The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain

He would just move on to another businesslike marriage after shattering her heart and not even knowing he’d done it.

“Your Highness, would you like me to order you some dinner?” one of the security men asked from the open doorway.

She averted her face so he could not see the tears, then took a breath to steady her voice. “No, thank you.”

“If you are not hungry now, I can order later delivery.”

Oh, gosh…she could not handle this. She just wanted to be alone. She forced her convulsing throat to speak. “I do not want any dinner, thank you. And, Roberto, could you…” She had to swallow back a sob.

“Your Highness?”

“Could you please shut the door?”

Her answer was the quiet snick of the door latch catching.

She felt her control slip another notch as the nominal privacy of the shut door registered with her emotions. She’d been holding herself in check for so long; forcing herself to bite back the words of love she’d wanted to utter, to hide her distress at the frequent separations from Claudio brought about by their schedules, and for the past several months pretending that the horrific pain of endometriosis did not exist.

At first, she’d convinced herself it was just the period pain made more intense by going off the pill. But then, one night when Claudio had been gone on yet another business trip, she had fainted from the cramps and when she woke up on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood, she’d known she had to find out what was wrong.

She’d gone to see her doctor in the States, a habit she’d developed early in her marriage to protect her privacy. Trips abroad were easy enough to justify in her schedule that she found it quite easy to hide the purpose of her stopovers in Miami.

Her doctor’s initial prognosis had been utterly disturbing. He’d thought she was probably suffering from endometriosis, but the only way to tell for sure was to perform a laparoscopy. She thought she could handle it and accepted a prescription for painkillers, only to give in the following month and schedule the outpatient surgery.

She’d gotten the results the day before along with a big bucket of ice water to dash her hopes that she would be one of the lucky ones who wasn’t impacted too heavily by the disease. Apparently she’d had it for quite a while, but being on the pill had mitigated its effects. There was major tissue build up on both of her ovaries and even with the surgery to remove it all, her chances of getting pregnant without IVF were less than ten percent. Even with IVF, there were no guarantees.

Those were not the kind of odds Crown Prince Claudio had been counting on when he had her take fertility tests before announcing their engagement. A future king had responsibilities to the throne and one of the most important ones was providing an heir to carry on his lineage. He expected her to be able to do that with one hundred percent success and for all intents and purposes, she was infertile.

After seeing the way the press and the Scorsolini family had reacted to Marcello’s supposed sterility, Therese knew there was no chance her proud husband would willingly suffer similar vilification for her sake. And she wouldn’t expect him to.

If he loved her, it would be different, but then so much would be. Love was not an emotion that could be faked, nor could it be replaced with a sense of duty.

Claudio might offer to remain married, but his heart wouldn’t be in it and she could not live with the knowledge that she was a burden around his neck…a source of humiliation to his royal pride.

A sob snaked up from deep inside her to explode out of her mouth and she had to clamp her hand over her lips to keep the sound from traveling to the other room. Feeling like an old woman, she pushed herself to her feet.

She would take a shower…she could at least have privacy for her tears in there.

Once she’d shut the door, then the door on the shower and turned the water on full blast, she cried herself hoarse. She grieved the loss of her marriage, the loss of her hopes of motherhood and stopped fighting the pain that came from loving a man who did not and never would love her.

She ruthlessly quashed any hope that everything would be okay. Deep in her heart, she knew it would not be. After Claudio’s reaction to her unexpected departure from her schedule, she didn’t even have the tiniest hope that her marriage could or should survive this setback.

And that was destroying her. All along, she had harbored the foolish hope that she was wrong, that somehow they could weather the treatment for her condition and the problems it would bring. She hadn’t admitted it to herself because it would have hurt too much, but now that she was faced with the final end to her marriage, she had no choice but to acknowledge the living flicker of hope as it died a painful death.

Claudio could not have made it more obvious he did not love her if he had tried. His every action pointed to the carefully defined roles she played in his life, none of them connected to his emotional needs. Unless she counted sex and even if he did…she didn’t.

She’d had such hopes when they married. They would make a family and she would know the love she had never known with her parents at least with the children that would come. She had also hoped that eventually Claudio would come to love her. She had wanted it all and now there was nothing but the dead ashes of a fire that had consumed her for almost three years.

She had wanted to be a mother. She’d wanted it so much. Why had he wanted to wait? Why? It wasn’t fair. If she had gotten pregnant right away, the endometriosis might never have even shown up. But “if onlys” were as futile as wishing on the moon, an exercise for small children who still believed the possibilities of life were endless.

She had learned they were far too limited. She’d wanted to give birth to the Scorsolini heir and raise him knowing that love lit his path, not duty, that there was more to life than his position. She’d wanted to rectify the mistakes her parents had made with her. She’d wanted a chance at love, knowing that her children would love her, even if their father could never bring himself to do so.

Hadn’t she loved her parents, no matter how much they hurt her? And she would have been a good mother, a truly loving mother. She would never have made her children feel they were nothing more than the sum of what they could do for her.

Falling to her knees, she cried, “God in Heaven, it isn’t fair!” The words echoed around her in the shower stall, no one there to answer…or if He did, she did not hear the Heavenly voice.

She covered her face and sobbed, but eventually her tears had to abate. She’d cried herself dry. She turned off the shower, her throat sore and her eyes almost too puffy to see out of. No way would anyone looking at her now not know how she’d spent the last hour, but it didn’t matter. Claudio wouldn’t be back for ages and when he did arrive, she planned to be asleep. She was beyond tired, her emotional reserves used up completely.

She hadn’t realized how exhausting her pretense of contentment had become until she gave herself permission to let it go. With aching limbs, she pulled on a nightdress and climbed into the bed, not caring that it was just going on seven o’clock.

Without thought, her hand automatically searched out his side of the bed, but of course it was empty. As it had been on so many nights of their marriage and would be every night once she left New York. A dry sob caught in her throat and she bit it back, but she’d soaked her pillow with silent tears before she managed to slip into a fitful sleep. Her last thought that tears were never ending…

She woke sometime later to the sound of the shower going in the bathroom and light spilling from the cracked door into the bedroom. The digital clock beside the bed read nine o’clock. She blinked, trying to think what that meant. It was earlier than she had expected him, but not so early that she could trick herself into thinking he’d rearranged his time for her.

The shower cut off and a minute later, Claudio strolled into the room, completely naked and drying his hair with a white towel. He leaned over to flick his bedside lamp on the lowest setting, casting his bronzed body in a golden glow.

Her mouth went dry as desire and emotional need spiraled low in her belly. It had no place in the devastation inside her and yet it continued to bloom as if her heart had not been decimated in her chest.

He tossed the towel to the side and looked over at her. He paused when her eyes caught his dark gaze. “You are awake.”

“You’re back.”

“Obviously.”

She winced at his sarcasm. “How did your meeting go?”

She didn’t really care, but nothing else came to mind and total silence simply did not work right then. Nevertheless, she had no doubts that the meeting had gone exactly as he had wanted it to. He was that kind of man. It took a will of iron with the intelligence of Socrates and Einstein combined to defeat Claudio’s plans.

Or a woman’s rebellious reproductive system, a voice in her head mocked. He couldn’t battle that, no matter how smart and stubborn he was, could he? And in all likelihood, he wouldn’t want to. It would require her having treatments that may or may not be successful for pregnancy that the press was bound to get wind of.

She couldn’t bear the thought of what that would mean and knew he wouldn’t tolerate such an intrusion into his life.

“It went much as I expected it to.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only that you are very good at getting your own way.”

“I am not selfish.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing.”

“Roberto said you did not eat dinner.”

“I ate on the plane.”

Claudio frowned. “A cup of coffee and two cookies is not dinner.”

“It was all I wanted.”

“Skipping meals is not healthy.”

“One missed dinner is not going to kill me.”

“Are you sick?” He asked it so baldly, without the slightest trace of compassionate concern that she winced again. “If you are, you should not be traveling.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you the flu, or something. I’m not sick.” Not with anything he could catch anyway.

He did not look appreciably cheered by that assurance. “I expected you to be awake when I got back, but you were not.”

“I had no way of knowing when that would be.”

“It is barely nine o’clock.” He said it like he couldn’t imagine going to bed this early. And probably, he couldn’t. The man needed less sleep than anyone she knew.

If he knew she’d gone to bed as early as seven, he’d be convinced she was ill. She saw no reason to enlighten him. “I was tired.”

“But you are not sick?”

“No.”

“You are certain?”

“Yes.”

“Are you pregnant?” He asked the question with the same lack of emotion he’d asked if she was sick to begin with.

The words skewered her. And there was no sense of anticipation in his features, no warming at the prospect, which hurt just like everything else did right then.

“No. Not pregnant,” she forced out of stiff lips.

“You are sure?”

She hadn’t started, but she was sure. “I’m positive.”

“Then this strange behavior is the result of period hormones?”

No doubt a good portion of what she was feeling and her willingness to act on those feelings was caused by hormonal imbalances. “If it pleases you to think so, then yes.”

Hormone driven, or not, the knowledge her marriage was over was real. His lack of love for her was fact. Her unpredictable reproductive system was not the stuff fantasies were made of and the pain inside her was a physical ache that made it hard to breathe.

He made an impatient movement. “Nothing about this situation pleases me.”

“I am sorry.”

“I do not want an apology. I want an explanation. You said you had things you wanted to talk about but I come back to the suite only to find you sleeping.”

“Is that a crime?”

“No, but you are making no sense to me right now.”

“Heaven forbid I should stop fitting in the slot you’ve assigned me to in your life.”

“I have done nothing to deserve your sarcasm.”

“Except refuse to listen to me.”

“On your timetable. I am here now. Ready to listen.” He spread his hands in an expansive gesture that also served to draw her attention back to his beautiful naked body.

Tears burned the back of her eyes, but maybe they were not as never ending as she had thought because no moisture glazed her vision. She was going to miss him so much and it did not even shame her to admit that part of that missing would be pure physical need going unmet. Because for her, the desire was part and parcel to the love and both would be starved of his presence soon enough.

She sighed, trying to breathe through a very different kind of hurt than what had been consuming her body for months now. “I realized that I was foolish to fly up here to talk to you. Waiting three days won’t change anything. I’m not even sure there is a point in having the discussion I wanted to have at all.”

Really, she just needed to tell him about her condition and then let him work out the details of the separation and divorce. But after her emotional holocaust in the shower, she didn’t have the wherewithal to discuss that with him. Her inner reserves were all gone and she simply couldn’t face telling him of her failure as a woman, as a wife, especially in the face of his obvious hostility.

“Why is that?” he asked in a dangerously soft undertone she was too drained to understand. Shouldn’t he be relieved she didn’t want to get all emotional with him?

“Some things cannot be changed.” No matter how much she wanted them to be.

“And what are those things?”

“I’d rather not talk about it right now,” she admitted in a voice that sounded dodgy to her own ears.

In a move she did not expect, he came around to her side of the bed at supersonic speed and lifted her right out of it. “That is unfortunate because I do.”

She gasped and wrapped her arms around his neck to stop herself from falling. “You can’t always have your way.”

“That is not a concept I recognize.”

“Then it’s time you did.”

He tightened his hold on her. “Stop playing games and tell me what the hell has you acting so far out of character.”

The furious undertone in his voice said his patience was about used up. And the iron-hard glint in his brown eyes said he wasn’t giving up until she spilled, either. No matter what she wanted, no matter how hard it might be for her, he would settle for nothing less than full disclosure.

She knew it and finally accepted it. She’d started this thing and she had to finish it, no matter how much she might want to put it off. No matter how deeply she might regret her impulsive decision to come to New York. Tears choked her throat and she knew she couldn’t begin tell him about her body’s deficiency with even a semblance of emotional detachment. There was only one thing she could say.

And she wasn’t even sure how to say it.

Feeling pressured beyond endurance in her current overly emotional state and overwhelmed by the simple sensation of being held in his arms for what she was sure was the last time, she ended up just blurting it out, “We have to divorce.”

Eyes filling with inimical rage, he dropped her in an act of such utter repudiation her stomach knotted with pain to add on top of all the other hurt she was feeling. If she hadn’t grabbed him for support, she would have fallen flat on her bottom.

But he shook her touch off with disdainful rejection. “You bitch.”

She’d never seen him so angry and it scared her silly. “I…I h-have to tell you—”

“You will divorce me over my dead body,” he interrupted in a deadly voice.

Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t make anything come out. She tried, but no words would issue forth. It all hurt too much. She’d never believed she would have to say those fatal words to him. She would have done anything, given any amount of money…even years from her life not to have had to do so. And yet as horrific as his response was to her demand for divorce, she could not make herself speak the truth that labeled her a total failure as a woman.

He had hurt her too much and there was nothing left inside her of trust for his willingness to spare her emotions.

And the harshness of his reaction confused her…made it harder for her to think, to cope with what needed to be said. She simply had not expected him to respond with such fury. After all, they were in effect discussing the dissolution of what he considered a business contract. Nothing more.

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