The Unwanted Wife (Unwanted #1)(3)
Sandro had recovered first. He had taken a step toward her, followed by another and then another, until he stood directly in front of her, so close that his every inhalation of breath caused his chest to lightly brush against her. Theresa had tilted her head back to stare at him in wonder, tracing every angle and curve on his face in fascination.
“Hello, cara.” His voice, like dark velvet over gravel, had sent a shudder of awareness up her spine. “What’s your name?”
“Theresa.” She had been helpless to do anything but respond. He had smelled wonderful, and she had found herself leaning toward him to breathe in his scent.
Theresa remembered every word, every emotion, every sensation of the exchange that had followed.
“Theresa?” he repeated, his appealing voice going slightly husky. “Bellissima. I’m Alessandro.”
“Yes,” she said, not making much sense in that moment, and he grinned. It was a beautiful, warm, boyish smile that made him even more handsome.
“Can you say it?” he asked quietly.
“Say what?”
“My name. I want to hear my name on those amazing lips.” He traced a finger over her lips and she stopped breathing completely and moaned. “Say it, cara. Four little syllables—A-les-san-dro. Please?”
“Alessandro,” she whispered, and he groaned a little.
“Perfect. You’re perfect, little Theresa.” No one had ever looked at her and seen perfection before. No one had ever smiled at her with so much appreciation and warmth in his eyes before. Theresa had found herself staring back at this appealing stranger, and for the first time in her life, she had felt wanted. Between one heartbeat and the next, Theresa had fallen head over heels in love.
She shook herself, refusing to dwell on past events that she could not change and instead tried to focus on her present.
Breakfast passed with agonizing 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 focus 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 halfheartedly. 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 valiantly believed that if she loved him enough, he would go back to being the laughing, affectionate man she had known in the first few months after they had met. She still wasn’t completely sure what had caused the change, but from the snide things he sometimes said in passing, she suspected it was her father’s influence. After nearly a year of marriage 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 realized 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, 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 Palmer 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 on their relationship, and Theresa didn’t want that on her conscience.
She sighed heavily and started to do the dishes. She liked to do little household tasks despite the fact that her thirty-one-year-old husband, who had worked his way up from mailroom clerk to the president of the bank his father owned, “had more money than God,” as her father had once put it. Theresa had even enthusiastically insisted on doing some of the cooking herself. They employed a housecleaning staff, as was practical when one lived in a ten-bedroom, five-bathroom monster of a house.
Because their marriage united two prominent families, the press avidly followed the intimate details of their marriage, yet Theresa tried to cling to what she believed was a semblance of normalcy. On Saturdays the staff had the day off and Theresa liked to pick up after herself and Sandro rather than wait for the maids to get to it later. She had never had a “normal” life, and she fondly imagined that these tasks kept her grounded in reality. Sandro didn’t pretend to understand her need to have a hand in the everyday running of the house and had mockingly accused her of playing house once, shortly after their wedding. He had never seemed to notice it again after that. She stared down at the dishes she had ready to be placed in the dishwasher and quite abruptly abandoned the task halfway through before heading upstairs and leaving Sandro still in the kitchen.