The Unwanted Wife (Unwanted #1)(13)
“But I told you, I don’t want to spend time with you,” she said in a soft, bewildered voice. “I don’t want to be anywhere near you!”
“Theresa…” he said, still gently, taking a cautious step into the room. Theresa backed up until she hit the fridge.
“The one place I had…the one place I could come and be myself…” She shook her head, her eyes were wide and shimmering with tears. “And you had to take that from me too.” The tears overflowed and she desperately tried to blot them from her cheeks with the hem of her T-shirt. He made a soft almost dismayed sound in his throat before moving so quickly that she barely had time to register it. One second he was still close to the kitchen entrance, and the next he was right in front of her, sandwiching her between his body and the fridge. His large hands reached up to cup her face, and his thumbs brushed roughly at the tears on her cheeks.
“Don’t.” His voice was low and gravelly and so thick that she could barely understand that one word. She raised her much smaller hands to his and tugged futilely at his hold, trying to get him to release her.
“I want to make things less difficult for us, Theresa,” he muttered awkwardly, his face so close to hers that his breath washed over her skin and raised goose pimples all over her body.
“Why now?” She challenged the ludicrous statement angrily, trying to ignore the effect his closeness was having on her very receptive body. Her soft green eyes snapped up to his through her tears. “Is it because I’m threatening to leave this marriage without giving you your precious son? Is that it?” She dropped her hands down to his hard, broad chest and tried to push him away. He wouldn’t budge.
“No,” was all he said. “That’s not it…because I know you won’t leave.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” she hissed, and he was silent for a while before responding.
“The discussion we had yesterday,” he admitted. She went limp against him, all the fight leaving her abruptly.
“Well, if you’re so sure that I won’t leave, what’s this sudden need you have to spend your every waking moment with me?” she asked hollowly.
“We’re married for God’s sake…and we’re like strangers! I know nothing about you!”
“Of course you know nothing about me.” Her voice was hoarse with the effort it took not to scream at him. “You’re the one who decided, even before we got married, that there was nothing worth knowing about me.”
“Well, I’ve changed my mind.” He didn’t bother to deny her accusation, probably because it was true. Instead he dropped his hands down to her narrow shoulders and gave her a little shake.
“Which once again begs the question of why, after eighteen months of marriage, why now?”
His hands fell from her shoulders before he shrugged with an air of disinterest, which belied his urgency of just seconds ago.
“Why not now? Now’s as good a time as any.” He was back to being remote and icy and Theresa shuddered involuntarily.
“It’s much too late, Sandro,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around her slender frame. “I may be trapped in this marriage, but I want nothing to do with you! The very sight of you makes me sick to my stomach.”
“There’s a way out of this you know,” he murmured.
“I know,” she said, and his hooded eyes snapped back up to her face. “Have a baby, right? You want a son and I’m the chosen incubator.” She watched his face carefully, but he betrayed not one iota of emotion other than a slight tightening of his jaw. “So what happens after I have this precious baby of yours? Who gets him after the divorce? You expect me to be nothing but a surrogate mother. I’m to bear him and you’ll then take him away from me, right?”
She was aching to hear an affirmative from him, anything that would prove to her that he was the one who wanted the child and that she had misunderstood the conversation she had overheard between her husband and her father that morning.
“Of course I wouldn’t take him from you.” He shook his head, sending her heart plummeting. “I wouldn’t be that cruel. Naturally you’d maintain custody.” Theresa shut her eyes to shield her agony from him, and she felt her scalding tears seep down her cheeks.
“How very…magnanimous of you,” she whispered. “To be so desperate for something only to give it up in the end. You’re so much more generous than I gave you credit for. How often would you want to see him?”
“I would naturally move back to Italy, so I would probably see him two or three times a year. It is what you want, no? Less contact with me?”
She inhaled deeply and her brow furrowed. Two or three times a year? That was all the time he was prepared to spend with a child who was half hers? She opened her eyes and met his gaze squarely.
“Like I said before, you’re being quite generous, but it’s all moot anyway because I have no intention of having a baby with you!”
“You’re being very childish, Theresa,” he admonished quietly.
“No, I’m finally making my own decisions. Up to this point in my life, everything has been decided for me…this marriage would never have happened if my father hadn’t decided that you would make the perfect son-in-law. After that, the wedding date, the venue, the cake, where we would live…it was all you or my father. I couldn’t even choose my own wedding dress.” The last emerged in a small, broken voice that quavered with remembered disbelief and outrage. Her father had simply had the dress delivered to her room with the direction that it was to be worn on her wedding day, no discussion and no choice.