He’d seen the way Alison had gazed at him when he strode into the hotel suite earlier that evening. Her eyes soft with longing.
They only had a few more months of their marriage left, and already he had let it get so far out of hand he couldn’t even control his hunger for her, let alone the greed to have more of her than he could ever deserve.
That would have to end tonight. He would speak to Marlena, gauge the situation with Enzo, wait for word from the police and stay away from Alison until she had gone back to London. And he wouldn’t contact her again, until he was finally back in control of his senses.
The car sped past the Coliseum on its way out of Rome towards the suburbs.
The arc lights illuminated the ancient building’s broken façade and for the first time, instead of seeing the epic majesty of the place, and everything the people who had built it had achieved, all he saw was a ruin, the brutal bloodshed once celebrated within its walls a symbol of the hollow shame inside him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALLY WATCHED THE black SUV stop in front of a large mansion block in the outskirts of the city.
Dominic got out of the car and headed past the children’s play equipment in the building’s front garden, the bars of a climbing frame glinting in the moonlight. Confusion accelerated the hammer thuds of her heartbeat.
She wasn’t even sure what had possessed her to follow him. She’d left the opera in a daze, the pain of his betrayal so huge it was almost choking her.
The questions running through her mind telling her what a fool she’d been.
Why had she assumed their marriage would be exclusive? After all, he’d never put that stipulation in any of the paperwork he’d made her sign. Why had it never even occurred to her to ask? Because she’d never asked him about anything? She’d never insisted or demanded a single thing. She’d trusted him implicitly, right from the first.
But as the young cab driver had sped through the streets of Rome following the SUV with the skill and precision of Jason Bourne in a chase scene—and telling her in broken English how much he’d always wanted a fare like this one—the open wound in her chest had made it brutally clear that stupidity and naiveté weren’t her only flaws. She still loved him, despite her suspicions.
‘Scusa, signorina? You go in?’ the cab driver asked from the front of the car.
Did she want to go in? Indecision added to the trauma.
The building Dominic had disappeared into looked like a school. Or maybe a children’s home.
Did his mistress work here? What if she’d made a terrible mistake and he wasn’t seeing another woman? Perhaps she should return to the hotel as he’d requested, wait for him to come back?
But even as the desperate hope that she had been wrong, or misguided, that she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion, bubbled inside her, the voice in her head that had persuaded her to follow him in the first place refused to be silent.
Was this really about whether or not Dominic had been seeing another woman? Or was it much more fundamental than that?
He’d shut her out, from so much of his life, his past, his future, and yet he had become such an important part of hers. He’d refused to let her in. Hidden behind the business arrangement they’d made long after it had stopped being just about business and become so much more for her.
She’d fallen in love with him weeks ago, maybe even months ago, and she’d been in denial about that, too. But she wasn’t in denial any more.
Whatever this place was, whoever Marlena was, they were significant in Dominic’s life and yet she knew nothing about them. Good grief, she hadn’t even known her husband spoke fluent Italian.
He’d talked about trust once before, when they’d consolidated their marriage bargain—but she’d always trusted him. It was him who had never trusted her...
Opening her purse with trembling fingers, she pulled out two twenty-euro notes and passed them to the driver. ‘Grazie, mille.’
‘Grazie, signorina. You want I wait?’ he asked as he took the money.
Yes. Just in case I don’t get up the guts to follow him into that building.
She stifled the plea. She’d been enough of a coward already. Letting him set the boundaries of this relationship. She didn’t want to be bound by that contract any more. She wanted a real marriage. Or no marriage at all. She couldn’t live like this, or she would be exactly what she’d always strived to avoid. A shadow of who she could be, a woman like her mother, chasing dreams and not facing reality.
‘No, grazie,’ she said and forced herself to step out of the car.
She took a deep breath, which did nothing to calm her racing heartbeat, or close the hole that had opened up in her belly. And walked up the path to the building’s main entrance as the cab drove away.
As she rang the bell she read the sign on the door: Fondazione per Ragazzi
Perduti.