Page 11 (1/1)
“Your Highness?”
“Could you please shut the door?”
Her ansas the quiet snick of the door latch catching
She felt her control slip another notch as the noistered with her e; forcing herself to bite back the words of love she’d wanted to utter, to hide her distress at the frequent separations froht about by their schedules, and for the past severalthat the horrific pain of endometriosis did not exist
At first, she’d convinced herself it was just the period pain ht when Claudio had been gone on yet another business trip, she had fainted from the cramps and when she woke up on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood, she’d known she had to find out rong
She’d gone to see her doctor in the States, a habit she’d developed early in her h to justify in her schedule that she found it quite easy to hide the purpose of her stopovers in Mianosis had been utterly disturbing He’d thought she was probably suffering from endometriosis, but the only way to tell for sure was to perforht she could handle it and accepted a prescription for painkillers, only to give in the following otten the results the day before along with a big bucket of ice water to dash her hopes that she would be one of the lucky ones asn’t impacted too heavily by the disease Apparently she’d had it for quite a while, but being on the pill had ated its effects There was major tissue build up on both of her ovaries and even with the surgery to renant without IVF were less than ten percent Even with IVF, there were no guarantees
Those were not the kind of odds Crown Prince Claudio had been counting on when he had her take fertility tests before announcing their engage had responsibilities to the throne and one of thean heir to carry on his lineage He expected her to be able to do that with one hundred percent success and for all intents and purposes, she was infertile
After seeing the way the press and the Scorsolini family had reacted to Marcello’s supposed sterility, Therese knew there was no chance her proud husband would willingly suffer similar vilification for her sake And she wouldn’t expect him to
If he loved her, it would be different, but then so much would be Love was not an emotion that could be faked, nor could it be replaced with a sense of duty
Claudio ht offer to remain married, but his heart wouldn’t be in it and she could not live with the knowledge that she was a burden around his neck…a source of humiliation to his royal pride
A sob snaked up from deep inside her to explode out of her mouth and she had to cla to the other roo like an old woman, she pushed herself to her feet
She would take a shower…she could at least have privacy for her tears in there
Once she’d shut the door, then the door on the shower and turned the water on full blast, she cried herself hoarse She grieved the loss of her hting the pain that ca a man who did not and never would love her
She ruthlessly quashed any hope that everything would be okay Deep in her heart, she kneould not be After Claudio’s reaction to her unexpected departure from her schedule, she didn’t even have the tiniest hope that her e could or should survive this setback
And that was destroying her All along, she had harbored the foolish hope that she rong, that somehow they could weather the treat She hadn’t admitted it to herself because it would have hurt too much, but now that she was faced with the final end to herflicker of hope as it died a painful death
Claudio could not have made it more obvious he did not love her if he had tried His every action pointed to the carefully defined roles she played in his life, none of them connected to his emotional needs Unless she counted sex and even if he did…she didn’t
She’d had such hopes when they married They would make a family and she would know the love she had never knoith her parents at least with the children that would come She had also hoped that eventually Claudio would come to love her She had wanted it all and now there was nothing but the dead ashes of a fire that had consumed her for almost three years