He snorted, looking at the four-inch heels. “No wonder.”
As they walked down the stairs, she clutched his arm as if her beautiful shoes were really the problem, trying to convince herself everything would be just fine. All right, so she was in love with Cesare and he’d never love her back. All right, so her whole body yearned for him to touch her, but he insisted on separate bedrooms and was likely planning to hook up with the next gorgeous actress who struck his fancy.
But they had a child together. Their marriage would be like a business partnership. That counted for something, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
Her throat tightened.
As they approached the mansion’s ballroom, she saw his friends—tycoons, actresses, diplomats and royalty. The women were thin and young and beautiful, in chic, tight clothes with no stretch marks from pregnancy. They all turned to look at her speculatively. She could see their sly assumption: that Emma had gotten pregnant on purpose. That was how a gold-digging housekeeper trapped an uncatchable playboy.
Their expressions changed as they looked from her to Cesare. And she realized that being in love with him just made Emma exactly the same as every other woman in the room. They all wanted him. They all broke their hearts over him.
She swallowed, glancing up at him through her lashes, suddenly desperate for reassurance, unable to fight this green demon eating her alive from the inside out.
Cesare abruptly stopped at the bottom of the stairs, in front of the open ballroom doors. “Time to face the music.”
His voice was strangely flat. All the emotion had fled from his expression. Meeting her eyes, he gave her a forced smile, as if he already regretted his unbreakable, binding promise to marry her. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
She suddenly wanted to ask him if those were the words he’d say to himself on their wedding day, too. She looked down at her diamond necklace. At her enormous engagement ring.
I can do this, she told herself. For Sam.
Cesare led her into the ballroom, and as she walked across the same marble floor she’d once scrubbed on her hands and knees, she pasted a bright smile on her face as she was formally introduced to London society: the housekeeper who’d been lucky and conniving enough to trap a billionaire playboy into marriage.
* * *
“So the great Cesare Falconeri is caught at last,” Sheikh Sharif bin Nazih al Aktoum, the emir of Makhtar, said behind him. His voice was amused.
“Caught?” Cesare turned. “I haven’t been caught.”
The sheikh took a sip of champagne and waved his hand airily. “Ah, but it happens to all of us sooner or later.”
Cesare scowled. The two men were not close; he’d invited the sheikh as a courtesy, as his company sought to get permission to build a new resort hotel on one of his Persian Gulf beaches. He’d never thought the man might actually come, but he’d showed up at the Kensington mansion in a black town car with diplomatic flags flying, in full white robes and trailing six bodyguards.
Six. Cesare had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Bringing two bodyguards was sensible, six was just showing off. He bared a smile at his guest. “I’m the luckiest man on earth to be engaged to Emma. It took me a year to convince her to marry me.” Which was true in its way.
The sheikh gave a faint smile. “Some men are just the marrying kind, I suppose.”
Cesare raised his eyebrows. “You think I’m the marrying kind?”
He shrugged. “Clearly. You’ve experienced it once and choose willingly to return to it.” The dark eyes looked at him curiously, as if Cesare were an exhibit in a zoo. “As for myself, I’m in no rush to be trapped with one woman, subject to her whims, forced to listen to her complain day and night—” He cut himself off with a cough, as if he’d just realized that saying such things at an engagement party might be poor form. “Well. Perhaps marriage is different from the cage I picture it to be.”
A cage. Cesare felt the sudden irrational stirrings of buried panic. He could hear the harsh rasp of Angélique’s exhausted voice, a decade before.
If you ever loved me, if you ever cared at all, let me go.
But Angélique, you are still my wife. We both gave a promise before God....
Then He will forgive, for He knows how I hate you.
We can go to marriage counseling. He’d reached for her, desperate. We can get past this.
Her lip had curled. What will it take for you to let me go? She narrowed her eyes maliciously. Would you like to hear how long and hard Raoul loves me every time we meet, here and in Paris, all this past year, while you’ve been busy at your pathetic little hotel, trying to make something of yourself? Raoul loves me as you never will.
Cesare had tried to cover his ears, but she’d told him, until he could bear it no longer and went back on everything he’d ever believed in. Fine, he told her grimly. I’ll give you your divorce.
Twenty-four hours later, Angélique had returned from Buenos Aires and swallowed an entire bottle of pills. Cesare had been the one to find her. He’d found out later that Raoul Menendez was already long married. That he’d laughed in Angélique’s face when she’d shown up on his doorstep.
So much for love.
So much for marriage.
Oh, my God. A cold sweat broke out on Cesare’s forehead as he remembered that panicked sense of failure and helplessness. The sheikh was right. A cage was exactly what marriage was.
“Your bride is beautiful, of course,” the man murmured. “She would tempt any man.”
Cesare looked up to see Emma floating by on the dance floor in the arms of Leonidas, his old friend and former wingman at London’s best nightclubs. The famous Greek playboy had a reputation even worse than Cesare’s. Emma’s beautiful face was laughing, lifted to the Greek’s admiring eyes. Cesare felt a surge of jealousy.
Emma was his woman. His.
“Ah. So lovely. Her long dark hair. Her creamy skin. And that figure...” The sheikh’s voice trailed off.
“Don’t even think about it,” Cesare said dangerously.
He held up his hands with a low laugh. “Of course. I sought merely to praise your taste in a wife. I would not think of attempting to sample her charms myself.”
“Good,” he growled. “Then I won’t have to think of attempting to knock your head off your body.”
The man eyed him, then shook his head with a rueful snort. “You have it badly, my friend.”
“It?”
“You’re in love with her.”
“She’s the mother of my son,” Cesare replied sharply, as if that explained everything.
“Naturally,” the other man said soothingly. But his black eyes danced, as if to say: you poor fool, you don’t even see how deeply your neck is in the noose.
Reaching up his hand in an involuntary movement, Cesare loosened the tuxedo tie around his neck. Then he grabbed a glass from a passing waiter and gulped down an entire glass of Dom Perignon in one swallow before he said, “Excuse me.”
“Of course.”
Going to the other side of the dance floor, Cesare watched Emma dance. He saw the way her face glowed. Sì. Think of her. Beautiful. So strong and tender. It wouldn’t be so awful, would it, having her in his house?
As long as they didn’t get too close.
As long as he didn’t try to seduce her.
That