The Unwanted Wife
Authors: Natasha Anders
The Unwanted Wife
By
Natasha Anders
All Alessandro de Lucci wants from his wife is a son but after a year and a half of unhappiness and disillusionment, all Theresa de Lucci wants from her ice cold husband is a divorce. Unfortunate timing, since Theresa is about to discover that she’s finally pregnant and Alessandro is about to discover that he isn’t willing to lose Theresa.
Text Copyright 2012 © Natasha Anders
All Rights Reserved
Cover Art Copyright 2006 © Natasha Anders
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Theresa fell back onto the mattress, her body slick with perspiration and limp with pleasure. Spasms of her powerful release still violently racked her slender frame. Alessandro had disentangled, detached and distanced himself from her within seconds of their mutual orgasm and lay on his back beside her, his breathing heavy and ragged.
Theresa turned on her side to lovingly trace his harsh profile with her eyes, yearning to touch and caress the smooth, silky and slightly tanned skin but knowing from experience that her touch would be rebuffed. His words, the ones that were always wrenched from him during his climax, still hovered in the air between them and they still, after all these months, hurt more than they should have.
“
Give me a son, Theresa…”
With those five words, he inevitably killed the afterglow, destroyed the intimacy of the moment and relegated the act into nothing more than a biological imperative. After eighteen months of the same, Theresa had finally realized that it would never change. It wasn’t an abrupt realization, rather it was one that had been growing steadily since the very first time he’d said the words.
But Theresa had her own five words! They were words that had been on the tip of her tongue for months and should have been spoken long before now. They were words that she could no longer swallow back; no matter how much it killed her to say them. She sat up, naked, her body still trembling and drew her knees to her chest. She wrapped her arms around her legs, pressed her cheek to her knees and watched as his breathing steadied, his own shaking was subsiding slightly. He lay spread-eagled, also magnificently nude, his eyes were shut but she knew he wasn’t asleep. No, he would take a few moments to compose himself before heading for the shower, where she always imagined him frantically scrubbing her scent and touch from his bronzed skin.
She could no longer contain the words and they spilled from her lips with desperate earnestness.
“I want a divorce, Alessandro.”
He tensed, every single muscle in his body went as tight as a coiled spring, before he turned his head to meet her watchful gaze. His eyes were hooded and his upper lip curled mockingly.
“But I thought you
loved
me, Theresa,” he taunted with exquisite cruelty and Theresa lowered her eyelids, trying to mask the shaft of pain at his words. When she was sure she had her emotions under control, she once again lifted her eyes to his dark gaze.
“Not anymore,” she managed, hoping the lie sounded convincing.
“Hmmm…” it sounded deceptively like the purr of a cat. “What happened to ‘I’ll love you forever, Sandro’?”
“Things change,” she whispered.
“What things?” He rolled onto his side and propped himself up onto his elbow, resting his head on his hand. He looked so much like a Roman gladiator in repose, that her throat went dry with desire. She swallowed painfully.
“F.feelings change…” she stuttered haltingly. Again that husky purr of agreement but Theresa wasn’t fooled by his relaxed posture; he was as tense as a coiled snake. “I.I’ve changed…”
“You look no different,” he said assessed, his voice still terrifyingly tender. “Still the same Theresa I married. The one who claimed to love me
so
much, she couldn’t live without me. The one whose daddy made
sure she got exactly what she wanted…”
And that was when he struck, without moving, without so much as changing his voice.
“The same timid little Theresa, who can’t even give me the only thing I’ve ever wanted from this pathetic excuse for a marriage.” She flinched but she refused to divert her eyes.
“A.all the more reason for a divorce,” she tried for blasé but failed miserably.
“Maybe for you,” he shrugged elegantly. “But I told you from the very beginning,
cara
, there would be no easy way out of this marriage. Not until I got what I wanted from you and that day looks to be a long way off! Unfortunately, cliché though it may seem, you’ve made this bed and we
both
have to lie in it!”
“I can’t live like this anymore,” she buried her face in her knees and fought to keep the tears at bay.
“Neither of us has much choice…” he sat up and stretched languidly before getting up and walking, naked, to the en-suite bathroom. Theresa heard the shower start moments later and took a few seconds to compose herself, swiping the hot tears from her face with the backs of both hands before dragging on a gauzy peignoir and heading toward the kitchen to make herself a hot drink. While she was sitting on a bar stool, sipping her hot milk, she felt Sandro’s presence behind her and the hairs in the nape of her neck stood on end.
“You must be cold in only that skimpy little thing you’re wearing…” he observed idly heading to the fridge and dragging out a carton of orange juice. His short black hair was damp and standing up in tufts where he had carelessly towel-dried it after his shower and he wore nothing but a pair of black boxer shorts. He looked as gorgeous as always and Theresa hated him more than ever for that masculine perfection.
“I’m fine…” she got up abruptly and headed toward the sink to rinse her mug but he grabbed her elbow to halt her movement. She tensed, shocked by the touch… Alessandro
never
touched her outside of the bedroom. In the eighteen months they had been married, this was the first time that she could recall him touching her without it being a precursor to sex. He leaned closer to her and lowered his lips to her ear. She felt his hot breath on the side of her face before he spoke.
“There’ll be no more talk of divorce, Theresa…
ever
,” he told her with a sickening air of finality.
“You can’t stop me from divorcing you, Sandro,” she responded bravely.
“You really want a divorce,
cara
?” He asked tauntingly and she nodded stiffly. “If you get that divorce, your cousin loses her business and she can’t afford that now, not with a new baby on the way. She and her husband need all the capital they can get.” Somehow she hadn’t expected that. She
should
have but she hadn’t. Sandro had loaned her cousin, Lisa, the start-up capital for her bookshop. Theresa didn’t know what the specifics of that loan were but she had always assumed that it was something he had done out of generosity. Staring up at him now, she couldn’t believe her own naïveté. Sandro did nothing out of sheer generosity and that loan was merely another weapon for him to use against her if he needed to!
“You wouldn’t,” she responded with nothing but bravado. “Lisa has done nothing to deserve this.”
“
Cara
, I will do whatever it takes to get what I want from you.”
“I have money too I can help her…” she began desperately.
“No,
you
have a rich father and he had the opportunity to help Lisa when she was looking for the start-up capital for her bookshop but he made his contempt of the idea more than obvious to everyone at the time and you know
that he would
never
support you through a messy divorce, Theresa.”
“I still don’t believe you would do it! You have a reputation to uphold, you’re an honest businessman, you wouldn’t destroy a small business just to prove a point. What kind of message would that send?” she asked bravely.
“That I’m not to be trifled with,” he shrugged. “Do you honestly think I
care
what people think of me, Theresa? Do you think I care what
you
think of me? I never have and I never will. You’re weak and spoilt…”
“I’m
not
…” she tried to defend herself but he made a scoffing sound in the back of his throat before continuing on as if she hadn’t spoken.
“You’ll get your divorce eventually but there’s something I need to get from
you
first! You wanted this marriage, remember? You begged for it… So if you want a divorce right now, it’ll come with some heavy penalties attached to it, are you willing to gamble with your cousin’s future?”
He knew she wouldn’t do it! He knew he had her exactly where he wanted her. There would be no divorce. Not when so much hung in the balance. But there
would
be changes… Theresa Chloe Noble De Lucci was done with being a doormat! She said nothing, choosing to turn and walk away instead. He watched her go, she could feel his gaze burning into her slender back but he did not call her back. She did not return to the bedroom they had been sharing since the first day of their marriage, opting instead to head for the library, knowing that she could not sleep another wink. Not in that room, not anymore…
He came downstairs, hours later, for breakfast. It was a Saturday morning and he usually didn’t have any early morning meetings to rush off to on a Saturday, instead he tended to linger over his newspaper and coffee and largely ignore Theresa. That morning was no different. It was as if their early morning argument hadn’t happened at all. They usually ate their casual weekend meals in the kitchen and the homey setting lent a false sense of domesticity to the scene. But while Theresa was uncomfortable and tense in the intimate setting, Sandro always remained as cool as the proverbial cucumber.
Then again, that was nothing new, as he rarely showed emotion. In fact the “discussion” of that morning was the most heated she had ever seen him. He kept his feelings under wraps but had always made his contempt of her more than clear. It was in the way he refused to meet her eyes, the way he could make love to her without kissing her on the mouth, the way he could talk past her when he had something to tell her… while eternally optimistic,
stupid
Theresa, had never been good at hiding her feelings from him. Not from the very moment she’d met him, nearly two years ago. How hopelessly infatuated she had been! How quickly she had fallen in love… She shook herself, refusing to think about things she could not change and instead tried to focus on changing her present.
Breakfast passed with agonising slowness, the silence broken only by the sound of his newspaper as he carefully perused the business section. She barely ate and hated him for being so unaffected by the tension that he could finish a hearty meal. She picked up her dishes and headed to the sink.
“You have to eat more than one slice of toast,” his voice suddenly growled unexpectedly. “You’re getting much too thin.” The fact that he had noticed what she’d eaten, despite having hardly glanced at her over his newspaper, startled her.
“I’m not that hungry…” she responded softly and placed her dishes in the sink.
“You barely eat enough to keep a sparrow alive,” he lowered his paper and met her eyes for a few seconds before diverting his gaze back to the mug of coffee on the table in front of him. The direct eye contact was so unusual, that Theresa barely restrained a gasp.
“I eat enough,” she responded half-heartedly, normally she would have let it go but she wanted to see if she could goad him into meeting her eyes again. No such luck, he merely shrugged, neatly folded his newspaper and dropped it onto the table beside his empty plate. He gulped down the last sip of his coffee before getting up from the table.
She watched as he stretched; his black t-shirt lifting to reveal the toned and tanned band of flesh at his abdomen. Her mouth went dry at the sight of that dark flesh and once again she was disgusted by her reaction to his physical presence. She had spent the first year of her marriage believing that Sandro would come to love her. She had firmly believed that he would get over his anger at being forced to marry her and that he would go back to being the laughing, affectionate man she had known in the first few months after they had met. But after nearly a year she had been forced to face reality, he truly hated her. He hated her so much so that he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her, kiss her, touch her outside of bed or even
look
at her. Theresa had finally realised that there would be no thaw; their marriage was a perpetual winter wasteland and if she ever wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on her face again, she had to get out of it. Unfortunately, she now knew that escaping would be trickier than she had thought. She would have to find a way out that did not include hurting her cousin. Lisa and Rick were expecting their first baby and while Lisa was having a fairly easy time of it, Theresa was concerned that anything that would upset her could be potentially harmful to her or the baby. Also, while Rick’s advertising agency was fairly successful, Lisa had always prided herself on the fact that she held her own financially in their relationship. Taking her bookshop away could put too much strain their relationship and Theresa didn’t want that on her conscience!