The Unwanted Wife (Unwanted #1)(31)

“I’m not hungry,” she maintained wearily. “It’s really as simple as that. Please finish what you were saying about that clause.” He looked frustrated but seemed to recognize that she would not budge on the issue.

“Basically, we have an out,” he began slowly. “We give him a grandson and we can divorce without any repercussions.” Hearing him put it so bluntly took the wind clear out of her sails, and she needed a couple of moments to recover from it.

“An out,” she repeated hoarsely. “Every single time you touched me, every time that’s all you ever thought about, wasn’t it? Getting out?” She laughed bitterly. “And how diligently you’ve worked toward your goal. So often and so very thoroughly.”

“Theresa,” he whispered, his voice alive with misery. Nothing more, just that, just her name. It was as if he recognized that nothing he could possibly say at that moment would make any difference to the pain she was feeling.

“My God.” She swiped at a few errant tears, furious with herself for allowing him to see them. “Every time you came you practically prayed for me to give you a son. That was the only thought in your mind, every single time…escape! At a time when most people can’t even remember their own names, you were begging me to give you a son because life with me was so incredibly unbearable for you.”

“It wasn’t you,” he interrupted lamely. “It was the situation.”

“So this son you so desperately wanted.” She tried to keep her voice level, even while it cracked with strain. “You don’t really want him, I take it? He’s just a means to an end?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” he admitted uncomfortably.

“I mean, surely you wouldn’t want anything to do with a child spawned with a woman you despise and carrying the blood of a man you consider your enemy?”

“The child has never seemed real to me,” he murmured with brutal honesty. “I had some vague idea that you would have him and I’d move back to Italy afterward. I never thought beyond that.”

“With a father who felt nothing for him, a mother who didn’t want to get pregnant, and a megalomaniacal grandfather waiting in the wings, it’s probably best that the last one didn’t make it,” she concluded heartbrokenly.

“Don’t you ever say that,” Sandro snapped, one of his hands reaching out to enfold her tightly furled fists on the tabletop. “He would have been loved.”

“What makes you so sure of that? When you admit that you don’t know how you would have felt about him?”

“I know you,” he murmured huskily. “And you have a capacity for love that boggles the mind. Of course you would have loved that baby; it’s the only way you know how to be.”

“How am I supposed to keep living with you now, Sandro?” she asked him helplessly. “It was bad enough before but the thought of going home with you now is almost completely unbearable.” His hand loosened its grip around hers, and he reached up to stroke the side of her cheek tenderly.

“We’ll get through this,” he whispered, and she flinched away from his touch. His eyes flickered with some strange emotion before his hand dropped back down to the table.

“I’m tired,” she said quietly. “Take me back to the house.” He nodded and summoned the waiter over to ask for the check. Theresa’s eyes dropped to the full table regretfully.

“Such a waste,” she whispered half to herself, but she was surprised when Sandro overheard her and asked the waiter to multiply their order by fifty and deliver it to the nearest homeless shelter.

Nothing much else was said between them until they got home, where Theresa excused herself under the pretext of being tired and closeted herself in her room for the rest of the afternoon.




“Sandro.” Theresa cautiously breached the sanctity of his study later that night. In all the time they had been living in the house, it was the first time Theresa had ever set foot in the study while he was in it. He looked up to see her hovering uncertainly in the doorway and stood up abruptly, nearly sending his chair toppling. She jumped backward at the sudden violent movement, but he was around his desk in an instant and approaching her with one hand outstretched.


“Theresa,” he intoned huskily. “Please come in.” He seemed almost eager to have her there. Not exactly the reception she was expecting. He steered her toward the huge leather easy chair in one corner of the large study, seating her before taking the chair opposite hers. He leaned toward her, with his hands loosely clasped together and hanging down between his thighs.

“I want to know why,” she whispered, after a lengthy silence. “I want to know what commodity you so casually traded my happiness for. What meant so much to you that you were willing to give up your precious freedom for it?”

He was quiet for so long that she wondered if he would bother to respond.

“Not many people know this, but my father has been extremely ill. We’ve tried to keep it out of the news,” he said in a low voice, keeping his head down and his eyes fixed on his hands. “He grew up on a wine farm. Not a very profitable vineyard, but it had been in our family for generations and it meant a lot to him. It was the land he was born on, the land he imagined retiring to and eventually dying on.