The Borghese Bride Page 10

  Arianna flashed him a look that could have frozen the Medusa, but he didn’t care. He headed for the door without looking back. Maybe she didn’t want to be his wife, but Gianni wanted to be his son.

  His stepson.

  This was his city. If his wife didn’t want to share it with him, the boy did.

  The day was filled with fun, but the smile on Gianni’s face disappeared when they got back and found Arianna waiting. Dominic felt his own good mood fading. There was no mistaking her look of tightly banked rage.

  “Go to your room,” she told her son. The boy’s lip trembled, and her expression softened. “I’m not angry at you, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t be angry at Dom’nic, either. We had a really good time, Mom.”

  For a moment, Dominic thought she’d relent. Then she looked at him and her eyes hardened.

  “Go to your room, please, Jonathan.” As soon as he was gone, Arianna rounded on Dominic. “You will not undermine my authority again. I’m Jonathan’s mother. I’ll decide what he does and doesn’t do.”

  Maybe if she’d suggested discussing things, Dominic would have reacted differently. But he was tired of her coldness, her rudeness, her dismissive attitude.

  “You have it wrong. It is you who will not undermine my authority. This is my home. You are my wife. Gianni—Jonathan—may not be my natural son, but he is my responsibility now. I don’t have to ask your permission for anything.”

  There was a quick flash of something in her eyes. Despair? Pain? Whatever it was, he sensed that it cut much deeper than his words. She turned away from him and left the room.

  Dominic listened to the tap of her heels against the marble floor, heard the snick of the door to the guest suite as it shut behind her.

  For a moment, he regretted his angry words. Then he thought of how she’d treated him since they’d exchanged their vows and decided he didn’t regret anything….

  Except, perhaps, the marriage.

  * * *

  A month later, nothing had changed.

  It was a blisteringly hot August afternoon. The air conditioning in Dominic’s office was having trouble keeping up with the heat. Maybe that was why he put down his pen, stared blindly out the window and finally faced the truth.

  His marriage wasn’t working.

  He’d really believed that a marriage based on expedience would work. There’d be no need for lies or fairy tales.

  He was wrong.

  Knowing your wife had married you for reasons that had nothing to do with her heart was no better than suspecting it. In fact, it was worse. Had he married a woman who professed to love him, he might have been able to delude himself into believing it.

  He’d have laughed if anyone had told him he wanted to come home at night to a kiss, to look up from reading the paper after dinner and see a smile meant only for him. The truth was—and it was almost painful to acknowledge—he wanted the little signs of affection that went with marriage, even if they were phony.

  Dominic leaned his elbows on his desk and put his head in his hands.

  He’d lived alone almost his entire life, but he’d never felt lonely until now. Part of it came from little things, like hearing his wife’s laughter as he came to the front door…and hearing it stop, once he put his key in the lock.

  Part of it came from her treating him as if he were a barbarian at the gate. She jumped if he brushed her arm as he moved past her in a narrow space, and sometimes he caught her looking at him with an expression that suggested she expected the worst of him at any minute.

  He wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t going to demand she spend her evenings talking to him, instead of going to her room after Gianni was tucked in. He wasn’t going to order her to his bed, despite his earlier threats. Why did she look at him that way? Why did she catch her breath if he came too close?

  She was driving him crazy.

  Was it deliberate? Did she know what she was doing? Had she really only wanted him when he was a stranger?

  Heaven knew she wanted no part of him now that he was her husband.

  Especially because he was her husband.

  Dominic sat up straight. His wife was right about one thing. He’d forced her into this marriage. He might not admit it to her, but why lie to himself? And he’d be damned if he’d let her force him to end it. Maybe that was her plan, to make him unhappy enough to tell her all right, he’d had enough, it was over.

  He wasn’t going to do it.

  Frowning, he picked up his pen and looked at the stack of letters awaiting his signature.

  “See if you can’t manage to sign them before the day ends,” Celia had said, “and before you snap at me and tell me to mind my own business the way you’ve been doing lately, Signore Borghese, kindly remember that getting your letters out is my business.”

  It was a surprisingly blunt remark, even from his gorgon. Dominic had lifted his eyebrows, but he’d said nothing. He knew he deserved the chastisement.

  He’d been staring at the letters for two days and the only thing that had changed was that the stack had grown higher.

  He didn’t actually have to read the mail. Celia was efficient. She typed his correspondence precisely as he dictated it, and in those instances where he told her to answer a letter herself, she always did so in ways he approved.

  He wondered if she’d approve of the fact that he was married. He hadn’t told anyone yet, except for his household staff. Why would you tell people you had a wife when, for all intents and purposes, you didn’t?

  Celia knew something was up, though. Was he feeling all right? she’d asked a couple of days ago. Certainly, he’d replied… but he suspected she hadn’t bought the quick answer. He knew he wasn’t behaving normally. Until a few weeks ago, he’d prided himself on being aware of everything that went on in his office.

  He was the man in charge of what some called an empire.

  How could you run an empire unless you had your head on your shoulders?

  Dominic frowned.

  It was a stupid metaphor and, lately, an even worse description of the job he was doing. His head wasn’t on anything but his disastrous marriage.

  His frown deepened. He plucked the first letter from the pile and stared at it.

  Dear Carl, blah blah blah, as I explained when you telephoned, your plans for expanding Adrian International sound most promising, but unfortunately…

  But, unfortunately, he really didn’t give a damn about Adrian International.

  Dominic cursed softly, dropped the letter and ran his hands over his face.

  This had to stop.

  He wasn’t sleeping well at night, wasn’t paying enough attention to work during the day, and he waffled when he made decisions. He’d always been a man who thought about what he was going to do and then did it, no regrets, no second-guessing, no time wasted on “what-if.”

  “Dominic Borghese runs his various enterprises with a firm hand and an enviable sense of conviction,” a TV reporter in Milan had said of him recently. “Borghese researches an issue thoroughly before reaching a conclusion. As a result, he rarely needs to alter his position. If he does, you can count on something vital having changed in the equation.”

  Dominic tilted back his chair.

  Really? What was the “something vital” that had changed his decision about marriage? He’d not only laughed at the idea of asking Arianna to be his wife, he’d laughed at the idea of asking anyone.

  His long term plans had included a wife, but not now. And the wife he’d envisioned had been nothing like Arianna. What man would be foolish enough to choose a woman who was contrary? Who treated him with scorn?

  Who’d borne another man a child?

  That was another problem. He loved the boy more each day—who wouldn’t? The kid was terrific. But he didn’t like thinking about the faceless man who was Gianni’s father. Arianna wouldn’t talk about him at all, even though Dominic assured her he could accept that she had a sexual past. This wasn’t the mi
ddle ages and trembling virgins weren’t his style.

  Then, why did it trouble him to know that some stranger had impregnated his wife? Why did he sometimes look at the boy and think how wonderful it would be if the kid could have been his?

  The boy was the best thing, the only good thing, in this farce of a marriage.

  Dominic went to a small refrigerator built into the wall, took out a bottle of mineral water and poured a glass.

  Gianni was an amazing little boy. He was sweet-natured, he had a great sense of humor, and he showed an avid curiosity about everything… including the sleeping arrangements of his mother and stepfather.

  “Aren’t husbands and wives s’posed to sleep in the same room?” he’d asked Dominic as they walked to a gelato shop a couple of days ago.

  “Not necessarily,” Dominic had said calmly, lying through his teeth. Of course husbands and wives were supposed to sleep in the same room, but he wasn’t about to tell that to a little boy.

  He wasn’t about to tell it to Arianna, either.

  He would not order his wife to his bed, though he had to admit he thought about it.

  Thought about it, a lot.

  No. He wouldn’t do that.

  Dominic’s hand tightened on the water glass.

  Instead, he would let his work slip, snap at Celia, drive his Ferrari so fast he’d been warned to slow down by a politiziotto that very morning—a thing virtually unheard of in a city where people drove as if they were on the course at Le Mans.

  He’d do everything, including keep his promise about the Butterfly, which his attorneys were transferring to his wife’s name.

  Would she smile when he handed her the papers? Would she be happy to hear the amount of money he intended to put into the resurrection of the Butterfly?

  Dominic lifted the glass to his lips and drank down the rest of the water, though he knew it would do nothing to cool his growing temper.

  He knew the answers to his questions, too.

  Arianna wouldn’t show pleasure in anything, not if it involved him.

  And that took him full circle, to the realization that since his wedding, he seemed willing to do anything…except deal with reality. He had a wife who was not a wife, and he was permitting it to happen.

  The glass shattered under the pressure of his hand. He cursed, dumped the shards in the wastebasket and flung open the door to his office.

  Celia looked up, clearly startled.

  “Those letters on my desk?” he said as he strode past her. “Sign my name to all of them.”

  Celia stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. Was it because of what he’d said, or because he looked as furious as he felt? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered except teaching his wife that she was his wife, and he was tired of pretending she wasn’t.

  Every man had his breaking point, and Dominic had reached his.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ARIANNA sat in a lounge chair on the terrace off the sitting room of Dominic’s apartment, drinking an iced cappuccino as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  One story below, in a flower-laced courtyard that looked as if it had come straight out of some glorious painting by Raphael, her little boy and his newfound best pal, Bruno, sprawled beneath a flowering tree, lying on their bellies as they played with a fleet of small wooden cars. On a terrace across the courtyard, a fat Persian cat basked contentedly in the sun.

  It was a beautiful, peaceful scene in stark, almost brutal contrast to the despair in Arianna’s heart.

  A month had gone by since Dominic had forced her into marriage and brought her here, a month since she’d become his unwilling wife…and a month that she’d awakened each morning, terrified that it would be the day he looked at the child he called his stepson and realized that Jonathan was his, and all her lies had been for nothing.

  Her life, which had seemed so complicated in the States, had taken on enough added twists and turns so that her former existence seemed simple by comparison.

  In America, she’d run a business without capital and raised a child without anyone knowing it.

  In Italy, she spent endless days doing nothing and raised her child in the home of the man who’d fathered him, living in fear of the day he stopped believing that child had been fathered by someone else.

  Arianna put down her glass of coffee and touched her fingers to her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache threatened.

  The situation was so ludicrous that she’d probably laugh if she clicked on the TV and saw the same story unfold in an afternoon soap, but this wasn’t a soap. It was her life, it was real, and she sometimes felt as if she were dancing on the edge of a razor.

  Maybe if she had something to do, something to fill the endless hours…

  But she didn’t.

  She knew now that Dominic’s talk about handing over the Butterfly had been meant to placate her, nothing more. He’d kept his promise to the marchesa and not foreclosed on the business, but all the rest had turned to dust. He hadn’t given it to Arianna to run, hadn’t put his people to work on finding ways to improve its financial health, hadn’t even mentioned it again except to say once, in passing, that he’d sent in a team to inventory the stock.

  Arianna hissed, closed her eyes and pressed her hand against her head.

  The headache had arrived, as promised. No surprise there. The one thing she could count on, every day, was that her head would pound. Tension, stress… Sometimes, she felt like an advertisement for aspirin.

  Had Dominic told her about the inventory just to bait her? Maybe he’d figured she’d say, What happens when your people are finished? Will you keep your promise and let me take over again?

  If that’s what he hoped, he was in for a disappointment. She’d never ask him for anything, never tell him she wanted anything, never let him see her beg.

  God, how she hated her husband!

  “Mommy? Hey, Mom!”

  Arianna sat up straight and looked down into the courtyard. Jonathan smiled up at her and waved.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” she said with forced good humor, “what is it?”

  “Can I go for ice cream with Bruno and his mom?”

  “Gelato,” Bruno called, being helpful.

  The boys grinned at each other. Jonathan was teaching his pal English; Bruno was reciprocating with lessons in Italian.

  A happy arrangement, Bruno’s mother called it. An unhappy arrangement, as far as Arianna was concerned. She knew it was foolish, but she didn’t want her little boy turning into a Roman. He was American, not Italian. He wasn’t Gianni, as even the marchesa now addressed him, he was Jonathan.

  He wasn’t Dominic’s, he was hers.

  “Mom? Can I go?”

  “May I go,” Arianna said automatically. She looked at the two boys and at Bruno’s mother, Gina, who’d joined them and was smiling politely. The woman probably thought she was a terrible mother. “Yes. Yes, you may.”

  Jonathan and Bruno exchanged high fives.

  “You could come, too, if you want.”

  Arianna knew the answer she should give; she could see the hopeful look on Jonathan’s face, but even the thought of making the two block stroll while pretending to chatter happily with her pleasant neighbor made her stomach clench.

  “I have a headache, sweetheart. I think I’ll stay right here.”

  Gina clasped the children’s hands. “It is the heat,” she said politely. “It takes time to grow accustomed to it.”

  “Not for my mom,” Jonathan said. “She grew up in Italy, right, Mommy?”

  Worse and worse, Arianna thought, and answered the question with a question. “Would Bruno like to have supper with us tonight?”

  Bruno bounced up and down with excitement. His mother laughed.

  “I think that must be a ‘yes.”’

  “Good. Then I’ll see you later.”

  Her neighbor waved, shooed the boys ahead of her through the gate that led from the cluster of elegant litt
le houses and onto the Via Giacomo. Arianna watched the trio make their way along the narrow old street until they disappeared from view.

  Then she sat back.

  It would have been nice to go for ice cream with the boys and her new neighbor, who lived in the house next door. In fact, it would have been nice to become friends with her.

  Jonathan and Bruno had discovered each other Jonathan’s first day here, and Gina had gone out of her way to be welcoming, both to the little stranger from America and to Arianna.

  Arianna sighed.

  She’d been polite, but she hadn’t been very gracious in return. Thank you, she said whenever Gina invited her for coffee, but…

  After a while, Gina didn’t bother asking. She said she understood.

  “A newly married woman has much to do in her new home, si?”

  She’d offered a woman-to-woman smile and Arianna had returned it, making them companionable conspirators in a world of happy brides and eager grooms.

  What would her neighbor say if she knew the truth? That there were no happy brides or eager grooms in the Borghese household, that there were, instead, two people who maintained a polite front for the sake of a little boy…

  That as far as Arianna was concerned, she had no new home.

  She was imprisoned in a cage. Nobody could see the bars except her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She was living in a city where she knew no one, with a man who’d all but bought her, and she had a secret so awful that it threatened to consume her.

  She was depressed. Dominic was angry. Between them, they were miserable. That couldn’t be anyone’s definition of a marriage, not even his, though Arianna often wondered what, precisely, he’d thought he’d get for the purchase price he’d paid for her when he’d made his bargain back in the States.

  A woman who loved him? Not that. Love hadn’t been part of the deal. A woman who respected him? That hadn’t been included, either.

  Actually, she knew what he’d expected, that the passionate fuse they ignited would light again and make the arrangement acceptable, but she’d made it clear that she would not share his bed….