Michelle Smart - A Passionate Reunion In Fiji

There was no point in her saying anything. It would only be a rehash of a conversation they’d had many times before, a conversation that would only lead to an argument. Or, as usually happened, it would lead to her getting increasingly het up at his refusal to engage in the conversation and losing her temper, and Massimo walking away in contempt leaving her shouting at the walls.

In any case, Massimo’s sidelining of anything that wasn’t work-related was none of her business. Not any more. If he wanted to blow his own money on projects and assets he had no intention of enjoying then that was up to him. If he wanted to keep his family on the fringes of his life for eternity then that was up to him too. He wasn’t an adolescent like her youngest brother, Gianluca, who’d been born seven months after their father’s death.

There was hope for Gianluca. Unlike their other siblings, who had succumbed to life in the Secondigliano, Gianluca’s humanity was still there. The question was whether he had the courage to take Livia’s hand and join her far from the violence and drugs that were such an intrinsic part of the Espositos’ lives before it was too late and he was sucked into a life of crime from which his only escape would be in a coffin.

It was too late for Pasquale, who like their dead father had risen high in Don Fortunato’s ranks, and too late for Denise who had married one of Pasquale’s equally ambitious friends and was currently pregnant with their second child. Livia’s siblings and her mother all knew Livia’s door was always open for them. Gianluca was the only one she allowed herself to hope for. He could still leave without repercussions just as she had but time was running out. He’d recently turned eighteen. Should Don Fortunato decide Gianluca was worthy of joining his guard he would strike soon.

The man Livia had married, a man who abhorred violence and anything to do with illegal drugs, had made his choice when he was only a few years older than Gianluca. He’d chosen to leave Italy and leave his family, just as his own grandfather had done seventy years before him. The difference was his grandfather had left Fiji for the love of his life, an Englishwoman, and set up home with her in England. When their daughter Sera had married an Italian, Jimmy and Elizabeth had moved again, this time to Italy so they could stay close to their daughter. For them, family came first above all else. They were as close as close could be. All except for Massimo himself.

He didn’t want to change. He saw nothing wrong with how he lived his life, nothing wrong with keeping a physical and emotional distance from the people who loved him. That was the choice he’d made and Livia had to respect that. She couldn’t change it. She’d tried. When the realisation hit that his emotional distance from his family extended to her too, along with the recognition that this too would never change, she’d had no choice but to leave him.

She hadn’t clawed her way out of the Secondigliano to spend her life as a trophy in a glass cabinet masquerading as a home.

While she had spent the past four months trying desperately to fix herself back together, for Massimo there had been nothing to fix. He’d got on with his life as if she’d never been a part of it.

Finishing her drink, she put the empty glass in the holder beside her bed and got under the covers. ‘I’m going to get some sleep. Goodnight.’ Then she turned her back on him and closed her eyes.

Massimo lay under his bed sheets, eyes wide open. He’d drunk enough bourbon to tranquillise an elephant but his mind was too busy. Except now it wasn’t the project he’d spent over a year working on that stopped his mind switching off.

Turning his head, eyes adjusted to the dark, he watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Livia’s duvet. He guessed she’d been asleep for around an hour now. He always knew when she was properly asleep and not just faking it. When she faked it, she lay rigid in absolute silence.

They’d slept together the first night they’d met—once they’d got talking at the hotel bar he hadn’t let her out of his sight—and both of them had known it was no one-night stand. He’d been dozing in the aftermath, Livia wrapped in his arms, his body thrumming with the delights they’d just shared, when she’d mumbled something. That was his first experience of her sleep-talking. He’d quickly discovered that she talked a lot in her sleep. Sometimes the words were distinct. He remembered the feeling that had erupted through him the first time she’d mumbled his name. It had been ten times the magnitude of what he’d felt to be offered two hundred million dollars for the stupid game he’d developed during his boring university evenings.

But her dreams hadn’t always been good. At least once a week he’d had to wake her from a bad one. The darkness of the life she’d lived until she’d left Naples at eighteen still haunted her.

Had another man woken her from the nightmares since she’d left him?

He pinched the bridge of his nose and willed the pain spearing him away.

Livia’s sex life was no longer his business.

The thought of her with a lover was something that hadn’t even occurred to him until she’d stepped onto his plane and now it was all he could think of.

In the four months since she’d left him, his own libido had gone into hibernation. From the feelings erupting through him now, he realised he’d shut down far more than his libido.

He’d shut down long before she’d left him.

Their marriage had begun with such high hopes and such certainty. They’d both been too foolish to realise that it was nothing but lust, a flaming passion that could only burn itself out.

He’d been intoxicated by her. He’d never met anyone like her: tough on the outside but marshmallow-soft inside. Straight talking. Capable of lancing with her tongue. But tender and compassionate. Someone who would drop everything if she were needed. Someone who would give everything they had if it were needed. Massimo had never been one for showing his emotions but being tactile with Livia had come naturally. She’d brought that side of him out right from the start.

And then the tide had turned. His assumptions that he would be able to continue his life and work in the same way he always had but with his beautiful, vivacious wife to come home to had been quickly dispelled.

He should never have married her, that was the truth of it, but he’d been so swept up in the need to tie her to him and make her his in every way possible that he’d blinded himself to what marriage to a woman like Livia would actually entail. It entailed far more than he could give.

It was still dark when Livia woke. Groping for her phone, she looked at the time and was relieved to see they only had a couple of hours left until they landed.

Creeping out of her bed so as not to wake Massimo, she took her overnight bag from the compartment and made her way to the bedroom. She needed a shower. It was pure misfortune that the main bathroom was reached through the bedroom.

The moment she opened the bedroom door and stepped inside, she realised her mistake. The bathroom light was already switched on and the scent of Massimo’s shower gel seeped through the gap in the door. Before she could beat a hasty retreat, the door opened and he stepped over the threshold as naked as the day he was born.

Startled caramel eyes met hers. All the air flew from her lungs.

Seconds passed that stretched like hours as they did nothing but stare at each other.