MASSIMO FELT AS if he’d been drugged.
He’d kept his gaze fixed on Livia, telling himself again and again that he wouldn’t play her game.
He’d still been telling himself that when he’d stripped his clothes off.
He’d still been telling himself that when he’d stepped into the water and swum to her.
She made no effort to acknowledge him, not even when he stood behind her.
His hands working of their own volition, he reached into her hair and pulled the pin holding it together out.
Her right shoulder made the smallest of movements but she still didn’t acknowledge him.
Her hair tumbled down.
He smoothed it with his hands then pressed his nose into the fragrant silk while dragging his fingers down her back and then sliding them around her waist. ‘Why did you cut it?’ he murmured.
She leaned back into him with a soft sigh and moved her hands to slide them over his arms. Her nails scratched through the fine hairs of his forearms as her bottom wriggled provocatively against his arousal.
He slid his hand over her ribcage and cupped a weighty breast. His blood had thickened so much that even his heart felt sluggish within the heavy beats.
The small hands pulled away from his arms and reached up behind her shoulders, her fingers groping for him. And then she twisted around to face him.
Her breasts brushed against his chest, her abdomen pressed against his arousal, her hands cupped his neck.
Colour heightened her face, the dark eyes black with desire, the plump lips parted...
Those lips...
Mouths fused together in a kiss of hard, passionate savagery as the desire between them unleashed like a coil springing free from its tight box.
This was how it had always been between them, he thought, in the hazy recess of his mind. One touch had always been enough to ignite the torch that blazed so brightly between them.
Gripping her hips, he lifted her from the water to place her bottom onto the pool’s ledge, parted her legs with his thighs, and thrust straight inside her welcoming heat.
She gasped into his mouth then kissed him even harder.
His fingers digging into her hips, her fingers digging into his neck and scalp, mouths clashing together, he drove in and out of her, fast, furious, thrusting as deep as he could go, pain and pleasure driving them on and on to a climax that had her crying his name and Massimo finding himself separating from his body in a wash of brilliant colour.
It took a long time to come back to himself.
He barely remembered climbing out of the pool and collapsing into an entwined heap of naked limbs on the soft lawn. The afternoon sun above blazed down on them, its heat tempered by the breeze coming from the ocean.
‘We should get some sunscreen on you,’ he muttered.
Her lips pressed into his neck before she clambered upright and got to her feet. ‘Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a minute.’
When she’d disappeared from view, he rolled onto his back and stretched his limbs with a long sigh.
Slinging an arm across his forehead, he closed his eyes. There was a lethargy within him. His heart still thumped heavily.
He should get up and put his clothes back on before Livia came back with the sunscreen.
He knew what he should do. The trouble was his lethargic limbs refused to cooperate, just as his limbs had refused his mind’s instructions not to play her sensual game in the pool.
His body had been Livia’s slave from the moment they’d met.
He wanted to be angry with her for using her sexuality as a weapon against him but he couldn’t. He understood what she was doing. His anger was directed at himself.
When she returned wearing her sarong and carrying two full flutes of champagne whilst also balancing the sunscreen and a couple of beach towels under her arm, he rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow.
‘Livia, I’m sorry...’
‘But this doesn’t change anything?’ she finished for him with a raised brow. She put the champagne and towels on the poolside table and removed her sarong.
‘It’s okay, Massimo,’ she said as she spread the sarong out like a blanket on the lawn. ‘Sometimes great sex is just that—great sex. Could you do my back for me, please?’
Livia sat with her legs stretched out on the sarong and waited for him to join her on it.
Massimo, she had discovered early on in their relationship, opened up more easily after sex, when his defences were down in the wave of euphoria that followed it.
She knew stripping naked and seducing him visually could be considered as fighting dirty but there was no shame in seducing her own husband. They both took great pleasure from making love. If she could go back in time and do one thing differently it would be to stop herself turning her back on him in the last months of their marriage. Without sex to keep the intimacy between them alive, the glue that had held them together had disintegrated. There had been nothing left.
But sex wasn’t all a marriage could or should be and intimacy came in many forms.
She leaned forward, hugging her knees when he put his hands filled with sunscreen on her back.
Unlike when he’d worked the screen into her skin briskly on the yacht, he took his time. His touch was soothing. She closed her eyes to savour the sensation.
‘What did I do to turn you away from me?’ she asked quietly.
His hands paused in their work. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes, you do. You turned away from me, Massimo. You stopped caring. Even if tomorrow you decide everything’s still over for us, I need to know because the not knowing’s killing me.’
Massimo clenched his jaw and breathed in deeply.
What was the point in discussing something that wouldn’t make the slightest difference to anything? But she’d steered it so he had no choice. If she’d shouted her demands as she’d always done, he would happily walk away, as he always used to. But she was using temperance. Using the closeness of sex.
He rubbed the sunscreen into her lower back and forced his mind to disassociate from the soft skin beneath his fingers. ‘You didn’t do anything. We’re just not suited. My work is my life. There isn’t the space for anything more.’
‘You didn’t think that when we got together.’
‘My feelings for you took me by surprise.’ They’d floored him. ‘I let those feelings guide me instead of sitting down and thinking them through rationally. You and I have a rare chemistry but, when you boil it down, it’s nothing but adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin...’
‘Do not reduce my feelings to a chemistry lesson.’ An edge crept into her voice.
Good. The dopamine currently flowing through her needed to be extinguished.
‘All the effects of desire and what we think of as love can be reduced to a chemical level,’ he explained levelly. ‘The overwhelming feelings we experience at the start of a relationship are a surge of chemical reactions but those chemicals are raised to unsustainable levels. Eventually they lessen, which is what happened to us.’
‘Nice try at deflection but what happened to us is that you turned away from me.’ She leaned forward and traced her finger along the scar on her leg. ‘This cut was when I really felt it. You didn’t care that I was injured.’
‘I did care but you told me it wasn’t anything serious.’ But his first instinct had been to grab his keys and speed straight to her. That had been the day after he’d realised how far behind they were on the carbon filter project because of basic errors he’d made. The first errors he’d made in his entire career. The day after he’d woken Livia from a nightmare and held her trembling body tightly to him and found himself developing his own cold sweat at how badly he’d wanted to dive into her head and rip out the terrors that plagued her.
That had been the moment he’d understood what a dreadful mistake he’d made.
The fun, sexy marriage he’d envisaged for them had become an all-consuming sickness in his blood. Livia had taken full possession of his mind as well as his body.
He’d had to back away. Before he lost everything.
If she had given him the space he needed things might have been very different but she hadn’t and a gulf had opened between them that had only solidified how wrong they were for each other.
‘I didn’t want to worry you because I thought you would drive to me,’ she said wistfully. ‘When we first married, I slipped and bumped my head one evening. Do you remember that? It wasn’t anything serious but you stayed home the next day to keep an eye on me. You were worried about concussion even though I’m a nurse and told you there was nothing to worry about. Less than a year later you sent your PA to drive me to hospital with a gashed leg.’
He’d sent his PA after first having to prise his car keys from his own hands to drop them in Lindy’s palm.
He shifted away from Livia’s smooth, golden back and got to his feet. ‘Do you have any idea how much work I missed in the first year of our marriage and how behind we got because of it?’ He snatched up one of the beach towels she’d left on the poolside table. ‘This carbon filter we’re about to test should have been ready months ago.’
‘That’s because you have to micromanage everything.’
He secured the towel around his waist. ‘It’s my company.’
Her eyes found his. If she felt at a disadvantage remaining naked while he’d covered himself, she didn’t show it. ‘You employ some of the world’s biggest brains. If you can’t trust their skills and judgement then what does that say? It says you’re either a control freak or you need to employ people who you do trust.’
‘No, it says I take my responsibilities seriously.’
‘You’re in the position where you can allow others who are equally responsible and qualified to share the burden. You choose not to. You use the excuse of your work to cut yourself off from everyone who loves you and you still haven’t explained why you cut yourself away from me. We were happy, Massimo. We were. And then we had nothing and I need to understand why and, please, for the love of God, don’t explain it to me as a scientific formula. I get that we’re nothing but atoms and dust but we’re also conscious beings who feel and love and dream.’
Feeling in better control of himself, he took a seat at the poolside table and drank his champagne in one deep swallow. Bourbon would have numbed the agitation growing in his stomach much better but this would do.
He had to make her understand. Whatever delusions Livia had allowed herself to believe, he needed to dispel them. Since she’d left him, his world had reverted to its prior orderly calm. His time was where it needed to be—with his business. His mind was clutter-free. The stupid errors that had crept into his work were relegated to history. His wife would soon be relegated to history too. Everything would be as it should be.
‘It’s just the way I am. I was always different from the rest of my family.’ Damn but he really could do with a bourbon. ‘They didn’t care if the clothes they wore were fraying at the seams or if there wasn’t the money available to fix things that broke but I did. They think love alone can fix everything when in reality only hard work achieves anything. I love them in my own way but I never felt as if I belonged and I never wanted to settle for making do. I didn’t set out to be rich but I did set out to be well off enough that I would never want for anything.’
Livia pounced on his choice of words. ‘You love them in your own way? That implies you’re aware of feeling love on something other than a chemical level.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re twisting my words against me.’
‘No, I’m pointing out your hypocrisy. You know perfectly well that love, however it is formed, is real but you’re using science as an excuse to deny that what you and I had was real. I never had shoes with holes or clothes that didn’t fit but, given the choice, I would have suffered that than live through my childhood. My father was always generous with his money and gave me everything I asked for but I was terrified of him.’
There was the barest flicker in the shuttered caramel eyes but it was enough for the faint hope in her heart to continue beating. ‘Whenever he hugged me, all I felt was his gun digging into my chest from his pocket. When he was killed, I was upset because he was my father but I never grieved him like the rest of my family did because the bogeyman of my early childhood was my father. My mother was hardly ever there and when she was she would be high or drunk. I practically raised Gianluca—I was the one who took him to school every day and helped him with his homework and made sure he had a hot meal at night.
‘Your parents are decent, law-abiding, loving people.’ If she was going to fight, she might as well fight on his family’s behalf too. But it wasn’t just a fight for herself or for the Briatores. She was fighting for Massimo, for him to wake up and see all the joy of love and family that he was denying himself. She got to her feet and gathered the sarong as she continued, ‘They could have worked longer hours or taken additional jobs to give you everything you wanted but they made the choice to be there for you whenever you needed them and I wish I could make you see how priceless that was.’
‘From your perspective, anyone else’s childhood would be priceless.’
‘Maybe,’ she conceded, wrapping the sarong around her. ‘But we’re talking about our own, not anyone else’s. You are very different from your family but there are similarities. You have their generosity but yours is given in material ways where theirs is given in time.’
His fingers curved on the table but his eyes remained fixed on her. ‘I cannot un-live my childhood just because yours was, on a sliding scale, much worse. It made me who I am. It taught me that anything I wanted or needed, I had to get by myself. My parents loved me, yes, but their love didn’t change the reality of us being poor. It didn’t solve anything. You could be right. I could be a control freak. But everything I have has been achieved by my own endeavours. Science is logical and it’s real. It’s where I feel most comfortable. It’s where I belong but to do my best work, I need my mind to be free from clutter.’
It took her a moment to process the implication of what he’d just said. ‘Are you calling me clutter?’
His response was unapologetic. ‘You became a distraction. You demanded my attention when I needed to be focused.’
‘All I ever demanded was your time.’ Try as she might, she couldn’t hide the rising anger. ‘Since when is it a crime to want to spend time with your own husband?’
‘That is my point perfectly encapsulated. I cannot produce my best work when I’m constantly worrying about you. I need to be free to focus without limits, not clock-watching, not worrying about you being lonely at home, not thinking I need to drive home because you’re waiting for me with your dinner going cold.’
‘My food wouldn’t have gone cold if you’d bothered to let me know you were going to be late,’ she retorted.
‘That was never intentional.’
‘And now you’re contradicting yourself again. If it wasn’t intentional you wouldn’t have worried about it.’
Over the still air, Massimo’s ringtone suddenly played out. He looked from Livia to the table on the veranda and back to her.
She gritted her teeth. ‘Please. Leave it.’
But of course he wouldn’t leave it. It might be important. Far more important than her and their marriage.
He strode away without a backwards glance.
She suspected bitterly that he would have cut their conversation short to answer it even if it were a cold caller.
Massimo had set himself up in a shaded part of the veranda, laptop open before him and his phone wedged to his ear. Furious with his retreat from their conversation and his deliberate immersion back into his work, Livia knew she needed to create a little distance between them before she snatched his phone off him and chucked it into the ocean. Doing that would only make things worse. If they could get any worse.
Of the many stories Jimmy had told her about his childhood on this island, the one that had fed Livia’s imagination the most had been tales of the Seibua children playing in the naturally formed freshwater pool hidden in the thick forest. When she’d taken Jimmy for an exploration of the island, he’d pointed in the direction of its location and it was with that in mind, and conscious that the sun would soon begin its descent, that she set off.
By the time she passed the lodge, her fury had dimmed a little, enough for her to pass a message to Massimo through one of the staff members of where she was going. Just in case he missed her. Which he wouldn’t, a knowledge that curdled her belly with bitter misery.
Her head streamed their conversation continually as she reached the red mangrove saplings planted at the edge of the shore; it echoed as she made her way inland past the black mangroves, which Massimo had explained were protection against the shallow flooding that occurred at high tide, still burred in her ears as she strode upwards to the white mangroves and onwards to the butterwoods until she reached the island’s natural forest.
The pathway the Seibua children had taken had disappeared long ago but she’d walked in as straight a direction as she could and she was sure she would find it. If not, she’d go back.
Here, under the natural canopy of trees, the vegetation was dense with colourful wildlife and rich with sound. The heat was stifling but she didn’t care. Large red-chested sociable parrots chattered noisily in squeaks and whistles, other less visible birds adding to the wonderful cacophony. None of them seemed bothered by her presence.
Soon, just as Jimmy had described, the canopy began to thin until she was standing in a small, sandy clearing centred around a startlingly clear pool of water no bigger than their private swimming pool. It was like stepping into a magical fairy tale.
She stood still for a moment to inhale the fresher air and enjoy the feel of the light wind on her face. At the water’s edge two coconut palms stood tall and proud, their fronds dancing to the breeze’s rhythm.
The last of her anger left her as she noticed the distinctive red heads and bright green bodies of Fiji Parrotfinches bathing happily in the pool. She wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of deer and rabbits appeared and began communicating with her.
Livia removed her sandals and sat carefully on the stony wall encasing the pool. The Fiji Parrotfinches were not prepared to tolerate this and flew off back into the surrounding forest, leaving her in silence.
Her thoughts weren’t silent though. They were screaming their rising desperation and panic in her ears.
Foolishly, she’d hoped Massimo would at least consider giving their marriage another try. The happiness they’d once shared...that had been real.
Why hadn’t she fought sooner? There had been so much to fight for but they had both let it descend into cold acrimony. She bore as much responsibility for this as Massimo. Livia knew how to fight. Fighting was one thing she excelled at. She could shout and scream and stamp her feet but she hadn’t done the most important thing, which was to listen. When he’d asked for space and peace she’d taken it personally. She’d allowed her insecurities and fears to take root. Instead of giving him what he’d asked for she’d pushed even harder.
Exhaustion washed through her. What did all this even matter? How could she fight for a marriage when her husband didn’t see anything worth saving? He’d had a taste of life without her and found it preferable.
Oh, God, the pain that ripped through her. And then the panic. It was all there in her battered, frightened heart as the depth of her love finally screamed unfiltered to the surface.
Massimo was the love of her life. How could she ever sleep again if he slipped away for good? How could she ever breathe properly?
The tears that had threatened to unleash since she’d woken in his arms filled her eyes. She no longer had the strength to hold them back.
Hugging her knees to her chest, Livia bowed her head and wept.