“Was it so damn bad?” Luca couldn’t help snarling. “I stopped you from going to school because I knew you didn’t really want to do it. It was a fucking mistake – you were committing the same mistakes Maria did—-”
“Oh, Luca.” Vivi gazed at him despairingly. “You don’t get it, do you? I get why you were concerned. I get why you were worried. But it still didn’t give you the right to control me. To cage me. I’m your wife, not your prisoner—-”
“Everything I did—-” Frustration seethed in him, making Luca raise his voice. “Everything I did was for us to stay together—-”
“I wanted that, too,” she cried back at him. “Or at least I did want it until you made me feel it wasn’t even my choice to stay with you.” And this time, tears slowly fell on Vivi’s cheeks like an endless, transparent trail of pain. “That’s when you stopped being the man I fell in love with.”
VIVIAN WHISPERED, “WAKE up, caro. You’re having a bad dream—-” She shook him again, and this time her husband shot up to a sitting position. Hearing him desperately suck his breath, she quickly pushed herself up as well and twisted around to flick the light switch on.
The pair of bedside lamps flared into life, and when she looked back at Luca, she saw the stream of golden light illuminating her husband, who was still breathing hard. The covers had fallen to his waist, and his powerful, naked body was enveloped with cold sweat. When she lifted her gaze to his, Vivi saw that his light blue eyes had a haunted look to them, and a twinge of pain pinched her heart.
Moving to him, she laid her hand on his arm, whispering, “It’s just a dream, Luca.”
He slowly reached for her, almost as if he was afraid that she would disappear any moment, and instinct made Vivian keep herself still. Her husband’s fingers grazed her cheek, and when he still didn’t say a word, she whispered uncertainly, “Luca?”
He said abruptly, “I dreamt you left me.”
Oh. That such a thing could cause him to have so much darkness in his gaze—-
It pinched her heart again, but the pain was a sweet agony because the darkness was also proof of how much he loved her.
This man who had once turned his back completely on love, this man who had once pushed her away in order to harden his heart against her-—
Giving Luca a tentative smile, she tried to lighten his mood, saying, “That was the bad part, right? You’re not telling me that the nightmare was the fact that you woke up and realized I’m still your wife—-”
In a blink of an eye, her beautiful husband had her pinned under him.
“Luca!”
“I’m not joking,” her husband snarled under his breath, and clasped tightly to him, Vivian could feel the way his heart beat hard and fast against his chest. This suggested that he was seriously worried she could leave him, and she blinked up at him in bemused shock. “Oh, Luca.” Vivian shyly clasped her husband’s face, mumbling, “How can you even think it’s possible for me to leave you? I love you—-”
“And I love you, too, cara.” He took her hands, kissing her knuckles gently, and in spite of the simplicity of the gesture, it was still enough to make Vivi’s body shiver in sensual awareness.
“But even so—-” The tautness of his tone drew her gaze back to his face. “I still made you cry. I still make you cry—-”
“That’s normal,” she dismissed lightly. “And besides, we always make up—-”
Her husband’s expression remained hard. “All your troubles now are because I made you my wife.”
These last words finally clued her in to where he was coming from, and she sighed. “This is about me being turned down a chair in St. Francis’ board, isn’t it?”
When her husband’s lips tightened, she thought with a mental wince, Bingo. Looking at her husband, she said carefully, “They were right to turn me down, and I was stupid to even have tried applying without consulting you.”
Luca absently threaded his fingers through his wife’s silky dark locks, asking, “Why did you try applying?” Because this was the part he still didn’t get. Although Vivi was the type who liked to help, it wasn’t like her to want a title along with it.
Vivi bit her lip at his question, and he stiffened slightly at the way the sight reminded him too much of the way she had looked in his dream—-
Stop being foolish, he ordered himself. A dream was a dream, and it could only influence reality if he allowed it to.
Looking down, he prodded gently, “Vivi?”
“All the wives of billionaires are board members of charities,” Vivian confessed awkwardly.
Comprehension dawned, making Luca ask incredulously, “And so you thought you had to be one as well?”