But she did not smile in return. Their time in the shower had been incredible, but they had spent what remained of the night wrapped in each other’s arms. Only he didn’t mention that, did he?
Sex. That was all he wanted from her and when it was on offer, she was the perfect wife. He’d said that when he told her he was bored with her…that her value had dropped significantly when she began turning him down. The fact that the night before and his reaction to it only supported that truth was not a particularly pleasant reality.
She turned her head away. “Last night did not change anything important.”
He said a truly foul word and her gaze flew back to him.
He finished shrugging into his coat, his dark brown eyes hard as granite. “You are not telling me you still think a divorce is necessary. I refuse to accept you are saying that.”
“But that is what I am saying,” she admitted wearily, her head now pounding.
The look he gave her would have brought about her demise if looks truly could have been lethal. He looked like he hated her and he didn’t say another single, solitary word. He simply finished dressing and left their room.
Moving as quickly as she could with the cramps now reaching toward debilitating levels, she dressed as well and followed him. She found him downstairs, giving instructions to his father’s assistant as well as his own.
“The others are waiting for us in the car,” he said when he saw her. Then he dismissed the employees and headed toward the back of the palace where the car would be parked.
“Claudio.”
“Do not speak to me, Therese.” The venom in his voice silenced her as effectively as a gag.
He did hate her.
He was like that for the rest of the morning, only managing to maintain a thin veil of civility in front of his family. It slipped to blatant hostility when they were not within earshot.
The one bright spot was that King Vincente came through the surgery with flying colors and was mostly lucid for visits with his family afterward. When Flavia offered to stay at the hospital with him, he gratefully accepted and sent the rest of them home with a good dose of his trademark arrogance.
Despite her father-in-law’s continuing improvement in health, the next few days were a torment for Therese. Both in mind and body. Claudio stayed in their suite for appearance’s sake, but the width of the Great Divide ran down the middle of their bed…that was when he was in it. He also refused to speak to her when they were alone, except to discuss their respective duties.
If she even looked like she was going to get personal, he made an excuse to leave…or walked away without an excuse. When he was there to begin with. Which wasn’t often. She saw him more frequently in the company of others than she did in the privacy of their suite and that was rare enough.
He had always had a backbreaking schedule, but now it was even worse. He had to cover both his own responsibilities and those of his father. As a world leader, those duties were such that he could not leave any of them undone. He’d always functioned on less sleep than she did, but now she wondered sometimes if he slept at all.
His brothers pitched in where they could, but Claudio’s role in the family dictated that the majority of the decisions, responsibility and stress fell squarely on his broad shoulders.
No matter how much his angry rejection hurt, she felt badly for him, worried about him and wished about ten times a day that she had waited to ask for a divorce until after the crisis had passed. He refused to accept comfort or help from her in any form and she didn’t blame him, but she longed to help him somehow.
Her request for a divorce had stung his pride and shattered his ego when he could least afford that kind of wounding. He needed a full store of inner strength in his current circumstance, but he was handicapped by his anger over her defection. She wanted to explain that it wasn’t defection, but the physical pain from her endometriosis and the haziness resultant from the drugs she took to control it depleted her ability to pursue anything.
It was all she could do to make it through each day, much less fight with her husband to put their marriage to rights…only to convince him that it had to end anyway.
In every way she looked, she couldn’t help but see that it would have been so much easier on both her and Claudio if she had waited to tell him of their need to divorce until after he got back from his trip to New York. At least then, all of this hostility and energy draining anger during such a critical time could have been avoided.
The guilt of hindsight weighed her down, making it harder than usual to deal with her physical pain and there were some nights she simply laid in her lonely bed and cried. As the doctor had predicted, this month’s pain was worse than the one before once her period arrived and some days she didn’t know how she was going to survive it.