And he knew why the words he would speak now were the only ones he wanted to say. Spoken out of that still, small space inside the hurricane where truth was. The only truth that mattered.
The certainty of it poured through him and his gaze poured into hers as she stared up at him, uncomprehending, stricken...
‘I will stand by you,’ he said, with indelible certainty, absolute promise. ‘And I give you my word...’ his eyes held all that he knew he must say ‘...no one will ever know your baby is not mine.’
Lana lurched to her feet and the blood drained from her again, making her legs collapse, her lungs collapse. For a second time Salvatore caught her, his hands gripping hers as her body sagged.
‘No, don’t faint on me! I didn’t mean to shock you! Sit down—’
Once again he was propelling her into the armchair and she sank down. If she had been in shock before, now it was threefold. A million-fold. He let slip her hands and they dropped like weights into her lap as he stood there, looking down at her.
What was in his face was something she had never seen before.
He was speaking again, and in his voice was something she had never heard before.
‘I do not talk of forgiveness,’ he was saying, his eyes never leaving hers, ‘for there is nothing to forgive. You knew him before you knew me. He hurt you badly and you hated him for it! So I understand—truly, I understand why you went back to him when he returned to London. And I understand your hopes, your thinking—believing—he might stay with you this time...’
And now his voice darkened, edged with an anger, a contempt, that was not directed at her.
‘But you were wrong to trust him—he let you down again! Abandoned you again! Used you just as he used you the first time around!’ His eyes flashed with anger. ‘If he were here now I would pulverise him for what he’s done to you! Left you—again! Looking out for himself, and only for himself, as he always did!’
She couldn’t speak...couldn’t think. Could not believe—
But he was not done yet.
‘For all that he has done to you, you are well shot of him! He’s worthless scum! Forget him! Forget him and come back to me.’
She took a breath. Deep into her lungs. Her whole being seemed to be sucked into that breath. She looked up at him. She couldn’t read his face. It had closed again.
‘Are you telling me,’ she asked slowly, with infinite care—because suddenly, out of nowhere, out of the maelstrom that had stormed over her, it was the most important question in the world, in the entire universe, ‘that you would want me even if I was carrying Malcolm’s baby?’
His eyes were fixed on hers. His face still had that expression she had never seen before, the one that was impossible to read.
‘Yes.’
A single word to answer her.
She took a ragged breath. It seemed the words must break from her now.
‘But why?’
For a moment he did not answer her. Only stood there, his gaze still fixed on hers. That unreadable look still on his face. She felt her heart start to thud, as if something were about to happen that she might not be able to bear.
She could see the tension edging his jaw, sitting across his shoulders, when he spoke next, as if his words were being forced from him. She heard them through the thudding of her heart, the tightness in her lungs. Sitting there, nerveless.
‘All my life,’ he said heavily, ‘I have thought myself like my father. Feared it. I knew, therefore, that I should never marry lest I bring misery to my wife as he did to his. But then I discovered something about myself that I had never known,’ he said, and his words were heavier yet. ‘Giavanna came to see me after you’d walked out on me. Dropping poison in my ear. Giving me an explanation for why you’d left me. Por Dio, I did not believe it—did not want to believe it! Refused to believe it! Yet when I came to your house and saw Malcolm walking out of it...then I knew—’
Pain was in his voice—she could hear it through the thudding of her heart—and a hurt and wretchedness that reached out to her and gripped her heart like a vice.
‘I knew, in that single moment, that it was not being my father’s son that I should have feared...’ He looked at her, and the pain that had been in his voice was in his eyes too. ‘It was being my mother’s.’
He was silent for a moment, and so was she, unable to speak, too full with what was inside her now. Then more words were coming from Salvatore. Halting, painful.
‘I had come to know, as she did, the pain of being rejected for another. Because you...’ his face was bleaker yet ‘...had rejected me for Malcolm, who wanted you back after he’d been dumped by his Hollywood star.’
Slowly...infinitely slowly...Lana found the words she needed to speak. ‘How could you ever think I would go back to Malcolm? After what he did to me!’
The tightness of his face made it a mask. ‘I thought he must have repented...repaid you the mortgage money.’ His mouth set. ‘I thought that that was the reason you were turning down the prenup payment we’d agreed.’