She had to flick her gaze away. The yearning had been there, no matter how self-deluded the wish had been. The death of that hope twisted her lungs in her chest, filling her voice with the wretchedness that gripped her.
“But I expected you to care. Not a lot, but enough to keep me from dying in childbirth on the floor of our bedroom—” It wasn’t even theirs anymore. It was hers.
Her throat seized and her eyes burned. She made herself fold the tiny jacket with trembling hands, refusing to look at him as she pushed her shattered expectations into an armored vault.
“Octavia.” His voice sounded like she felt. Shocked and shredded and tight. Strong hands took her shoulders in a warm grasp as he turned her into him. “I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t want to know,” she charged, knocking his hands away and stepping back. “You certainly never showed up to ask. He told me—” She didn’t want to say it aloud, didn’t want to know if it was true, but she had to face it if it was. “He said you were having affairs. Were you? Is that what happened? Are you in love with someone else?”
The look on his face created a kind of barometric pressure that couldn’t be heard or seen, only felt, making the air go dense around her. Pulsing and thick.
“No,” he said with understated thunder.
“I can’t believe you could think for one minute—”
Octavia tensed at his incensed tone.
He cut himself off, doing everything he could to stay this side of civilized. It was a struggle. The picture she painted of her terror during labor, along with the accusation she was throwing at him like tar, clung and burned. He was a man who took his responsibilities seriously, never behaved negligently, but he’d made a mistake. That was hard enough to take, but now this? Accusations of cheating?
“How would I know what you’ve been doing in Naples?” She was different. She’d hardened in the months since he’d seen her. As loving as she appeared toward Lorenzo, that was the only softness in her now as she stared at him, shades of denunciation and rejection skittering behind her eyes.
Something shook in his chest. Like a closed shutter taking a strong wind, testing the locks. It was painful. Disconcerting. Primo had been intent on hurting him. That was painful enough to face, but even more devastating was how effective Primo had been with his attack.
Octavia had been a delightfully easy addition to Alessandro’s life, biddable and filled with a shy passion he had mined with a type of gold fever. He hadn’t had to fight for her. Hadn’t had to give up anything of himself to get what he wanted.
He had taken for granted that he had her. He could admit that he’d been arrogant on that front. But what the fallout from Primo’s actions was rather graphically demonstrating was how nascent his connection to Octavia was. It was a piece of paper that bound their assets. He didn’t have her.
That unsettled him, which was odd because he hadn’t married for a love match. This, what they were enduring, was more angst than he had ever wanted to wade through. He’d deliberately sidestepped the highs and lows of an emotional landscape by marrying a woman who kept her own heart guarded.
Octavia pushing him away as she was doing, however, was the exact sort of chaos Primo had hoped to unleash.
“No one has ever accused me of so many dishonorable things,” he muttered. “But I am guilty of one thing only, Octavia, and that was trusting the wrong man.”
Her mouth twitched before she firmed it into a stubborn line. There was something else in her demeanor, however. Something bleak. “I thought he might be lying, but...” She searched his eyes with indecision clouding her own.
The air thickened as he instinctively sensed something worse coming.
“He said you only got me pregnant for the bonus my father offered you. That you didn’t care about how my pregnancy was going so long as Lorenzo delivered alive.”
“Porco cane,” he muttered, cursing his cousin while his mind exploded. “That is—” He had to move away and dig a hand into his hair. He clenched enough of a handful to hurt. Dio, at this rate his own security team would have to take him down if he was ever within five meters of his cousin. Otherwise he’d be jailed for first-degree murder.
“I was terrified for both of you,” he said, voice hoarse as he revisited those hours between being informed that she needed emergency surgery and arriving to hear they’d come through safely. “He deliberately played with me, leaving me hanging with partial information. It was a nightmare.”
She searched his expression and, just for a moment, he let the agony retake him. He let her see that he might not have been beside her, but he’d been with her.