“Don’t,” his voice was low and grav

“Don’t,” his voice was low and gravelly and so thick that she could barely understand that one word. She raised her much smaller hands to his and tugged futilely at his hold, trying to get him to release her.
“I want to make things less difficult for us, Theresa…” he muttered uncomfortably, his face so close to hers that his breath washed over her skin and raised goose pimples all over her body.
“Why now?” She challenged the ludicrous statement angrily, trying to ignore the effect his closeness was having on her very receptive body. Her soft green eyes snapped up at his through her tears. “Is it because I’m threatening to leave this marriage without giving you your precious son, is that it?” She dropped her hands down to his hard, broad chest and tried to push him away. He wouldn’t budge.
“No,” was all he said. “That’s not it… because I know you won’t leave.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” She hissed and he was silent for a while before responding.
“The discussion we had yesterday,” he eventually, reluctantly, said and she went limp against him, all the fight leaving her abruptly.
“So, if you’re so sure I won’t leave, what’s this sudden need you have to spend your every waking moment with me?” She asked hollowly.
“We’re married for God’s sake… and we’re like strangers! I know nothing about you!”
“Of course you know nothing about me,” her voice was hoarse with the effort it took not to scream at him. “You’re the one who decided, even before we got married, that there was nothing worth knowing about me.”
“Well I’ve changed my mind,” he didn’t bother to deny her wild accusation, probably because it was true, instead dropping his hands down to her narrow shoulders to give her a little shake.
“Which once again begs the question of why… after eighteen months of marriage, why now?” His hands fell from her shoulders before he shrugged with an air of disinterest which belied his urgency of just seconds ago.
“Why not now? Now’s as good a time as any…” he was back to being remote and icy and Theresa shuddered involuntarily.
“It’s much too late, Sandro,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around her slender frame. “I may be trapped in this marriage but I want nothing to do with you! The very sight of you makes me sick to my stomach.”
“There’s a way out of this you know,” he finally murmured.
“I know,” his hooded gaze snapped back up to her face. “Have a baby, right? You want a son… and I’m the chosen incubator.” She watched his face carefully but he betrayed not one iota of emotion other than a slight tightening of his jaw. “So what happens after I have this precious baby of yours? Who gets him after the divorce? You expect me to be nothing but a surrogate mother. I’m to bear him and you’ll then take him away from me, right?”
She was aching to hear an affirmative from him, anything that would prove to her that he was the one who wanted the child and that she had misunderstood the conversation she had overheard between her husband and her father that morning.
“Of course I wouldn’t take him from you,” he shook his head, sending her heart plummeting. “I wouldn’t be that cruel. Naturally you’d maintain custody,” Theresa shut her eyes to shield her agony from him and she felt her scalding tears seep down her cheeks.
“How very… magnanimous of you,” she whispered. “To be so desperate for something only to give it up in the end… you’re so much more generous than I gave you credit for. How often would you want to see him?”
“I would naturally move back to Italy so I would probably see him two or three times a year. It is what you want, no? Less contact with me?” She inhaled deeply and her brow furrowed. Two or three times a year? That was all the time he would want to spend with a child who was half hers? She opened her eyes and met his gaze squarely.
“Like I said before, you’re being quite generous but it’s all moot anyway because I have no intention of having a baby with you!”
“You’re being very childish, Theresa,” he admonished quietly.
“No, I’m finally making my own decisions. Up to this point in my life, everything has been decided for me… this marriage would never have happened if my father hadn’t decided that you would make the perfect son-in-law. After that, the wedding date, the venue, the cake, where we would live… it was all you or my father. I couldn’t even choose my own wedding dress,” the last emerged in a small, broken voice which quavered with remembered disbelief and outrage. Her father had simply had the dress delivered to her room with the direction that it was to be worn on her wedding day, no discussion and no choice.
“The only reason I got Lisa as a bridesmaid was because my father deemed it appropriate for my first cousin to be in the wedding party. If she’d been just a friend, I doubt she’d have fit the bill!”
“It turns my stomach to hear someone who’s led such a privileged life whine on about how terrible her life is, you’ve been spoilt and you’ve had everything money could buy…”
“Except love, specifically my husband’s love and my father’s love… apparently I’m not quite worthy of that.”
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself and I’m getting sick of it.”
“Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself,” she acknowledged bitterly. “And it’s very liberating. In the past all I’ve done is accept everything you and my father have dished out… thinking it was my lot in life, even thinking I deserved it; if two such powerful men as you thought I wasn’t worthy of love and respect, then who was I to differ? But I’m starting to realise that I’m not the one at fault here. I’m not the one with the personality defect… at least my motives for marrying you were honest; I stupidly believed I loved you. Yours were less than stellar, weren’t they? They certainly had nothing to do with love.”