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Lifting the glass to her mouth, she took a swift, deep gulp of the cooling water as she tried to collect her thoughts. She wished that Ricardo would move somewhere else or that he would come and sit down. Standing there, so tall and lean and dark, he seemed to tower over her oppressively, dominating the room and tightening every one of her muscles just to look at him.
‘Why…’ Her throat clenched and she had to take another gulp of water. ‘Why did you bring me here?’
The look he gave her said that that was a question that didn’t need answering but all the same he drew in a long, deep breath and then looked her straight in the eyes.
‘I wanted to see you with Marco—how you would react. How you would be when you met him for real.’
So she had been right. He had been testing her. The atmosphere she had sensed in the room earlier had been real and not the product of her overheated imagination.
‘And what did you find out?’
‘That you lied.’
It was the last thing she had expected but as she opened her mouth to refute the accusation he ignored her attempt at protest.
‘You lied in that note you left when you said you wanted your freedom—at least when you said you wanted your freedom from Marco. So something else took you away. You said you were sick—what was wrong?’
‘I wasn’t exactly sick…’ Lucy hedged. ‘It was more like a…a breakdown.’
She had his attention now. Those dark eyes couldn’t have burned any stronger, or been more fixed on her face.
‘A mental breakdown?’
If there had been any hint of shock or horror in his voice then she might not have been able to answer him but the truth was that his tone was completely controlled, totally matter-of-fact. So much so that it was only just a reaction.
‘Yes…’
She nodded, keeping her eyes locked with his. That steady black gaze never wavered, never moved. Instead, it stayed fixed on her, probing deeper and further with every breath that she took.
‘You were depressed.’
‘You could say that.’ Lucy’s voice was shaky, her weak attempt at laughter even more so. She knew from his quick frown that her laughter seemed out of place but she just couldn’t hold it back. Depressed seemed such an inadequate word for what she had been through. She had barely known who she was or what she was doing. And the world had seemed like a dark, empty cavern, one that she couldn’t find her way out of, no matter how she’d tried. ‘Though depressed sounds like the way you’d describe it if you lost a job or your dog died.’
‘Not true depression. And if you had a breakdown, then that’s what you must have suffered.’
Looking up into Ricardo’s face, Lucy blinked hard at the unexpected note in his voice. She hadn’t anticipated such sympathy. Was it possible that he might understand after all?
‘It was horrible.’ She shivered at the memory. ‘The whole world seemed black and I didn’t know how to make myself get out of bed every day.’
And knowing what she had done to Marco, that by running away she had probably lost him, and the man she’d loved, for ever, had made things so, so much worse. The future had stretched ahead of her, bleak and cold and empty, and she hadn’t known how she was going to cope. If it hadn’t been for the care of a kind and understanding doctor, the support of therapists, she didn’t know how she would have survived.
‘There didn’t seem to be any point in going on. Any reason to—’
She broke off sharply, startled into awareness of the way that Ricardo had suddenly abandoned his position against the wall and had come close, his fingertips resting lightly on her arm.
‘Don’t…’ he said quietly, pulling her out of the dark fog of her memories.
‘Ricardo…’ Her voice was all over the place, shaking and quavering in a way that she just couldn’t control. And she felt so cold…so horribly cold. She was shivering as if she were in the grip of some horrible fever.
‘Give that to me.’
It was only when Ricardo’s hand came out and eased the glass from her clenched fingers that she realised how tightly she had been gripping it. She had been holding it so firmly that when her hand had started to shake the water inside the glass had swirled around, slopping over the side and splashing onto the pink linen of her skirt, marring the fine material with ugly dark patches.
She remembered buying this skirt—at least, she thought she did. It had been one of the things she had found on one of the first trips she had made away from the villa a couple of weeks after Marco had been born. She had left him with his nanny and had called Enzo, who took care of and piloted the motorboat, to take her across the lake to the shore. And there she had taken the car into Verona, where she had shopped, hunting for something—anything—that would make her feel more human. Something that would make her feel more alive, more in control of herself and her life.
And something that would make Ricardo look at her like a woman he desired once again.
Without the glass to hold, her hands were shaking even more and when she clasped both of them together on her lap they still kept shaking, shuddering where they lay on the pink skirt. With a terrible effort she twisted them together even more tightly, whimpering faintly when it had no effect.
‘Lucia…’
Ricardo’s hand, cool from the cold glass, came over both of hers, holding them, stilling them. But he still couldn’t calm the waves of despair that were taking her body by storm, making it tremble and shake convulsively.
‘Lucia, no,’ Ricardo said quietly, calmly. So calm in contrast to the way she was feeling that it stopped her heart for a moment as she tried to take it in. ‘There is no need for this.’
‘You don’t understand…’
Somehow she managed to get the words out, though her voice was as jerky and uneven as her heart.
It was his closeness that was doing that to her. He had slid down now from where he had been sitting on the arm of the settee and onto the cushions beside her. She could feel the warmth of his body, of the long, strong thigh that was pressed close up against hers. And she drew in the scent of his skin with each uneven, ragged breath. The width of his chest in the deep red shirt, the buttons opened at the throat, was level with her eyes, just a hint of dark curling hair revealed in the open neck, and she longed to be able to rest her head against his strength, draw new courage from him. But the distance between them, the yawning emotional chasm that separated her, would always hold her back.
‘Oh, but I do.’
To her consternation, she found that Ricardo had somehow seemed to read her mind, to know just exactly what she needed. His strong arms folded round her, drawing her close. At first she tensed, trying to resist. But then the sense of loneliness overwhelmed her and she yielded, soft and yearning, against him.
Her head rested on the hard wall of his ribcage, the steady, thudding beat of his heart pounding under her cheek. She could feel his chest rise and fall with every breath he took and she felt, dangerously, as if she had come home.
Ricardo smoothed one hand over the length of her hair, sliding down her back, raising every tiny nerve in response. The warmth of his palm against the skin of her neck made her heart jolt at the feel of it and a moment when those caressing fingers slid briefly in at the scooped neck of her shirt had her breath catching sharply in her throat. The hard strength of his body was against one breast and as the stroking arm brushed against the other with every slow, gentle movement her nipples tightened in stinging response to the sudden waking need low down between her legs.
‘I understand so much better than you could ever believe,’ Ricardo murmured, the deep rumble of his voice drowning out the involuntary sigh of longing she had been unable to hold back. ‘There’s just one thing I want to know.’
Lucy froze against Ricardo’s chest. An edge to his voice made her tense in sudden apprehension. The growing sense of warmth and comfort that had been seeping through her body, driving away the chill that had invaded her blood, suddenly seemed to stop and then, shockingly, started to fade again, allowing the shivering cold to start to creep back again.
‘I want to know his name.’
She hadn’t been wrong about the alteration in his tone, the difference in his mood. It was there too in the sudden change in his position and the way he held her. She was still in his arms, still held close, but it no longer felt like home.
Hard fingers suddenly clamped around her arms, moving her away from him, away from the secure warmth of his lean, hard frame. He held her so that he could look down into her eyes, his dark burning gaze searing her clouded blue one.
‘Who the hell is he, Lucia? What’s the name of the man who did this to you? The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.’
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_d57e17e2-4f52-54af-bde0-78ad51c991c3)
WHO the hell is he, Lucia?…The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.
For the first few spinning seconds she hadn’t been able to understand what had happened. Ricardo’s sharply snapped questions made no sense. She couldn’t understand where they came from or why he was even asking them. But then, slowly, reluctantly, she looked back over the conversation and realised the train of thought that Ricardo had been following, the conclusions he had jumped to.
He thought that she had had the breakdown after she had left the villa. He really believed—the only way he could possibly see it happening—was that she had run off with another man, leaving him and Marco behind in her determination to start a new life with her lover—his rival.
And then he believed that when that lover had walked out on her, leaving her as she had left him, then and only then had Lucy had the breakdown she had talked about.
‘You think that…’
She had stiffened in his arms, pulling away from the warmth and support of his body. And just the tiny movement seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort, bring with it a wrenching pain that was out of all proportion to the distance she put between the two of them.
‘You really believe that the only reason I could possibly leave Marco was because there was another man!’
Ricardo didn’t need to answer. It was there in his eyes, stamped into the lines of his face. Suddenly, disturbingly, she was seeing her erratic behaviour through his eyes. The excessive spending, the way she had disappeared for most of the day, with no explanation. Had he really thought that she was meeting someone else? That she was having an affair? The thought that she might have put him through that made her shiver inwardly. How could she blame him for thinking so badly of her if that was what he had suspected?
‘I can see now that the way I behaved might have made you think that,’ she admitted shakily. ‘And you don’t know how much I regret it if it did. But you have to believe me—there never was anyone else.’
She saw his frown, the way his dark eyes dropped to lock with her own clouded gaze.
‘Then why…’
‘I wasn’t ill—didn’t break down after I left here.’
Though leaving Marco had been the last straw. The one that had broken this particular camel’s back and driven her in despair and desperation to find a doctor.
‘You’re saying…’
Ricardo’s face changed as realisation dawned. This time his eyes went to the cot where Marco still slept, then came back to her.
‘Are you telling me that it was post-natal depression that caused your breakdown? That was why you left?’
Lucy could only nod, her throat too clogged for speech. It was impossible to read the rush of feelings that flashed in Ricardo’s eyes, but she saw the questions there and straightened her spine, waiting for them to come. And now he was the one to move away, putting more distance between them.
‘That was like no depression I’ve ever seen.’
‘No,’ Lucy admitted.
She couldn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t recognised what even she hadn’t known. She had had the doctor to explain it to her. Ricardo had been looking in from the outside.
When he had been there, which wasn’t often.
‘You were out all the time. Spending money like water.’
‘I know—I was hyper. Manic.’
Post-natal psychosis, the doctor had called it. Not just depression but the more severe form of the illness, which had literally driven her almost out of her mind. So much so that she had been unable to think straight enough to recognise what was happening to her.
It hadn’t helped that her relationship with her own mother had been so difficult. The only time that Janet Mottram had shown any real interest in her daughter had been when she had used the child as a pawn in her personal battle with her exhusband. And, looking back, Lucy knew that what she had feared most was being as distant and unloving a mother to Marco as Janet had been to her.
And, without anyone to confide in, she had been trapped with her own thoughts. Thoughts that had so frightened and appalled her that there was no way she could have admitted them to Ricardo.
So she had put on a front. A cold, distant front that had driven him away from her even more. And she had succeeded so much better than she could have hoped. From the time that Marco had been born, she and Ricardo had barely spoken to each other. It had been what she wanted but at the same time it had added to the aching inside her, creating a spiral of despair from which she had felt that she would never break free.
‘You bought clothes, perfume—clothes you never wore when you were with me.’
And he had thought that she had bought them to make herself look good for someone else.
‘All that spending—it was just an attempt at distraction. I didn’t even want the clothes half the time.’
And the other half she had wanted them to boost her image, to make Ricardo look at her with the desire he had once shown her. But it had seemed that the women she had overheard had been right. She was not the sort of wife who could hold a man like Ricardo. A man who didn’t do commitment. Who was used to having his pick of the most glamorous, most sophisticated women of the world.
If only he would speak—say something. Anything, other than subjecting her to the dark, silent stare that seemed to want to probe right into her eyes, burn its way into her head.
‘Heaven knows what you must have thought of me!’
‘It was only what I expected,’ Ricardo stated flatly. ‘Normal female behaviour. Every woman I’ve known has been out for what I could give her. Why should you be any different?’
How could she fight such cynicism? She hadn’t been able to do so when they had been together, so why should anything be different now? Besides which the thought that she still hadn’t told him absolutely everything, that there were still things she was holding back, things she could hardly bear to think of herself, sat like a leaden weight in her heart, closing off her throat so that there was no way she could make herself speak.
‘And you are well now?’ he asked, an edge to his voice that she couldn’t interpret and she felt too emotionally adrift even to try.
‘The doctors say I am,’ she managed stiffly. ‘They think all should be well and that I’m not likely to relapse. I would never have come back here if I’d thought…’
‘I believe you,’ Ricardo said when her voice broke too much for her to go on. He was still so very distant, his deep-set eyes hooded and hidden, but his tone gave her a little cause for hope.
‘So if you could see your way to letting me spend some time with Marco…’
And, just at that moment, with amazing timing so that it was almost as if he had heard his name spoken, in the other room the baby stirred and started to whimper faintly, still half asleep.
‘Marco…’
Instinct drove Lucy to her feet but she was only halfway there when realisation struck and she froze, grabbing at the settee arm for support as she looked back at Ricardo, meeting the deliberately blanked out expression in his narrowed gaze.
‘I…I’m sorry…’
She regretted that as soon as she’d said it. She wasn’t sorry at all for reacting automatically to the sound of her child’s cry. She might not have been the best mother in the world—she knew she hadn’t—but that didn’t mean that her maternal instincts had died, swamped by the tidal wave of foul stuff that that rushed over her in the depths of those darkest days. After all, she’d only left because of what she was afraid of. Because of the fear that she might do something dreadful to her little boy. That was those mother’s instincts working overtime, not losing their way. And now she was doing exactly the same—responding to the way that her baby most needed her.
The memory of that cry had never left her. In her sleep she would hear it and come jerking awake, sitting up in a rush, eyes wide with horror and fear, needing to find Marco…and knowing he wasn’t there. That had been the worst, the most terrible moment of all. The thought that somewhere her baby was crying and she couldn’t go to him.
Here and now, she could respond to his call. But at the same time she didn’t quite dare to. Not with Ricardo watching and not knowing how he would react if she followed her instincts. He had sworn that she would never take the baby from him, so would he let her comfort the little boy—or would he grab at her arm, to hold her back? Or would he, worst of all, wait until she was at the cot’s side, about to take her son into her arms and then snatch the little boy away from her—so near and yet so desperately far again.
‘I doubt that you’ll understand…but…’ Her voice trailed off as she met the burning darkness of his eyes, felt herself flinch under their scorching force.
From the other room came a second more wakeful cry, louder this time, drawing Lucy’s eyes in a glance of yearning anxiety towards the door.
‘I’ll call the nanny,’ Ricardo said and the words brought back such a rush of memory that it pushed her response from her mouth before she had had a moment to consider if it was wise.
‘No!’ she said sharply. ‘No nanny! Not now.’
‘You were happy enough to leave him in her care before.’
‘Did you give me any choice?’ Lucy flung at him. ‘Did you even discuss it with me? No—you made a unilateral declaration that Marco was going to be looked after by a nanny. It may be the way you were brought up—the norm in your wealth driven world to have your children farmed out to the hired help, but it wasn’t what I wanted.’
‘I had no intention of having him “farmed out”,’ Ricardo snapped coldly. ‘And it certainly wasn’t the way that I was brought up. My mother barely had enough money to feed and clothe me, never mind hire a nanny.’
