‘This is the fastest way,’ he promised. ‘I know you’re angry, but let me do this.’
Emmeline looked away, panic and worry making her uncertain.
Pietro’s voice came to her as if from a long way away. He spoke into his phone in his own language, ordering the flight preparations to begin. In some part of her mind she was glad. She was furious with him—furious in a way she doubted she’d ever forgive—but she wasn’t sure she could face this completely alone.
He disconnected the call and she spoke without meeting his eyes. ‘When?’
‘Now. Come. I’ll drive.’
She kept her eyes averted as he lifted her suitcase easily, carrying it down the stairs and past the car he’d given her only hours earlier. She ignored the anguish that churned her gut.
Mrs M. What a joke. She’d been nothing to him. Was this why he’d married her? To keep this lie? To deceive her?
All her ideas that their marriage had begun to mean something real were obviously just stupid, childish fantasies. There was no way that he loved her as she loved him. If he’d cared for her at all he would have found a way to break the truth to her sooner.
She stared out of the window as he took the car to Fiumuncino, the countryside passing in a blur that eventually gave way to the built-up cityscape and then more industrial outlying buildings. Finally, it pulled up at a small air terminal.
‘Here.’ He nodded towards a hangar that was guarded by a single soldier.
It wasn’t Emmeline’s first time flying in a private jet—her father’s was permanently stationed in the States—so it was no surprise for her to be ushered through a private building and customs area before being whisked across the deserted Tarmac to a jet bearing a golden ‘M’ on its tail.
He handed her suitcase to an attendant, but it wasn’t until he climbed the stairs with her that it occurred to Emmeline he might be coming along for the trip. That she might have given herself a rather long flight with a man she never wanted to speak to again.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her words as cold as ice as she paused at the top of the plane’s steps.
‘What do you think?’ He walked deeper into the plane, pausing at an armchair and waiting for her to follow.
She shot him a pointed look, but moved towards him. Fine. If he wanted to join her—to sit with her—then she’d make him sing for his supper. He could damned well give her some answers to the questions that were crashing around inside her.
‘So he told you before you and I had even agreed to the marriage?’ she said, sitting down in the armchair and buckling her seatbelt in place.
Her fingers were trembling so she clasped them firmly in her lap. Shock was a wave that was spreading around her, swallowing her in its depths.
‘He bullied you into marrying me,’ she murmured, her eyes locking on the view beyond the window. She had to focus on this conversation or she’d fall apart.
A muscle jerked in Pietro’s cheek at her characterisation of their marriage. ‘He asked me to help him.’
She pulled a face. ‘To help him manage me? God! This was meant to be my decision. My first step to freedom.’
There was a throb of anxious silence, and if Emmeline had lifted her eyes to Pietro’s face she would have seen the aching sympathy there. But she couldn’t look at him. His face was now inextricably linked with betrayal.
‘He was worried about how you’d cope. He didn’t want you to see him unwell.’
Emmeline stared out of the window, the lump in her throat growing bigger by the minute. Was he in pain? Was the housekeeper Miss Mavis looking after him? Was he scared? Tears filled her eyes and she didn’t bother to blink them away.
‘I didn’t agree with his decision, but I had to honour it.’
She whipped her head around, barely able to see him through the fog of her grief. ‘Don’t say that. You can’t have it both ways! If you didn’t agree with his decision then you should have told me.’
‘I wanted to tell you.’ A frown was etched across his face. ‘I’d decided I would tell you one day, when the time was right.’
Her laugh was a harsh sound of fury. ‘You just said he has months, maybe weeks, to live. What were you waiting for?’
‘Excuse me, signor? Signora?’ An attendant practically tiptoed down the centre of the plane, her expression professional. ‘We’re ready for take-off. Can I get you anything to eat? Drink?’
‘No,’ he snapped curtly.
‘Yes. Scotch. Neat,’ Emmeline demanded. ‘And some aspirin.’
‘Yes, signora.’
Pietro leaned forward and put a hand on her knee once privacy had been restored. ‘This changes niente—nothing about what we are.’
‘Like hell it does!’ Her disbelief was a force-field of shock. ‘You have been lying to me this whole time. This whole time.’ She sat back in her seat, all the fight in her evaporating as quickly as it had appeared.
When the attendant appeared with her drink she threw it back, then lifted the aspirin.
‘Don’t take those,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve just had a ton of alcohol...’
She glared at him angrily and tossed the pills into her mouth. ‘Go to hell.’
* * *
She woke somewhere off the coast of the States. Her head was pounding, her eyes were scratchy and there was a heaviness in her heart that didn’t initially make sense. She was disorientated and confused.
She blinked her eyes open and looked forward.
Straight into the brooding stare of her husband.
The smile that was always so quick to come to her lips when she saw him did not come.
Sadness and grief sludged through her instead, and then it all came rushing back. The lie. The secrecy. The betrayal. Her father’s cancer.
The fact that he was going to die.
And she hadn’t been with him.
Instead she’d been living in Italy, believing everything was amazing, pretending
