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‘Then they’re leaving with one less passenger.’ His rough, raw tone would have stopped a lesser woman in her tracks but Laurel jammed her feet into her shoes.
‘I’m going to be on that flight and if you dare try and stop me I’ll call the police.’ She ignored the fact that the Chief of Police regularly dined with the Ferraras. ‘The divorce is already going ahead. I saw Carlo this morning and signed everything you wanted me to sign.’
‘That’s irrelevant now.’
‘What do you mean, irrelevant?’ She zipped her jeans and freed the long sweep of her hair from the neck of her scarlet shirt. His eyes followed the movement and she tried not to remember how many times he’d buried his fingers in her hair as he’d kissed her.
‘Italian law expressly declares that a separation must be physical to be valid. A couple has to be formally separated for three years before a decree can be issued.’ His eyes slid from her hair to her mouth, his intimate and deliberate gaze reminding her of what they’d just done.
As the meaning behind his statement slowly sank in she felt a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Had she inadvertently sent the clock back to the beginning? No. Not that. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Even if we hadn’t just proved that we can’t be apart for that length of time, there is no way I’d be giving you a divorce now.’ His voice was like steel and she was suddenly aware of her heart hammering against her chest.
‘There’s no one you can’t influence. You could arrange it if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Yes, you do! You hate me for leaving you.’ Desperately she tried to stoke his anger but he was maddeningly cool.
‘And you hate me for going into one more meeting when I should have flown home to be with you. We both made mistakes. Being married is about fixing them and moving forwards. That’s what we’re doing.’
He was so smug, she thought desperately as she zipped the suitcase shut and grabbed the handle. So arrogantly sure that all he had to do was snap his fingers and whatever he wanted to happen would happen. So confident that he could wipe away the past.
‘You think we can move forward, but you have no idea what happened on that day.’ She was shaking with the stress of thinking about it. ‘You don’t know how I felt.’
His icy exterior splintered. ‘So tell me how you felt. Tell me now. Don’t hold anything back.’
The suitcase landed on the floor with a dull thump. ‘It started with a pain, low in my stomach.’ Her voice was remarkably steady given the fact that this was the conversation she’d thought she’d never have. ‘I thought to myself, This isn’t right. I called you, but your PA told me that you couldn’t be disturbed.’
His jaw tightened, like a fighter bracing himself for a punch. Clearly these weren’t the feelings he wanted to hear.
‘Laurel—’
‘I don’t hold that against you.’ She didn’t give him time to speak. It was her turn now and she intended to use it. ‘The first message didn’t get through but that was her fault, not yours. And my fault for not being more forceful about needing to speak to you. I called the doctor and he told me to take painkillers and go back to bed and rest for a while, so I did that and the pain grew worse. I knew no one else in Sicily. Your mother was staying with her sister in Rome, Santo was with you in the Caribbean. I was alone. And frightened.’ Her emphasis on that word triggered an indefinable change in him. ‘I called you again. This time I was forceful. I insisted on speaking to you and she put me through—’ Her heart rate doubled and she was back in that room; back with the pain and the panic. She remembered again the terrifying sense of isolation. ‘You asked me if I was bleeding and when I said I wasn’t you spoke to the doctor and between you, you decided that I was a neurotic woman.’
‘That is not true. At no point did I accuse you of neuroses.’ He sprang to his own defence but Laurel wasn’t in the mood to listen.
‘You were always labouring the fact that I found it hard to tell you how I was feeling. “Trust me,” you said in that same seductive voice you always use when you’re determined to get your own way. So I did. On that day, I put all my trust in you. I told you I thought something was badly wrong and that I didn’t trust the doctor. I told you I was scared. That’s the first and only time I’ve admitted that to anyone. For the first time in our relationship I put my trust in you and your response to that enormous risk on my part was to dismiss my concerns as less valid than the doctor’s and return to your meeting. With your phone switched off.’
