The Return Of Her Billionaire Husband. Melanie Milburne
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to the task at hand, determined to keep control of her emotions. She was moving on, processing the grief the best way she could. Part of that process was getting through this weekend and handing over the divorce papers to Joe.
She was still deciding which dress to wear to the drinks and rehearsal and had her choices laid out on the bed. The very big bed with cloud-soft pillows and gazillion thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. It was similar to the bed she and Joe had spent that one-night stand in, having off-the-Richter-scale sex.
A night she couldn’t erase from her brain or her body.
She swung away from the bed and snatched up her make-up bag from her open suitcase. She needed armour and not just the cosmetic sort. She needed anger armour. Anger was her friend now. Her constant companion. It simmered and smouldered deep in her chest like lava inside a grumbling volcano. Anger was her way of punching through the blanket of despair that had almost smothered her after losing the baby seven months into the pregnancy. A despair so deep and thick it had taken every particle of light out of her life. Happiness was something other people experienced. Not her. Not now. Not ever. A part of her was missing.
Broken. Shattered.
And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men were not going to be able to put her back together again.
Juliette was on her way to the bathroom off the bedroom to do her make-up when she heard a brisk knock on the door of the suite. Thinking it was a waiter bringing the pot of tea she had ordered a short time ago, she called out, ‘Come in. Just leave it on the table, thanks.’ And went into the bathroom and closed the door.
She heard the suite door open and the rattle of a tea cup and saucer as presumably the tea trolley was wheeled in. Then the door closed again with a firm click.
Should she have given the waiter a tip? Probably not while she was dressed in a bathrobe, even if it was the most deliciously soft fabric she had ever worn against her skin. Not that she had too much spare cash lying around for tips. She refused on principle to touch the obscenely excessive amount of money Joe put in her bank account every month. Guilt money? No. Those were relief funds. His relief. He hadn’t got there in time for the birth, but when he came in half an hour later she hadn’t seen a father grieving for his stillborn baby girl. She had seen relief washing over his features. She had seen a man who was relieved his sham of a marriage now had an excuse to end.
Their baby had died and so had any hope of them remaining together.
They were a mismatch from the start. Hadn’t she always known that on some level? He was suave and sophisticated and super intelligent. A self-made man who answered to no one but himself. His cool aloofness had drawn her like a moth to a dangerously hot flame.
And it had burned her in the end. Even after three months living together as man and wife, he had always kept an emotional distance, which had reinforced every fear she harboured about herself. It mirrored the emotional distance she’d experienced from her parents while she was growing up. The sense she wasn’t enough for them—not clever enough, not pretty enough. She always felt they were holding back, keeping her to one side, compartmentalising her.
Juliette picked up her foundation bottle, took off the lid and released a sigh. Joe had done the same. He had travelled abroad for most of the time they were married, leaving her stranded at his villa in Positano. As far as she could see, he hadn’t made any adjustments to his life by marrying her. He had expected her to do all the adjusting. She had moved countries, left friends and family behind and lived in a large villa with no one for company other than a rotating agency-recruited team of household staff. None of whom stayed long enough for her to learn their names, much less their language.
Juliette picked up her foundation brush and ran her fingers over the soft bristles. Of course, she was always there waiting for Joe when he returned, and she couldn’t fault their physical relationship. It was as exciting and pleasurable as ever but it niggled at her that he seemed to spend more time away than he did at home. What did that say about her? Hadn’t her parents done the same? So many trips abroad, lecture tours, sabbaticals, leaving her languishing and lonely in boarding school.
Juliette applied some foundation to cover the dark shadows that seemed to be permanently under her eyes. There was nothing she could do about the shadows in her eyes—they were also permanent. She put on some eye shadow and then a coat of mascara but she left the lip-gloss for after she had her cup of tea. She unwound the towel from around her head and shook her shoulder-length hair loose. Looking at herself in the mirror, there was no sign she had ever carried a baby to seven months’ gestation. Her weight was back to normal...well, the new normal, because her appetite was hardly what anyone could call enthusiastic these days. Her hair had grown and thickened up again after a lot of it falling out due to hormones and deep emotional stress.
She looked like the same person...but she was not.
Juliette came out of the bathroom and walked into the lounge area and immediately saw the tea trolley next to the table by the window. She heaved a sigh of relief. A proper pot of tea with a silver tea strainer. No musty little tea bags and lukewarm water for this wedding party guest.
Big tick for you, Celeste.
Juliette could smell the bergamot notes of the high-quality Earl Grey in the air...and something else. Something that struck a chord in her memory and made a faint prickling sensation tiptoe across her scalp.
She swung around from the tea tray to see her estranged husband, Joe Allegranza, seated on the sofa behind her. A gasp rose but died in her blocked throat, her hand coming up to her chest to hold her leaping heart in place.
‘What the hell are you doing in my room?’ Her voice was a fishwife screech, her pulse a thud-stop-thud-stop hammering in her temples.
Joe rose from the sofa, his expression as unreadable as one of her father’s astrophysicist research papers. ‘It’s apparently our room.’ His deep baritone with its rich Italian accent made something in her stomach swoop.
Juliette frowned so hard a year’s supply of Botox would have given up in defeat. Two years’ supply. ‘Our room? What do you mean “our” room?’
‘There’s been a mistake with the booking.’
She narrowed her eyes to hairpin slits. ‘A mistake?’ She knew all about mistakes. Wasn’t he her biggest one? She wrapped her arms around her middle, wishing she wasn’t naked under the bathrobe. Wishing she had more armour against the tall, unknowable man in front of her. She needed heels the size of stilts to get anywhere near his six-foot-four height. She needed her head read for even noticing how gorgeous he looked, dressed in dark denim and a sky-blue open-necked shirt that highlighted his olive complexion.
She drank in his features, hating herself for being so weak. The determined jaw, the slash of aristocratic cheekbones, the ink-black eyebrows over hooded eyes the colour of centuries-old coal. The sensual mouth that had wreaked such havoc on her senses from the first time he had smiled at her, let alone kissed her.
But she was not going to think about his kisses. No. No. No.
Nor his earth-shattering, planet-dislodging love-making. No. No. No.
What she had to concentrate on was her anger. Yes. Yes. Yes.
‘Juliette...’ His voice had a note of authority that made her spine stiffen. ‘The way I see it, we have two options here. We either go downstairs and make a fuss and thereby draw a lot of attention to ourselves, or we suck it up and leave things as they are.’
Juliette unwound her arms from around her middle and widened her eyes to the size of the saucer under her bone china teacup. ‘Are you out of your mind? Why can’t we go downstairs and tell Reception they’ve made a monumental error? But wait—isn’t this the wedding planner’s mistake? Celeste Petrakis was the one who organised the accommodation. She’s being paid a ridiculous amount of money to make sure everything runs smoothly. This—’ she pointed her finger between him and herself ‘—is not what I’d call running smoothly.’
A frown