A Passionate Reunion In Fiji / Cinderella's Scandalous Secret

He stood his niece on his lap and stared at her cherubic face and felt the tightness in his chest loosen. This little one would be raised with security and love. She would never be exposed to the danger and violence his wife and her siblings had lived.

Huge blue eyes stared back. Unable to resist, he sniffed the top of her head. She smelled of baby.

‘When are you two going to have one of those?’ Raul asked with a grin.

Ice laced like a snake up Massimo’s spine in an instant.

All eyes focused on him…and the presence he sensed behind him. Livia had returned from her phone call.

She sat back down, phone clutched in her hand. ‘It’s not the right time for us to have a child,’ she said and shrugged apologetically. ‘You know the hours Massimo puts into his work.’

‘You would work those hours if there was a child?’ his mother said, looking at him with an air of bewilderment. It was a look he’d become used to during his childhood, a physical expression that the differences between Massimo and his family were felt as keenly by them as they were by him.

‘My work is important,’ he pointed out cordially. He didn’t expect her to understand. To his parents, work was only important in as much as it paid the bills. That hadn’t stopped his parents from accepting the luxury home he’d purchased for them and for which he footed all the bills and the monthly sum he transferred into their bank account for everything else they could possibly need. He did the same for his sister and his grandfather and for his father’s siblings and their offspring. He would have done the same for his mother’s siblings if she’d had any.

He had stopped them ever having to work again—work being something none of the extended Briatores had been enamoured with either—and still his work ethic bewildered them. He provided for them all and the source of their wealth came from the technology he was creating that would, hopefully, allow baby Elizabeth, along with future generations of Briatores, to live on a planet that wasn’t a raging fireball. And still they stared at him with bewilderment, unable to comprehend why he worked as hard as he did.

‘I know, but…’ His mother must have sensed something from his expression for her voice trailed off.

Livia had no such sensibilities. Pouring herself a glass of fruit cocktail, she said, ‘Your son is a workaholic, Sera. It makes for a lonely life for me. I could not bring a child into that.’

‘You could get help,’ his mother suggested hopefully.

Livia shook her head. ‘In America, any help would be from English speakers. I’ve been trying to learn but it’s very hard. I had a cut on my leg last year that needed stitching and it was very stressful trying to understand the staff at the hospital.’

Talk of that incident made Massimo’s guts clench uncomfortably and his gaze automatically drift down to her leg. The scar, although expertly stitched and incredibly neat, was still vivid. Livia had gone for a swim in their outdoor pool in LA. One of the pebbled tiles around its perimeter had broken away leaving a sharp edge that she had sliced her calf on when hauling herself out of the pool. He’d been at his testing facility when she’d called to tell him about it, saying only that she’d cut her leg and needed help communicating with a medical practitioner about it. He’d sent Lindy, fluent in Italian, to deal with it and translate for her.

He’d been furious when he’d returned home that night and seen the extent of the damage. Seventeen stitches, internal and external. Her reply had been the coolest he’d ever received from her—up to that point anyway—Livia saying, ‘I didn’t want to make a drama out of it and worry you while you were driving.’ He’d stared at her quizzically. Her lips had tightened. ‘I assumed you would come.’

It wasn’t his fault, he told himself stubbornly. He wasn’t a mind reader. He couldn’t have known how bad the damage had been.

The damage it had caused to their marriage in the longer term had been far more extensive.

‘Look!’ His sister’s exclamation cut through his moody reminiscences.

Everyone followed Madeline’s pointed finger. Holding Elizabeth securely in his arms, Massimo carried her to the balustrade. Swimming beside the yacht, almost racing them, was a pod of bottlenose dolphins.

Around thirty of the beautiful mammals sped sleekly through the water, creating huge white foams with their dives. It was as if they’d come to check them out and decided to stay for a while and play.

It was one of the most incredible sights he had ever seen and it filled him with something indefinable; indefinable because it was nothing he’d ever felt before.

He looked at Livia and the awed joy on her face and experienced a fleeting gratitude that she’d forced him from his work and enabled him to enjoy this priceless moment.

Elizabeth wriggled in his arms. He tightened his hold on her to stop her falling and, as he did, Livia’s blame as to their childless state came back to him and the brief lightness that had filled his chest leached back out.

Livia tried her hardest to keep a happy front going but it only got harder as time passed. Gianluca hadn’t answered her returned call and he hadn’t called or left a message since.

And then there was Massimo.

The excitement of the dolphins racing so joyously alongside them had waned once they’d finally swum off and the lightness she’d witnessed in his eyes had quickly waned too. Was she the only one to notice his underlying tension? She would bet the knots on his shoulders had become even tighter.

Her assumption that he would keep the reasons for his anger to himself was dispelled when they returned to the island. His family retired to their chalets for a late siesta before dinner, leaving them together on the terrace of the lodge drinking a coconut and rum creation the head bar steward had made for them.

The moment they were alone, he fixed her with hard eyes. ‘Why did you say all that rubbish about a baby?’

‘What rubbish?’

‘You let my family believe the issue of us not having children lies with me.’

‘I’m prepared to pretend that our marriage is intact but I’m not prepared to tell an outright lie.’

‘You’re the one who didn’t want a child. Not me.’

Confused, she blinked. ‘When did I say I didn’t want a child?’

His jaw clenched. ‘You laughed when I suggested we have one.’

‘Do you mean the time you suggested we have a child to cure me of my loneliness? Is that the time you’re referring to?’ Of course it was. It was the only time the subject of a baby had come up since their first heady days when they’d spoken of a future that involved children. ‘I laughed at the suggestion, yes, because it was laughable. And even if you hadn’t suggested a child as a sticking plaster for my loneliness I would still have laughed and for the reasons I shared with your mother—ours was no marriage to bring a child into.’

His hand tightened perceptibly around his glass. ‘You made it sound like you’re a neglected wife.’

‘I was a neglected wife,’ she bit back. ‘Why do you think I left you? To pretend otherwise is demeaning—’

‘You’re here this weekend so my grandfather can spend what is likely to be his last birthday on this earth believing everything is fine between us,’ he interrupted.

‘We’re not going to do that by pretending that you’ve suddenly turned into a model husband, are we? Your grandfather isn’t stupid—none of your family are, and they’re not going to believe a leopard can change its spots. I visited your family on my own and made excuses for you for over a year before I left and I’ve been doing the same for the last four months and they have been none the wiser about the state of our marriage. When we finally come clean that we’ve separated, the only surprise will be that it’s taken me so long to see sense.’

Livia knew she was baiting him but she didn’t care. She wanted him to argue with her. She’d always wanted him to argue back but he never did. It was a circle that had only grown more vicious as their marriage limped on; her shouting, him clamming up.

True to form, Massimo’s mouth clamped into a straight line. He pushed his chair back roughly and got to his feet but before he could stride away as she fully expected him to do, he turned back around and glowered at her. ‘Unless you want a fight over any divorce settlement, I suggest you stick to the plan and stop putting doubts about our marriage in my family’s head. I don’t care what my parents or sister think but I will not have my grandfather having doubts about us.’

‘If you want a fight over the settlement then I’ll give you a fight,’ she said, outraged at his threat, ‘but I am sticking to the plan! You’ve neglected your family for so long that they think it’s normal that you neglect your wife too.’

‘I’m not having this argument again.’

She laughed bitterly. Her hands were shaking. ‘We never argued about it. Whenever I tried to tell you how unhappy I was, you walked away from me. You never wanted to hear it.’

‘You were like a stuck record.’ He made crablike pinching motions with his hands. ‘I’m bored, Massimo,’ he mimicked. ‘I’m lonely, Massimo. Why do you work such long hours, Massimo?’ He dropped his hands and expelled his own bitter laugh. ‘See? I did listen. Maybe if you’d ever paused for breath between complaints I might have felt more incentivised to come home earlier each night.’

‘I only complained because you work such stupid hours!’

His eyes were cold. ‘I didn’t force you to move to America. I didn’t force you to marry me. You knew the kind of man I was before we married but you thought you could change me. Instead of solving your problems for yourself you sat around the house wallowing and complaining and expecting me to fix everything for you.’

‘I never wallowed!’ she said, outraged. Of all the things he’d just accused her of, for some reason that was the one that immediately bit the hardest. ‘And as if I would have expected you to fix anything—you aren’t capable of fixing anything to do with the human heart. You’ve spent so much time with your machines and gadgets that your heart has turned to metal.’

He took the three steps needed to smile cruelly down at her. ‘You did nothing but wallow. And sulk. And complain. For the first few weeks after you left I thought I’d gone deaf.’

And then his smile turned into a grimace as he turned on his heel and, parting shot delivered, strode off leaving Livia standing there feeling as if he’d just ripped her heart out.

CHAPTER SIX

MASSIMO LOCKED THE bathroom door. He didn’t trust Livia not to barge in.

He’d expected her to follow him to the chalet. Every step had been taken with an ear braced for a fresh verbal assault.

But the assault never came.

He turned the shower on and closed his eyes to the hot water spraying over his head.

Livia’s defiant yet stricken face played in his retinas.

Guilt fisted his guts. He’d been cruel. The words had spilled out of him as if a snake had taken possession of his tongue.

Being here…with Livia, with his family, seeing how close to death his grandfather really was…it was all too much.

Hearing accusations of neglectful behaviour towards those he loved had driven like a knife in his heart.

He’d done his best for his family. They might not see him as much as they would like but he made up for his lack of presence in other ways.

And he’d done his best in his marriage. That his best did not live up to his wife’s exacting standards was not his fault. Neglect seemed to suggest that she was a child who needed taking care of when they both knew Livia was more than capable of taking care of herself. This was the woman who’d survived the Secondigliano without being seduced by its violent glamour. This was the woman who’d discovered an affinity for nursing when the local doctor the neighbourhood gangsters visited to fix their gangland wounds recognised her coolness under pressure when one of her cousins got shot in the leg. From the age of fourteen Livia had been paid a flat fee of fifty euros a time to assist the doctor whenever required. Like Massimo, she’d stashed it away. Unlike Massimo, who’d saved his money in a box in his bedroom, never having to worry about his family stealing it from him, she’d kept her cash in a waterproof container under the vase in her father’s grave. As she was the only mourner to place flowers on the grave, it was the only safe place she had for it.

She’d refused to be sucked into a life of crime. The only vice she’d picked up in her years where drugs were cheap and plentiful was cigarette smoking, which she’d quit when she’d achieved the grades needed to study nursing in Rome and taken all her cash and left the life behind her. She was as tough as nails. To suggest she needed caring for was laughable.

Finished showering, he rubbed his body with a towel then wrapped it around his waist. Bracing himself, he unlocked the door and stepped into the bedroom.

He’d been right to brace himself. Livia was sitting on the end of the bed waiting for him. But the fury he expected to be met with was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes, when he met them, were sad. The smudge of mascara was still visible.

After a moment’s silence that felt strangely melancholic, she said, ‘I don’t want it to be like this.’ It was the quietest he’d ever heard her speak.

He ran a hand through his damp hair and grimaced. ‘I thought you wanted me to argue with you. Isn’t that what you’ve always said?’

‘Arguing’s healthy, but this…?’ Her shoulders and chest rose before slumping sharply, her gaze falling to the floor. ‘I don’t want us to be cruel to each other. I knew things would be difficult this weekend but…’ Her voice trailed away before she slowly raised her head to meet his gaze. There was a sheen in her eyes that made his heart clench. ‘This is much harder than I thought it would be.’

Massimo pressed his back against the bathroom door and closed his eyes. ‘It’s harder than I thought it would be too.’

‘It is?’

He nodded and ground his teeth together. ‘I shouldn’t have said the things I said. I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t know you felt like that.’

‘I don’t.’ At her raised, disbelieving brow, he added, ‘Not in the way I said it.’

‘You made me sound like a fishwife.’

His lips curved involuntarily at the glimmer of humour in her tone. ‘I was lashing out. Being with you…’ The fleeting smile faded away. ‘I can’t explain how it makes me feel.’

‘It just makes me feel sad,’ she admitted with a whisper. Then she rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and took a deep breath. ‘When the time is right for us to file the divorce papers, I won’t be wanting a settlement.’

‘I didn’t mean it about fighting you. We can come to an—’

Her head shook. ‘No. No settlement. You’ve given me enough money since we married. I’ve hardly spent any of it. I’ve enough to buy an apartment—’

‘You were going to buy one when you went back to Rome,’ he interrupted. ‘You were supposed to let my lawyer know when you’d found somewhere.’ He’d informed his lawyer and accountant that Livia would be purchasing a home in Italy in her sole name and that funds should be made available to her when she got in touch with them about it, no questions asked. He didn’t care what she spent.

He’d specifically told them to go ahead without notifying him. He hadn’t wanted to know when she’d made that last, permanent move out of his life for reasons he couldn’t explain, not even to himself.

Massimo ran his eyes over his finances once a year when it was tax season and that was for scrutiny purposes. He would have noticed then, he supposed, that she hadn’t bought herself a home.

‘I’ve been renting my old place.’ Actually buying herself a home of her own had felt too final, Livia realised. It would have been the ultimate confirmation that their marriage was over for good.

Had she been living in denial? And if so, what had she been holding out for? Miracles didn’t exist. The cruel truth was that she and Massimo were wholly incompatible and she’d been a fool for believing differently. She’d known it when she’d left. It hadn’t stopped her heart skipping every time her phone had buzzed only to plummet when his name didn’t flash on the screen. It hadn’t flashed once since their separation.

‘Once everything’s out in the open, I’m going to go back to nursing,’ she added, fighting back a well of tears. To cry in front of him would be the final indignity.

He rested his head back against the bathroom door with a sigh. ‘You don’t need to work, Liv.’

The simple shortening of her name…oh, but it made her heart ache. Massimo was the only person in the world who’d ever shortened her name. And then he’d stopped calling her Liv and started calling her Livia like everyone else. And then he’d stopped calling her anything.

Blinking away the tears that were still desperately trying to unleash, she sniffed delicately and gave a jerky nod. ‘I need a sense of purpose. I like knowing the money in my pocket is earned by my own endeavours. I never wanted to be a kept woman.’

His throat moved before he gave his own nod. ‘At least let me buy you a home like we agreed I would. The law entitles you to much more.’

And he would give it, everything the law said she was entitled to and more. If only he were as generous with his time as he was with his money…

But those were pointless thoughts to have. Massimo was who he was, just as Livia was who she was. They’d tried. They’d failed.

She just wished she could find a way to stop her heart from hurting so much.

‘Thank you.’ Swallowing hard to dislodge the lump in her throat, she got to her feet. ‘I’ll leave you to get changed. I’m going to make myself a coffee—would you like one?’

‘That would be great, thank you.’

She smiled and left the bedroom and kept smiling as she made the coffee, smiling so hard that eventually the tears sucked themselves dry and her cheeks ached miserably in their place.

It didn’t occur to her until she was standing under the shower an hour later that this was the first real conversation she and Massimo had had that hadn’t descended to insults and recriminations in over a year.

The cloudless sky had turned deep blue, the sun a deep orange shimmering on the horizon when Livia ventured out of the chalet in search of Massimo. She found him on the wrap-around veranda drinking a bottle of beer and looking at his phone, wearing a pair of old battered jeans and a crisp white shirt, a booted foot hooked casually on his thigh.

It was the first time she’d been at the rear of their chalet and she tried hard not to let sadness fill her as she recalled poring over the architect’s designs for it, imagining all the happy times she and Massimo would spend here. This chalet had been the only part of the complex Massimo had taken a real interest in. They’d chosen to build it high on the jutting mound of earth that, when the tide was low, could be walked to along a sandy pathway created by nature at its finest. This was supposed to be their own private hideaway in their private paradise. Their horseshoe swimming pool, garden and veranda were entirely hidden from prying eyes.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to think about the sleeping arrangements that night. Their chalet only had one bed. It was a huge bed but, still, it was only the one bed. She supposed she could sleep on the sofa. Massimo’s long frame would never fit on it.

His eyes widened slightly when he looked up as she approached and he unhooked his foot and straightened.

The vain part of her bloomed to see his response. Although it was only a family meal they were going to have, she’d applied her make-up and done her hair with care. She’d been mortified to look in the mirror and see a huge smudge of mascara under her left eye.

But it wasn’t vanity that had propelled her to make an effort. It was armoury. When she looked her best it had the effect of boosting her morale and for all the unspoken truce they’d forged, her emotions were all over the place. She needed every piece of armour she could find to hold herself together.

Massimo turned his phone off and tried hard to temper the emotions crashing through him. Livia had dressed casually in a pair of tight white three-quarter-length trousers and a shimmering red strappy top that stopped at her midriff. On her feet were high, white strappy sandals that elongated her frame but did nothing to diminish her natural curves.

A lifetime ago he would have beckoned her over, put his hands on her hips and pulled her to him.

The instant awakening of his loins proved, as if it needed proving, that nothing had changed. He still wanted her with an ache he felt deep in his marrow.

Inhaling deeply through his nose, he willed the thudding of his heart to steady.

‘You’re ready?’ he asked.

She nodded.

He finished his beer and got to his feet.

In silence they walked the veranda to the front of the chalet and headed to the lodge. The tide had risen in the past two hours, the sandy path now mostly submerged beneath the powerful ocean and the colourful, tropical fish that swam in it. Its gentle rhythm was soothing.

His family had beaten them to the lodge and were all sitting around a set dining table chatting noisily. One of his grandfather’s carers sat discreetly in a far corner of the lodge reading a book.

The meal passed quickly. His grandfather was tired and, fed by Massimo’s mother, ate only his soup before retiring for the night. Madeline and Raul quickly followed, taking an increasingly fractious Elizabeth, who’d turned her nose up at all the offerings they’d tried to tempt her with. Considering it looked like mushed vomit, Massimo didn’t blame her for smacking the plastic spoon out of her mother’s hand. When his brother-in-law attempted to feed her, her little face turned bright red with fury. If Massimo had been offered that excuse for food, he’d have been tempted to screw his face up and bawl too.

He was about to rise and retire to the chalet to check in on work, when his father’s suggestion of a game of Scopa, the traditional Italian game played with an Italian forty-card deck, gave him pause.

His mother’s hopeful gaze made his ready refusal stick on his tongue before he could vocalise it.

He didn’t need to look at Livia to know she was beseeching him with her eyes to accept too. Her earlier insistence that his family wanted only to spend time with him kept ringing in his ears.

He stretched his mouth into the semblance of a smile. ‘Sure.’

The beaming grins made his chest tighten.

He signalled to the barman. Soon, a bottle of bourbon, a bucket of ice and four glasses had been taken to the outside table they now sat around. Massimo and his father formed a team and sat opposite each other, the ladies playing as the opposing team. Livia sat beside his father, his mother beside Massimo. He shuffled the cards, dealt them three each and four face up on the table. The first game of Scopa began.

What began as a sop to please his parents turned into a couple of hours’ mindless fun under the warm starry sky. His parents were the most laid-back, easy-going people on the planet but when it came to card games, they became ultra-competitive.

And Livia’s competitive streak came out too. His wife and mother were both determined to beat their spouses and were not above cheating to achieve this. When the women were two nil down, suddenly they both found it necessary to halt the game for frequent bathroom breaks.

Soon after this mysterious onset of bladder issues, he spotted his mother furtively pulling something out of her handbag, which, when she was challenged, turned out to be a king with a value of ten points. Rather than display any shame, his mother giggled. Livia though…her throaty cackle of laughter filled his ears and suddenly he was thrown back to his sister’s wedding and the first time he’d heard it.