"You do want me," he said with conceited assurance.
That was unfortunately entirely justified.
"But I don't want no-strings sex."
He stepped back, a cloak of cold withdrawal going around him. "I'm not offering strings to you."
"I didn't think you were." Which was why, this time, Annette was thinking with her head and not her sexual desire, or her heart. "You made that abundantly clear the last time."
"So, you refuse to give into what we both want because I know better than to trust you with anything other than sex?" His tone said he couldn't quite believe his ears.
She wanted to shout,Welcome to the club, buddy!, but asked instead, "You don't think you can trust me?" She made no attempt to hide her own shock.
"How can you be surprised by that?" He stared down at her, that disbelief now written clearly on his handsome features. "You left me standing at the altar."
"I told you I wouldn't be there." She still didn't understand why he'd shown up.
"I thought it was prewedding jitters. I made the mistake of trusting you to keep your promise and all that got me was public and private humiliation and vilification," he said with grim judgement.
Carlo had really believed she would show up at the church. That just boggled her mind.
Was it because he'd believed in their relationship that strongly, or simply could not imagine her refusing to fall in with his plans?
"You wouldn't listen to me, not about the honeymoon, not about moving. It took too long for me to realize that there were compromises we could have made, that we needed to talk more." How many times had Annette wished over the last seven and a half years she'd gone through with the wedding and then offered up those options, or at least insisted on discussing them beforehand?
"Compromises?" he asked with scorn, the usual urbane charmer no longer in evidence. "Your actions showed you weren't interested in compromising in any way."
She could see why he thought that. She'd told her parents the wedding was off after trying to give Carlo back her ring. Then she'd run away. She'd turned off her phone and found a no name motel to hole up in. She hadn't even realized the media frenzy was happening until it was too late to do anything meaningful to mitigate it.
By then Alceu had his accident and Floyd Hudson had already spoken to the head office of her organization, making an offer they had no intention of refusing. Her transfer had happened in a matter of days. "I am truly sorry. There are reasons—"
"There is no excuse for you running away like you did," he said adamantly.
"I didn't say excuses, I said reasons. And honestly, even understanding myself better now, after the highhanded way you planned our future and the length of our honeymoon without consulting me, I'm not sure I could have done anything differently." That had been a hard thing to acknowledge.
Almost as hard as realizing she had reacted more to the fear of being rejected than what he'd said and done.
It was a conundrum she'd never quite found a solution to. She knew her reaction had been knee-jerk and over the top, but even knowing that she should have pressed for another talk with him, she could not be confident that the end result would have been any different.
As much as she'd wished over and over that she'd gone through with the wedding, she'd also thought an equal number of times she'd been right to call it off. Not how she'd done it maybe and not because she was afraid of him eventually dumping her because she wasn't the perfect woman for him, but because their relationship had been too unequal.
She'd been too used to unequal relationships to see it. Then anyway.
Now, she saw the past through a very different lens than the one she'd used to look at life through when she was twenty-two. Which did not mean they couldn't have found more even footing to stand on.
Was that why she found it so hard to let him go? The unknown of whether they could have worked things out, or not?
"Good to know your apology just now was as sincere as your promise back then." Carlo turned and walked away, but unlike Joyce, he headed back inside the traditional Mediterranean style mansion.
Annette didn't call him back.
She was too busy reliving the conversation that had prompted her to call off the wedding.
CHAPTER 5
"So, we'll take two months, using a house on the Dalmatian Coast as our base, and my new yacht, exploring every bit of ancient culture in Croatia, Italy, Greece and Turkey that we can." Wealthy Sicilian tycoon, Carlo finished speaking and looked at Annette with expectation in his grey gaze, like he'd just offered her the world, not tried to take hers apart.
"I can't take two months off for a honeymoon," she told him, quite reasonably she thought, when really? She wanted to scream.