She had had a few hours to work out how she was going to deal with what she had seen. She had contemplated saying nothing and had rejected that option because the
not knowing for sure
would eat away at her like a cancer. But she wasn’t going to get hysterical. Cristiano didn’t do drama. She rolled over onto her back and heaved herself up into a semi-sitting position.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked, her eyes fluttering away from the magnificent sight of him which, she realised with dismay, could still make her feel weak and gooey inside, even though that was a sensation she desperately wanted to suppress.
‘There were sandwiches tonight round the conference table.’ Cristiano stared down at her taut frame, the way her eyes were skittering away from him. ‘You’re tiptoeing round something. Why don’t you just come right out and tell me instead of working yourself up into a lather?’
‘How did you spend your day?’
Cristiano shook his head impatiently and walked towards his chest of drawers, dropping the towel en route and shrugging on a pair of boxers. ‘I worked. That’s what I do. I sat opposite boring men in suits poring over reports, checking legal documents and signing off on deals. In between I kept my eye on the shares index so that I could head off any potential investment crises. At eight-thirty one of the secretaries went out to buy some sandwiches. I ate two. I came home. You were upbeat when I left you this morning. I did not envisage returning to find you in a mood.’
‘I’m not in a mood. I’m just trying to find out how you spent your day.’
‘And now you have. Unless you’d like me to elaborate on some of the more tedious details.’
‘Maybe just one,’ Bethany told him, taking in a deep, steadying lungful of air.
Cristiano sighed and looked at her wryly. He had no idea where she was going with this but he would humour her. She was big with his child and she was his wife-to-be. All normal rules of play were suspended.
‘Can’t wait to hear.’
‘What were you doing at lunchtime with another woman? And don’t try to deny it. I saw you.’
C
RISTIANO
stilled. He was hanging on to his temper with restraint because he didn’t want to stress her out, but no one had ever questioned his movements before.
‘I don’t have to deny anything,’ he said. Habit born from a lifetime of being unanswerable to anyone slammed into place. He wasn’t going to be cross-examined by
anyone.
It smacked of being under the thumb and yes, he had altered a lot for this woman but enough was enough. Lines had to drawn, essential boundaries established.
His words shattered every fragile hope that there would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what she had seen and Bethany felt as though she had been delivered a physical blow.
‘You’re too much, Cristiano,’ Bethany whispered. ‘You’re just too much.’
‘What is
that
supposed to mean?’
‘It means that I can’t go through with this marriage with you.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ He was keeping his voice low and reasonable but it was a feat of willpower. ‘And you don’t need to get worked up at this point in time.’
‘I’ll get worked up if I want to get worked up!’ Everything
came down to her health because she was carrying his baby! Tears of bitterness and disappointment and frustration trembled on her lashes and she pursed her lips to avoid the disadvantage of becoming emotional.
Cristiano gritted his teeth together. ‘Is this it, Bethany? Am I to be subjected to a change of mind every single time you get a little down over something?’
‘I’m not
getting a little down
, Cristiano! I’m just asking you to explain why you lied to me about where you were today. Is that asking too much?’
‘It’s telling me that you don’t trust me,’ Cristiano said quietly. ‘You’re accusing me of having an affair and I’m telling you that I’m not. I don’t see why there should be anything further said on the matter.’
So why, Bethany wondered, wouldn’t he tell her exactly what he had been up to with the woman she had seen him with? If he was as innocent and as pure as the driven snow, why the secrecy? Maybe he was
technically
telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t involved in some kind of rampant sexual situation with the woman but what if he was
playing with the idea
? Maybe he didn’t count
flirting
as infidelity, but
she
did. She didn’t want him to even
look
at another woman. Ever.
Her thoughts clamoured in her head like a thousand squabbling voices. She tried to get hold of a little reason and common sense. She knew that he was right in so far as she couldn’t chop and change her mind about marrying him like a leaf blown about in a high wind. But he didn’t love her so how could she, ultimately, trust him?
‘Fine,’ Bethany muttered miserably.
She had retracted her claws, Cristiano acknowledged, but not for long. He knew this woman like none other, knew her well enough to recognise her determination when it came to
getting answers. Indeed, she was very much like him in that respect. But he wasn’t going to be browbeaten in this instance. He bracingly told himself that however much he was responsible for her well-being and however honourable a man he was when it came to doing his duty, he was not about to be emasculated by anyone demanding detailed reports on him to satisfy her feverish imagination.
He had done nothing wrong, end of story.
Arriving at this irrefutable truth should have instantly restored his mood, but Cristiano found that he was still weirdly out of sorts.
‘It’s late,’ he said abruptly. ‘And arguing into the early hours of the morning isn’t going to do you any good. You need your sleep.’
‘Stop telling me what I need and what I don’t need.’
‘Why? I’m right.’ He said that as though it was a truth written in stone.
‘For
right
, read
arrogant.
’ How could he stand there and treat her like a child throwing a temper tantrum over nothing? Would that be the way he intended to treat her in the future? To every concern she might voice, would he just always say,
Trust me, I’m right
?
She had made her bed and she knew that she would lie in it, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about the woman who had been smiling up at him. If she had been dressed in a suit, if she had looked the part of the businesswoman, then Bethany might not have had such a hard time believing him, but what businesswoman dressed in combat trousers?
Like a record stuck in a groove, she kept replaying the scene in her head until she wanted to burst into tears.
Cristiano was watching her carefully. Her body was as rigid as a piece of board. He couldn’t understand why she
was making such a fuss over nothing but, driven into a corner, he refused to unbend. Instead, he said in a conciliatory voice, ‘I’m going to go to the study and work for a while. Leave you to calm down.’
‘I don’t
want
to calm down! I want to talk.’
‘You either trust me or you don’t. Yes, I met a woman at lunchtime. No, I am not sleeping with her. Now, I’m going to leave you on your own to get some sleep. Don’t be concerned if you wake and I’m not here. I think I might sleep in one of the spare rooms tonight.’
As soon as he had left the room, Bethany succumbed to a flood of hot tears.
Had she been wrong? She had wanted answers and no one could say that that had been unreasonable, but if she had been right, then how was it that she now felt as though the bottom of her world had dropped out?
She resisted the temptation to follow him to his study and pick up where they had left off, but pride glued her to the bed and, besides, would he say anything different from what he had already said? Cristiano was fiercely independent and ran his life according to his own personal laws, which were always fair. He had conceded much on her behalf. She remembered his revised timetable which had seen him with her at times that would have surely gone against every workaholic gene in his body. He had accused her of mistrust and her brain had shrieked that mistrust was always going to be an issue when he didn’t love her, but she couldn’t imagine Cristiano sneaking around behind her back. Which, in turn, brought her back to the same old questions and the same old fears.
Added to this horrible mix was an element of doubt. When had Cristiano ever lied to her? In fact, when it came to that particular trait, it was fair to say that
she
was the main
culprit. Yet she had not hesitated to accuse him of lying or at least of concealment.
She finally fell asleep, disquieted by the fact that somehow, somewhere, the conversation had turned and she had been left feeling the guilty party.
She surfaced the following morning at the ungodly hour of seven-thirty to find that his side of the bed had not been slept in.
Panic gripped her and she stumbled through her ablutions, which now took much, much longer because of her unwieldy girth.
Where was Cristiano? Despite her troubled thoughts, she had slept like a baby, despite her awkwardness lying down. She had not heard him enter the room at any point. Had he been true to his word and slept in the guest room? There was no sign of him in any of the guest rooms. Perhaps he had gone to work early.
She was dialling his number with trembling fingers as she walked out of the bedroom and she almost fainted in relief when he picked up on practically the first ring.
‘Where are you?’
Cristiano heard the urgency in her voice with a deep sense of satisfaction. Direct inquisition had disagreed with him, but he had felt no better having stood firm on his resolve not to have his movements questioned. In fact, he had spent the night feeling as though he had been punched in the gut. At some ridiculous hour in the morning he had sneaked into the bedroom and looked at her. It felt all wrong not to slide into the bed next to her, but he hadn’t wanted to risk waking her up. Hadn’t wanted to take the chance that she might surface to resume her argument with him.
‘You’re up.’
‘Where are you? You haven’t answered me.’
‘Give me a minute.’
Bethany heard the dull burr of a phone that had gone dead and she snapped shut the lid of her cellphone. Her heart was beating like a hammer. She glanced down at the cellphone in her hand and, when she looked up, it was to see him standing in the kitchen. She hadn’t heard him but he must have been working in the study at the end of the apartment. Relief at just
seeing him
nearly blew her off her feet. She wanted to race over to him, fling herself into his arms, tell him how much she loved him.
‘Sleep well?’ she asked instead, looking at him cautiously as he strolled towards her. He was absolutely gorgeous. She wondered whether, one day, she might become accustomed to the immense physical impact he always contrived to have on her. He wasn’t smiling, which made her nervously wonder if he was still brooding on their argument of the night before. Right or wrong, she realised that she didn’t want that.
How far would she go, she wondered, in accepting whatever Cristiano chucked at her? Because she loved him? Experience was fast telling her
very far indeed
.
‘No.’
That single word jolted her out of her painful musings. ‘You don’t look like a man who’s had a restless night.’
‘I scrub up well.’
‘What…were you doing?’ She hated herself for asking the question but she unhappily heard herself ask it anyway.
‘I worked for the better part of the night. Right here, to forestall your next question. On my own.’ Cristiano had had hours to think about their argument. He had had hours to analyse his initial response to her questioning and minutes to conclude that really, far from being driven into a corner, which was a place he didn’t care for, he had
liked
it. He had
liked
the fact that she had been jealous because from jealousy
came need and need was a very good thing in her. Habit had conditioned his initial response. It was time to say goodbye to habits, even the old ones that took the longest to die.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said, urging her into the kitchen. ‘I’ll make you some breakfast.’
‘Why?’
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘I mean why aren’t you mad at me?’ She wondered if he thought that she might suddenly go into premature labour if she became too stressed out. His concern usually centred on making sure that she was in tip-top shape with the pregnancy.
‘Why should I be?’
‘Because…because…’ She found herself seated at one of the bar stools in the kitchen, watching as he deftly whipped up some scrambled egg on toast for her. She wasn’t entirely sure how she had got there.
‘You had every right to ask me what I was doing in the company of another woman.’ Cristiano placed the plate of toast and egg in front of her and pulled one of the chairs around so that he could sit on it facing her as she dabbled with her fork, ostensibly not meeting his eyes, until he gently tilted her face up.
‘You either have to eat or else look at me. You don’t have the option of doing neither.’
Bethany chose to concentrate on her food. He had become a dab hand at cooking certain basic dishes. Scrambled eggs was one of them.
‘I
do
trust you,’ Bethany mumbled between mouthfuls, her face burning. ‘It’s just that I was…’ While she racked her brain to think of an adjective that wouldn’t reveal the level of her obsession with him, he jumped in to supply it.
‘Jealous?’
There was a whisper of silence and she put down her
fork, staring down at her plate, which seemed the only safe point on which to focus. His hand covered hers and she risked a glance at his face.
‘I’d be jealous of you too,’ he admitted roughly.
‘You…would?’
‘Hell, yes.’
‘That’s because you’re the kind of guy who sees women as possessions.’ She made her excuses for his confession lest she begin playing with the seductive fantasy that it meant more than he intended.
‘You couldn’t be further from the truth, in actual fact.’ He stood up abruptly and removed the plate, which seemed to have acquired mesmerising qualities for her. He didn’t want her mesmerised by anything or anyone but him.
‘I won’t pretend that I haven’t had my fair share of women,’ he began, his back to her as he roughly washed the plate followed by the saucepan and pieces of cutlery. Then he turned round so that he was looking directly at her, leaning against the counter, his feet loosely crossed at the ankles. He shrugged as her eyes flickered towards him and he noted that glint of jealousy again. However hard she tried to hide it, it seeped out of her and she was obviously innocently unaware of how intoxicating he found it.
‘And I’ve never allowed any woman to dictate terms and conditions to me.’
‘I wasn’t dict…’
‘Shh. Let me finish.’ He nodded towards the sitting room and waited until she was settled comfortably on the sofa before sitting next to her to continue. ‘I’ve always led a life conducted on
my
terms. Women had the choice. Abide by my rules or quit. My rules were simple. Work came first and there were to be no scenes. No hissy fits, no possessiveness, no wanting more than I was prepared to give.’
Totting up the number of rules she had broken on his magical list made Bethany feel a bit faint. She had also
got
onto his list, in the first instance, by breaking the cardinal rule number one, which had to be
no deception
. He had shown remarkable resilience in the circumstances but had he now run out of patience with her?
Cristiano leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He raked his fingers through his hair and shot her a baffled sideways glance that had her nerves frantically racing.
‘Okay. So maybe I broke one or two of your…’
‘Forgot another rule. No interrupting. Not when I’m trying to figure out how to say what I have to say.’
‘Which is…?’ Bethany’s voice was a shade above a whisper.
‘Which is…’ Cristiano looked at her. There was a strange, swooping sensation inside him. It alternately made him feel terrified, exhilarated and absolutely convinced that this was where he was finally destined to be. ‘Which is…that you are allowed to break every rule in my book. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve already ridden roughshod over most of them and I’ve discovered that I don’t care.’