CHAPTER TWELVE

‘YOUAREGOING to tell me where we're going at some point, aren't you?' Rae asked, smiling at the mysteriousness with which Domenico was acting.

‘In about ninety seconds, you'll see for yourself,' he answered, at the exact moment the car drew to a stop.

They had arrived at a marina and as she saw what sat at the end of the dock Rae's eyes widened. The yacht had to be at least fifty feet long, with four levels, dazzlingly bright white against the darkening sky. The captain welcomed them as they stepped aboard, explaining that they would circle the island before introducing them to the crew, who were waiting to greet them with warm smiles and a glass of champagne.

As they pulled away from the dock, Domenico led Rae up to the third deck, where a tapas feast and a candlelit table for two was awaiting them.

‘I cannot believe you did this,' Rae exclaimed when they were sitting at the table.

‘We had to do something special to celebrate. With your help I finalised a very significant deal for The Ricci Group today.' Domenico had met with Lorca for two hours that morning and had returned to the villa with a completed contract and a triumphant mood. ‘I only wish that Elena and Raphael could have been here to see it.'

‘I have no doubt that wherever they are, Elena and Raphael are incredibly proud of you tonight.'

‘I hope so,' he said quietly, a shadow scudding across his expression.

Rae's heart rippled with pain for him. ‘You're still doubting yourself. Even after everything you've achieved today. You still think you have something to prove?'

‘I've always felt it,' he admitted with a press of resignation to his lips. ‘And I always think maybe if I do this, or if I achieve that...but nothing is ever enough to erase the feeling. I'm starting to think nothing will ever be the cure.'

‘The cure is you, Domenico,' Rae beseeched him. ‘You have to believe that you're deserving, that you're good enough. You have to ignore that voice that tells you you're lacking or worthless and trust that Elena would never have left you in charge of The Ricci Group if she didn't believe in you and trust you enormously. You have to believe that she loved you with all of her heart. I believe that. I saw it every time she looked at you. And you have to know that it doesn't matter one bit whether there is a piece of paper stuffed in some drawer that names you as her child or not.'

His eyebrows lifted, the slant of his gaze disbelieving, and Rae wished so badly that she could make him see that his belonging and his worth were defined by so much more than a completed form.

‘In every way that mattered, you were Elena's son. It was you who had dinner with her every Sunday night. It was you who went with her to her hospital appointments. It was you she turned to when she had a problem. That is what belonging to someone is about. All those small, everyday acts. Not a name on your birth certificate.'

Domenico nodded, but he could hide little from her now and the flatness of his mouth, the way he cast his eyes down was telling.

‘But it's not just that, is it?' Rae deduced. ‘It's not just your mother leaving you and Elena not adopting you... What else happened?'

Pain flashed like lightning across his handsome face and for a split second Raw saw, to her shock, all the anguish that he had so adeptly hidden from her. It was right there on the surface.

‘She had other children. My mother,' he stated in a voice breaking with repressed emotion. ‘The reason she moved to Venice was because she got married and they had children—children whose births she announced and celebrated, welcoming them into her life in the way she never did with me. She even had stepchildren whom she happily accepted. And I was...ignored. I watched it all...watched her embrace those babies, giving them the security of family and parents...and each time I saw them I found myself asking what was so wrong with me that she hadn't kept me. Why I was so unlovable.' He shook his head, emitting a low curse in his native tongue. ‘I shouldn't have cared. I had Elena and she gave me her name and a home, protection I would never have had. It shouldn't have hurt me.'

‘Of course it should,' Rae reassured him, reaching out to curl her hand around his tense arm. ‘You're not wrong to be hurt by what happened. Anyone would be.'

Rae's throat was clogged as she considered what those circumstances must have been like for him. Watching from afar, having that same bruise pressed upon day after day.

‘You'd think I would have been smart enough to learn my lesson that day she looked right through me. But I wasn't. I went to her home once, to try and meet her.'

‘What happened?' Rae asked, almost holding her breath, because she knew by the hollow look in his eyes that it had left a wound.

‘I'm sure you can imagine.'

She nodded. ‘I can. But I think you should tell me anyway. Then maybe you can let it go.'

‘I knocked on the door and an older couple answered. Her parents, my grandparents. It was the first time I'd ever seen them, but I think they knew who I was straight away. I introduced myself and a look of such contempt came across both of their faces. I told them I wanted to see my mother, they refused. They said that she wasn't my mother, she'd never wanted anything to do with me, that I was a no one even if Elena had given me her name, that I was nothing more than a mutt and none of them wanted anything to do with me. Then they hissed at me to leave and never come back and slammed the door in my face.'

Rae gave a small shake of her head. To have experienced such cruelty from people who should have loved and cared for him. Accepted him.

‘But that wasn't even the worst part. As I backed away, I looked up at the house and I saw her—my mother—watching from a window. She'd known I was there, she'd heard everything they said and did nothing. She just looked right through me again before turning away. Like I really was nothing.' He smiled grimly. ‘I've never told anyone about that before.'

Was that when it had started, Rae wondered, his habit of burying everything so deep so he could pretend it had never happened? How it all must have festered in him, turning every thought dark and black and hopeless, making him worry that every relationship would end with a closed door.

‘There's no way to defend their actions, but I will say this about your mother. She was only very young when she had you and if her parents weren't supportive that can't have been easy. So maybe when she left you on Elena's doorstep she knew she was leaving you with someone who would take care of you, the way she wanted you to be taken care of. Maybe that was an act of loving you.' She saw by his expression that he was listening. And hearing. ‘And maybe...maybe when she saw you again, well...'

‘Maybe she had consigned that to a box that she didn't want to open either,' Domenico offered, finishing her thought with a sigh of willing acceptance.

‘It's possible. But what I know for sure is that you're definitely not nothing, Domenico. Your grandparents could not have been more wrong. You are remarkable. You're intelligent and generous and kind. You stepped up when Elena needed you to. You've spent every day of your adult life honouring her and Raphael's legacy. Those are the actions of a wonderful man.'

‘It's a little strange to hear the wife who walked out on me declaring how wonderful I am,' he remarked with dry humour, but beneath that veneer Rae heard his vulnerability. Saw the hurt etching itself into his profile in spite of his efforts to hold it back.

And for the first time she could see the far-reaching consequences of her hasty, panicked decision to quit their marriage. Could see how that had cut to the deepest part of him, inflicting a fresh wound over an old one. And she knew she could no longer withhold what truly lay at the core of that decision—the truth of her mother's passing. She had let it remain a secret for too long and now that Domenico had taken the monumental step of laying his soul completely bare, Rae had to find the courage to do the same. She had to be as brave and vulnerable as he had been. Only then would he be able to understand everything about her, and she knew what a beautiful gift that was.

‘I didn't leave because I thought you weren't good enough, Domenico,' she admitted, steeling herself with a quick breath because she knew there was no going back from this moment. ‘I left because of me. Because I was scared.'

‘Scared?' Domenico repeated, unmoving as he absorbed her confession and tried frantically to make sense of it. ‘Of what?'

Colour drained from her face and she scraped her teeth over her lower lip before answering. ‘Of being like my mother.'

Domenico frowned in confusion, her words making no sense to him. ‘Explain,' he commanded softly.

Rae took a small breath, glancing off to the side, but she wasn't quick enough to hide the sheen of tears coating her gaze. ‘When my dad died, my mum gave up completely. Her whole life had revolved around him and with him gone, she didn't know who she was. Each day that passed, she slid deeper and deeper into a depression that none of us could pull her from.'

‘I thought she died of pneumonia,' he queried gently, trying to assemble all these new facts into the right order.

Rae gave a small, stiff nod, meeting his eyes for only the tiniest moment. ‘She did. She got caught outside in a storm without a coat and she caught a chill that went straight to her chest and eventually ended up in hospital. But she shouldn't have been outside...' She hesitated, her face filling with a ravaged kind of hurt. ‘She wasn't strong enough. Since he'd passed, she'd barely eaten, barely slept, her weight had fallen off her. She was like a ghost.'

He moved closer to her, wanting to offer comfort with his presence, the promise that she was safe from that past. Seeing the tremble of her body, he slid his jacket from his shoulders and draped it over hers.

‘It was awful, Domenico. Watching her waste away like that. Day after day. And I couldn't do anything. Then, when I realised how empty my life was in Venice, all I could think was that the same thing was going to happen to me, and I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't follow her down that path. I couldn't put Maggie and Imogen through that agony all over again, put myself through it.'

He pulled her into his arms, holding her securely against his chest as her body shook with emotion. Not only did he ache for the losses she had suffered, but for the agony she'd had to go through in watching it happen and being powerless to stop it. He hated that he hadn't known any of it before that moment, that in attempting to keep his pain buried, he had forced Rae to be silent about her own. He knew nothing good came from keeping pain boxed inside, but at no point in time had he considered it was his role as her husband to try and tease her secrets from their hiding place, but it was not a new realisation that as a husband he had focused on all the wrong things. On formalising her position as his wife, on gifting her jewellery and various other material luxuries, but not what she'd really needed and wanted. A husband attentive enough to know that she was battling a deep-rooted fear, a husband who would listen and share in return, a husband who'd make the effort to find out her needs and prioritise them.

But he was no longer in the dark. He understood why she had left him, why she'd felt it had been her only choice. Why she had seen no future in their marriage.

That she trusted him enough now to tell him her truth, after everything, was incredible. Obviously, he had somehow managed to start to restore the connection that had once bound them together, but it burned him to know that he could have known these truths sooner and spared them both a mountain of pain. If only he hadn't been so intent on keeping their relationship as a primarily physical connection, so scared of going any deeper than the surface and dislodging everything that lay below. If only he had done as Elena had urged and gone after Rae the second she'd left. He should have chased her to London and banged on her door and refused to leave until she'd talked to him. Dios, it was what a large part of him had strained to do...but he had been too proud. And too scared.

It had been too easy to believe that she'd deserted him because she didn't love him any more. Too easy to recall his past and heed those dark thoughts that rose in his mind like smoke. He'd let himself be convinced that all that awaited him in London was a closed door and another rejection and had idiotically fallen prey to that fear of not being enough.

Although Rae had been the one to leave him, Domenico knew now that he was the reason she had stayed lost to him.

Rae was right. He needed to silence those ugly thoughts in his head. He needed to look to what he knew to be true in his heart and trust that or he would be doomed to stumble again and again over that same fear.

Holding on to her tighter, he pressed his lips to the top of her head and inhaled that light scent she always carried with her. She drew back slightly, pressing her hands to his chest and looking up at him.

‘Surely you see now it was as much to do with me as it was you. And if I'd had any idea what that my leaving would make you think...' She stopped, raising a hand to his face, her warm palm curling around his cheek, a touch of such tenderness he found himself leaning into it. ‘You're not unlovable, Domenico,' she whispered, gazing up at him with all the magic of the stars above reflected in her eyes. ‘You're the furthest thing from it.'

Her words held such feeling and such quiet power that the only thing he could do in that moment was claim her lips and it was a kiss that contained everything. Joy and passion. Forgiveness. But also regret and sorrow. Because, as badly as they wished it, neither of them could change what had happened, their many mistakes and the many hurts.

And yet, amongst all that wreckage, there was a single revelation sticking in Domenico's mind. That Rae had never stopped loving him, and that made his heart feel fuller than it had in a very long time.