A memory of Lilly, exhausted and seemingly emotionally spent, begging him to let her stay home the night of the financial district’s Christmas ball filled his head. He’d thought she was just being difficult and had insisted on her attending because it was a De Campo-sponsored event.
She’d obviously been struggling.
His hands tightened around the glass. He could have destroyed her by not knowing. By continuing to push her. Had he really been that oblivious? Was he so set on perfection in those around him she’d felt she couldn’t come to him? Couldn’t talk to him?
Had he been, as Lilly had accused, so caught up with his obsession of becoming CEO he hadn’t seen anything but the end goal?
An intense feeling of shame washed over him. There had been one month in that last year when he’d only been home one night because he’d been traveling so much, opening restaurants. One night.
And maybe there had been more months like that...
“You left me alone to deal with the fallout of being Lilly De Campo.”
Was that what he’d done?
He took a swig of the rum and stared out at the cars whizzing by on the snakelike coastal road. Their ability to hurt each other was monumental. The breakdown in communication between them breathtaking. How had something so good gone so wrong?
He watched as a new arrival joined the other grizzled old men on the steps. They clapped him on the back and kept on talking about last night’s game, which apparently had been a barn-burner. He was struck by how absolutely insane his life had become. He was a machine, not a man. He no longer remembered what it was like to live because he was too busy planning for tomorrow.
He nursed the glass between his hands and stared down at the brilliant amber liquid. It was time he simplified his life. Step one had been this weekend with Lilly, to discover the truth. Step two would be in three months, when Antonio ceded control to him. Step three was going to be about honesty.
“I faked my way through our entire marriage.”
The statement had made his blood boil. He might have done things all wrong but Lilly had owed him honesty. She had owed that to their marriage. And nothing, nothing made up for the fact that she’d walked out on him. And left him to deal with the fallout of their marriage.
“It was never going to work.”
Her words danced in front of him like a red cape, egging on an enraged bull. If his wife thought she was going to check out again now, when the honesty had just started between them, she was sadly mistaken. Lilly was about to find out what it was like to follow through on a promise. What it was like to pay as he’d been paying for the past year. Because De Campos didn’t divorce. They stuck it out—even if they were in a loveless partnership like his parents.
He drained his glass and set it down with a thud that drew the eyes of the faction of grizzled old men. Standing up, he went back inside and slapped his glass on the counter. “Another,” he said hoarsely. “Make it a double.”
* * *
This time he had left her.
Lilly stood on the balcony of their villa, staring at the ocean as it sparkled in the moonlight. It was pushing one o’clock and still her husband hadn’t come home. He had decided the muddled, mass of confusion his wife undoubtedly was wasn’t CEO wife material. Wasn’t worth the effort.
Hot, silent tears ran down her cheeks. She’d kept her secrets because she’d known if she’d told the truth about who she was she’d lose him. But in the end it hadn’t mattered. She’d lost him anyway.
Had he been repulsed by her secret—by the anorexia that had been her Achilles’ Heel? Or had it been the dishonesty? The lies she’d told to save herself?
She didn’t blame him for not wanting her. She’d only just started to learn how to appreciate herself.
“I thought you’d be asleep.”
Her husband’s deep voice came from behind her. She spun around, her heart in her mouth as her gaze moved over his strained, somber features.
“You came back.”
“Of course I did.” He closed the distance between them. “I told you this is not over between us.”
That had been before tonight. Before they had annihilated each other.
His gaze moved over her face. “I’ve never seen you cry.”
She raised a hand to swipe the tears from her face. Telling him she still loved him, that she’d thought she’d lost him forever, wasn’t going to happen. Not when she was sure he hated her for what she’d done to him. But she couldn’t stop the emotion that was suffocating her, threatening to spill over into something she couldn’t control.
His eyes darkened and the strain on his face deepened, looking even harsher in the moonlight. “This is not over,” he repeated. “Get that through your head, Lilly. We are only getting started.”
How could that be? This reconciliation of theirs was only for six months. And it wasn’t real. But tell that to her brain. He did away with the last few inches between them, a look of intent on his face so deliberate her heart stopped in her chest.
“Ric—”
The hand she held out to ward him off was captured and folded against his chest as he pulled her into him. “No more talking,” he murmured, moving his lips to the upper curve of her cheek, where the tears were still falling. “We’ve done enough talking for a lifetime tonight.”
She knew she should protest, but then he was kissing away her tears one by one, following the hot, salty path down over the curve of her jaw. As if with every one he dispensed with he was wiping the past away. A sigh was torn from deep inside her as she arched her neck back. If this was supposed to be comfort she couldn’t quite envision it, because he was setting her blood on fire.
His big hands swept the straps of her négligée aside so his lips could continue their exploration down the sensitive skin of her neck and over the roundness of her shoulder.
The honesty of this—the honesty of them together like this—had never been in question. And tonight she needed for him to heal them.
To hell with the consequences.
She moved willingly against him as he pulled her up on tiptoes and kissed her—a slow, drugging caress she felt down to her toes. It was like an anesthetic to her soul, his touch, as if the only thing she’d been put on this planet to do was kiss him in these deep, never-ending caresses that devoured the essence of each other.
A shiver ran through her—anticipatory, all-consuming. She buried her fingers in the thick muscles of his shoulders, rediscovering the feel of him under her hands, the way the sharp tug of her teeth on his bottom lip made him groan low in the back of his throat.
“You are killing me,” he murmured, sliding his hands down over her silk-covered bottom and yanking her closer.
The feel of his big, warm hands on her, shaping her against the muscular hard length of him made her whimper. His thick erection made her gasp.
“Esattamente,” he muttered, scooping her up into his arms. She breathed in the familiar, heady male scent of him as he carried her into the bedroom. It was like coming home.
Light from the big, fat, almost-full moon flooded the beautiful blue-and-white-striped bedroom that