage couldn’t drown out the discordant beats of her heart as he ended the call.
‘I must leave,’ he said.
He lifted her fingers to buzz a kiss across the knuckles but his detachment, his distance, felt like a physical blow. He wasn’t here with her any more, he was with Marlena.
‘Wait, Dominic.’ She held onto his hand, refusing to let him discard her so easily when her sex was still aching from his lovemaking.
She knew he’d kept things from her. She knew he had never wanted her to see past the barriers he put around his heart. And she’d respected that because she’d thought she had to, until he was ready. Until they were both ready to take the next step.
But she had never thought, not even for a moment, that this marriage had been a complete sham—a cover for something else.
All this time, while she had been convinced he wasn’t ready to love, had he been giving what she yearned for to someone else?
‘Who’s Marlena?’ she asked, her voice dull.
His scarred brow rose in surprise, but then she saw the guilt flicker across his face.
‘She does not concern you,’ he said. ‘Stay and enjoy the rest of the show.’ The suggestion came out as a command. Cold and final.
As he strode out of the box without a backward glance, her heart—which had been so full, so joyous, so hopeful only moments before—shattered.
* * *
Dominic was still shaking as he climbed into the SUV and barked an instruction at his driver.
A new message appeared on his phone in Italian from Marlena Romano.
Dominic, there is no need to leave the event. We have alerted the police to Enzo’s disappearance and will inform you as soon as we have any news.
He typed a reply in Italian—not easy with his fingers still trembling from the feel of his wife, coming apart in his arms. And the look of devastation on her face afterwards.
Not a problem, Marlena. I am on my way.
He had caught Enzo, a ten-year-old street kid, trying to pick his pocket that afternoon, while he had been waiting outside the hotel for the car that was due to take him to the airport and Alison.
He’d been so preoccupied with thoughts of his wife and how much he wanted to see her again, to hold her, to find out how her show was progressing, that the nimble-fingered young thief had almost got away with his wallet.
But as soon as he’d grabbed the child’s bony wrist, heard the boy’s cry of distress and seen the angry defiance in his jaded eyes, it had been like looking into a mirror. And all the reasons why he shouldn’t be quite so eager to see Alison again had come tumbling back to him.
Marlena was right, of course. It wasn’t an efficient use of his celebrity to leave an event that had been planned for months to help fund the Lost Boys charity he had set up in Rome and a collection of other European cities, to help street kids like himself, both boys and girls—children who had no hope and no chance and no opportunities. To give them the support and encouragement they needed to succeed and tap all that wasted talent and potential before it was too late.
All he would be doing was getting in the way. Marlena and her staff were highly trained and extremely capable and once the police located Enzo, and returned him, the staff would be better placed to convince the boy to take the chance the home could offer him.
But when he had received Marlena’s call he hadn’t been thinking straight. The truth was he hadn’t been thinking at all.
He’d needed a way out, an excuse to escape from the emotions threatening to choke him as he’d looked at his wife’s dishevelled appearance, and the dazed shock in her eyes, and felt like an animal.
How could his hunger, his need, have got so spectacularly out of control that he’d taken her against a wall during a public event? When was it ever going to end? Because the more he had her, the more wild he became.
And the driving hunger for sex wasn’t even the worst of how delusional he was.