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When he’d asked her about it, she had laughed and claimed he must have been mistaken. Because she’d been cooped up in the apartment, struggling with her latest painting.
Later, with one word to Bruno about her whereabouts, he’d learned that she’d indeed been in London twice in one month.
Still, he had waited for her to come to him.
Then other things had started disappearing, like his platinum cuff links and the diamond bracelet his mother had bought Nyra that she hadn’t liked one bit. Little things he wouldn’t have noticed unless he was keeping an eye out.
To think, he’d even tried to justify it as an undiagnosed case of kleptomania. But she was not a magpie who stored all the things she stole, nor could he see any change in her clothes or her spending habits.
Even after becoming his wife, she’d always dressed in loose, dowdy clothes that she made from his discarded shirts and sweaters, like some hippie artist.
Much to his mother’s, and sometimes his, dismay.
In nine months, she had shown no interest in designer clothes, or expensive jewelry, or leaning into the role of a society wife. She’d never even joined him for a dinner with guests from his circle.
All she wanted, she’d admitted to him after one of their marathon sex sessions in the little apartment by Navigli Lake District, where she preferred to stay, was to paint, read, while away time in cafés looking for inspiration when he was absent and to spend time with him when he was present.
It was so intoxicating to be one of the things she wanted in her simple life that Adriano had defied his mother’s incessant demands that his wife needed to take part in his life.
They had even slid into a strange sort of domestic bliss, his life with Nyra thoroughly compartmentalized from his work and society and even family. If his business associates and the world in general carped on about Adriano Cavalieri’s wife being absent from grand dinners and charity galas, he hadn’t given a damn.
A part of him had reveled in keeping her to himself.
And when that moment arose outside of that cozy apartment, outside of touching her, when he thought it a madness, when he needed at least the illusion of control over his life, he told himself that she was an expensive hobby he had acquired in a fit of acting out.
After all, he’d spent the first thirty-five years of his life, dutifully fixing the family bank and growing its fortunes, holding together the car crash of his parents’ marriage and taking care of a slew of illegitimate half-brothers and half-sisters his parents had spread around like bees spread pollen.
Stealing away from his own life to the one he shared with Nyra—long nights of sex, soft moments of silence and surrender, being alone together while she painted and he worked—had become his reward. His escape.His…haven.
He had expected them to get bored with each other, their passion to wither and die, their near-secret relationship to lose its charm, sooner or later. Then he would give her a nice settlement, make sure she was looked after for the rest of her life, before quietly divorcing her.
But he hadn’t expected this…betrayal that seemed to cut through him as mercilessly as a knife sliced through butter. Rending him into so many pieces. His limbs shook, his extremities felt cold. And yet everything felt extraneous to the hard thumping of his heart in his chest.
The why of it was a vicious echo in his head.
Why had she done it?
Why hadn’t she simply asked him for money? Was all the passion they’d shared nothing but an act? Or was it that she’d found a new man and hadn’t wanted to let go of the security Adriano had provided just yet?
So many lies…and now he couldn’t distinguish what had been real and what had been pretense. Everything felt tainted, the past and the present.
His gaze drifted to the photos over and over again, like some ghoulish spectator drawn to a disastrous train wreck.
Cristo, he’d never had a taste for masochism, and yet looking at those pics of her half naked and writhing in another man’s arms made bile crawl up his throat.
And Adriano realized how deep she’d sneaked under his skin, how hard this betrayal of hers had struck him. How he might never recover from it.
A pained growl escaped his lips and it might as well have been a wretched scream for a man who rarely let himself feel things. And he buried his face in his hands, trying and failing to fight the sense of losing something precious.
* * *
Nyra Shah Cavalieri gazed down the length of the heavy mahogany sixteen-seat dining table at Adriano Cavalieri, her husband of nine months. But he didn’t look at her. Not once, in two hours of this unending dinner.
With a sigh, she looked out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows toward the sweeping vistas of Lake Como. Lush green hillsides dotted with elegant villas and charming villages greeted her but did nothing to cheer her up. The setting sun painted the sky with vivid splashes of pinks and oranges. But even the artist in her couldn’t appreciate the magnificent view.
The villa had always felt more like a prison than a home to her. Especially since anytime she stayed here, it was because Adriano was traveling and she found herself the recipient of a variety of taunts and surprising trash talk, for all the sophistication they claimed, from his parents and his younger siblings Fabiola and Federico.
Gold diggerwas a common one along withwitch, and when Nigella, his mother, got really upset, Nyra had even heardslutsometimes.