The Marriage He Must Keep(57)

She wanted the dream.

Patience, she reminded herself.

“Loving someone madly is exactly what leads to broken hearts,” Sandro muttered. “It’s like watching a pair of trains headed for a collision that can’t be avoided.”

She stilled as a suspicion struck her like a freight engine: that she would never see undisguised love on her husband’s face. She knew him better now, understood his aversion to deep emotion and it hit her that he wouldn’t welcome the vulnerability of love. He had wanted an arranged marriage to avoid the emotional pitfalls of a love match.

Had that been one of the reasons he had chosen her? Because he knew he’d never really love her?

The heart that had been creeping onto her sleeve was suddenly yanked from the washer still damp, shaken and strung up on the line. She loved him. Irrevocably. While he, she suspected, would never, ever let himself love her back.

“Do you honestly feel like that?” she asked numbly, not wanting to hear it, but knowing she had to face it if it was the truth.

He started to say something then paused, seeming to read something in her face that sobered him. His tongue touched his bottom lip and tension gathered around his eyes. As the silence lengthened, the significance of the moment grew.

“You do,” she said, and her heart began to tremble and crack. “We’ll never have that. Will we? What your mother has. Because you don’t want it.”

If there was a man with a stronger willpower than Sandro, she hadn’t met him.

Despair crashed into her heart like his runaway train, spreading pain outward. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do this again. When she’d had hope, it had been different, but she couldn’t offer love again and know without doubt it would forever go unrequited.

“Cara,” he began in that oh-so-careful tone that meant he wanted to let her down easy. “You don’t want it, either. You see her happy now and think it’s worth it, but when you feel that much joy, you feel the loss of it that much more cruelly. I’m protecting you. What if something happens? I wouldn’t want to leave you in the sort of pain she’s known.”

Octavia was in pain all right. She looked away, sucking in a tight breath that burned her lungs. “I don’t know why I thought— No, I do know why I thought you might come to love me. Because you’re capable of it. I’ve seen it. You love your son and your grandfather and even your mother, despite the fact she drives you crazy. So I thought you might come to love me, but you don’t. Do you?”

“Octavia.” He reached across, but she backed up.

“No.” She shook her head in denial. “Sex isn’t enough. I told you that before we came home from London.”

“You also told me you didn’t expect love,” he reminded grimly.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t want it! No,” she said, holding him off with an upraised hand as he came around the desk. “You don’t get to kiss me into thinking we’re okay. I’m not okay, Sandro. My marriage was supposed to be better than my mother’s. Why do you want yours to be worse?”

“We are better, cara. You know that. We’re solid. Unshakeable.”

“No, we’re stationary. That’s what I’m realizing right now. Are you really going to stand there and tell me to be happy because you’re willing to love everyone around you except me?”

“Cara, you know I care about you very deeply.” Pressure was drawing a white line around his mouth. “Do I really need to make love to you in the garden to prove how much? Be sensible.”

“Don’t mock her for loving so freely,” she shot back, lips quivering and throat aching. “You told me you were coming back to this marriage wholeheartedly and you’re not. You lied to me.”

He flinched, head going back as if she’d slapped him.

Beyond the door, Lorenzo began to cry.

Octavia cast her husband one last baleful look and walked out the door. But it wasn’t enough. As she gathered Lorenzo close and his warm, tiny body failed to drag the pieces of her heart back together, she knew she couldn’t sit on the terrace and be the only person there whom Sandro would never love.





CHAPTER ELEVEN

SANDRO STOOD ROOTED to the floor, eyes closed in a wince, trying to take back the past five minutes.

And go back to what? Pretending this was never going to happen?

It wasn’t supposed to! From his earliest forays into relationships, he’d known he didn’t want to fall in love. All his affairs had been lighthearted and his goal for marriage had been to find a compatible partner he could respect without putting his heart on the roller coaster his mother had endured.