The Delicious De Campos: The Divorce Party

He turned around, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the setting sun. The dull look on his face made the rest of her shrivel away.

“A marriage needs trust to survive. And between the two of us I think we’ve proved we have none.”

And there it was, she thought miserably. Their marriage summed up in one glaring truth.

“It was never going to work.”

Her words sat flat and lifeless on the night air between them. Riccardo’s head snapped back, a flare of angry color slashing across his cheekbones. His steps as he closed the distance between them were jerky, full of a barely leashed rage that made her suck in a breath. When he stopped in front of her, his furious glare leveled on her face, her heart seemed to stop.

“We may have spoken a lot of truths tonight, Lilly, but do not, do not absolve yourself of the responsibility you carry for this marriage. You checked out. You left me. You chose to give up. And you will own that.”

She pulled in another breath, but it wasn’t enough, and desperately she dragged in another. There never seemed to be enough oxygen on the planet when she was with Riccardo because he sucked it out of her. Stripped her bare.

He stared at her for a long moment, waiting for her to respond, waiting for her to give him what he demanded of her, but she couldn’t force the words out of her mouth.

He spun away and stalked toward the French doors.

“Ric—”

“I need some space.”

He disappeared inside. Lilly watched him go, too numb to react. Where was he going? The sound of the front door slamming made her heart drop. He was leaving?

She ran to the front door and threw it open, but only the glaring darkness of the Caribbean night stared back at her. She would have heard the car if he’d taken it. He must have gone on foot.

She closed the door and fumbled with the deadbolt to lock it. Unsure of what to do next, she turned and leaned against it, pulling in deep, long breaths. Then she slid down to the floor and did the thing she hadn’t let herself do since the week she’d left Riccardo.

She sobbed her heart out.

Tears streamed down her face in a barrage that it seemed would never end. Her worst fear about her marriage had been both proven and unproven in one explosive conversation that had left her so raw and exposed she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to close herself back up again.

Riccardo had kissed Chelsea Tate with the intent of sleeping with her. And even though he hadn’t been able to do it, the fact that he’d kissed Chelsea—the thought of him kissing her—splintered Lilly’s heart into a million pieces.

How could he? The man who’d promised to love and protect her that day in the cathedral when they’d been married, whom she’d let down all her barriers for, had betrayed her in the worst way possible. Because, she thought numbly, wasn’t kissing the most intimate act of all?

Somewhere, someplace deep down inside her, she’d been hoping she was wrong. That Riccardo had been telling her the truth when he’d said nothing had happened between him and Chelsea and that her early naive belief that nothing could touch them was true.

But it wasn’t something she could hang onto anymore. She and Riccardo were fallible and his message had been clear. She had driven him into Chelsea’s arms. He had wanted to hurt her as she’d been hurting him. And that, she realized, swiping the tears from her face, was something she’d never thought of. That cool, hard-as-rock Riccardo could be hurt in any way. That she had the power to hurt him like that.

But in the end it had been as she’d always known it would be. She hadn’t been capable of being what he needed. She hadn’t been enough for him. Otherwise he never would have gone to Chelsea.

Her severed heart throbbed with a misery that said there was still some life in it. She closed her eyes and breathed. To leave had been her survival mechanism. To stop trying to be something she could never be.

But Riccardo’s relentless assault continued to unpeel her layers, as if once started it would never stop. Emotions that had been bottled up far too long bubbled over and tumbled into her consciousness. She remembered that perfect day before everything had unraveled, when they’d rescued their dog, Brooklyn, from the street, taken her to the house in Westchester and spent the weekend there. Her gorgeous husband had scooped up Brooklyn in one hand and Lilly in the other and tucked them all into bed. Throwing out the heart-stopping comment as the puppy lay snoring at their feet that maybe they should make theirs a family of four.

She’d been so excited, her mind whirring like the hamster’s wheel from her childhood, that she hadn’t slept that night. Like the luckiest of little girls on Christmas morning, she’d felt as if she’d been given everything she’d ever dreamed of. She had Riccardo, a great career and a home. A real home, where love reigned—not dramatic tension that would take her who knew where next. And for the first time since she’d left Iowa as a teenager, scared and unsure of her future, she’d known everything was going to be okay.

She would have a family of her own—one that wasn’t living a hand-to-mouth existence. A family that wasn’t a dysfunctional, sordid mess.

Dreams could come true, she’d told herself, falling asleep in Riccardo’s arms at dawn.

The impossibly perfect memory made her suck in a breath.

She was still in love with her husband.

No matter how hard she tried to deny it, no matter how much she told herself they shouldn’t be together, it was never going to go away. That deep, gnawing pain that had started when she’d left him and never stopped.

She pried her eyes open and stared dully up at the grandfather clock in the hallway. Its rhythmical tick-tock was deafeningly loud in the still villa. She was mad about a man who’d spoken of their love in the past tense tonight. As if he was as sure as she was they’d done too much harm to each other ever to be able to recover from it.

And he was right. About all of it. She had shut down on him. She should have told him about her anorexia. She should have told him about the photos. Instead she’d run, like she always did.

But he had kissed Chelsea. And that wasn’t something she was sure she could forgive.

She bit her lip, vaguely registering the metallic taste of blood. The clock droned on...tick-tock, tick-tock. She had made huge mistakes in her marriage. But at least tonight she’d taken her first step forward. She’d told the truth. And that was something.

She bit her lip, refusing to give in to the fresh set of tears burning the back of her eyes. If it was clear they were over, then that was for the best. They had closure. In six months she was going to have to walk away from Riccardo, this time for good.

She was going to have to move on.

At least now she could.

She got to her feet, splashed cold water on her face and went back out to the terrace to wait for Riccardo. Two, three hours passed—she wasn’t sure. A million stars blanketed the dark Caribbean sky as she drank wine and listened to the rhythmic pull of the ocean.

Her eyes started to drift shut.

The clocks chiming midnight woke her. Disoriented and half asleep, she padded inside to a dark, empty villa. And realized her husband wasn’t coming back.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#u8b806eea-318a-5338-a9ba-e45ee4ae1875)

RICCARDO ENDED UP nursing a glass of ten-year-old rum on the front steps of a local rum shack in Holetown. Neat, as the grizzly old proprietor had suggested.

He’d needed a place he could think, away from the glitzy west coast hotels and restaurants. A place where he could digest his mind-blowing conversation with his wife. Because if he’d suspected before that he didn’t know all of her it was now brutally apparent he hadn’t even scratched the surface of who Lilly De Campo was.

Mind reeling, he’d wandered down the road from the villa until he’d come to the local hotspot—a red-and-cream-painted clapboard house emblazoned with the logo of a local beer company, one of dozens of such dwellings scattered around the island. There had been a handful of Bajans sitting on the front steps, chatting about last night’s cricket game, and zero expectations of socializing.

Perfetto.

He took a sip of the rum and was glad the proprietor had talked him into drinking it neat. It brought out the oaky molasses flavor of the blend and right now he needed its smooth burn. Needed to quell the tumult raging through his brain.

His wife had trusted him so little she’d paid a gossip columnist one hundred thousand dollars for pictures that weren’t even of him. Then she’d lied to him about where the money had gone.

Che diavolo.

He pulled in a deep breath. What state of mind must she have been in to do something like that? To air their dirty laundry to a tabloid journalist and expose their private lives rather than come to him? He wanted to shake her. To chastise her for being so stupid. Except it had also been his fault. He had given her reason to be jealous. He had violated the trust in their marriage.

He had almost smeared the past in her face without knowing it by being unfaithful to her like her father had her mother.

He uttered a smothered oath. The bombshells had just kept coming. His wife had been suffering from an eating disorder he hadn’t known about. She had been struggling with a disease only made worse by the limelight she’d been thrust into and he hadn’t noticed. How had he not noticed? It was inconceivable to him. He wasn’t an expert on eating disorders, but didn’t women usually make themselves throw up when they had one? He knew for sure he hadn’t missed that. Lilly hated throwing up, and when she did so because of her migraines she was miserable.