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There was a moment when neither of them spoke and then she drew in a little breath.
‘I don’t have anything to wear.’
That quintessentially female response loosened the tension in his muscles. If her biggest worry was what she was going to wear then they were making progress. ‘That is easily fixed. There are clothes in the dressing room.’
Her head turned. Those beautiful eyes cooled and narrowed. ‘Your bedroom is stocked with women’s clothes?’
‘Our bedroom.’ He found that uncensored display of female jealousy oddly reassuring. At least she cared who he’d been clothing in her absence. ‘I bought them for you. It was part of the surprise. The day after we discovered you were pregnant you went to London on business and I made all the final arrangements. When you landed in Sicily I was going to bring you here.’
‘Instead of which you flew off to the Caribbean and we didn’t even see each other.’
Another regret to add to the pile already littering his mind.
‘Yes.’
‘I only saw you once more after that, when I was packing to leave Sicily.’ She paused. ‘I expected you to come after me. Not that I wanted you to, but I expected it. Why didn’t you?’
It was a question he’d asked himself a million times. ‘I was blinded by my own sense of righteous injustice that you’d walked out on our marriage. I made many mistakes. Give me the chance to make it up to you.’
There was a long silence. ‘Can we go for a walk through the town? I always loved the little antique shops and the buzz.’
At that moment he realised just how afraid he’d been that she’d demand to be taken back to the airport. That she wouldn’t give him another chance. ‘It’s the middle of the day, tesoro. You will be sautéed in the heat and squashed by tourists.’
‘I’m sure you have a hat in the wardrobe you bought me and the two of us can elbow our way through tourists. Please? I really want to do something normal.’
Normal?
‘There’s nothing normal about choosing to walk along the Corso Umberto in the heat of the sun.’ Especially when I want to take you to bed, undress you and explore every inch of you.
But that part of their relationship had always been easy. It was the rest of it that had proved challenging. And it was the rest of it he was determined to fix.
They strolled through the old medieval town, exploring the network of narrow streets and alleyways. To the casual observer they probably looked like lovers enjoying a holiday but Laurel was aware that his attentiveness sprang not from the romance of their surroundings but from a genuine desire to heal the deep rift between them.
Whether or not it could be healed, she didn’t know.
Putting her trust in someone had taken a huge leap of faith on her part. And he’d let her fall. She wasn’t sure she was ready to risk doing it again.
A pretty bikini caught her eye in the window of an exclusive boutique and she went to try it on, eager for distraction from her own thoughts.
She hadn’t had a proper holiday for years, she realised as she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Not since their honeymoon. After that they’d both been sucked into the volume of work that demanded their attention. It would be bliss to just spend some time lying by that beautiful pool with a book. If she could relax for long enough.
This wasn’t a holiday, was it?
It was—
She frowned as she realised she didn’t really know what it was. A reconciliation? A trial of togetherness? Was it possible to fix what had gone wrong between them? She didn’t know. What she did know was that she wasn’t the same girl he’d married.
Wondering whether he’d still be interested in the person she was now, she handed the bikini to the girl behind the desk. Cristiano insisted on paying and she let him because she knew it would please him to spoil her and it seemed petty to argue over something so small.
As he handed over his credit card Laurel saw the girl send him furtive glances and turn a pretty shade of pink.
Even dressed casually, he had that effect on women, she thought. And most of the time he wasn’t even aware of it. Or maybe it just happened so frequently he no longer noticed.
As they left the shop, Laurel glanced over her shoulder and sighed when she caught the girl staring enviously after her. ‘That girl was ready to marry you and have your babies.’ She spoke without thinking and Cristiano frowned.
‘What girl?’
‘The one in the shop.’
‘I’m already married. And I’m staying that way.’ He didn’t tackle the other part of her sentence and Laurel wondered what on earth had possessed her to make a remark like that. What had she been thinking? And what was the point of this attempt at reconciliation, because even if they managed to fix one part of this mess, there was another part that couldn’t be changed.
