“Did you think I’d stay here this week, and that we’d be together like this, whenever our bodies desired, and in the mean time, you would tend to the child I had no clue about?”
“Please,” she said, the word torn from her.
“Please?” He mimicked. “Please? Please what? Please forgive you? Please stop being angry? Please tell you that it doesn’t matter? Ava, you have lied to me by omission about perhaps the most serious matter on earth. What do you ask me to ‘please’ do now?”
She was crying properly now, enormous sobs were wrenching from her body. But Cristiano couldn’t feel sympathy for her. He was too angry. Too hurt. Too shocked.
“She is my child. Mine. Not just yours. You should have told me.”
“I tried,” she shouted, clutching her hands to her chest. “I tried to tell you.” She stared up at him through her tear-coated eyes. “I came to Rio. I was pregnant. I knew that you’d want to know.”
“You were still married,” he said with a ripple of anger. “You married him, why? Intending to pass my child off as his? Is that why he divorced you? Because he discovered the truth? No one could believe that little girl was Angus Edwards’s.”
“No!” She spat, the denial rich with sincerity. “Don’t be absurd.” She stood, her legs shaking beneath her. She put a hand on his chest but he shook away.
“Don’t touch me, Ava. You disgust me. I cannot believe I ever thought I loved you.” He sucked in a breath; it burned with fury. “You have robbed me of something you had no business concealing. Did you do it to hurt me? Did you do it to punish me for leaving you?”
“No!” She pressed her palms to her eyes, despair making her weary. “You are so, so wrong. I did it because I loved you.”
“What?” He demanded, his brows lifting in fury. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She swallowed. “You didn’t love me enough to stay here.” She crinkled her forehead, trying to find the right words. The right order in which things had happened. She desperately needed him to understand her mindset. “You left.”
“So you were angry enough to hide my child from me?”
“I tried to tell you!” She reminded him forcefully. “And if you’re going to shout question after question at me, at least let me answer!”
A knock sounded at the door and Ava spun away from it, embarrassed by what she must look like. It creaked inwards, and Marie poked her head around. “Sorry to interrupt,” she addressed Cristiano, for Ava wasn’t looking in her direction. “But Milly’s getting a little upset at all the yelling.”
“Christ,” Cristiano muttered. “Of course. Ava and I are to go out.”
She glared at him sidelong, her expression mutinous. “You’re to go out. I’m staying here.”
“Ava Anne Henderson, I am not above lifting you over my shoulder and kidnapping you, if that is what it will take to have this conversation privately.”
Marie would have swooned if the tension weren’t so obvious. She looked from one to the other and nodded. “We’ll be fine here.”
Ava felt like she was hyperventilating. “She’s never heard me yell,” she said, more to herself. “Poor Milly must be beside herself.”
“Then let us spare her any further distress,” he muttered. “Do you need anything?”
She looked at him bleakly and shook her head.
“My car is outside.”
She nodded. What purpose could be served by objecting? She walked stiffly beside him, pausing only to slip her feet into a pair of sandals by the door. She was numb through. The moment; this day of reckoning … it had finally come.
The sun was dazzling and the heat intense. Ava slid into the car, and stared straight ahead at the rows of green vines. Far in the distance, she could see Cristiano’s friends – her guests – assembled on the green lawn. Again, she was hit with the sense of how carefree they all were. How different his life must be to Ava’s.
She gripped her hands in her lap.
“Marie says you’re in a relationship with that American woman.”
He stirred the powerful engine to life and turned the car towards the long, sloping drive. “Does she?” The words were choked from his mouth.
“Are you?”
Anger flushed his system. “Let us be frank about something. Who I am sleeping with, and who you are sleeping with, is immaterial.”