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‘Yes. And now I am at a loss. I want to change her mind, I want her to marry me, except I don’t know how to do it.’
‘I see. Well, you’re the genius, Ari. Why don’t you work it out?’
‘I have,’ he snapped. ‘If we could sleep together, it would be fine. I would just seduce her into taking my ring. But sex is forbidden until the babies are born.’
Cesare was silent a long moment and Aristophanes fiddled incessantly with the pen, impatience and frustration winding tight inside him.
‘You need to spend time with her,’ Cesare said at length. ‘Do some nice things for her. If you’re not in love with her, the least you can do is make her feel as if you are.’
‘Is that what you did for Lark?’
‘Yes. I spent time with her and our little one, took them all around Italy. Showed her some of my favourite haunts. Wandered around eating gelato, that kind of thing.’ His voice warmed. ‘It was wonderful, and she loved it.’
There were obviously happy memories there for Cesare, so Aristophanes tried to think about similar things he could do with Nell and failed. He didn’t have any favourite haunts. He didn’t like gelato. His life consisted of flying from office to office, playing around with numbers and attending the odd gala when he absolutely had to. Which was not, he suspected, what Cesare was talking about.
‘I don’t know...what she would like,’ he said at last.
‘Then, my friend, may I suggest you find out? Perhaps even have a conversation or two?’
‘I could just insist,’ Aristophanes muttered, even more aggravated. ‘Make her do what I said.’
‘Tell me, my genius friend, have youevertried making a woman do something she doesn’t want to do?’ Cesare asked. ‘Not something I would recommend, not if you value any part of your manhood. And seriously, that wouldnotbe good for her well-being.’
Aristophanes threw the pen down on his desk in a snit. ‘Do you, in fact, have any suggestions? Or are you just wasting my time?’
‘You called me, remember?’ Cesare said calmly. ‘Good God, man. It’s like you’ve never seduced a woman before.’
‘I told you. We can’t have sex—’
‘I’m not talking about sex. Look, a woman isn’t an equation to be solved or an algorithm to compute. She’s a person. A human being. Find out what she likes to do, what her interests are. Listen to her. Remember, Ari, sometimes the most important gift you can give to a person is your time.’
Time. A precious commodity and that he understood. But did Nell even want his time? He’d told her about his schedule, about its importance, but would she understand if he gave her some of that?
Why does it matter that she understands you? This is about her, remember?
The thought sat in his head after he’d ended the call, and he found himself sitting and staring out of the window once again, his mind working feverishly. Thinking about Nell. Thinking about her childhood, about her aunt and uncle. About how she’d been made to feel as if her existence was something that went unnoticed and unappreciated.
Nell had survived without love, it was true, as he had. But she’d also said that surviving wasn’t living. And while he didn’t quite understand what she meant by that, he did understand that she’d had love once, before her parents had died. For her, love had been a good thing and she’d mourned its loss.
He couldn’t remember what love had been like for him. Perhaps the vague recollection of his mother’s embrace. A kiss on the head. A smile. Yet every one of those things had been negated by what had followed it. Sitting in an emptying church pew, waiting, waiting. The gradual realisation that his mother wasn’t coming to get him. The sense of a dark pit opening up inside him, a pit he was going to fall headlong into. Because she’d left him there. She’d left him there alone, unwanted—
He jerked his thoughts away. Again, this wasn’t about him. This was about Nell. He didn’t love her, but perhaps he could make her feel as if he did. Give her the things she’d missed out on in her life: attention and care and respect. Easy enough to do in bed, naturally, but he was going to have to think of different ways to do it now.
The thought galvanised him. He’d always loved a challenge and he had a couple of ideas already spinning in his head, so he leaned forward to his computer and, with a couple of mouse clicks, cleared his entire schedule for the next week.
Then he began planning.
Nell sat by the pool, on a lounger, trying to pay attention to the book she’d found in the villa’s library, and failing. It was annoying that she felt just as miserable now as she had when she’d gone to bed the night before, hoping a good sleep would help. Except she hadn’t had a good sleep. After leaving Aristophanes and the lovely dinner he’d laid out for her the night before, she’d gone to her bedroom and lain down, hoping oblivion would come. Instead, she’d tossed and turned, her head full of him and his marriage offer.
She shouldn’t have walked away from him. She should have stayed and tried to explain what she wanted, because it was clear he didn’t know, and that wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t as if he’d had a normal childhood. He’d been abandoned by the one person who was supposed to love him, then gone from foster family to foster family, making no connections with anyone. Withdrawing into himself deeper and deeper, escaping into that wonderful mind of his.
A lonely man. A man who had no idea about love. And while he might be a genius with numbers and money, he was functionally illiterate when it came to emotions.
Last night it had all felt too much and she didn’t even know why she was staying here. She wasn’t a prisoner after all and, while he was offering a great deal of support for their children, it was obvious he didn’t care that much for her.
She didn’t know why she wanted him to, either.