The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain (8 page)

He loved her and no one in the family could doubt that fact. Not now. Not ever, in her opinion.

But
Claudio
did not and had not loved
Therese
when he had been courting her with an eye for marriage. He’d kissed her and touched her with searing passion, evoking a response that she had learned to accept, but which had at first shocked and terrified her. To be so at mercy to her body’s desires had gone against her need for control and the way she had been raised to suppress any deep emotion.

Truthfully she would probably never have allowed her love for
Claudio
to bloom fully if he had not evoked her latent sensuality. It had broken through her every emotional barrier and laid her heart bare to his influence.

Now she would pay the price for her weakness.

Vulnerability always came with a cost. Hadn’t her father told her that time and again, and her mother…though in different words? Yet, she’d been powerless to stop herself falling in love with the prince who had a heart made of stone.

The cost of that love was her own shattered heart.

Learning of King
Vincente
’s illness had added another level of pain to the maelstrom of hurt inside of her. She loved her father-in-law in a way she’d never been free to care for her own father. But then King
Vincente
had accepted her as her father had not. He admired her feminine strength and told her so. He enjoyed her company and told her that as well.

He commented on his son’s dedication to duty in less than complimentary ways when he thought she was being neglected. He had been her ally for three years and if she lost him to death, it would tear her apart. It would also mean her husband’s need for an heir would be even greater.

Claudio
had said the older man was stable, but she knew how unpredictable a heart condition could be. And no one had even known that King
Vincente
had suffered from one. As unfair as she’d felt Claudio’s accusations about her behavior had been, if she had known her father-in-law’s health was at risk, she would have waited for her husband’s return from New York to talk about their marriage.

Because she cared too much for King
Vincente
, who was a better father to her than her blood relative to have ever allowed for the possibility that he might end up alone in a hospital room worried for his life.

Her own fears in that regard were enough to make her heart quake. On top of that, she was still reeling from the way
Claudio
had smashed her every hope that she meant anything more to him than a body in his bed and a political sidekick of the necessary sex.

She honestly did not think she could stand an ongoing war of silent hostility with her husband in addition to everything else. Though once she explained about her endometriosis at least that would end. He might be bitterly disappointed. He might even see her as a complete feminine failure, as she did herself, but he would no longer be furious with her.

Her own anger said she should not care, but her heart was too bloody from recent wounds to withstand much more and she was smart enough to realize it. Besides, it was entirely possible she would not be able to hide her physical agony from the endometriosis when her monthly came.

At least if she told him about it now, she would not have to deal with revelations during a time she was least up to doing so. Every month got worse and until she had the surgery, it would continue to do so. While he might not like hearing the truth, it couldn’t be worse than his belief that she was selfishly letting him down.

She moved to sit beside him, anger and the need for honesty between them still at war inside of her. “
Claudio
.”

He looked at her, his dark eyes winter-cold. “What?”

Remember, diplomacy and tact, she told herself. “I don’t want to add to the burden of worry you are dealing with King
Vincente
, but—”

“Then do not.”

“What?” she asked, not having expected to be cut off like that. After all, despite the way he’d been acting earlier, he’d been trained in diplomacy since infancy, too.

“You are about to tell me why you want a divorce, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Do not.”

“But I need to.”

“I do not wish to hear it.”

“But—”

“You can have your divorce,
Therese
, but not until my father’s health is stable enough to withstand news that his treasured daughter-in-law has feet of clay. Until that point, we will continue the facade of our marriage. Capice?”

“No, not really. I don’t understand at all, actually,” she admitted, reeling for the third time that night at a totally unexpected reaction from him. It was as if he had become a completely different man to the one she had thought she married. “I thought you said our marriage would end over your dead body.”

“I have changed my mind.”

“I can see that, but why?”

“You are not the only one who has grown bored with the setup, but I would have done nothing about it which I am sure you think makes me a fool for duty.”

And she had thought she had grown inured to more pain. What a joke. She felt like her heart was being ripped right out of her chest. “I never said I was bored.”

“But I am.” He flicked his hand in a throwaway gesture that implied their marriage meant that little to him. “The truth is, I am only too happy to give you a divorce, but as I said…it will have to wait on my father’s health. You can live with that limitation, I imagine?”

“You want a divorce?” she asked, that portion of his words the only ones that registered with any real impact.

This was worse than any scenario she could have predicted. She’d thought it was very possible he might accept her solution with an equanimity that would hurt, but she had never envisioned he would actually welcome it. That he had grown bored being married to her.

“You are beautiful,
Therese
, but a man needs something more than a pretty face and impeccable table manners to ease the prospect of an entire lifetime together. Once you started turning me down in the bedroom, your stock in my life dropped dangerously low. As I said, I would have stuck it out because once I make a promise, I keep it. But I will not fight for a marriage I do not actually want.”

“You don’t want to be married to me?” she asked faintly, needing him to verify his words.

“Why so surprised? You feel the same way.”

“I…do?” she asked stupidly, her brain having ceased to function on an analytical level.

“And you did not even have the strength of character to stick it out,” he said, treating her words like a confirmation rather than a question. “Funny, I always thought there was more to you than that, but I will not pretend grief I do not feel.”

“But earlier…”

“I allowed my pride to dictate my words. Certainly I was not reacting to what I really wanted.”

Feeling sick to her stomach from some very real grief,
Therese
lurched up from her seat. “Then, I guess there is nothing left to say.”

“Nothing that I could want to hear, no.”

She nodded jerkily, amazed on one level at how much agony the human heart could withstand without ceasing to beat and simply hemorrhaging internally from that pain on another.

Claudio
watched his wife stumble down the aisle back to her original seat and wanted to hit something. Damn it, why did she have to look so distraught? She was the one who had asked for a divorce. She was the one who had found someone else.

And she’d wanted to tell him about it. As if hearing the details could somehow make her infidelity all right.

She was probably going to tell him that she had fallen in love, that she couldn’t help herself. He’d heard that line used before by friends and acquaintances in the world he moved within. But rarely did even the love vote move those people in positions of major political impact to divorce.

He had understood his stepmother’s need to leave his father, but he’d never understood her going so far as to get a divorce. It wasn’t as if she had ever remarried…and one time early on he’d overheard her tell someone she probably never would. So, why get a divorce, why drag the royal family’s name through the mud.

For a principle?

He’d been so damn sure
Therese
would never do anything so rash, but he had not accounted for her finding someone else.

Perhaps arrogantly, he had assumed he was enough for her both in and out of bed. He had been wrong. So why was she acting like his words devastated her?

He’d said them to save face. They’d come bursting out, totally unexpected, when he’d realized she was about to tell him all about the other man. He wasn’t proud of lying. He was an honest man and that shamed him, but he would not unspeak the words if he could.

His pride had been lacerated by her request for a divorce and the subsequent realization that his every niggling fear about her lack of sexual interest and ditzy woolgathering had been justified. She had found someone else and she wanted to divorce him, Principe Claudio Scorsolini, for this other man.

There was no other explanation possible for the night’s revelations.

The knowledge made him furious enough to want to kill, but it wasn’t her he wanted to hurt. It was the man who had lured his gentle wife to a passion that had obviously surpassed what they found together.

Claudio
could barely believe that was possible.

The biggest lie he had told
Therese
was that he had grown bored with her. He continued to crave her body, even with her lack of recent sexual availability. In fact, it had challenged him as much as they had frustrated him. It was the natural predator in him, but having her move away had drawn him inexorably into chasing her.

The knowledge that he had planned seductions and had put so much effort into claiming her body when she had been pining for someone else made him sick with anger. Even so, he could not believe he had said what he did to her. Not because he wasn’t capable of being as ruthless as any of his ancestors who had settled
Isole
dei Re
, but because the words had been so far from the truth. He was shocked he had come up with that line of defense.

Their marriage had never been only about the sex, though it had been a big issue for him. For what man wouldn’t it be? But she’d believed him. Which said what about how she saw him? He had been nothing more to her than a body in her bed and a way to fulfill her mother’s ambitious social climbing nature.

So who was the new guy? Not a nobody that was for sure. An American. That would make sense of her frequent trips to the States. It shouldn’t be too hard for his private investigator Hawk to find a name. For some reason, the idea of getting details on his own did not grind in his gut like broken glass like the thought of having her tell him did. Maybe because he felt in control when he was the one garnering the information.

What
Claudio
would do with that data once he got hold of it, he was not sure.

The desire for revenge was a bloodlust inside him.

Would he ruin the other man? Would he do anything to prevent the chances of
Therese
finding happiness with him? All he had to do was refuse the divorce. It was no easy thing to end a marriage to a member of the royal family of
Isole
dei Re.

Flavia had only succeeded with his father because the marriage had taken place in Italy, and even in that case because he had not contested the divorce or denied her charge of infidelity. She had no physical evidence to make a case with, but Papa had felt so much guilt over letting down his own high moral standards, he had let his wife walk away.

Claudio
did not know if he had the same fortitude. He had told
Therese
that he would not cling to a relationship he did not want. That was truth…but it was not true that he did not want his marriage. He didn’t know if he could touch her again, knowing her body had belonged to another man, but he did not know if he could let her go, either.

And the knowledge galled him, making him feel even more vicious than learning of her unfaithfulness.

* * * * *

They arrived in Lo Paradiso sometime after one in the morning and went directly to the hospital.

Therese had tried to doze on the plane, but she’d found it impossible to sleep with her thoughts careening from the shock of Claudio’s expressed desire for a divorce and King Vincente’s heart attack. She had believed that nothing could be worse than learning she had endometriosis with a high chance of total infertility.