“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!