She heard his words echo...about mothers who didn’t care. Her eyes flickered to him, saw his profile silhouetted.
What do I know about him other than the power he has over me to make me want him? And the fact that he does not want me in return?
She felt her throat tighten. Heard herself speak. ‘Well, I got used to it. Got used to being not wanted—neither by my parents nor my grandfather. Which is why...’ she forced the words from her ‘...not being wanted by you is just par for the course really.’
It seemed important somehow for her to say that.
Perhaps it will make it easier to deal with.
She kept her head turned towards him. Only the lights from oncoming cars illuminated his stark features. It was easier to say things in the dark. Things that were difficult to say yet which needed to be said. Things she was ready to say now. Ready to face. To accept—however painful.
‘I have to accept, Luca, that you don’t want me,’ she heard herself say. ‘That you hate it that we fell into bed—twice—and that you hate me for stopping you marrying Mia. You hate, above all, that I am now pregnant. I am the very last woman, just as you told me, you’d want a baby with.’ She looked away, meshing her fingers in her lap so tightly the blood flow was cut off. ‘We can’t help who we want or don’t want in our lives.’
He did not answer and she did not expect him to. She turned her head away to look out over the dark, deadly waters of the glacial lake only a few metres from the road. Heaviness filled her, like a weight dragging her down into those deep, drowning waters, never to emerge again.
She felt tears prick in her eyes, but she could not brush them away or Luca would know that she was crying. Her throat constricted, tightening unbearably as she stifled the rising sob.
‘Ariana...?
She heard him say her name. His voice low. There might have been concern in it, but that was not likely. Well, not concern for her, at any rate. For the baby, yes, but never for her.
Never.
Luca Farnese would never be concerned about her. Would never stop resenting her presence in his life. Would never want her. Would never care about her.
She had known it since that hideous morning in New York, as he’d rejected her to go back to Italy and marry the woman hedidwant—her own cousin Mia. Who did not want him. Who’d turned toherto save her.
And save her I did—and thus earned the enmity of this man who never wanted to want me, even for passing sex. The man whose child I now carry.
She shut her eyes, feeling that heaviness press down upon her, suffocating her. The mess of her life...the mess of his. Her thoughts burned with it. Her eyes burned with it.
It was a mess—nothing but a doomed, unholy, blighted and accursed mess...
Slow tears oozed again, scalding on her cheeks.
Then, ‘Ariana—don’t. Don’t cry.’
Luca’s voice was low, and what was in it was something she had never heard before.
In the darkness of the car’s interior she felt him reach out his hand, close it over hers, still twisting in her lap. Stilling them.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said again, and his palm was warm as it covered her hands.
A single teardrop fell, splashing his fingers and hers.
He lifted his hand away, returned it to the steering wheel. Drove on in silence.
Yet it seemed a different silence, somehow.
Luca stared down at the whisky in the glass in his hand as he stood by the window of his hotel room looking out over Lake Como, its surface dark except for where the lights of the nearby houses fell on it in shimmering pools, each separate from the other. Through the narrow wall of his room was Ariana’s. Separate from his.
His thoughts were strange. Difficult.
He had strived to break her power over him—the power of his own unwanted desire for her—and he had failed. Now she was beyond him anyway—her pregnancy assured her of that.
In his head, the words she had spoken in the car circled.
‘I have to accept that you don’t want me.’