Her eyes were distended, her voice a bare husk.
‘Why...?’
The single word came again, as if it had been ground from her out of broken glass.
The impatient look was on his face again—and something more. Absolute rejection.
‘I’m returning to Italy today.’
He took a razoring breath. Eyes levelled on her, cutting into hers.
‘I’m getting married,’ he said.
Luca sat immobile in the hotel limousine driving him to JFK International Airport. His fingers gripped into the leather of the seat’s armrest. In his head a scene was replaying. That tableau in the elevator lobby outside his hotel suite.
For a second—a fraction of a second—she’d held herself completely motionless, wrapped in a bathrobe, hair tumbling over her shoulders, face stark, after he’d said what he’d had to say...given her his reason for walking out on her as he had. Then a cry had been wrenched from her—a hoarse, gasping sound—and every feature had contorted. She’d started forward, hands clenched, hurling words at him like bullets sprayed from a machine gun.
‘Youbastard! You total, absolute bastard! You piece of—’
That broken cry had come again, and then she’d been surging forward, hands raised, closing the short distance between them to where he stood, rigid and rejecting, by the elevator doors. She’d pummelled his chest and he had seized her wrists, holding her away with main force and a face as black as night. She had tried to wrench her hands free, twisting her body frantically, repeating her denunciation of him, yelling at him, her eyes ablaze with fury.
And fury had seized him too. Fury that had come from somewhere very deep inside. From a place he’d never before allowed to get control of him. But which had possessed him then.
He had not spoken, only thrust her away, releasing her wrists as the elevator doors had opened. The car had been occupied, with hotel guests coming down from a higher floor, and he’d seen them react to the woman hurling vitriol at him, with her tangled hair all over the place, wild-eyed, features contorted, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe all but coming apart at her cleavage. He’d seen their shock, their embarrassment.
She’d still been yelling at him, but his own black, ice-cold fury had deafened him to it. He’d stepped back, moving into the elevator car as the doors sliced shut, blocking her out. Silencing her.
His rage had been absolute.
It still was.
With her, and with someone who was even more culpable than the yelling banshee he’d thrust away from him.
With himself.
For the criminal stupidity of what he’d done.
Ariana sank down on the bed, its crumpled sheets cruelly, viciously mocking her. She was shaking...shaking all over...her legs like straw, her body weak, as if she were made of tissue paper.
She felt eviscerated—as if talons had ripped her open. Humiliation seared through her like a wash of burning acid. To have done what she had—let herself be used as Luca Farnese had used her, so shamelessly, so ruthlessly, for a night of sordid sexual gratification! An empty, meaningless encounter that he’dknownwas to be nothing more—couldbe nothing more!
He had known all along. From the very first moment when he’d stood looking at her as she danced...to the moment he’d walked out on her, leaving her, used and discarded, in his tumbled bed.
In her head, his cold, dismissive words stabbed like an icy knife.
‘I’m getting married.’
Those words had consigned her, in that instant, to being little better than a prostitute. And condemned himself, beyond any excuse, to being what she had told him he was, hurled at him in her rage and humiliation...
She wrapped her arms around her body as if to hold herself together.
He deserved it! He deserved every word I threw at him!
And she—oh, she deserved the other word burning in her throat. Choking her.
Fool. Fool, fool, fool...
To have done what she had done...