Her husband took her in from beneath veiled lashes. “And here I thought we had declared a truce.”
She frowned. Looked down at herself. Pink. Her swimsuit was pink.
Heat filled her cheeks. “It was the only suit that didn’t make me look like an adult movie star.”
He reached for her, his fingers closing over her forearm. “Why go for modest when you look that good, cara?”
She sucked in a breath as he pulled her against his hard, dripping wet body. “Did you listen to a word I said last night?”
“Si. I am intent on desensitizing you.”
She pressed a hand against his chest to balance herself. “You can’t just wave your fairy wand and cure me, Riccardo. Anorexia is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, even if I have it under control.”
“I know,” he said, bringing his lips down on hers as he swung her up in his arms. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
She smiled at his arrogance. His lips were warm from the heat of the sun, his kiss as leisurely as the mood he seemed to be in, and she found she just didn’t have the willpower to fight him.
He walked into the sea, and the water was so warm it barely registered on her heated skin. Then he wrapped her legs around him so they floated on the buoyant sea.
“Riccardo...”
“What?”
“I—I don’t think this is appropriate.”
He gave her an amused look. “We’re married. What’s inappropriate about it?”
She focused her gaze on his Adam’s apple. “Last night was...amazing...but I think anymore of that is just going to complicate things between us.”
He lifted her chin with his fingers. “If you mean sex, Lilly, then I’m going to have to disagree. Sex breaks down the barriers between us, and if you think, now that we’re finally talking, I’m going to let you put them up again, you’re mistaken. By the end of this weekend there isn’t going to be anything I don’t know about you.”
She went rigid. “There isn’t anymore to say.”
He pressed his lips together. “How did you keep it from me? I never saw the signs.”
“My anorexia?”
He nodded.
She pressed her hands against his chest to put some distance between them, but he kept his arms firmly banded around her. “I was better when I met you. I’d gotten control over it. I’d spent my career practicing physiotherapy, learning how incredible the human body is—how strong it is—and how much more important it was to honor your body than do what I’d been doing to it.”
She swallowed hard. His gaze on her face was making her feel as if she was under a microscope.
“It started to get bad for me again after that first year, when our honeymoon with the media wore off and they made a game out of criticizing how I looked or what I wore.”
“Which they do with anyone who’s in the limelight like that,” he interjected.
“Yes. But for me it was harder. Anorexia isn’t something with a lot of outward signs. It’s insidious. I withdraw. I stop eating. It becomes impossible for me to look at my body objectively. Everything gets distorted.”
He frowned. “I thought it was a vanity thing. The need to look perfect.”
A rueful smile curved her mouth. “The need to not hate myself would be more accurate.”
His jaw hardened. “Was I really that impossible to talk to? Did I really demand that much perfection from you?”
“It comes with your life, Riccardo. It’s expected from those around you.”
His jaw hardened. “We could have made adjustments to our life to make things easier for you.”
She shook her head. “You’re going to be the head of a ten-billion-dollar conglomerate when you take over from your father. You couldn’t make those changes even if you wanted to.”
His dark eyes glittered. “We could have. We could have done what was necessary and let the rest go.”
“You’re a dreamer,” she bit out. “You needed a new wife. And you refused to admit it.”
His lip curled. “I did not need a new wife. I needed a wife with the guts to tell me what was wrong. I needed a wife who was there for me at one of the lowest points of my life and instead you were gone.”
She recoiled. “I had lost myself, Riccardo. I had lost the ability to keep myself in balance. If I hadn’t left I would have reverted back to my old bad habits and destroyed myself.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You couldn’t have waited until I’d gotten back? Been there for me?”
She pushed hard against his chest and this time he let her go. Finding the sandy bottom with her feet, she stood facing him. “What happened in Italy? All I knew was that you’d been summoned there on Antonio’s orders.”
He scraped his wet hair out of his face. “It doesn’t matter now. We’re talking about why you left.”
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