“What?” Bleakness. Confusion.
He was closing himself off from her. He watched as she pulled her clothes on, but he was filling with a sense of dispassion. It was the opposite to how he’d felt only moments earlier. Now, he was numbed through. He studied her body through the eyes of a stranger. She was as beautiful as ever. Altered a little. Breasts that were fuller. A stomach that was flatter. She was softer. She had a fine mark on her abdomen that he remembered kissing now.
“You were so certain that you wanted to marry him. Angus Edwards. Yet it didn’t work out. Why not?”
Ava licked her lower lip.
What could she say to that? It would be a lie to insist that it was none of Cristiano’s business. He had been front and centre of her marriage breakup. “I …”
She closed her eyes. She felt nausea. The gulf of knowledge that existed between them would shock him, if he felt it. For how much had happened to Ava since that one last day, when he’d left as if life was a simple question of right and wrong, black and white. He’d gone and she’d been left to pick up the pieces.
To try to make sense of the world she’d once known.
“It was complicated,” she finished lamely.
He expelled a breath through his nose, and his nostrils flared wide. He was staring at her as though certain she would speak. As though she was about to lay bare all of her feelings.
But to what end? He would never forgive her if he knew about Milly. That she’d had their baby and raised it on her own, without including him. A man like Cristiano would feel the betrayal to his core.
And if he knew how she’d struggled? How her delivery had left her permanently scarred and forever unable to have further children? If he knew how she’d suffered with her grief and depression after the devastating operation that removed both Milly and any hope of future babies from her at the same time? If he knew h
ow she’d cried for him in the middle of the night, and wished he had been there to comfort her?
He would hate himself.
She blinked away the sudden urge to give in to the tears.
“Complicated? You’re saying it was complicated? Jesus, Ava, you were so damned sure.”
“I know.” She nodded jerkily.
“So what? What happened?”
“Come on, Cris. Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” he growled. “I loved you, Ava. I loved you.”
She arched a brow, but her heart was thudding painfully in her chest. Both his declaration and the way he’d couched it in the past tense flooded her raw emotions with acid. “Not enough,” she said with a small grimace. “You loved me, but only so long as I fell in with your plans.”
His face drained of colour. “No,” he denied, but she cut him off.
“Yes, Cristiano. You assumed I loved you so much that I’d pack up and leave my home. The only home I’ve ever known. You loved me, but your love was fickle. You loved me only until I told you no, and then you walked away. At the first obstacle, you ceased to love me.”
“Bullshit!” His curse was loud and she lifted a finger to his lips.
“Keep your voice down, Cris. I’d prefer to keep this private, if you don’t mind.”
His expression was a tempestuous storm. When he was angry his accent was thicker. “That’s you in a nutshell. You give too great a shit about what other people think. You cared about what your sisters thought. You cared about what Angus and his family would think. You cared about everything and everyone more than you did about you and me. And for that you deserved to be unhappy, Ava. You made the wrong choice. You made the wrong choice.”
His words were like bullets in her armour. She felt her soul weakening as it was punctured again and again and again.
“You wouldn’t have been the right choice,” she said firmly. She had held that certainty to her chest as a sort of balm for a long time. It had comforted her when she’d woken up in the middle of the night, with visions of Cris so strong and real that she almost felt she could reach out and grab him. “It wouldn’t have worked for us either.”
“How can you say that with any degree of certainty?”
She gaped her mouth. “I’ve never been more certain of anything,” she muttered. She ran a hand over her skirt and then turned to the mirror. Her face was so obviously passion ravaged that she winced. She ran her fingers through her damp hair, and pinched her cheeks.
“That is most curious,” he murmured. He approached her from behind, and met her eyes in the reflection. “Because I have long felt the exact opposite.”