“Do you...” She rubbed her forehead, trying to ease the tension there. “Do you think he married me just to hurt you?”
Lauren’s question notched higher the suspicion Paolo had been holding off with bone-gripping denial. It wasn’t just the treachery it implied. It was a blow to a woman who was already struggling to recover from infidelity. To learn her husband had never really loved her was too cruel to suggest.
For long seconds he refused to look at her, but was ultimately unable to lie to her. When he finally did take in her anxious pallor, regret cut through him like a broadsword. He had never, ever meant to draw her into what he now feared had always been more feud than friendship.
“He had his own jealousies,” he allowed, holding out a hand that she ignored. “You know what his father was like. Mine was proud and supportive... In Ryan’s eyes I was spoiled, living an easy life.”
“So it’s possible.” Her voice sounded like she’d swallowed broken glass.
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“At the time I thought he was marrying you because you made him happy.” It was easy enough to believe when he’d coveted her for himself. “If I’d suspected otherwise, I really would have stopped it.”
She shrugged that off, lost in a place that pulled down the corners of her mouth.
“Look at me.” Taking a firm grip of her soft chin, he waited for her shattered gaze to tentatively meet his.
He gentled his touch so he was caressing her downy skin, trying to ease the anguish from her expression while a personal hurt reared inside him. “You walked away from me and went to him more than once. I thought he made you happy, too. That was important to me, that you were happy.”
Her lips quivered and he stilled them with the brush of his thumb.
“I thought you wanted nothing to do with me,” he admitted gruffly. “That’s why it meant everything when you knew it was me you were making love to that night in Charleston.” The floor became quicksand beneath him as he opened himself up this way.
Her breath hitched and her yellow-brown eyes melted into liquid gold. “You realize my passport says Lauren Green.”
Paolo’s body seemed to consolidate into a statue of tested strength. His grip hardened on her chin. His eyes closed and for long seconds his only movement was the flare of his nostrils and the visible pound of his pulse in his throat.
“You are a cruel, cruel woman, Ms. Green.”
She couldn’t help the wicked smile that traced itself across her lips. Her heart fluttered in pleasure and anticipation.
He looked down at her with pupils that had expanded to swallow all the color from his irises, inciting a shiver of delicious excitement. His hand slid to her neck and his other one splayed at her waist, firm and possessive.
“But this is important to me, Lauren. I want my wife in my bed. No one else.”
Lauren was still anxious at how fast things were moving between them, but honestly, if she had wanted to raise this baby alone, she never should have told Paolo he was the father. He was too paternal to let that go and she wanted him in her life.
Her heart gave a little thunk as she realized she might have been expressing that desire with her phone call to him. As foreboding as Ryan’s disappearance had been, she hadn’t been reacting as a wife fearing for her husband. Her marriage had been over. Ryan had been a big part of her life and she would never want him to suffer the kind of tragic end he’d met, but she could have waited to hear the truth. She had known answers would come eventually, delivered on the standard military need-to-know basis.
Instead she’d seized the excuse to reach out to Paolo, sensing that her tenuous connection to him was about to fray away completely. The truth was, she had been longing for five years to explore what might have happened between them if Paolo had not been engaged when they had met in New York.
Her heart felt like it was beating outside her body, unprotected and at risk. The reason she had turned to Ryan in the first place was that he hadn’t been able to reach through her inner barriers the way Paolo did. That spinelessness had led her to marry the wrong man.
As scary as it was to open herself to Paolo, she had to or they’d never stand a chance. There was no shrinking back into the shadows here. She’d come too far. It was time to adapt to the new world she’d put herself in.
She nodded jerkily. “I want to be married, too.”
Until she saw the ease that washed over him, she hadn’t realized how tense he’d been. Marrying her was important to him. Touched, she let her gaze flick to the desk where he’d left the ring.