She shook her head. ‘No, I’m leaving.’
Whittaker’s polite smile did not falter. ‘Mr De Severino hopes that you will stay and continue the discussion you began a few minutes ago. Shall I bring you some tea, madam?’
Before she could argue, Isobel found that she had been steered into the sitting room, and there was a faint click as Whittaker departed and shut the door behind him. She didn’t understand what Constantin was playing at. It was clear they had nothing to discuss that could not be dealt with by their respective divorce lawyers. Her immediate thought was that she was not going to be a puppet controlled by the master puppeteer as had so often happened during their marriage.
She reached for the door handle just as the door opened and the butler entered carrying a tray with a silver teapot and a cafetière.
‘I remembered that you prefer Earl Grey tea, madam,’ he said, smiling as he held out a cup and saucer.
Good manners prevented Isobel from storming out of the house. She had always got on well with Whittaker, and her problems with her marriage were not the elderly butler’s fault. Suppressing her irritation that Constantin had got his own way as he had so often done in the past, she wandered over to the window. The view of the park was familiar and evoked painful memories.
‘I’ve just spoken to my lawyer and instructed him to send a new divorce petition for you to sign. You’ll also have to give a written statement saying that we have lived apart for two years.’
At the sound of Constantin’s clipped voice Isobel jolted and slopped tea into her saucer. She spun round, disconcerted to find him standing close to her. For such a big man he moved with the silent menace of a panther stalking its prey, she thought ruefully. The black jeans and polo shirt he had changed into emphasised his lethal good looks. His hair was still damp from his recent shower and the citrusy fragrance of soap mixed with his spicy cologne teased her senses.
‘Giles still thinks I have good grounds to divorce you for desertion.’ Constantin’s anger that she had thwarted him was evident in his harsh tone. ‘But the legal advice is that it will be quicker to go with the fact that we have been separated for two years. The one thing we can both agree on is that we want a swift end to our marriage,’ he drawled sardonically.
Determined to hide the pang of hurt that his words evoked, Isobel turned her gaze back to the window and stared once more at the pretty park at the centre of Grosvenor Square.
‘When I was pregnant, I often used to stand here and imagine pushing our baby in a pram around the gardens,’ she said softly. ‘Our little girl would have been almost two and a half now.’
The shaft of pain in her chest was not as sharp as it had once been, but it was enough to make her catch her breath. Coming back to the house where she had lived when she had been pregnant had opened up the wound in her heart that would never completely heal. She had chosen one of the bedrooms at the back of the house for a nursery, and had been busy planning the colour scheme before she and Constantin had made that fateful trip to Italy.
She watched him pour himself a cup of coffee and felt a surge of anger that he had not reacted to the mention of their daughter. Nothing had changed, Isobel thought grimly. When she had lost their baby, twenty weeks into her pregnancy, she had been numb with grief. A few times she had tried to talk about the miscarriage with Constantin, but he had rebuffed her and become even more distant, and eventually she had stopped trying to reach him.
‘Do you ever think about Arianna?’ The nurse at the hospital had advised them to choose a name for their baby, even though she had been born too early to survive.
He sipped his coffee, and Isobel noted that he did not meet her gaze. ‘There’s no point dwelling on the past,’ he said shortly. ‘Nothing can change what happened. All we can do is move forwards.’
Two years ago, she had been chilled by his lack of emotion, but as she looked closely at him and saw a nerve flicker in his cheek she realised that he was tenser than he appeared.
‘Is that why you’ve begun divorce proceedings? You want to bury the past?’
He winced at her deliberate use of the word bury, and Isobel wondered if his mind pictured, as hers did, the small white marble tombstone in the grounds of the chapel at Casa Celeste—the De Severino family’s historic home on the shores of Lake Albano—where they had laid Arianna to rest.
Constantin’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is there a point to this conversation? I haven’t heard a word from you in two years. Why have you turned up out of the blue?’
He did not try to disguise his frustration. He had not anticipated this meeting with his soon-to-be ex-wife, and Constantin hated surprises. His shock when he had caught sight of Isobel standing in the doorway of the gym had sparked his anger that she had left him—even though he acknowledged that he had driven her away. She had a hell of a nerve to stroll back into the house, looking so beautiful that he’d been instantly and embarrassingly aroused.
His temper was not improved when he felt his hand shake as he lifted his cup to his lips and gulped down his coffee, scalding the back of his throat in the process. He did not want her here, stirring up memories of the past that he had successfully kept locked away. An image flashed into his mind of their tiny, perfectly formed baby girl who had never lived. Pain flared inside him, but he controlled it as he always did, by force of will, and blocked out the memories.
Harder to control was his body’s reaction to Isobel. Unwanted memories were not the only thing she was stirring, Constantin acknowledged self-derisively as he shifted position in an effort to hide the bulge of his arousal. No other woman had ever turned him on as hard and fast as Isobel.
He remembered the first time he had met her. She had hurtled into his office half an hour late for work, a flurry of honey-blonde hair framing a strikingly beautiful face, and announced that she had been sent by the temp agency to cover for his office assistant who was on maternity leave. He’d cut short her explanation of why she was late, but his impatience had died when he had looked into her wide hazel eyes and felt a shaft of desire so strong that it had literally taken his breath away.
From that moment his sole aim had been to take her to bed, a feat he’d achieved within the month. Discovering that he was her first lover had elicited emotions he had not believed himself capable of. The weekend they had spent together in Rome had been the best—and worst—of his life.
It had been the beginning of the nightmares that had haunted him ever since he’d woken in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking, and utterly appalled by the truth that his dream had revealed. He had looked at Isobel sleeping innocently beside him, and realised that for her safety he could not allow their relationship to continue.
THE SUN GLINTING through the windows turned Isobel’s hair to spun gold. A sensation he could not define tugged in Constantin’s chest, but he ignored it and forced himself to study her objectively.
Her clothes bore the hallmarks of superb design; the close-fitting jeans drew his attention to her endlessly long legs and her tee shirt snugly moulded her firm breasts. A gold chain around her neck was her only item of jewellery. His mouth thinned as he glanced at her bare left hand and pictured her wedding ring and diamond engagement ring that she had left behind when she had abandoned their marriage to pursue her career.
Her physical appearance had changed little in two years. Her face, with its high cheekbones and firm jaw that gave a clue to her determined character, was as beautiful as he remembered, and her hazel eyes fringed with long lashes were clear and intelligent. Her natural blonde hair was sexily tousled, and the just-got-out-of-bed style made him want to run his fingers through the silky layers.
His eyes sought hers, and he was intrigued when she met his gaze with calm self-assurance where once she would have blushed and looked away. There was something very