The Delicious De Campos: The Divorce Party
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He blinked at her, a look of complete incomprehension on his face. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You called a gossip columnist, demanded information about my infidelity and paid her for fake photos?”
“They weren’t fake,” she cried. “Everybody in New York knew you were having an affair! Too bad I was the last to know.”
His fingers tightened around her shoulders. “They are fake photos because I did not sleep with Chelsea Tate—ever—after our relationship began.”
His rage and the icy, menacing look on his face vibrated through her like a sledgehammer. Riccardo had never lied to her. Not once in their marriage. Until Chelsea. Truth was like a badge of honor to him—it was the De Campo creed, the way he conducted his life. Better to be brutal and get it over with.
What if she was wrong?
“Lilly?”
She yanked herself out of his grasp and turned away. Her brain moved wildly through the possibilities. Photos could be doctored. They were doctored all the time. Maybe those hadn’t been shots of him and Chelsea. It had been hard to see their faces after that initial shot of them kissing...
A cold, buzzing feeling descended over her. Would Lacey Craig have dared to sell her fakes? Wouldn’t she have been worried Lilly would take them straight to Riccardo, who would have pronounced them as such and sued the hell out of her?
Or maybe Lacey hadn’t known they were fake...
Oh, God.
Riccardo took a step toward her, his face hard and determined. “How much did you pay for those photos?”
She shook her head.
“How much?”
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
“A hundred thousand?” His brow furrowed. “They wouldn’t give you a full-page ad for a hundred grand...”
Lilly felt her world fall apart.
His gaze sharpened on her face as understanding dawned in his eyes. “That was the money you said you sent your parents?”
“Yes.”
He sucked in a breath, his fists clenching at his sides. “You trusted me so little you would do that without talking to me?”
“You kissed her, Riccardo! You went home with her, intending to sleep with her. Where in that is there anything that says I should have trusted you?”
His jaw clamped shut. He was silent for several long moments, each one driving the stake that was impaling her heart deeper and deeper.
Finally he raised his gaze to hers and asked quietly, “Was there ever any point in our marriage you were happy?”
She fought the fire burning the back of her eyes. “That first year after we married was the most amazing year of my life. I loved you, Riccardo. I worshipped the ground you walked on. You were my knight in shining armor who’d swooped into my life and made it whole again. But somewhere along the way I lost my glitter when it came to you. You didn’t want me the same way you did before. And it was torturous for me to be with you like that.” She looked down at the sparkling ring on her finger. “So I left.”
“You left because you thought I didn’t love you anymore?”
“I left because we were destroying each other. You became obsessed with that job—obsessed with having your birthright. And you left me alone to deal with the fallout of being Lilly De Campo. Something I couldn’t do on my own.”
He was silent, a granite mask stretching across his face. She hugged her arms around herself and listened as a chorus of tree frogs filled the air with their haunting, rhythmical song.
“You never once thought I might be struggling too? That I might need my wife?” He said the words quietly, deliberately, his face devoid of emotion.
“How would I have known? You’re like Mount Vesuvius. You keep everything inside until you explode. And when you do there’s nothing for me to respond to but the anger.”
His dark gaze rested on her. “I could say the same about you.”
“Yes, you could.” She nodded. “I have a ton of baggage, I know. But at least I acknowledge mine.”
His mouth pulled tight as her arrow hit home. He swung away and walked to the edge of the terrace, rested his elbows on the railing as he looked out at the sea. “I always thought if you wanted something bad enough you made it happen. That we could resolve our differences because we loved each other that much.”
The lump in her throat grew so large it felt as if she was aching all over. “Sometimes,” she choked, “love isn’t enough.”
He turned around, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the setting sun. The dull look on his face made the rest of her shrivel away.
“A marriage needs trust to survive. And between the two of us I think we’ve proved we have none.”
And there it was, she thought miserably. Their marriage summed up in one glaring truth.
“It was never going to work.”
Her words sat flat and lifeless on the night air between them. Riccardo’s head snapped back, a flare of angry color slashing across his cheekbones. His steps as he closed the distance between them were jerky, full of a barely leashed rage that made her suck in a breath. When he stopped in front of her, his furious glare leveled on her face, her heart seemed to stop.
“We may have spoken a lot of truths tonight, Lilly, but do not, do not absolve yourself of the responsibility you carry for this marriage. You checked out. You left me. You chose to give up. And you will own that.”
She pulled in another breath, but it wasn’t enough, and desperately she dragged in another. There never seemed to be enough oxygen on the planet when she was with Riccardo because he sucked it out of her. Stripped her bare.
He stared at her for a long moment, waiting for her to respond, waiting for her to give him what he demanded of her, but she couldn’t force the words out of her mouth.
He spun away and stalked toward the French doors.
“Ric—”
“I need some space.”
He disappeared inside. Lilly watched him go, too numb to react. Where was he going? The sound of the front door slamming made her heart drop. He was leaving?
She ran to the front door and threw it open, but only the glaring darkness of the Caribbean night stared back at her. She would have heard the car if he’d taken it. He must have gone on foot.
She closed the door and fumbled with the deadbolt to lock it. Unsure of what to do next, she turned and leaned against it, pulling in deep, long breaths. Then she slid down to the floor and did the thing she hadn’t let herself do since the week she’d left Riccardo.
She sobbed her heart out.
Tears streamed down her face in a barrage that it seemed would never end. Her worst fear about her marriage had been both proven and unproven in one explosive conversation that had left her so raw and exposed she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to close herself back up again.
Riccardo had kissed Chelsea Tate with the intent of sleeping with her. And even though he hadn’t been able to do it, the fact that he’d kissed Chelsea—the thought of him kissing her—splintered Lilly’s heart into a million pieces.
How could he? The man who’d promised to love and protect her that day in the cathedral when they’d been married, whom she’d let down all her barriers for, had betrayed her in the worst way possible. Because, she thought numbly, wasn’t kissing the most intimate act of all?
Somewhere, someplace deep down inside her, she’d been hoping she was wrong. That Riccardo had been telling her the truth when he’d said nothing had happened between him and Chelsea and that her early naive belief that nothing could touch them was true.
But it wasn’t something she could hang onto anymore. She and Riccardo were fallible and his message had been clear. She had driven him into Chelsea’s arms. He had wanted to hurt her as she’d been hurting him. And that, she realized, swiping the tears from her face, was something she’d never thought of. That cool, hard-as-rock Riccardo could be hurt in any way. That she had the power to hurt him like that.
But in the end it had been as she’d always known it would be. She hadn’t been capable of being what he needed. She hadn’t been enough for him. Otherwise he never would have gone to Chelsea.
Her severed heart throbbed with a misery that said there was still some life in it. She closed her eyes and breathed. To leave had been her survival mechanism. To stop trying to be something she could never be.
But Riccardo’s relentless assault continued to unpeel her layers, as if once started it would never stop. Emotions that had been bottled up far too long bubbled over and tumbled into her consciousness. She remembered that perfect day before everything had unraveled, when they’d rescued their dog, Brooklyn, from the street, taken her to the house in Westchester and spent the weekend there. Her gorgeous husband had scooped up Brooklyn in one hand and Lilly in the other and tucked them all into bed. Throwing out the heart-stopping comment as the puppy lay snoring at their feet that maybe they should make theirs a family of four.
She’d been so excited, her mind whirring like the hamster’s wheel from her childhood, that she hadn’t slept that night. Like the luckiest of little girls on Christmas morning, she’d felt as if she’d been given everything she’d ever dreamed of. She had Riccardo, a great career and a home. A real home, where love reigned—not dramatic tension that would take her who knew where next. And for the first time since she’d left Iowa as a teenager, scared and unsure of her future, she’d known everything was going to be okay.
She would have a family of her own—one that wasn’t living a hand-to-mouth existence. A family that wasn’t a dysfunctional, sordid mess.
Dreams could come true, she’d told herself, falling asleep in Riccardo’s arms at dawn.
The impossibly perfect memory made her suck in a breath.
She was still in love with her husband.
No matter how hard she tried to deny it, no matter how much she told herself they shouldn’t be together, it was never going to go away. That deep, gnawing pain that had started when she’d left him and never stopped.
She pried her eyes open and stared dully up at the grandfather clock in the hallway. Its rhythmical tick-tock was deafeningly loud in the still villa. She was mad about a man who’d spoken of their love in the past tense tonight. As if he was as sure as she was they’d done too much harm to each other ever to be able to recover from it.
And he was right. About all of it. She had shut down on him. She should have told him about her anorexia. She should have told him about the photos. Instead she’d run, like she always did.
But he had kissed Chelsea. And that wasn’t something she was sure she could forgive.
She bit her lip, vaguely registering the metallic taste of blood. The clock droned on...tick-tock, tick-tock. She had made huge mistakes in her marriage. But at least tonight she’d taken her first step forward. She’d told the truth. And that was something.
She bit her lip, refusing to give in to the fresh set of tears burning the back of her eyes. If it was clear they were over, then that was for the best. They had closure. In six months she was going to have to walk away from Riccardo, this time for good.
She was going to have to move on.
At least now she could.
She got to her feet, splashed cold water on her face and went back out to the terrace to wait for Riccardo. Two, three hours passed—she wasn’t sure. A million stars blanketed the dark Caribbean sky as she drank wine and listened to the rhythmic pull of the ocean.
Her eyes started to drift shut.
The clocks chiming midnight woke her. Disoriented and half asleep, she padded inside to a dark, empty villa. And realized her husband wasn’t coming back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RICCARDO ENDED UP nursing a glass of ten-year-old rum on the front steps of a local rum shack in Holetown. Neat, as the grizzly old proprietor had suggested.
He’d needed a place he could think, away from the glitzy west coast hotels and restaurants. A place where he could digest his mind-blowing conversation with his wife. Because if he’d suspected before that he didn’t know all of her it was now brutally apparent he hadn’t even scratched the surface of who Lilly De Campo was.
Mind reeling, he’d wandered down the road from the villa until he’d come to the local hotspot—a red-and-cream-painted clapboard house emblazoned with the logo of a local beer company, one of dozens of such dwellings scattered around the island. There had been a handful of Bajans sitting on the front steps, chatting about last night’s cricket game, and zero expectations of socializing.
Perfetto.
He took a sip of the rum and was glad the proprietor had talked him into drinking it neat. It brought out the oaky molasses flavor of the blend and right now he needed its smooth burn. Needed to quell the tumult raging through his brain.
His wife had trusted him so little she’d paid a gossip columnist one hundred thousand dollars for pictures that weren’t even of him. Then she’d lied to him about where the money had gone.
Che diavolo.
He pulled in a deep breath. What state of mind must she have been in to do something like that? To air their dirty laundry to a tabloid journalist and expose their private lives rather than come to him? He wanted to shake her. To chastise her for being so stupid. Except it had also been his fault. He had given her reason to be jealous. He had violated the trust in their marriage.
He had almost smeared the past in her face without knowing it by being unfaithful to her like her father had her mother.
He uttered a smothered oath. The bombshells had just kept coming. His wife had been suffering from an eating disorder he hadn’t known about. She had been struggling with a disease only made worse by the limelight she’d been thrust into and he hadn’t noticed. How had he not noticed? It was inconceivable to him. He wasn’t an expert on eating disorders, but didn’t women usually make themselves throw up when they had one? He knew for sure he hadn’t missed that. Lilly hated throwing up, and when she did so because of her migraines she was miserable.
So where had been the signs he’d been supposed to see?
She’d always been tall and thin, and he’d thought that was her natural predisposition, but now that he thought about it she had been curvier when they’d met. She’d consistently lost weight throughout their marriage until she’d been ultra-thin at the end, but he’d thought that was because she’d wanted to fit into the designer dresses she’d worn. In hindsight, he admitted, shifting uncomfortably on the steps, her penchant for skipping meals near the end should have raised alarm bells. It was just that he hadn’t been home enough to monitor it.
A memory of Lilly, exhausted and seemingly emotionally spent, begging him to let her stay home the night of the financial district’s Christmas ball filled his head. He’d thought she was just being difficult and had insisted on her attending because it was a De Campo-sponsored event.
She’d obviously been struggling.
His hands tightened around the glass. He could have destroyed her by not knowing. By continuing to push her. Had he really been that oblivious? Was he so set on perfection in those around him she’d felt she couldn’t come to him? Couldn’t talk to him?
Had he been, as Lilly had accused, so caught up with his obsession of becoming CEO he hadn’t seen anything but the end goal?
An intense feeling of shame washed over him. There had been one month in that last year when he’d only been home one night because he’d been traveling so much, opening restaurants. One night.
And maybe there had been more months like that...
“You left me alone to deal with the fallout of being Lilly De Campo.”
Was that what he’d done?
He took a swig of the rum and stared out at the cars whizzing by on the snakelike coastal road. Their ability to hurt each other was monumental. The breakdown in communication between them breathtaking. How had something so good gone so wrong?
He watched as a new arrival joined the other grizzled old men on the steps. They clapped him on the back and kept on talking about last night’s game, which apparently had been a barn-burner. He was struck by how absolutely insane his life had become. He was a machine, not a man. He no longer remembered what it was like to live because he was too busy planning for tomorrow.
He nursed the glass between his hands and stared down at the brilliant amber liquid. It was time he simplified his life. Step one had been this weekend with Lilly, to discover the truth. Step two would be in three months, when Antonio ceded control to him. Step three was going to be about honesty.
“I faked my way through our entire marriage.”
The statement had made his blood boil. He might have done things all wrong but Lilly had owed him honesty. She had owed that to their marriage. And nothing, nothing made up for the fact that she’d walked out on him. And left him to deal with the fallout of their marriage.
“It was never going to work.”
Her words danced in front of him like a red cape, egging on an enraged bull. If his wife thought she was going to check out again now, when the honesty had just started between them, she was sadly mistaken. Lilly was about to find out what it was like to follow through on a promise. What it was like to pay as he’d been paying for the past year. Because De Campos didn’t divorce. They stuck it out—even if they were in a loveless partnership like his parents.
He drained his glass and set it down with a thud that drew the eyes of the faction of grizzled old men. Standing up, he went back inside and slapped his glass on the counter. “Another,” he said hoarsely. “Make it a double.”
* * *
This time he had left her.
Lilly stood on the balcony of their villa, staring at the ocean as it sparkled in the moonlight. It was pushing one o’clock and still her husband hadn’t come home. He had decided the muddled, mass of confusion his wife undoubtedly was wasn’t CEO wife material. Wasn’t worth the effort.
Hot, silent tears ran down her cheeks. She’d kept her secrets because she’d known if she’d told the truth about who she was she’d lose him. But in the end it hadn’t mattered. She’d lost him anyway.
Had he been repulsed by her secret—by the anorexia that had been her Achilles’ Heel? Or had it been the dishonesty? The lies she’d told to save herself?
She didn’t blame him for not wanting her. She’d only just started to learn how to appreciate herself.
“I thought you’d be asleep.”
Her husband’s deep voice came from behind her. She spun around, her heart in her mouth as her gaze moved over his strained, somber features.
“You came back.”
“Of course I did.” He closed the distance between them. “I told you this is not over between us.”
That had been before tonight. Before they had annihilated each other.
His gaze moved over her face. “I’ve never seen you cry.”
She raised a hand to swipe the tears from her face. Telling him she still loved him, that she’d thought she’d lost him forever, wasn’t going to happen. Not when she was sure he hated her for what she’d done to him. But she couldn’t stop the emotion that was suffocating her, threatening to spill over into something she couldn’t control.
His eyes darkened and the strain on his face deepened, looking even harsher in the moonlight. “This is not over,” he repeated. “Get that through your head, Lilly. We are only getting started.”
How could that be? This reconciliation of theirs was only for six months. And it wasn’t real. But tell that to her brain. He did away with the last few inches between them, a look of intent on his face so deliberate her heart stopped in her chest.
“Ric—”
The hand she held out to ward him off was captured and folded against his chest as he pulled her into him. “No more talking,” he murmured, moving his lips to the upper curve of her cheek, where the tears were still falling. “We’ve done enough talking for a lifetime tonight.”
She knew she should protest, but then he was kissing away her tears one by one, following the hot, salty path down over the curve of her jaw. As if with every one he dispensed with he was wiping the past away. A sigh was torn from deep inside her as she arched her neck back. If this was supposed to be comfort she couldn’t quite envision it, because he was setting her blood on fire.
His big hands swept the straps of her négligée aside so his lips could continue their exploration down the sensitive skin of her neck and over the roundness of her shoulder.
The honesty of this—the honesty of them together like this—had never been in question. And tonight she needed for him to heal them.
To hell with the consequences.
She moved willingly against him as he pulled her up on tiptoes and kissed her—a slow, drugging caress she felt down to her toes. It was like an anesthetic to her soul, his touch, as if the only thing she’d been put on this planet to do was kiss him in these deep, never-ending caresses that devoured the essence of each other.
A shiver ran through her—anticipatory, all-consuming. She buried her fingers in the thick muscles of his shoulders, rediscovering the feel of him under her hands, the way the sharp tug of her teeth on his bottom lip made him groan low in the back of his throat.
“You are killing me,” he murmured, sliding his hands down over her silk-covered bottom and yanking her closer.
The feel of his big, warm hands on her, shaping her against the muscular hard length of him made her whimper. His thick erection made her gasp.
“Esattamente,” he muttered, scooping her up into his arms. She breathed in the familiar, heady male scent of him as he carried her into the bedroom. It was like coming home.
Light from the big, fat, almost-full moon flooded the beautiful blue-and-white-striped bedroom that looked as if it had come straight out of a magazine. But all Lilly had eyes for was her husband as he let her slide down his body to the floor, the silk catching between them. He was the most smoking hot man she’d ever encountered on so many levels.
Intense, like the night. Exciting, like a summer storm that made everything electric. Earthy, like a man who knew how to savor every moment like the fine wines his family created.
Her heart thumped at the foot of her throat as he slid his fingers under the straps of her négligée and dropped it to the floor. She closed her eyes as his gaze moved over her naked flesh. She had never been perfect but she was definitely less than that now.
“Dio, Lilly. Come sei bella.”
His raspily intoned observation made her eyes fly open. The look of pure lust on his face made her knees go weak. “I don’t look like I used to,” she whispered.
He slid his hands down her back to her bottom and tugged her forward, until her naked flesh was flush against his still clothed body. “I told you,” he murmured. “I love the curves... If anything, I want you more than I did before.”
Oh. Liquid fire raced through her veins as his fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck and he tipped her head back to receive his kiss. Open-mouthed, and hotter than Hades, it immersed her in a pool of want that threatened to eat her alive.
Her control snapped. The depth of her emotion for this man was frightening, endless, but to have him again like this made her frantic, desperate.
“Ric,” she muttered against his mouth. “Please.”
He abandoned her lips in favor of a fingertips to bare skin exploration of the weight of her breasts. “Do you know how hard it’s been for me to keep my hands off you?” he breathed, brushing his thumbs over the tips of her nipples. “I took down a ninety-foot tree in Westchester, I was so crazed.”
Lilly squeezed her eyes shut as her nipples hardened beneath his touch. “I can’t believe you didn’t kill yourself.”
“Gabe helped. Matteo got in the way.”
She smiled and wriggled against him, trying to get closer, but he closed his hands down hard over her shoulders and held her away.