‘Now we just have to manage the consequences. What we want is irrelevant—only the baby matters. And we have to deal with that. Somehow.’
He let go her hand and it fell back onto the bedclothes like a dead weight. She felt him stand up, heard him walk to the door again. Walk out.
She did not turn her head or move. Only as her eyes stared up sightlessly in the darkening room slow tears started. Silent and scalding, and quite, quite pointless.
Luca opened the passenger door of his car.
‘Ariana...’ he prompted.
Silently, she complied, getting into the low-slung car. Just as she silently complied with everything—from going to the obstetrician to coming to the table for meals. Or, as now, getting into his car.
Ariana never contested anything he told her to do.
A rapier of emotion slit him as he slid into the driver’s seat. It was like the ghost of the life he’d once thought would be his. Making a marriage where there would be no drama, no discord, no angry contestation or denunciation. A marriage of only co-operation, complaisance. Agreement. A quiet, tranquil marriage. With a wife who would never subject him to the histrionics he’d grown up with, as his father had endlessly tried to placate his always angry mother.
Why had he done that? Why had his father never stood up to her?
But he knew why. Had known since he’d reached his teenage years and discovered for himself the power of female allure. His father had been in sexual thrall to his wife—a woman he could not live with or without.
Luca felt his jaw tighten, his body tense.
That’s what I feared for myself—why my dreams were always of a woman like Mia.
Yet it was not Mia he was now going to marry.
He gunned the car’s powerful engine, exiting the garage, making his way slowly through the Milan traffic. The weather had brightened and he was glad. He needed the elements on his side.
‘Where are we going?’ Ariana’s question was indifferent, uninterested, and she did not look at him as she asked it.
‘Somewhere that might suit you better than here,’ was all the reply he made.
She made no answer to it, only went on sitting there, her hands in her lap, gazing out of the window straight ahead of her. She didn’t speak again. Stayed silent.
He gained the autostrada, heading north towards their destination. Lake Como. He drove steadily, enjoying the feel of the powerful vehicle under his control. His face set. There was not much else in his life to enjoy. Had his life gone to plan he would have had Mia at his side right now. It was for Mia he’d bought the lakeside villa on Como he was now heading for—a weekend retreat from Milan for them both.
Now it was for a different woman.
The woman replacing Mia.
Displacing her.
His eyes went to the woman at his side, pregnant with his child. So utterly unlike Mia. Yet now she was as quiet as Mia, uncontesting, docilely complying with everything he said.
He felt that rapier of emotion pierce him again, engendering a chill. The words of an old warning shaped in his head.
Be careful what you wish for.
Ariana looked about her. For the first time in unnumbered days—days that had passed one after another, each as dead as the previous day, days when she had felt nothing, because nothing was all it was safe to feel and all she had the energy to feel, days of just lying on her bed for hours—it was as if something were drawing her. She felt something stir within her—a gleam of interest.
Part of her wanted to ignore it, to let it sink down into the oblivion into which she, too, wanted to sink. But without her wanting them to her eyes went to the house Luca had drawn up at, a short drive from the snaking lakeside road, secluded and private on a small promontory over the lake.
Out of long professional habit, she categorised it as her eyes rested on it. A lakeside villa, late nineteenth-century, a picturesque summer retreat from Milan. Her gaze narrowed critically. Its condition was not pristine. The exterior paint had faded and flaked and there were uneven roof tiles, a sagging porch. The gardens were bathed in autumnal sunshine. And beyond, she could see the dark indigo of the lake, silvering to obsidian.
Luca was getting out of the car and she did likewise, hardly noticing that she was doing so.
‘What is this place?’ she asked, looking around her.
It didn’t seem like a place that he would have anything to do with. Its ornate, fin-de-siècle style could not have been more different from that stark, bleak, modernistic apartment of his in Milan.