The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain (19 page)
“I did. Believe me.”
“But you decided the reason was because my heart had become unfaithful to you, if not my body.”
“I could not be sure I ever had your heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have never said you loved me.”
“Love was not a requirement of our marriage bargain.”
“No, it was not.”
Inexplicably she got the impression that he had wanted it to be…for her anyway. But why would he want her love when he did not feel deeply for her? It made no sense. Any more than his newfound desire to coddle her because she was sick.
Or did that make sense?
“I think I understand.”
“I am glad.”
“Not why you believed I’d found someone else.” She disabused him of that notion immediately. “But I think I understand you feeling the need to coddle me now.”
“Because you are ill?”
“Because you are feeling guilty for thinking I was unfaithful.”
“That is not the reason I want to take care of you now.”
“But you do feel guilty.”
For once it was very easy to read his thoughts. They were written all over his pained features. “Yes. I should have realized you were ill.”
“At least you noticed my behavior was out of the ordinary.”
“Of course I noticed.”
“There really is no of course about it. I thought you didn’t particularly care one way or the other that I had started saying no in the bedroom.”
He looked at her like she’d lost what was left of her mind. “That is absurd. Naturally I cared, but I was not going to be a petulant child about it. A woman’s no is no.”
“And why I said no wasn’t important?”
“Of course it was important.”
“But you would rather think me guilty of immorality than to ask.”
“I did ask.”
Then she remembered. “And I didn’t want to talk about it, but it had been going on for months. Why wait so long?”
He shifted on the bed, his face a study in hard angles and stonelike passivity. “It stung my pride for you to reject me sexually. To talk about it would have made it worse. I would have felt like I was begging for your favors.”
“That’s absurd.”
“It is not absurd. It is truth. Why do you think I was gone so many months during your period?”
“Because it was convenient.”
“You do not think much of me, do you?”
“That’s not true.”
“I believe it is, but it is not the issue under debate, so we will leave it. I organized my travel plans to coincide with your monthly because you made it clear that even light touching during your monthly made you feel uncomfortable. I find it a real challenge to keep my hands off you and the best solution was to be gone from our bed completely. You can believe me, or not…but I organized my schedule for your sake, not my own.”
“You have no problem not touching me outside the bedroom.”
“If you truly think that, you are blind. I would touch you all the time, but it is not seemly for a king to be that way with his wife.”
“You aren’t a king yet.”
“But I will be. And because of my position, I have set standards for my own behavior. Achieving those standards challenges me, especially where you are concerned. The only place I gave myself permission to be completely free with you was our bedroom. I found it very difficult to police my behavior in there as well,” he said as if admitting a grave sin.
“I didn’t realize….”
“In my own defense, I thought you knew.”
“How could I?”
“I thought my desire for you was obvious.”
“It wasn’t obvious when you took no so easily and acted as if nothing was different between us. I thought it didn’t matter.”
“Now you know differently.”
“I know that sex is a key element in our relationship, yes.”
“You say that like it is a bad thing.”
She bit her lip and looked away. How honest should she be? Her marriage was over even if he wasn’t willing to recognize that. Was there any use in rehashing old hurts? Then again, hadn’t she spent enough of her marriage hiding from him?
She turned her head so their gazes met. “I wanted you to care for me on a level that was more personal than the sexual.”
“What is more intimate than sex?”
“I’m not sure how to explain it,” she admitted. “It’s just that I wanted to be important to you for my own sake…not only because of the pleasure you found in my body, or even how well I did my job as your wife.”
“You want me to love you.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe nothing less than love would have satisfied me, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You no longer want my love? Is that why you fight my coddling as you call it? You are content to do without me?”
“I don’t mean to fight your attention,” she said around a yawn as the pain meds started taking serious effect. “It’s just come as such a surprise.”
The truth was she liked it. Too much. If she let herself get used to it, it was going to be that much harder to walk away, but she couldn’t seem to summon the necessary willpower to keep rejecting it, either.
“I’m glad you’re here with me right now,” she said softly. “Even if you should probably be somewhere else. I know you have too many other responsibilities right now to be worrying about me, but I can’t help enjoying the attention. I suppose that makes me weak.”
She was speaking to herself really, but he answered.
“No, it does not. It makes you human.” He seemed pleased about something, but she couldn’t imagine what.
She sighed. “I guess, but you can’t afford to take the time to be calling me several times a day, or to keep playing nursemaid.”
“You must stop trying to take care of everyone else in the world. I can well afford the time for phone calls and if I do not care for you, who will? You refuse to tell anyone of your condition.”
He had a point, but she couldn’t leave it there. He was trying to make everything sound so easy and it wasn’t. Only her muddled brain was having a hard time remembering why exactly. She remembered one thing.
“You didn’t have time for phone calls before.”
“I did…until you stopped answering all my calls.”
She stared at him, remembering through the mist trying to cloud her mind. What he said was true. He used to call her several times a day, no matter where he was in the world. There had rarely been any more discernible reason for the phone call than to connect briefly. He would ask about something on her schedule or give her a short rundown on his latest meeting. In fact, a lot of communication she took for granted had happened during those calls. It was only when he stopped making them that she realized it. She had started ignoring some of his calls and even cutting him off when she did answer…because he wasn’t saying the right thing. “It felt like you were only checking on my role as your princess. The calls were too impersonal.”
And that hurt, but then so had having him stop making them.
“How could I have made them more personal?”
Looking back, she saw that for him those calls had been personal, his way of being with her when duty kept them apart so frequently. Her throat tightened with emotion.
“You could have told me…just once…that you missed me.”
“I am sorry I did not spell it out. I thought the calls themselves would give you that message.”
“You called me because you missed me?” she asked, even now shocked by the concept.
“Sì. For what other reason would I have called and discussed such inconsequential matters?”
“I don’t know. My brain is getting fuzzy.”
He frowned and got up from the bed.
“If you follow the pattern from last night, you will not be cognizant enough to converse at all in about twenty minutes and there is something I wish to discuss before that happens.”
“It was worse last night because I’d lost so much blood and gotten so little sleep,” she said woozily.
“If you say so.” He began pulling her shoes off. “You have said that surgery is the prescribed cure for endometriosis?”
“Not a cure exactly, but close. It’s my best chance for living a fairly normal, pain-free life.” She watched as he put her shoes aside and then rolled down her thigh-highs. His eyes flared with hunger as he looked at her exposed legs, but his touch was almost completely impersonal.
“What do they do? They only have to remove your reproductive system?”
At least this conversation was easy. She’d researched the alternatives so thoroughly, she thought she could recite them and their benefits or detriments in her sleep.
“No. Not anymore. They can actually usually remove the growths of tissue through laser surgery. Recovery time is minimal and I don’t even have to stay overnight in the hospital afterward.”
“But you will.”
“I will?” she asked delicately, her eyes narrowing.
The look he gave her from his brown eyes said she could argue all she liked, but his mind was made up. “Even laser surgery carries risk and is traumatic to the body. I do not agree with this move in the medical community of dismissing a patient from care too early.”
“I’m sure insurance companies have more to do with that than doctor preferences. If you are willing to pay for it, I have no doubt the hospital will happily keep me in residence.” She wondered if doing so would help assuage his guilt.
“And this surgery…it is a guaranteed fix?”
“No, but like I said…it’s my best chance. A high percentage of the women who elect to have the surgery end up having it again sometime down the road.”
“It seems a small price to pay if it will alleviate the kind of pain and bleeding you have been having.”
“That’s how I see it.”
He was taking her dress off and she was letting him. No matter what she said to the contrary it felt wonderful having him care for her like this. Especially knowing that soon he would not be there to even scrub her back in a sexy shower.
He did not offer to get her a gown, but said, “Do you need to fix things up for the night?”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Yes.”
But before she could stand up on her own, he was once again lifting her and carrying her into the en suite. He left her to take care of things and was undressed and in bed, his laptop and papers scattered around him when she returned to the bedroom.
“You don’t have to go to bed just because I am.”
“It is no hardship after the week I had, I assure you.”
She nodded, too sluggish from the pain meds to argue further. “Will you at least try to go to sleep before midnight?”
“Do you want me to?” he asked as if the idea pleased him.
“Yes. I don’t want you having a heart attack like your dad.”
“That would be unfortunate, would it not? After all, who would run our country if we were both convalescing?”
“The mind boggles, but I wasn’t thinking about the good of
She climbed into the bed, unable to believe she had almost blurted out her love for him.
* * * * *
And he had allowed her to believe so. It had been a conscious decision, but he had not foreseen the consequences. He had been protecting himself from taking his father’s path. He’d never wanted a love that could turn a strong man into a cheat. After the talk with his father in the hospital, perhaps he understood what had driven Vincente so many years ago, but with understanding did not come peace.
The result was the same. Love made fools of men.
But had denying the tender emotion in his relationship with
Worse than a fool, he felt like a cruel monster. It had never been his intention that
He had not anticipated the current events, but even so…to have failed so miserably at his first real test in the husband department was galling. He did not take failure well. He never had, which was why he worked so hard to avoid it. But there was no denying that he had misjudged his wife and in misjudging her, he had added to her suffering.
