The wind whistled past him and he was glad – feeling anything – even icy cold – was a relief.
At the gate to his mansion, he hesitated. He stared up at the place – lights on, courtesy of the servants who kept things running behind the scenes – and remained firmly where he was.
The idea of going in, and of being alone, was anathema to him.
He swore more loudly, dragging a hand through his hair.
For months now he’d been strong. He’d sacrificed his own wants and preferences to give Cleopatra what she needed and deserved, but in that moment, he was tired of putting himself last.
He wanted to be selfish.
He wanted to be weak instead of strong. He wanted not to feel like this – as though he’d been skinned alive and left for dead. He wanted relief, just for one moment, just for this one night.
He turned away from his home and began to run. He ran so fast that his breath was burning in his body and his mind didn’t have time to think, to contemplate the sense of this. With every step he took he knew he was getting closer, with every blink he saw her, and suddenly, there was no need for common sense or concerns over what Cleopatra deserved. There was only this – a need that was driving him to insanity; a need he had to answer.
Though he had a key to the apartment, he didn’t use it. Insanity might have been biting at his heels, but he wasn’t completely removed from reality. He understood that letting himself into her home was a step too far. In the back of his mind, he acknowledged that even being here was probably far outside the realm of acceptability.
He could make his peace with the latter.
He had to.
This was no longer about thought, it was a biological imperative. An emotional need?
He didn’t examine that question, nor did he make the distinction. Need was need, and he was thumping with it. He lifted his fist and hammered it on the door. A second later, he remembered the buzzer. He pressed it impatiently, jabbing his strong dark finger into the button until a low buzz pealed satisfyingly through the walls of the place.
A second later, footsteps.
Cleopatra. His breath – already tortured from sprinting a few miles across Rome on a wintry night – strangled him from the inside out. What the hell was he going to say to her?
Used to walking into a room and effortlessly commanding it, he’d been reduced to this – a man standing on the wrong side of his wife’s door, with no damned idea what to say.
She wrenched it inwards, her eyes laced with accusation, but the second she recognised who it was, her expression shifted completely and he had no skill to properly analyse it. He saw Cleopatra and it was as though everything inside of him locked fiercely into place.
“Christo,” he groaned, pushing the door fully open and sweeping into the apartment, wrapping her in his arms and dragging her to his body. The perfection of her nearness was like a shot of adrenaline. He knew he couldn’t lose her. Not again.
He’d been stupid to push her away, stupid to let her go.
She was stiff in his arms though, her body tense. “Benedetto?” Her voice shook, and he held her right where she was, not sure if he was trying to give her strength with his nearness or to take some of her strength for his own depleted needs. He knew only that it felt beyond perfect to hold her, as though everything was finally right in his world once more.
“Si.”
She smelled different – like sandalwood and roses. He breathed her in and it was as though all of the lights were being switched back on in a darkly cavernous space. Relief speared him; his ruthless determination resurfaced in a way he was glad for, because he knew it wouldn’t allow him to let her go.
“What are you doing here?”
He ran his hands down her back and groaned, because this was beyond right. He needed to feel her, to touch her, to kiss her and hold her, but first, he needed to speak to her. He needed to see her. Reluctantly, he pulled away, his eyes running over her with possessive heat, taking stock of all the tiny changes that had formed in the past few months. Months! How had he left it so long? The agony and torture of that expanse of time now felt like an utterly futile attempt at control – at controlling a force far greater than he’d ever reckoned with.
“I’m serious, Benedetto. You can’t just show up in the middle of the night after nothing for … so long. Too long.” She swallowed then, her throat shifting and he froze, because whatever pain he’d been living in, she’d been enduring similar. It was obvious and marked, from her still too-frail body to the dark smudges beneath her eyes, to hair that she’d chopped to shoulder length and scraped back into a tight ponytail.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he admitted gruffly, though she was right – he couldn’t’ just turn up in her life and expect her to welcome him with open arms. It had been a long time – it had taken him too long to realise, to see what was happening between them.
She nodded, moving away from him, towards the kitchen. There, she flicked the kettle to life, the noise a distraction in the silence of the room, the turmoil of their situation.
“You were,” she answered, so belatedly that he wasn’t initially sure to what she was referring. “You were right to make me leave you.”
The words were like daggers beneath his skin. He prowled towards the kitchen, pausing on one side of the bench. “Was I?”
She nodded jerkily. “It was the only thing we could do.”
“Because you were in love with me,” he murmured, his chest burning up.
Her expression flashed briefly with fury and he wondered at the cause of that emotion, but not for long. When she spoke, he understood.
“You keep doing that.” She dragged a hand through her hair, dislodging the elastic. “You keep talking about ‘when I don’t love you’, as though I ‘loved’ you then but don’t now.”
It was like being slammed in the solar plexus. “Are you saying you still love me?”
Her expression was stricken. “I shouldn’t be surprised that you have to ask that, given that you’ve sworn you’ll never love anyone.” She grabbed a mug from the cupboard behind her, the gesture harsh and filled with her anger. “Love isn’t something that just disappears. It’s not something you forget or simply get over. I love you. That means you’re a part of me, right here.” She dug her fingers into her chest, between her breasts, and his soul burst from him, like a bird being pushed from a dark cage.
“But I don’t want to love you. I wish I didn’t.”
The words were like lightning in his chest.
“You shouldn’t be here.” She pressed a tea bag into the mug and splashed in some water. A little bounced out of the mug and landed on her hand. She swore under her breath and he moved swiftly, coming around to her side, gently coaxing her wrist to the sink and quickly flicking on the taps so ice cold water ran over the burned skin.
“I’m fine,” she said, the words hoarse.
“Are you?” He wasn’t talking about the burn. He stared at it, though, at her burned flesh, and he ran his finger over it softly.
She risked a glance at him then looked away again. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You said that already.” He let go of her wrist so he could put his hands on her shoulders and lightly spin her around to face him. “Do you want me to go?”
Her eyes almost changed colour with the depth of her feelings. “That isn’t fair.”
Nothing about this felt very fair. “It’s a simple question.”
Her frown was so loaded with sadness, it broke his heart. “I just told you I love you. What I want and what I know to be right are two very different things.”
“That’s what I thought too,” he murmured, brushing his body forward, feeling her jolt with awareness. His gut churned.
He couldn’t live like this.
“You don’t get to do this to me,” she muttered. “Not again.”
“Do what, cara?”
But she was angry, and he was ironically glad for it,
to see her spirit because it took her from wan and waif-like to a fierce warrior woman. Anger brought her back to life.
“Do you have any idea what these last few months have been like? Do you have any idea how hard it’s been? I have spent every day living in some kind of hell, trying to forget you and simultaneously wanting to remember every single detail of you because only then, when I could conjure you up in my mind, did I feel something like whole again. I fell in love with you and I will always love you but I hate you a little bit too, Benedetto. I hate you for being everything I’ve ever wanted and nothing I can have. I hate you for the way you woke me up and walked away from me, the way you pushed me away even when everything between us was so damned good.”
“But it wasn’t good for you.” Pain at those memories cut through him. “Not that last week. I watched you fade away from me until I could no longer stand it. Before my eyes you went from being full of joy and light to … a shadow of that. And it was because of me.”
“Yes, it was because of you,” she muttered, lifting her teacup and using it to put more space between them. “But it wasn’t your fault. Even as I stand here now, I know you did nothing wrong. It’s not your fault that you don’t love me. You were honest about that all along – brutally honest, at times. I just didn’t believe you. Or maybe I did and my failure was failing to understand how broken you are, how determined not to love.” She shook her head with frustration. “But I get it.” Her eyes sliced through him. “I’ll never get over it. I’ll never forget you and I’ll never not love you, but I do finally understand. You ended what we were because you knew there wasn’t even a glimmer of hope. I was so stupid to think otherwise. I was so stupid to hope.”
Her tirade filled him with an emotion that almost brought him to his knees. He had to make her understand. He had to find a way to start making amends, to fix this, to make it better.
“You were not the stupid one, bella. You were brave and strong and so smart. So wise.” He wanted to hold her; he didn’t. He stood his ground, his arms crossed over his chest, his mind seeking the words that could explain everything. “You say these last few months have been tough?”
She made a strangled noise of agreement.
“But they have been worse for me, I promise you.”
She drew in an angry gasp. He shook his head, holding a hand up in an attempt to placate her. “You knew why you felt as though the world had been ripped away from you. I did not. I couldn’t fathom why every morning I woke with a sense that a rock boulder had been pressing on my lungs all night. I didn’t understand why my feet dragged and my mind slowed. I didn’t understand why I barely wanted to eat, why I couldn’t sleep, why I have been burying myself in work day in, day out. I didn’t understand why you have haunted my every thought.”
She was still now, every single part of her like ice, frozen in place.
“I didn’t understand what love is. Maybe because I have never felt it before, maybe because I was determined not to feel it. Is it this, cara?”
Her features showed caution. “Is what this?”
“Is it a certainty that I would lay down my life in the service of yours? Is it the way I want to speak to you every time something good happens, to tell you about it and share it with you? Is it a need to obsess over every detail of what we shared? Is it the way you have become so much a part of me that without my consent or intention I layer you into every vision I have of my future? When I see myself, I am no longer alone, Cleopatra. You’re there, always there, right by my side.”
Now, he moved forward, taking her tea cup from her hands before she dropped it in shock, and he curved his hands over hers, balling them against his chest. “If the flip side to love is hate then I have felt hate every day since you left. Hate for myself and my actions, hate for my life without you in it. And now, being here, seeing you, for the first time since that evening, I feel whole again.”
Her strangled sob was one of happiness.
“Is this love?” His question was more of a demand but it made her laugh shakily, her eyes latching to his and not letting go.
“What do you think?”
His lips shifted into the hint of a smile. “I think I can’t live another day without you. I think you are all my dreams come true. I think you are my breath, my body, my soul, my reason for being, my all and my everything. I think I want you to be my wife for real, and I want you to be that immediately. I want you to come home and never leave, unless it is with me, to see the world by my side. I want our family to be whole again. I want to raise Freddie with you and I want to have more children with you. I want everything, but mostly, Cleopatra di Fiori, I want you more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.” He stared at her and let his declaration sink in. “Do I love you? I love you in a way that no man has ever loved a woman. You are my life.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks and she lifted up to cup his face, holding him steady. “You don’t ever do anything by halves, do you?”
“I pushed you away. I lost you. I’ve lost any right to think of you as mine. Realising that was incredibly clarifying, and motivating. I will always regret that it took months of missing you to understand just what we were – what you mean to me.”
Cleopatra’s expression was philosophical now that relief was – quite literally – at hand. “What’s a few months in the course of a lifetime?”
He groaned, mashing his lips to hers desperately, his body igniting with pleasure and relief. “Does that mean you’ll come home?”
She nodded, not breaking their kiss.
“And you’ll be my wife?”
Another nod.
“Forever more, for all our days.”
“That sounds just about perfect.”
Epilogue
Six months later
“Butterflies are taking over my body.” Cleopatra breathed in deeply; it didn’t help.
“That’s to be expected.” Benedetto squeezed her hand. “I’m here with you, cara.”
She blinked up at her husband, a smile coming easily to her lips. He was with her, in every way. Six months after he’d begged to make their marriage real once more, their partnership had exceeded her every expectation. Without the worry that had, at one time, dogged her – a worry that he’d never return her love – an every day pleasure had morphed with a kind of soul-deep contentment. A certainty for almost the first time in her life that she was exactly where she needed to be, that she had found her way home.
“God, they’re taking forever.” She laughed anxiously and Benedetto returned it, his the sound of rumbling pleasure, it rolled right into her soul.
“It’s not even four yet.”
“Isn’t it?” She flicked her glance to the clock again, for the tenth time in a few minutes at the same time the doorbell pealed through the house.
“Ah huh.”
“Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick.”
Benedetto stood, extending his hands to Cleopatra. She placed hers in them so he could pull her to standing. It wasn’t physically necessary. Her stomach, though rounded, was nowhere near what she expected it would be in three months, when their baby’s due date rolled around. Still, the contact filled her with warmth. His kiss turned warmth to flame.
“You’ll feel better when it’s over.”
She nodded. Surely he was right.
“Come on, Signora di Fiori. Let’s go say ‘hi’ to your brother.”
Her heart was in her throat the whole way to the front door, and once they reached it, anxiety spread through her body. But Benedetto, who always seemed to know exactly how she felt and what she needed, turned to her with a smile and before she could guess his intentions, pressed a firm kiss to her mouth.
Pleasure sparked in her belly, strong enough to push everything else from her mind for a moment, and then Benedetto drew the door inwards.
Standing on the other side of the door was a couple, elegant and beautiful and yet Cleopatra found herself warming to them immediately.
“Hi,” the woman’s smile encompassed Benedetto and Cleopatra. “I’m Bella. Vitalo’s wife.”
Vitalo was still staring at Cleo. He blinked, shaking his head, a rueful smile sliding into place. “You are beautiful.”
And then, he was pulling her into his arms, the hug catching her off guard but somehow feeling completely, utterly right. This was her brother. Tears filled her eyes, happy tears, tears because of where she was in life, and who she had to fill her heart.
The afternoon passed in a blur. Once the initial meeting was over, they found there was no surfeit of things to discuss. From children to their lives, their parents, by the time Vitalo and Bella left, they’d made plans to meet the following week, with Freddie and their daughter in tow.
“Well, Cleopatra?” Benedetto pulled his wife to him, his eyes probing her face. He saw her tiredness and her radiance, her beauty and her goodness. He looked at her and saw the meaning to his life. “You are happy now?”
She smiled brightly. “I’m beyond happy. I honestly don’t know what I ever did to deserve this perfect, perfect life, but I will spend the rest of my days feeling blessed and grateful…”
He pressed a finger to her lips, silencing her, his eyes hooded. “It is I who am grateful and blessed.” He dropped is head lower, so his lips buzzed hers. She smiled against his mouth. “You deserve every thing that is good in this life, my beautiful, darling wife.” He lifted his head so she could see the truth in his eyes. “And I intend to make sure you have it.”
THE END
Other Books in THE MONTEBELLOS
All books are stand-alone, full-length romance novels.
REGRET ME NOT
JUST THIS ONE SUMMER