Apart from the dinner last night he’d noticed soft touches around the house in London. Flowers. Throws. Shoes left discarded. Unintentional little feminine touches. Not even anything concrete he could point to.
Ciro had never lived with a woman. Lara would have been the first and she was still the first. In spite of what had happened.
Because of what had happened.
He found that as much as it made him feel exposed and discombobulated he couldn’t say that he didn’t like it. He just hadn’t counted on Lara’s softness. Her ability to converse with the staff. Her...niceness.
She’d been nice before. And then she’d changed. So he wouldn’t believe it. He had to believe she was up to something. It was easier.
Lara could feel Ciro’s eyes on her. She could almost hear his brain whirring. She knew how he worked. He problem-solved. And she was a problem because she wasn’t behaving as he thought she should. As he thought the Lara who had rejected him should.
She felt something well up inside her. The urge to just turn around and let it all spill out. The full truth about her treacherous uncle. About what had happened. She even opened her mouth and turned to Ciro...and then promptly shut it again.
His head was thrown back and his eyes were closed. She’d never seen him asleep. He looked no less formidable.
The urge to talk drained and faded. It would be self-serving. She might want to be absolved of all her sins in his eyes, but was she really ready to face his disgust? He would get rid of her immediately, of that she had no doubt. As it was, the ties binding them were incredibly fragile.
Ciro was so proud. It would kill him to know that she knew the truth about the kidnapping. That it had been done to him by her family. He would blame her. No doubt. She blamed herself. Why wouldn’t he?
She got up from her chair and pulled a blanket over Ciro’s body. Immediately his eyes opened and he caught her, bringing her down onto his lap. She was instantly breathless.
She looked at him accusingly. ‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘Are you finished pretending to be uninterested?’
She saw something in his eyes then—very fleeting. It almost looked like vulnerability.
Lara might have made some trite comment or pushed herself away from Ciro, fought to keep the distance between them, but instead she said, ‘You’re not a person who would ever inspire a lack of interest, Ciro.’
‘That’s more like it.’
He pulled her head down and kissed her.
Lara fought to retain a little bit of resistance, but it was futile. Within minutes Ciro was carrying her through the cabin to the back of the plane, where the bed awaited.
* * *
New York felt different from London. Where London felt intimate, New York felt expansive and impersonal.
Ciro had a townhouse there too—which was some feat in a city full of soaring buildings and massive apartment blocks. It was nestled between two huge buildings by Central Park, on the Upper East Side.
His staff there were polite and impersonal. Lara couldn’t imagine getting to know them all that well. And from the day they arrived she was sucked into a dizzying round of events and functions.
The days took on a rhythm. Ciro would get up and go to his office downtown. Lara would get up, have breakfast and then go to the park for a run. Invariably she found herself sitting on a bench watching other people—couples, dog-walkers, children and their nannies.
She saw a family one day—father, mother and two children. A boy and a girl. It made her heart ache, and she cursed Ciro for making that pain real again even as she denied to herself that she was still in love with him.
Their evenings were spent either at banquet dinners or less formal functions. Lara had lost count of all the people she’d met. There was no time here for cooking cosy dinners in the kitchen. It was as if Ciro was purposely not letting her have the opportunity.
But even he hadn’t been able to complain when they’d been passing a famous pizza place a couple of nights ago and Lara had asked if they could stop. She’d been starving, and so, it turned out, had been Ciro, his driver and his security team. So they’d all stood around the high tables, eating slices of pizza. Ciro in his tuxedo with his bow tie undone and Lara in a glittering strapless silver sheath dress.
It had been a very private personal victory for Lara.
And then the nights...
Ciro would take her to bed in his room, shatter her into a million pieces over and over again and then deposit her back in her own bed. Sometimes Lara was glad, because the intimacy felt too raw. But other times she despised him for the way he seemed to find it so easy to despatch her.
His determination to keep her confined to the box in which he’d kept her since he’d married her was very apparent. She knew it wasn’t a real marriage, but their physical intimacy was wearing her down and making it harder and harder to keep her guard up. And she hated him for that. Because he seemed totally impervious to it.
That evening they had yet another function to attend and Ciro knocked on Lara’s door.
Feeling incredibly weary, she called out, ‘I’m ready.’
He opened the door and came in, his dark gaze sweeping her up and down. It turned hot as he took in her light blue silk evening gown. It was one-shouldered, and fell in soft fluid folds around her body—which came to humming life under Ciro’s assessing look. Damn him.
Her hair was up in a loose chignon and she’d chosen dangling diamond earrings. The only other jewellery she wore was her engagement and wedding rings.
‘Stunning,’ Ciro pronounced. And then, ‘Let’s go. The car is waiting.’
For a second Lara wanted to stamp her feet and refuse to follow him, but she swallowed the urge. This wasn’t a real marriage. Ciro didn’t care if she was feeling weary from the constant socialising. He didn’t care because this was all about work for him—a means to an end. And essentially she was just an employee. With benefits.
* * *
At the function that evening—there had been so many of them that even Ciro felt as if all the faces and places were blurring into one mass of people—he felt disgruntled. When he had no reason to do so.
Lara was at his side, conversing in Spanish with a diplomat. She was fulfilling her role as corporate wife with absolute perfection. She wasn’t behaving like a spoilt petulant princess, demanding attention, or moaning because her feet hurt from standing too long.
But he sensed it. Her discomfiture. He saw it when she moved her weight from foot to foot, or when she winced slightly as someone shook her hand too hard. He saw it when she quickly masked a look of boredom. The same boredom he was feeling.
He’d seen it in her eyes earlier—a kind of fatigue along with the slightest of shadows under her eyes. After all, they weren’t falling asleep until near dawn most nights.
Ciro had been feeling more and more reluctant to take Lara back to her own bed after making love to her, and was doing it out of sheer bloody-mindedness—so she didn’t get ideas and think that their mind-blowing sex was leading to any deeper kind of intimacy.
She’d asked if they could stop on their way home the other night. For pizza. The gratitude on his staff’s faces had made Ciro feel guilty about how hard he was working them. Not to mention the almost sexual look of pleasure on Lara’s face as she’d bitten into a slice. It had been the best damn pizza he’d ever tasted. And he’d eaten pizza in Naples.
It