The Marriage He Must Keep (8 page)

Octavia looked away, tempted to let his implacable personality roll right over her. That was the crux of the problem right there. He was such a force, so smooth in his handling of everything, she had fallen in with whatever he had suggested from minute one.
Of course I’ll marry you. Anything you want. Lie down on the bed? Here?

She’d given him her virginity, not her spine, she reminded herself, and made herself stand taller.

“I really would rather keep Lorenzo here,” she managed to say with calm assertion. Away from him, she could relearn how to think for herself. “As you’ve pointed out, you have a lot of demands on your time. You won’t see much of him anyway. At least here, he’ll have his grandmother every day.”

Not completely true, since Ysabelle was already talking about returning to her new lover in the south of France. Octavia forced herself to meet Alessandro’s daunting gaze.

“Your parents will want to meet him,” he said.

She pressed her lips together. Her father hadn’t responded to her email informing him of Lorenzo’s safe birth, only made a deposit of a ridiculous amount into her childhood allowance account. Her mother had sent flowers with a tag that read Congratulations. In Octavia’s mind, the word had come across as deeply sarcastic.

“My parents are as capable of climbing onto an airplane as your mother is,” she pointed out, tone sharpening with anger that they hadn’t even called.

“Don’t take out your anger toward Primo on me, Octavia,” Alessandro warned in a low, dangerous tone. “You’re better than that.”

A disbelieving laugh escaped her while an uncomfortable rush of adrenaline burned through her limbs as the moment became a confrontation. It wasn’t like her to push back, but she
had
to.

“I’m not
angry
with Primo. I hate him with every cell in my body,” she corrected with a tremble in her voice. “I
am
angry with you. You left me here with him.”

He absorbed that with a small rock back on his heels.

“I accept that. But I can’t fire my cousin for interfering with my marriage then go home without a wife. You can imagine how things look from a distance. Some are already siding with Primo.” His jaw tightened. “I can’t have that kind of rift, Octavia. You and I must present a united front. You need to show you’re not holding a grudge against the entire family. Together, we show everyone we are prepared to resume our lives without him and everyone will fall into line.”

“You want me to pretend we’re happily married,” she confirmed. “Despite all that’s happened.” She was crushing Lorenzo’s soft new jacket into a ball against her diaphragm.

“I’m not trying to downplay what he’s done, but we have to move past it. We can’t let it impact our marriage.”

A million responses tore through her mind, but the one that came out was an incredulous,
“What marriage?”

“We’re not talking about Primo, are we?” he said grimly, expression shuttering. “You think I was dishonest about my reasons for marrying you.” He folded his arms. “You’re turning this into something bigger than it is,
cara
. Why I married you doesn’t matter. We are married and we’re going to stay that way.”

This was the man she’d caught glimpses of when he spoke with other powerful men, like her father. When she had stood beside him at company events and seen minions leap to do his bidding before he’d finished stating what he wanted. No one said no to him, but she had to.
Had
to.

“Of course it doesn’t matter to
you
,” she corrected, blinking and trying to ignore that her eyes were stinging, hoping the low light hid how wet they were growing. “Because
I
mean nothing to you. I realize that now, thank you, although I admit it was a bit of a shock. I mean, I knew my father didn’t care which Ferrante took me so long as one of you did—he’s never had my best interests at heart—but I thought
you
, at least, had been more discerning. I thought you decided that night that you
liked
me, but no.” It hurt so much to face that. Her voice scraped all the way up her breastbone, abrading her throat. “I didn’t go into our marriage expecting love, Alessandro.”

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.

But going to that place was dangerous. He couldn’t control his reaction to having been sent there by someone he had thought he could trust. He slammed the door on that torment and looked away.

“He wanted to hurt us and we can’t allow it. We can’t let him destroy our marriage, Octavia. We can’t let him win.”

She swallowed, face pulling into lines of torture, chin dipping to hide her crumple of composure. She pulled a tissue from the box on the table. A tear fell as she quickly tried to swipe beneath her eyes. Her misery was a tangible thing he could taste on his tongue. An empathic sting in his throat and constriction in his chest gripped him, making breathing difficult.

He had to go to her, offer the comfort he should have given her all along. He pulled her into his lap as he sat on the sofa and
mio Dio
he wanted to kiss her so badly—

She stiffened as he gathered her so he only pressed his mouth to her temple, subtly drinking in her scent and parting his lips enough to taste her skin. She trembled and curled her fingers into his shirt, face tucking into his neck where he could feel the dampness of her cheeks against his throat.

She shuddered once, catching back a sob.

He cradled her closer, tighter, hoping the pound of his heart reached her. That she understood he wished he’d been here.

The separation of the past months had distanced them. They’d already been practicing abstinence as a precaution against miscarriage. Alessandro had fallen into a routine of working late then working out, blood afire in his veins, body craving hers like an addict withdrawing from drugs.

He’d borne it because he’d had to. Staying in Naples had made it easier, physically. Maybe a part of him had even wanted to prove he
could
stay away. Had it been ego-driven? He could still hear Primo’s askance comment, “
You’re going to fly all this way to cuddle her?”

Now he wished he had. She was tense in his lap, accepting the embrace, but only marginally.

Rejection squeezed him in a dank hold. He ran the flat of his hand in a reassuring circle against her back, coaxing her to relax. Coaxing her to remember they’d had something. She could trust him.

“I was so scared,” she whispered.

“I’m here now,” he said, trying not to crush her, but he was anxious to imprint her with his presence.

She sniffed and her hand slid up, curling around his neck. Her torso angled so her breasts became a soft, erotic pressure against his chest. Her plump bottom was a sweet weight that shifted against an organ swelling and aching with pressure.

He started to seek her lips, hand shifting to the side of her face, but his mother’s voice intruded from upstairs. She was looking for them. Dinner was ready.

“You need to eat,” Alessandro said, heart racing as he snapped himself from a lascivious mind-set and loosened his hold, gently helping Octavia find her feet as he rose.

She clung for balance. The tightness of her shaking grip and the small flinch that arrived as she stood told him how sore she was at her incision. She released him quickly, folding the edges of her jacket across her breasts and hugging herself. She seemed very young in that moment and he reminded himself that she wasn’t even twenty-four.

Seven years younger than him and not nearly so worldly. Hiding a lot. Why hadn’t she called and shared her worries? What had that been about her father not caring about her best interests? How much had he missed by not being here?

She started toward the dining room and he urged her to pause with a touch on her arm. “Octavia. I should tell you, in case it comes up in future. Your father did offer me a bonus for a live birth. I found it...distasteful, to be honest. Hardly something within my control and not something I wanted a financial reward hanging upon. I told him to pay it out to you if he felt so strongly about it.”

“He did,” she said in a flat voice he found difficult to interpret. “It went into my account the other day and it is distasteful, but at least it gives me options.”

CHAPTER SIX

A
LESSANDRO
WAS
NEVER
anything less than confident. Even when he’d been refusing to run
the Ferrante corporate holdings there hadn’t been any doubt in him over whether he could do it, only a firm belief he didn’t deserve to. He certainly never backed down from a fight until he’d exhausted all his own options.

He wanted to leap on Octavia’s comment, but now wasn’t the time. She was emotionally exhausted and physically done in. He might not be as effusive as his mother, but they were both in agreement that Octavia needed rest and lots of it, so he didn’t ask her to come to Paris with him, even though he wanted to.

He hated to leave her for even a minute, now that he realized how badly they’d fallen apart, but work needed piecing back together as much as his marriage.

Still, her remark continued to turn over in his mind, aggravating him even when he returned to his mother’s house and found her napping. She was so different, so serious and perhaps even more reticent than when they’d first met.

By the end of their honeymoon, he’d been captivated by the woman he’d married. She’d been passionate as hell in bed, bright and funny yet thoughtful. There was no sign of that woman now and it was his fault.

He must have come across as smug in those early weeks, because Primo had said, “
Lucky you
,” with a sneer, and made a remark about how he would be happy to continue steering the ship if Alessandro wanted to go back to playing house.

Alessandro had seen the threat then, he acknowledged now, had even acted by sidelining his new wife in favor of asserting his position at work and within the family. He’d sent Primo to expand the London office and the confident woman who’d begun to blossom had soon been sent to the same cold climate where she’d been stepped on until she was completely closed against him.

He wanted their marriage back to where it had been last year, before he’d gotten her pregnant, when she’d been quick to come forward and kiss him in greeting, hands sliding around his waist as if she’d been waiting all day to touch him.

The way he had waited all day to hold her.

Instead, they were back to the very beginning. In the days leading up to their wedding, she had allowed his touch, but she’d been a lot like she was now: wary and unwilling to look him in the eye.

With a bittersweet smile, he recalled his gentle breaching of her defenses on their wedding night. She’d been apprehensive, but endearingly brave in her determination to overcome her qualms. He had enjoyed teasing her past her reservations one slow step at a time. Dancing to low, erotic music in their hotel room while she got used to the feel of his hands on her body. Undressing in the light of candle flame so her skin glowed as she blushed all over. He’d coaxed her to explore him and she’d reacted as though he was too hot to touch, hands drawn mothlike to his skin, then fluttering away.

He’d been the one to burn on contact. She’d been so responsive, moaning against his mouth and gasping as he circled her nipple with his thumb. When he’d pressed her to the bed and lightly explored her inner thighs, driving them both crazy with anticipation before he’d finally found what they were waiting for, she’d been wetly aroused, so slick and heated he nearly lost it just from exploring her.

“Do you do this to yourself? Show me what you like
,” he’d said, petting, enjoying the way she shivered and tensed and made strangled noises in her throat.

“I’m not going to tell you that,”
she’d choked, hand trembling over his as she tried to decide between the pleasure he was giving her and the bashfulness that was receding behind desire.

“You do,”
he’d teased, then commanded,
“Let me make it happen for you
,
”
and had tongued her nipple, sucking as he fondled her into climaxing with her hands in his hair and soft cries escaping her lips.

He had wanted to thrust into her then, so close to losing control he’d been shaking, but he’d gone down, arousing her all over again, carefully penetrating with his fingers to prepare her and making her arch up to his mouth as she gave up another orgasm.

Then,
then
he had covered her, gritting out,
“I’ll be fast. It will only hurt for a minute
.
”
He’d had nothing left for discipline and for the first time in his life he wasn’t using a condom. But as he’d thrust into her, she had tensed in the wrong way, gasping an anxious,
“Wait
.
”

It had nearly killed him, but he’d kept himself still, eyes closed, breath held, racked in a state of exquisite torture. He’d been so aroused he had been one pulsing nerve that felt and smelled and heard. He had been completely in the moment, his entire world reduced to her silken clasp around him, her scent, her shaken breaths as she relaxed by slow degrees.

Finally, her soft lips had sought his, whispering a damp acquiescence against his mouth.

As he’d begun to move, he’d known what they were doing wasn’t sex. It had been everything from the basest type of mating to the highest art form. He had promised to be fast, but he had wanted it to last his lifetime. His need to pour into her had been so acute he couldn’t breathe. One more stroke, just one more then—

“Oh. I think I’m— Keep going. Don’t stop. Please. Oh, oh.”

Music and torment. He had guided her thigh to his waist and pushed a hand under her hip to angle her so he could drive deeper, kissing her hard as she dug her nails into his shoulders and sobbed with pleasure into his mouth. Then she had shuddered and rippled and had come again, pulling him with her so they were both tumbling through the same waves of mindless pleasure, clinging to each other while they drowned in ecstasy.

Alessandro came back to the quiet formality of his office in his mother’s house and the patter of afternoon rain outside. He set a hand on the window, then his forehead, letting the cold of the pane penetrate, trying to take his hot blood down a few degrees.

He and Octavia were so damned attuned when they were having sex. It had only grown better from that first time and he was hard as a diamond just thinking about it. He wanted to cross the hall and slide into the bed where she was napping, and remind her exactly how well matched they were.

But seduction was off his playlist.

Wait. Was it? He ran a hand down his face, trying to pull himself together, thinking he didn’t have to make love to her, just let her know he wanted to. Surely that would begin to reassure her?

A distant squawk told him his wife might not be awake, but his son was. He took custody of Lorenzo from the nanny, spending his first hour alone with the boy, fully taking in that he was a father now. That brought up memories of his own father and, if he had been looking for something to cool his ardor and shake him back to his priorities, there it was. He was glad of the privacy of his office as he dealt with the wrench of emotion.

Lorenzo was such an innocent. So perfectly unmarred by life. Alessandro enclosed the tiny boy in a protective cage against his chest, thinking how cavalier he’d been in producing this new life only so Lorenzo could struggle to hang on to it. This world was a harsh place. When he’d been making love to his wife, he hadn’t taken in that he was increasing a thousandfold the level of responsibility he had carried since he was twelve years old. But now he had this small boy to guide and guard into manhood. Did Octavia really believe he would allow his child to grow up anywhere but under his own nose?

The magnitude of how completely his life had changed hit him. His cousin, the man he’d relied on, was gone. His wife wanted to leave him. He’d been given a son.

His entire path forward had to be reassessed, but he wouldn’t move down it alone. Octavia was coming with him. That much he knew.

* * *

Octavia woke and went directly to her son, but he wasn’t in his nursery. Ysabelle might have him downstairs, she supposed, but the door to the master suite was closed and...

She glanced at the door at the end of the hall. It was the office Alessandro used when he was here. He’d been in Paris all week, despite his assurance days ago that he was here now. The door to his office was almost always closed whether he was in there or not, but a sixth sense had her going to it and knocking.

“Alessandro?” She poked her head in.

He stood at his desk and looked up from reading something on his laptop screen, his expression of concentration clearing to distracted welcome. He was impeccable if casual with his jacket and tie gone, two buttons open and a baby in his crooked arm.

“You’re up.”

“You’re home.”

Apparently they were stating the obvious.

She suddenly realized her shirt collar was turned under, her hair loose and uncombed and her eyes still puffy with sleep. “I didn’t know where he was. Is he hungry?”

“He hasn’t said so,” he said dryly, glancing at the blinking infant before inviting her in with a wave. He met her halfway into the room and let her take the baby. With a light touch against the side of her head, he held her for a brief but firm kiss, then moved past her to close the door. “How are you feeling?” he asked as he turned back to her.

“Good,” she murmured, disconcerted by the faint taste of coffee now on her lips. “You’re starting him rather early for taking charge, aren’t you?”

“One more reason to raise him in Naples,” he commented with quiet significance.

She looked away, but her gaze snagged on the oil painting by his aunt that hung behind his desk. It was the view from the veranda of the Castello di Ferrante onto the hills of the vineyard surrounding the ancestral estate.

“It’s his heritage,” Alessandro added, noting where she was looking.

As he said it, she heard the truth of it. She squirmed inwardly, but realized he had her. No matter what she thought best for herself, she couldn’t deny Lorenzo his birthright. Did Alessandro feel guilty at all using their son to manipulate her? If he did, there was not one iota of remorse in his expression.

“My grandfather used to tell me that being CEO of the family company is a caretaker’s position. I thought I understood what he meant, but I didn’t. Not until I brought my son in here today. I’m not just supporting the family, but building his future. You won’t deny it to him, will you?”

Octavia let her gaze flicker around the room. The place was in disarray. Alessandro was obviously still trying to bring order after firing Primo. He’d left file cabinet drawers open and papers spilled onto every surface. An assortment of flash drives and backup tapes littered a side table and an old laptop had been revived on the coffee table. The desk was peppered with his own laptop and tablet and phone. One of Lorenzo’s new stuffed bears sat crookedly in the big black executive chair like a tiny drunken CEO.

She didn’t take in the mess so much as search for escape routes, glancing to the window like a bird seeking freedom. But the window was closed.

“No,” she admitted in a small mumble of defeat. “Congratulations on finding my Achilles’ heel.” She glanced back at him, expecting triumph.

He was very somber. “My mother is going to sit with him tonight, so you and I can go out for dinner.”

“Oh. I—” She hadn’t expected that. After weeks of feeling too unwieldy to leave the house, then stuck in the hospital and finally recovering here, she was feeling very cooped up. The little bird in her gave a fresh flutter of its wings, but Ysabelle obviously didn’t see the tension between her son and daughter-in-law. “That’s a nice offer, but I’ll tell her it’s not necessary.”

“I asked her to.”

“Why?”
she blurted.

“Because we’ve been apart too long. It’s time to be a husband and wife again.”

This was exactly what she was afraid of. The moment she conceded one point to him, he assumed she was ready to resume their marriage.

Was she?

She was still trying to decide a few hours later, as she applied makeup for the first time in forever. She was still attracted to her husband, of course she was. Physically, he was so perfect it was a superpower. But he was extra powerful in other ways, too, which made her feel weak.

She sighed, standing back to examine the top and skirt she’d rescued from her early maternity wear. The black skirt had a kerchief hem and an elastic panel that didn’t put too much pressure on her abdomen. Her legs looked okay, especially once she stepped into a pair of heels. The overlong, eggplant-colored top was, well, she supposed the scoop neckline drew the eye to her cleavage, rather than the thick waistline she’d tried to define with a narrow gold belt. She looked voluptuous and very Italian, especially with her pregnancy hair, thick and wavy and longer than she’d ever worn it. With a quick twist, she wound a pale yellow-and-orange scarf around her neck, adding a hint of pizzazz.

“You look beautiful,” he said, expression softening into admiring lines as he watched her come down the stairs to meet him in the foyer. He drew her close to press a kiss to her temple and her crumpled ego ate it up.

She tucked a mumbled,
“Grazie,”
into his shoulder. His touch took her tension into a whole new stratosphere, reminding her how much she enjoyed his caresses. At one point she’d been sure he enjoyed their lovemaking, too, but she wasn’t so sure anymore.

She wasn’t sure about anything, least of all why had she agreed to dinner.

As if he knew she was wavering, he kissed his mother, thanked her for babysitting and escorted Octavia out to the waiting car. Minutes later they were at the Mayfair restaurant she liked. It was converted from an eighteenth-century town house and she only visited for afternoon tea when she was on her own, but Alessandro had brought her here on the tail end of their honeymoon and she absolutely loved it. They always had excellent music, new art and the atmosphere was very trendy and creative, the food beyond exceptional.

He’d booked them a private table in the library and held her chair himself. She let him order, too busy looking at the sketches on the walls to read the menu herself. When the sommelier came, she murmured, “I’m not sure if I should have wine if I’m nursing.”